Unterschied zwischen Eigentümer und CEO

0:00Entrepreneurship is far more a war of the heart than it is a war of the mind. Like we can understand what we should do, we just don't do it. And I think that's why we're so much better at giving advice than we are at following it. So most people if they just followed their own advice, they'd be successful. >> [laughter] >> Right? And so with this kind of valley of despair, I call it niche slapping. It's like don't make me niche slap you. >> [laughter]

0:26>> Which is like when you have three things going on, it's like let me like slap you into just picking one. Because the thing is is that any of them can work, but none of them will work unless you pick only one. Mhm. Because it's actually, in my opinion, an exercise in arrogance to assume that you doing three things is somehow going to beat somebody who's doing one. And I can promise you the competitor who is going to beat you is only doing that one thing. And you think a third of your time is going to beat theirs? No. It's not going to happen. I think it's arrogant. And so there's actually like an under There's like an underpinning of ego underneath of this. And I say this as somebody who did this. So like when I had the launch business, I also had my six gyms, I also had a chiropractor agency, and I also had a dental agency.

1:09And so I would introduce myself like, "Oh, I own lots of companies." But I think one of the biggest misconceptions when you're an entrepreneur is not understanding the difference between being an owner and being the CEO. And so they might hear that you have a portfolio, they might hear that I have a portfolio and be like, "Okay, well they have a portfolio, so I must model that. That guy's tall, I should play basketball." Doesn't work that way. Right? I should be So if I want to be rich, I should fly private. Doesn't work that way. Um it's conflating order.

1:35And so we must do these things in order to get the outcome. We have to concentrate on only one thing in order to get the outsize return. And that spreading of attention especially when you're newer in the entrepreneurial career, it's like you already don't know so many things. How do you now want to have three sets of unknowns that you want to try and conquer at the same time. And the the fallacy of thinking is that I'm going to try all of them and see which one works.

2:03But none of them will work because you're waiting to see which one will work. Because you can force, in my opinion, you can force one thing to work. Provided like I'm going to I'm going to just assume basics like you're selling you're not selling $5 bills for $4. Like you know, the normal economics of a business like if if if if a real estate business exists, there are other people are making money. There are hair salon businesses where people are making money. There are lawn mowing businesses where people are making money. You can make money in all of them. You just can't make money in all of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, [laughter] yeah.

2:31At the same And it is when you walked in today and you sat down on the chair, I said like what's going on with you professionally? I remember what you said. You said more of the same and better. Which clearly comes from your wisdom. My [laughter] infinite wisdom, right? Well, it's just from from from from from suffering. Um the the the woes of this. Like the biggest entrepreneurial mistakes I've made in my career have all come from splitting my attention.

2:57Every one of them. Like every single one of them. Like I talked about how I had the e-commerce business that I bolted onto my to my licensing company. I should not have done that. As soon as I did that, my my revenue started slowing down in its growth. Why did you? Because I was ADD. I like I just I was like oh my I don't want to leave money on the table. And I want to I want to be so violent about this. You are always going to leave money on the table.

3:21That is the result of focus. But you're you're leaving a small amount of money on the table to pursue the much larger money that's on another table of just sticking with the thing that you're on right now. Because compounding, if I were to show a chart here, it's like if you're at year three of your thing and you want to think about moving to year zero of a new thing, you have to compare maybe year zero of a new thing grows faster, but it has to grow faster than year three to four of the thing that you're on right now. And I think that's that people will compare year zero to year zero, but not year four to year zero.

3:57And the thing is is you actually we have a linear life. And so we that is it's an unfair but true comparison of the opportunity cost. And every exceptionally successful entrepreneur that I know has just stuck with one thing for such an inordinate amount of time. And I think there's a quote by I want to say Shane Parrish. He said, "Um success is doing the obvious thing for an extraordinary period of time without believing that you're smarter than you are."

4:24>> [laughter] >> And it's just like you we we know what we need to do. And So we don't need to make our lives more complex. Complexity will come with scale, I promise. And so just simply trying to do more of what you're already doing well is already hard enough. Don't add anything else. And so like if you need to write some sort of commitment of like I'm just going to stick with this, then do that. But the What happens is when we're talking about the levels earlier about like beating the bosses, so what happens is you know how to beat boss one through three of of the game.

5:04And so then you just say, "Okay, well, I'm just going to start the game over and beat boss I mean this this time it's going to be different." But then you just get to level three again and then you're stuck again. And so people will just keep getting up to level three and new and new and new endeavors over and over again because they never learn how to get past that boss. And so you just have to confront the uncertainty of knowing that you don't know how to do it, but that you will figure it out if you keep doing enough repetitions.

5:31And that's where you talk to as many people as you can. You see what they said, you consolidate it all, and you say, "I think this is the highest likely path. It might not work, but I do believe fundamentally that if we cut people's hair well and we do it for a long period of time, we will have a thriving business. And if we have a really good model from that thing, we might be able to open up another location. And if we keep our costs down, we might be able to have an actual model that we could either invest our own capital or bring somebody else and take it national. Right? Like all of these like I have yet to find a business that can't get to a hundred million dollars a year.

6:02That has a permutation of it that exists. You're a dry cleaner. Fine. Well, cool. We'll build the model and either we're going to license the model, we can franchise the model out, we can get outside investors, we can scale it nationally, we can do it. But the crazy goals are only crazy because people have crazy timelines. They're actually sane goals if you extend the timeline out. If you have a a true 10-year goal or a true 20-year goal, almost anything's accomplishable. I mean almost every multi-billion dollar company is about, you know, they get It's usually between like year six and 10 when companies get to kind of like those big numbers.

6:32And most people who are listening to this are five years into entrepreneurship, but you're six months into the thing that you've been working on right now. And you keep restarting the clock for getting to year 10 every time you start over. And I think that's the part that it took me a very long time to figure out and I think it takes a lot of entrepreneurs. Like everyone messes around with a lot of stuff in the beginning cuz you just don't know what you're doing. And so in my experience, it takes about five years for most entrepreneurs that I know to just like find something that works.

7:00>> [laughter] >> Like it like takes about five years to figure out which way is north. Yeah. And then it takes like another five years. And a lot of people that's it. Like they they restart, they they they go off crash and burn. Um and it takes another five years to build something that can generate can create generational wealth. So it's about a 10-year slog. And here's the really hard truth about it. If you have a job right now for almost all of that five years, you quit your job because you don't want to work as hard as you are and you want to make more money.

7:31And as soon as you quit, you will realize that you are now going to work way harder than you were and you're going to make less money for an extended period of time. The one benefit is that you get to claim all responsibility for how little you make and how much you work. Because you're like, "My boss is an idiot, and it's me." >> [laughter] >> But, it's the truth. And I think that in some ways having that um optimistic ignorance is actually one of the really redeeming traits of entrepreneurs.

7:59And one of the really hard parts is that the biggest jump you have to make gets so immediately reinforced from the freedom you have from being able to, you know, chart your own path. But, that big success of quitting one thing and starting another, you need to immediately forget. And I think that fundamentally that is why so many entrepreneurs keep doing it is because the first time you do it, it's the biggest rush ever. You quit your job, you do the business, and and you get some some first traction, and that for that first dollar that you make when the new business, it's like the best dollar ever, right?

8:37But, it's such a strong reinforcer that what does it reinforce? It reinforces stopping what you're doing and starting something else. And so, I think one of the fundamental errors of entrepreneurship is that sometimes the jumping ship to start this thing is the lesson that you need to immediately unlearn, because after that, you have to just stick with it for a very long period of time. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish I've now done multiple times. And so, I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as it increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, uh service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this, and it works.

9:29And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so, the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap. Just enter your info, and it'll spit it right back to you all free.