Josh Troy and his longtime partner Ryan Burk (Ryguy) share the hardest lessons from hiring and managing over a thousand sales reps across high-ticket environments. Raw, practical, and built from 40+ combined years of real experience at scale.

This conversation-style episode features Josh Troy, CEO of Curvion Blue, and his longtime partner Ryan Burk breaking down what they’ve actually learned from hiring and managing over a thousand sales reps across remote and in-person high-ticket environments. They open with their core scaling philosophy: predictable growth models plus constraint removal, with talent almost always being the binding constraint. A major theme is that top performers are built, not found — through systems, structured development, and rigorous pre-hire skills assessments. Josh and Ryan dig into the transferability problem: why a great closer in one environment (timeshare, mortgage, events) often fails in another due to differences in buyer avatar, sales cycle length, and emotional vs. ROI-based selling dynamics. They outline the most common rep development mistakes, including overloading reps with feedback, firing too early before pipelines mature, and over-training before reps ever take a live call. The “Big Three” framework — discovery, personalized pitch, and clean close — is introduced as the core skill set to build before anything else. The episode also covers how strategic transparency builds more trust than a polished pitch, and closes with a look at how AI call analysis is changing coaching at scale.