Manchmal gewinnst du nur, wenn du aufhörst zu spielen

0:00So, so going back to this video game analogy, you're on level four. >> Yeah. You get tired of losing, you start level one, level two, level three. Certainly in some skills like management or fundraising or leadership, you have to beat level four. But is there sometimes another game that you could play where there is no level four and you just go level five?

0:27It's a really good question. I think I think it it's basically like what is you know, what's the constraint? What's the constraint of the system? For most entrepreneurs, they are the constraint of the system. But fundamentally, a business has to have these functions occur. And if you were the only entrepreneur in the business or only founder, sometimes there are for sure like key people who can come in and can help you out. But if these things must occur, then like let's say you you get to a point where you need you need to get more leads for your business, just keep it simple, right? Okay, if I don't know how to advertise, advertising must occur. It has to happen in some way, in some form.

0:59And so if I never learn the skill, then the only option I have is to go recruit somebody who has the skill. But what if I don't have the skill of recruiting? Now, maybe the level four boss becomes a level 4.5 or a 4B, right? Which is okay, well, I can I can get over this bridge multiple ways. Um which is actually really interesting cuz um this is something I've been thinking a lot about, which is it's actually loops back to what we were talking about with advice.

1:27There for sure is bad advice, for sure. But I think there's also a lot of good advice that is half-heartedly executed, which then makes it into irrelevant advice because the execution nullifies the effect. And so I as somebody who gets asked for advice, um I have increasingly spent my time on how do I increase this person's conviction around the advice and less on the advice itself because if we use the analogy of a mountain, there typically are multiple ways up the mountain. Like you could make this thing a super viral product. You could also, you know, have a super, you know, heavy sales team and marketing. Obviously depends on the goal size, right? But like let's say somebody has a modest goal of hitting a million dollars a year or 10 million dollars a year or whatever it is.

2:14Um not a trillion dollar company. Sure, that'll have a more defined path. But if if someone wants to make 10 million dollar a year business, it's like you could do that a lot of ways. But no matter what way you pick, you have to be committed to it. And so it's like what are the few things that must be true, right? That you have to be committed to, you have to be focused on on whatever that thing is so you can get good enough at it, you can get deep enough into it that you can actually like break through level five of paid ads, of organic. But if you're if someone would say, how do I market this like how do we market this podcast hypothetically, right?

2:44Um well, we could run ads, right? We could go find affiliates who have audiences um already and then see if there's a way that we could partner with them, have them promote it or come on, whatever. Uh we could uh we could just get better at the organic game itself and get really into the nitty-gritty of like retention curves and packaging close to rates, all that stuff, right? Um and we could go on, right? These are all these different ways. And so could all of these things result in the views of this going up?

3:10Yes. And so if someone says, which one should I do? All of them would work. But they will only work if you do. So then then the problem to solve is which one of these things um does the person have the highest conviction on and and the largest percentage of of existing skills? So said in the inverse, the smallest skill deficiency between proficiency and where they're currently at. And so that is typically what my follow-up questions will be. Well, have you ever made videos before? Do you know a lot about this? Do you are you have you ever run media before? Have you ever done paid ads? Do you know anybody who's run paid ads?

3:43Like um or you a natural networker? It's like, oh, I'm a natural networker. It's like, boom. This is going to be the highest likelihood path. All of these work. And so it's like two people ask Alex who both have podcasts the same question, how to promote my podcast? And then there's different answers. It's like, well, cuz they're different entrepreneurs. And so I want to have the shortest gap between where they are and what would be proficient in order for them to get up the mountain. So, that's >> think there's like a consciously understanding that you can't pass this level and subconsciously going to the next shiny object. Yeah.

4:13>> And just to give you two counter examples to having to pass the level, the most extreme Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. I don't know if you saw any clips with him and Theo, but he still sounds like a robot. He still has no personality and yet he hasn't kept that from building a trillion dollar company. Yeah. Sam Altman realizes he's a genius strategist, has all these skills, Open AI. He realizes he sucks at hardware. He just paid six and a half billion dollars for Jony Ive. >> Right. That's not going to be a limit for him.

4:39>> Yeah. >> So there is a power to knowing Oh yeah. which levels to play and which characters you want to play in those levels as well. Yeah, I think it comes down to like what functions must occur and then it is my job to make sure that those functions happen. Now, the cheapest way, not the fastest, the cheapest way is to learn them yourself, right? And so then you become increasingly stacked with all of these different skills so that you can solve a myriad of problems in the business.

5:04Um but if there's a gigantic skill gap like I I will probably never be the person who's head of finance. Um in terms of like operational finance, like I'm not going to run the P&Ls and all that kind of like I'm just I'm not going to do that. Um but somebody should, we have to have that. Yeah. Right? [laughter] Um and so but like I could go learn how to do that. It's just but like it's easier for me to go find somebody else. And so I think uh we're basically it's buyer build but done on a n equals one.

5:30Am I going to buy this and bring Jony Ive in, right? Or am I going to build this within myself or within obviously somebody else if you want to train up the team. But if we're assuming we're trying to go fast then now, am I going to try and learn it or am I going to bring somebody else in? Real quick, 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 dollar scaling road map, 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 in 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 de-constrain the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can just book a call with my team and we will look at your 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.