Wie ich Firmen skaliere, in die ich investiere

0:00When you think about what you're investing for acquisition.com or now for ACQ Ventures, it sounds like traditionally it started from let me bring you better business processes. With school it actually shifted a bit to I can just bring you tremendous distribution via my own content. What types of companies were you leaning more toward investing? Ones you helped with the processes or ones where you think the content distribution actually is what matters? Cuz I'll say that it's both. >> Right. Um and I still use those three kind of legs of the stool. So I got money. We've got time or work. And then we've got brand reputation, distribution, etc. Um I prefer to do as many as I can of the first two. Mhm.

0:36Because in a lot of ways brand is so much more limited. Not limited in its power, but limited in how many. And maybe this could be a limiting belief of me, but I I don't think it is. I think it's it's very So brand is built on associations and pairings. Mhm. And if you pair yourself with too many things, it the brand starts to lose its potency because you have associated with too many disparate things. Now, if you made many associations with things in the similar buckets, I think you could get more bullets.

1:03>> Right. It's more okay. >> More shots on goal, if you will. But no, I I I try to basically do the the more scalable things, which money is actually, you know, pretty scalable. We've developed a pretty pretty exceptional team at the holding company for acquisition.com um because I I basically take I marry a lot of old school and new school. So we have a lot of young caught 5 and 10 year McKinsey, you know, um Bain consultants that will pull who are like I hate feeling like a cog in a machine and just doing billable hours.

1:34But are otherwise incredibly hard working, incredibly bright. And also see the problem with a lot of antiquated businesses and want to work with more new, more cutting edge stuff. And also really like and a lot of them came from, you know, my content, my world. Um and want to marry, I'd say, big business strategy with small business tactics. Uh and then kind of like bridge those two gaps uh together. And that's a lot of what we do Uh at ACQ anyways. And so, I think they really enjoy it because they learn a ton from the frameworks that we have for growing companies. It adds nuance and texture to their existing knowledge set from what they learned at the kind of like big consulting firms. And just to put context to this like if you're looking at like supply chain for Walmart Brazil, right? Or something you know, Walmart LatAm because you need to do some you know, analysis for that. Super heady, really complex, lots of moving parts and not useful to a small business.

2:34Like really valuable to a big business, which is why they pay the money for it. Not useful at all to a small business. But the thinking process and the reason I like taking people from that world one is because I came from it, but also because I think at the end of the day consultants are a lot like engineers in that you just have to solve problems. And being able to have a really good problem thinking mind is I think what makes a good a good consultant in general. And so, that feeds really well into the advisory practice.

2:58>> Would you invest in content creators? I would if like okay. Let me clarify and qualify the answer. So, are you saying invest in them like if I could buy a stock in a person or like if hey, I want to start a I want to start this umbrella company. >> I think initially the second. I probably wouldn't for a de novo idea. Mhm. Um for a couple reasons. One is like I don't I don't really like seed stuff like idea stuff. Also because creators are typically like big idea people. That's not the constraint. The constraint for them is execution. Mhm.

3:34Um and business acumen. And for a deal structure like that to like in a traditional structure, I probably wouldn't have majority control or ownership. And so, that would be really high risk I think. And so, I probably wouldn't like that deal. If it was a deal that was kind of like the opposite where like maybe they owned like 20% and we owned 80 and we fronted the capital and we like put all the stuff together. >> incubating them. >> Yeah, maybe. But even then it's like I also have to look at supply and demand of like my own deal flow. Right.

4:01>> And to do that it would have to prove that that deal structure provides more alpha than the existing thing which I would have a hard time believing. What about a later stage creator company like the primes of the world? >> Yeah, so like a Logan Paul or like a whatever a Jake Paul or something who's not him but somebody else. Right. It would be tough. Mhm. And the the main reason is investing in in someone like that isn't really investing. It's a joint venture. Mhm. And then it's really like so I'm starting another business.

4:33And that's really what it would be. And so it have to be a business that I felt the existing resources and assets that we had we already had a huge percentage of the core competencies required. Not just in knowledge but like in manpower. Yeah. To do it. >> Makes sense because for you you're either obviously you bring capital, money. >> Right. But you're also either bringing your image and likeness which is distribution or you're bringing operational expertise. Right. >> You're working with these businesses that are less savvy on the distribution side clearly something of value.

5:00>> Easy, yeah. You're working with these creators well you have distributions you don't necessarily need theirs and they don't have the operations side which means you have to spend tons of time building. >> Tons. They like they don't have any. Right. >> And so we'd have to build we'd have to build a company. And so that's where I see that as like like translating the ultimate question to like would you build a company for a creator? If that's what it if that's what I translated into then the answer is probably not. >> Right. Uh just given the the the construct like how much it would take.

5:28Real quick if you were a business owner and you were 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 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 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 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.