"I Did Everything Right and I'm Still Broke"

0:00Uh hey, I read all your books, followed your advice religiously, to the point that I'm I've moved to a city where I know nobody. Dope, okay. Tried posting for years, learning from feedback. Good. Uh I spent my money on courses, okay. Haven't been to the pub in the hopes of saving my money, okay, great. Done outreach 100 times a day for more days than I can count, yet you're still broke, okay. Uh is it just a waiting game? Do I legit just have to wait for good luck to finally find me? It's been years. Uh I've been starting following you the day your podcast released with Stewart Bartlett, Stewart Bartlett. I tried and tried and tried and yet I'm more self-conscious. Okay. So, I'll say this.

0:29There's the things you say and then there's the reality of it, which is that I'm going to I'm going to be I'm going to be kind, not nice, here. You didn't incorporate the feedback well enough. Like just saying like I incorporated the feedback in a sentence does not make it true. Because if you had iterated and gotten better, you would be better. And I find it hard to believe that you did you reached out to cuz let's do the math on this.

0:56If you said 100 times a day and you've been doing this for let's just say 3 years. All right. So, that means that you reached out to 100,000 people individually and you're still broke. Something does not add up. Now, spent money on courses, things like that. That matters very little to me because the money that you spend on courses has nothing has has I'm sure it has some correlation to making money, but the thing that has a much higher correlation to making money is doing the actions that that money making requires. And so, fundamentally, were you doing something that people found valuable? Like I'm I'm struggling to understand. Obviously, this is, you know, amorphous. Um and I want to be clear, I'm not I'm not pooh-poohing you. I just like I'm just going to be real, dude. I think you're buying into your own Like I think that you have and I know that it sounds heavy-handed for me cuz if you're watching this right now, but like there's there's no world where you reach out to 100,000 people and in that process of reaching out to 100,000 people, you've iterated what you were going to say 100,000 times and you didn't get any I just don't believe it.

2:07I don't think I don't think there's a universe where that happens. And so at the basic level in the leads book, if you reach out to 100,000 people and said I'll do something for you for free, you should have an absolutely full client load. And if you don't suck there's a percentage of those people that after you say you're no longer going to do that work for them, you say you do it for money because you're full, that they would say yes. And even if they did it, they'd be able to give you a testimonial. And even if they didn't do that, they'd still be able to give you a referral. And so there's there's not a world of reality that I see because of the reality that I've lived in my life to believe that 100,000 people did not accept a free offer where you work for them.

2:47And so my guess is you went straight for the sale on something that people didn't want. And so I think you need to start for free, get more reps, get practice, collect proof, and then in in the process of doing whatever that work is, getting good. And then you will make money. And so there's also a huge amount of demand for things that like maybe you just need to be doing something that other people that there's a huge supply demand, you know, uh offset. This it's shifted, right?

3:18There's There's more demand than there is supply. And so are you just trying to sell editing services uh you know, to to people on the internet? Yeah. I mean, that might be a relatively saturated niche. To be clear, doesn't mean that winners can't win cuz winners always win. And so um I just I could take your question at face value, but I do not believe it and I think that you believe it, which is why I'm trying to talk to that point more specifically. And I think that you thinking you're working is probably the thing that's getting in the way of you actually working.

3:47Just being real. If you're 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.