Du hast immer Schulden, nur nicht immer finanzielle

0:00So, if you don't have a business but would like to start a business, could you raise your hand for me? Okay, cool. That is helpful. Uh, if you are between like uh that so you so you've made your first dollar and like a h 100,000 a year, could you raise your hand for me? Okay, if you're between 100 and 250. Okay, if you're between 250 and a million, a million plus.

0:26Okay, this helps me a ton in terms of like what to be talking about. All right, so we were just talking about uh there's my add >> equity. >> Equity. Thank you. Um whenever you start a business, you always incur debt. And so the question is what type of debt are you going to incur? And so you can incur financial debt, which is one that people can understand. You can incur management debt because you hire people that are underskilled for whatever the opportunity is. you can incur technical debt because you don't have the infrastructure to build the business off of. And so you want to take on the debt that is easiest to repay as fast as possible. And so when you think about that from the onset, it's not like we're going to do this thing debtree. You're always going to incur debt. And so when you think about that, you have way more levers to play with in terms of how you want to build this structure for whatever you're ultimately trying to achieve. Now, if your if your goals are to make, you know, $100,000 a year or or $500,000 a year or a million dollar a year, you can pretty much do all of that owning 100% of the equity and just developing skills. Like, I don't I don't really think you need much more than that to do it. Um, and sub a million, everything comes down to sub a million, everything comes down to marketing and sales. Is that you have to let people know about your stuff and you have to be able to convince them to give you money in exchange for it. Unfortunately for what I'm about to say, product matters significantly less at that level because you honestly aren't making enough of a dent for the word of mouth to really catch up given how big the world is. And I'm saying that from a very realist perspective. If you just know how to market and sell, you could pretty much scam people for a million dollar a year for the rest of your life. I'm being very honest with you.

2:06And that's and that's why there's a lot of um bad advice that I think is out there from people who make around that because that's true for them. And so they're like that's all you need and it's true but I would imagine that this community doesn't want to be that way. And so on the longest time horizon the only thing that matters is product which is how good is the thing that you're ultimately giving in exchange for money. And do people feel like they are always on the better end of the deal? And I my ent I've gone like 180 degrees from when I first started in business until today where in the beginning everything I cared about was sales. And then I learned that you could like do sales one to many with marketing. And I was like this is like sales on steroids. This is so much better. And I got really good really good at that. Um but then I realized that it's a perpetual hamster wheel because nothing stacks. And so in order to get credit for the like in order to build something really big, you need some you need to be able to get credit for work you did over time. And that means that I want to get paid today for work I did three years ago. And the only way to do that is to have a product that somebody I sold three years ago is either still using today or it's still at least has positive things to say about me today.

3:19Otherwise, you're basically always hunting every month to find your next nut or whatever it is. And so if you always want to like everyone's going to always work, but you won't always accumulate. And you can only accumulate by building something that people always have good things to say about. And that takes a lot of work. And now we build businesses very differently, which is let's not let's not put any gas on this until we get everything right, until everyone absolutely loves the product, can't help but tell other people about it, we get referrals every single month.

3:53we grow without marketing and sales and then you add marketing and sales on top and then that's how you build really big [ __ ] but or and I I'll try and taper this because you can go all the way in the sky and like talk about like how you know trends of like what markets you want to go after or it's like I just want to get to 20,000 a month Alex. Um and are most people here doing products and services? Okay, if you're doing products and services should you raise your hand.

4:21Okay. So, that's And is technology the other slice there? Okay. So, it's mostly products and services. Okay. So, if you're And I'll shut the [ __ ] up whenever. [laughter] >> Keep going. Keep going. >> This is the sweet spot, baby. Let's go. Keep hitting these [ __ ] Let's go. [laughter] >> Um, if you're if you were I'm always amazed at um and it might be more prevalent in this community uh not doing the math. And so I know that there's probably a little bit more woowoo in this room than there would be in rooms that I'm accustomed to. Just say just on a comparative basis, right?

4:58>> Definitely strong woo woo family [laughter] here >> representing. >> And so I think there's probably a misconception that you can woo woo your way to money. And um some of you probably know that that's not true. And so reverse engineering what you actually want the math to look like is probably the first place to start. So I, you know, I get a lot of, uh, inbound questions of like, I just want to make a million dollars a year. How do I make a million dollars in 90 days, which is a terrible question to ask. Um, but if you just look at number of units you need to sell, and I break things down into days and weeks, because that's a lot easier for me to comprehend. And so it's like, okay, a million a year is $20,000 a week. Okay, so divided by seven. So three grand a day. Okay. Well, how do I do three grand a day? Um I we do investments based on like the world's simplest formula which is just number of units sold multiply by lifetime value.

5:51That's it. And so if we want to grow the company, we either need to sell more units or we need to make people worth more. That's it. Like everything else really just over complicates it. And so if you're in the beginning and you're doing stuff and if you look at your calendar in terms of how you spend your time because that's the asset that you're going to be spending the most of in the beginning. If it's not contributing to either getting you more customers or making them worth more, then stop doing it. Like you're wasting time. Like literally, you're just spending time. Cuz right now, if you if you work every hour of the day and you're not making more money, you're working on the wrong stuff.

6:27And that's like at the at the most basic level. And if you can accept that, then it's like great. Then now I have room to to improve. Because if you're not making any money, that means you can probably eliminate 90% of the [ __ ] you're doing. and nothing's going to matter because you're already not making any money. So that that's that cl that stuff clearly isn't working right. Um and so uh getting the more customer side is really about just letting people know about your stuff. And so I wrote the you know I just recently came out with the leads book and it was to try and simplify this for everyone. And if you are starting out so if you're sub a million there's there's eight ways well [ __ ] if you're at a billion there's still eight ways uh to let people know about your stuff.

7:01Four of them you can do four of them you use other people for. So you can just tell people that you already know about the thing you have and you cannot be a scumball about it and just say hey I'm starting this thing do you know any who'd be interested in it and nine times out of 10 when you ask someone like that it's way lower pressure because you're not asking them for it but on the flip side nine times out of 10 they're like actually I am kind of interested in something like that and so they're like screw my friends uh tell me more about that thing and then you actually get a more meaningful conversation where you could probably help them right and that's like the cheapest thing that every single person can do but people are like I'm so afraid of talking to my friends, but you're just asking them if they know anyone. And a lot of people still don't know like where do I go for that? It's like, well, right now every single person here has a means to contact probably at least a thousand people. That's like super conservative.

7:48And when I challenge an audience with that, often times someone's like, "Well, I don't." Pull out your phone, search contacts, export into an Excel sheet. That's list one. List two is you go into all the old emails and Gmails and Yahoos you've ever had and look at every message you've ever sent. export those sent messages and to list two. Go into social media, all the different social medias you have. Look at followers. All of those give people have given you permission to contact them. Now, most social media are like that with the exception of YouTube, but like Twitter, you can DM people. Instagram, you can DM people. Tik Tok, you can DM people if they're following you. Um, and you can export all of those into a list. And so just like that, if you took all your followers, all your friends on Facebook, all your your DM contacts, your emails, your contacts on your phone, you put them into one list, you probably pretty pretty decent sized list. And so I am a big fan of violence in terms of action and in general. Um, and take a violent approach, which is okay, I will reach out to a hundred people per day, and that takes about five hours. And if you're like, wow, that sounds like a lot of work. Like, welcome to business. um like and if you're starting out, it's welcome to business and being broke at the same time. It is what it is. And so the asset that you have right now is time and you got to spend as much as you can on it.

9:01And so make making sure that okay, if I'm putting five hours a day, it's 20 20 outreach attempts per hour and that's very inefficient. The better you get, you'll get dialers and automation and technology that can help you do that stuff faster. But if you're like, I'm poor and I don't understand any of this [ __ ] Start with that. And that's your first five hours of the day. I especially when I had less means, I started doing that around like four or five in the morning and then I'd be done around 10ish and then at that point I'd start my day. And so your job as the founder in the beginning is always promotion. Like that's the job is let people know that you exist because right now you're just in obscurity like no one knows like it's only exists in your mind. You have to make it exist outside, right? See a little spiritual know the audience, right? Yeah.

9:45Real quick, 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 the 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 deconstrain 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 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.