Aufhören, sich im eigenen Business zurückgeblieben zu fühlen

0:00So, first I just want to say thank you, because you bring me a [ __ ] ton of money. You're welcome. >> [applause] >> Thank you. So, so my last business was in early childhood education shared services startup. I built it from concept to fully funded $32 million. >> Awesome. And then scaled from just two to 133 staff people in 18 months.

0:22Awesome. So, thank you. And I left it because I made a community decision to incubate it at another nonprofit, but I was not the owner. Okay. >> So, I built it for them. Weird. Now, I help career women productize I mean, they made a [ __ ] ton of money. It made them a [ __ ] ton. Good. Yeah, so they um >> [laughter] >> So happy. Yes, so now I help career women productize themselves so that they can become solopreneurs or earn big startup founders. Cool. My question here is around your talk to us voice speed, Mhm. because for me I had 9 months to take very disparate stakeholders, pull them together, take concept, 18 months of diligence, and then launch.

1:02Now, I'm building a sales team. Yeah. >> I'm doing things like the personal branding is me. So, my talk to us around speed and that exactly what you shared earlier, the temperature that entrepreneurs are comfortable with, has been hard for me to calibrate, especially because of me. Do you feel like you're going too fast or too slow? I think I've gone too slow. And my brain You know what's weird is that I have I have yet to meet an entrepreneur who says that they're going too slow. You're the only one.

1:30Every other entrepreneur is like, I'm going way too fast. Um things are just happening so fast around me. Um I'm joking. Um no entrepreneur says that. Everyone's like, this should have been done 7 years ago. Like, why is this taking so long? Like, I can do this in 5 seconds, why does it take you 5 years? Um so So, I think first off, it's normal. Um but let's chunk down a level. What specifically do you feel like is not happening fast enough?

1:55So, think about it from inputs and outputs. So, outputs I don't care about. Outputs Outputs occur. Revenue occurs. Profit occurs as a result of inputs. And so, what inputs are not happening fast enough? So, it's to me it's the equation of cash flow and closing my learning gap. So, for example, I have been like, oh, I'm the sales person, and I'm building it, and I'm all of these things, which have required me to close my learning gap. Mhm. I would prefer to hire someone to like build out the sales team.

2:22>> But you don't have cash flow yet. Yeah. So, when you start So, this Okay. So, was Was the other thing funded that you did? Yes. Okay. So, this is really cool for everybody. This is a great meta concept. So, every single business on planet Earth incurs debt from the day it starts. It's just that the nature of the debt is different. So, if you're bootstrapped, you start with leadership debt, management debt, technical debt. You incur all these different types of debt.

2:48If you're venture-backed, for example, you incur financial debt, but you can spend the money to get the CRM day one. You can spend the money to get the executive team day one. And so, you incur less financial debt, less technical debt, less of all these things, but then you got to pay back the financial debt, or you just slice down the pie, and so you have a much smaller slice. And so, um whenever you trade, like you have There's There's tradeoffs between the types of debt that you choose to incur. And so, bootstrapped businesses in general take longer to grow because you have the issue that you have right now, which is that you have to keep stockpiling, and you usually have to work double time because you have to do today's job and tomorrow's job in order to get to generate Basically, you do two or three jobs to generate the cash flow from the savings of not paying someone else to do that job to be able to afford to pay the person to do the job that then levels you up to the next job that you can take over that pays even better.

3:40And so, that's fundamentally the cycle of a bootstrapped entrepreneur. And so, I don't think that you're going too slow. It feels slow cuz you were used to jetpacks that were artificial. No, I'm just being real. Like, if you're like, I've got 10 million bucks, let's go, it's a very different starting block. Right? Like businesses that I can grow now, I'll just I can just fund them to start, and that's where you get real leverage cuz you get the best of both. Because then you have the capital, you can start like your venture-backed, but you're the venture-backed company. And so, you can start with all the leadership in place, get all the consultants in so that you can get the text, you know, text stack and all that stuff, and you can pay for the enterprise savings for a year ahead of time, and you can do all that stuff and not dilute down, but then the company owes me money, but I own the company, so whatever.

4:25Right? And I know I'm going to get a good return on capital. And so, fundamentally Does that help everybody in terms of thinking about this from a speed perspective? Like venture-backed companies go faster because they cheat from like the nature of business. It's like they start with a ton of money, and they can spend it from money they didn't make. Bootstrapped, you have to make every dollar that you spend. But I think that long-term bootstrapped businesses are the most fundamentally sound.

4:50Um I won't even get too much into that cuz I'll just stop there. All The TLDR is you're going slow because you're comparing it to a venture-backed >> [clears throat] >> I will say that was a public-private partnership that was grant-funded, so we also didn't have the pressure of Like, we had social outcomes, too. Yeah, you didn't even have like You didn't even have like revenue or profit goals you had to even hit. So, you had like outside money you didn't You weren't accountable for any financial metrics, and you could just hire people.

5:18Like, yeah, that's like literally the opposite of a bootstrapped business. And so, like it's unsurprising that it feels different. Just a very quick you said technical Sure. So, my next hire will be someone in the content space and then sales in the future. How much of cash reserves do you think I should have before I bring on somebody who's going to make like six figures?

5:44So, this will be good for everybody. The rate at which you hire is actually a risk question, kind of like we were talking about earlier. And so, this is where I made a tweet the other day was like, your lifestyle is your competitor's opportunity, which is the amount that you require to live on in distributions is what you can't reinvest in the business. But there's no perfect answer for that. If you have a family with kids, like we were talking about earlier, then I don't see that as bad. It's just that if somebody else you're competing against doesn't have a family and kids and reinvests all that money, then they're going to beat you.

6:17But you might not care cuz you might not be in a business where there's a network effect that like it's a race to the top. Very few businesses are that way. Like, you're trying to build Facebook, then yeah, you probably want to reinvest everything. If you're trying to build a dry cleaning store, probably doesn't matter. And so, within the context of your business, I doubt that there are network effects that are going to like kick in at any time reasonable. And if you did, you need venture backing to get there in in time anyway, so let's just not get into that. Um And so, the time that you choose to hire that person is basically based on the risk that you're comfortable with dealing.

6:46Know Like, if you know that the business is going to continue to grow, then you're just You're just dragging the growth forward. But you're sacrificing your paycheck so you can pay somebody else so they can drag that growth forward. And so, it's a Like, the entrepreneur's dilemma is consumption versus investment. As, when do I start getting paydays? And it really just depends on you. So, if you've hit a revenue ceiling, or your entire business relies on you to grow, then I'd love to invite you out to our headquarters here in Vegas to learn how we scale. It's where my team spends 2 days with you to identify the thing that's holding your business back. And so, if that sounds interesting, click, book a call, and if you're a fit, we'd love to potentially see you out here in Vegas.