The One Thing Killing Your Business: Lack of Focus

0:00I have a real estate law firm and we sell real estate closings to home buyers. We do 2.5 million last year and we're on pace to do 3.5 million. >> Real estate law firm? >> Yes. >> Okay. >> Um I want to be at 10 million in revenue and I also myself operate a marketing company. My wife operates the law firm. That's what's I believe stopping me. >> Okay. >> She's the lawyer. I do the marketing and business.

0:27>> Okay. How much does the agency make? >> Uh 450 top line, 200 EBITDA. >> And how much does the law firm make? I mean you said you're on pace to do 3.5. What's the what's the bottom line? >> About 500. >> Oh, interesting. Okay. >> This year it'll probably be closer to 750 with the 3.5. >> So, do you not want to full-time market into your wife's law firm? >> She's a client. >> Of your marketing agency? >> Correct.

0:53>> That's smaller than her law firm? >> Correct. >> Why not join hands? >> It's tough to turn something stop something that's making $200,000 in my pocket every year. >> How much time do you put towards the agency? >> 30 to 35 hours a week. >> [laughter] >> If you took 30 to 35 hours a week and put it towards the thing that's already making, you know, seven times as much money, do you think you'd be able to find a way to get the extra 200?

1:22>> Yes, cuz our constraint is to get more butts in seats. Um I guess my my problem is like >> [laughter] >> shutting it down. How do you like how to shut something down like the right way, I guess? >> Yeah, yeah. No, it's a great question. Um So, it's actually kind of like the the example I gave with the the price race, um which is I just give people ample time. So, if I think that if something's going to disrupt someone's business, you know, for your own reputation, I'd say, "Listen, you know, it's been an amazing time. Um I know that, you know, you guys have been loyal clients. I just want to let you know two things. Number one is we stopped um accepting new customers.

1:56And number two, we're going to be um phasing basically phasing this out over the next 6 months. And so I wanted to give you guys 6 months. We'll continue levels of service for this period of time. Also, um I have three recommendations of people who I trust in this industry I think will do a good job. And then you negotiate deals with those guys to give you kickbacks for all of this book of business. And you'll probably would have made a hundred grand a year just from referring the business out to those guys, which we'll happily do. Um and then that's a very easy way for you to keep the money, get it to 100% passive, and then move on and help the help your I mean, I don't want to say help your wife is like you guys do your business together and crush it.

2:30>> Yeah. Uh would it be smart or dumb to hire an operator just to operate the marketing company instead? >> Yeah, I think that would be not smart. >> Cool. Thank you. Perfect. >> [laughter] >> If you are a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the $100 million scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through, and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it into these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at. And the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information. And if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.