Bootstrapped wachsen, ohne die Kasse zu leeren

0:00So, what is payback period? It's how quickly you can recover the cost of getting a customer. Now, for me, ideally, I try to do it within 30 days. So, payback period in general is how fast you get the money back from what it cost you to get somebody. My goal is within 30 days. Why? Because just about every business owner, at least in America, and at least the developed world can typically gain access to a credit card, which gives you 30 days of interest free money. Now, the reason that's important is that if you have interest free money, then it means that you can grow without money out of pocket. And that allows you to have limitless growth. If it if I can take a $100 of credit card money, which I don't have to pay anything for until the end of the month, and I can take that $100 and go get me a customer, and at the end of the month, make that $100 back, then at the end of the month, I owe no one anything, and I now have a customer.

0:43That is the power of this. Now, you can repeat that at infin item, which is Latin for lots of times. It's into infinity, but let's not get let's not get too technical. Um, so the reason that I use that as my as my as my rule of thumb is for that very practical reason. Now you might think to yourself, well our payback period is 90 days. There's nothing wrong with that. It's the same as like you know we had LTV to CACM launch of 100 to1. It didn't stay 100 to one. It was 1001 the first year right and over time it ended up being somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-ish to1. Um but the idea because as you scale more levels of of infrastructure will get introduced to the business and so that will drive down operating margins and that's okay as long as you have a business that scales. Now back to payback period.

1:28You could I want to shift the perspective on this which is that like even if you currently spend and get paid back in 90. You should still think to yourself like is there a way is there a money model? Is there a setup? Is there a configuration of pricing and products of what I currently have without introducing operational drag or too much operational drag that could pull cash forward? And functionally this is literally what the entire book for money models was about was driving more cash flow forward. Now, if you have a business where you're funded from the outside, A or B, you're very large business that has huge capital reserves, you have a huge base of recurring customers, then you can get more aggressive, of course, right? Like, if if you're going to go head-to-head with, you know, Apple, then sure, they can they don't need to get their money back in 30 days. I mean, they are a bank at this point. Like, they can they can borrow money from the entire world and and fund whatever they want. Um, but for again, everybody who's watching this, most of you guys are bootstrapped.

2:20Actually, can we do a poll real quick? Can we do a poll? >> Yeah. >> All right. Let's say who here is bootstrapped versus has investors. That's it. Bootstrapped versus investors. Um and if you don't own a business, you can actually put third uh wage. Wiji as the third option. All right. So, wage bootstrapped and and investor. No, no. I want to get I want to get the poll answers. Put it in the poll. Don't put it in the chat.

2:48Put it in the poll. I've already seen Bootstrap. [laughter] Justin. Justin, such a Get these wages out of here. [laughter] I think that might become permanent. Okay, put put it in there. Put it in there. I want to see I want to see. >> Okay, 97 votes, 16. Okay, we got 200 votes. Okay, great. Let me see what we got. What? Let me see some results.

3:12Brazil tales. See what we got. Okay. >> 21% investor. >> Okay. Great. So, one out of 25 of you guys, you don't have to worry about the payback period, but you still should. Uh, which is all the investor bros. Now, all the guys who have in outside investors, I promise you, you will get investors frothing at the mouth if you can uh show that you can get payback grade within 30 days. Number one. Number two, if you have payback period in 30 days, guess what? You also don't need investors because you don't need their money to scale, which gives you a huge amount of leverage into when you're getting into your fundraising period.

3:54Now, that's the one out of 25. For the other 20 out of 25 of you who are bootstrap business owners, y'all are like me, which is that I like Bank of Alex is what's funding this stuff. And so, we have to think, are there initiation fees? Are there setup fees? Are there is there an onboarding process? Is there an on-ramp? Is there a front-end defined program or setup that I can sell? Can I can I bundle in some sort of physical product upfront with my services? Can I sell a bundle of an extended period of time to cash flow at day one? Can I do a buy one get two? Can I get them to pay for the last month up front? All of these are different tactical versions of solving for the same problem, which is I want to pull cash forward so I can recover CAC within that first month. Because when that happens, I'm telling you, like all of my businesses, every single one that's gotten really big, we have been able to recover what it cost us to get a customer in the in the first 30 days.

4:49Period. So, it's the strongest recommendation I can give you. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10stage road map 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 headcount 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, brickandmortar, all of this.

5:23And it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.comromadap, just enter your info, and it'll spit it right back to you. Offering.