Warum Alex Dezentralisierung schätzt

0:00Decentralization wins. So, we are we are big advocates of decentralization. I'd say that we've taken this as a as a Warren Buffett, you know, a feather out of his his hat. I believe that people need to stay focused. Shared resources split resources. And so, our goal, especially in terms of how we're running the company, is that as fast as possible, we want to allow functions to be self-sustaining and ideally from day one. Right? And if not, we need to look at that investment from Holdco, something that has to get paid back as fast as possible so they can be come independent. And so, this is a little bit more of an operational thing, but the way that I think about this is like kind of like revenue lines. So, I do not like centralization. I want I want independent leaders who own their own P&Ls so that they can stay completely focused on making that thing win. And the times in my career where I have, quote, gotten distracted has actually been I distracted my own team from winning because I told I took resources from here and said, "Oh, we're going to also pursue this opportunity." But I didn't increase infrastructure. And so, I think this is honestly like this will this is one of the big reasons why I finally feel like I figured out how do we go from a few hundred million to a billion a year in sales. Like this is like this is for the more advanced business owners, this is the big unlock is that you have to think a business of businesses. You have to think a team of teams. Right? And so, it's not like, "Oh, Amazon is this one business."

1:20Amazon has many revenue lines and they function as basically just many businesses under the brand of Amazon. They have the same culture. They have the same ideals. They strive for the same ultimate outcome and they're aligned in that way, but the actual doingness of AWS versus the logistics business versus the private label business of Amazon, all of those are very different. And so, each of them has CEOs in their own right. And so, acquisition.com now, we have two two revenue lines outside our three revenue lines outside of outside of the portfolio. And I guess that's not even true. There's more than that. Well, each of them has to that each of them has their own presidents and leadership team. And so that is the big mistake that I kept trying to make cuz I kept thinking I had to make this business bigger when in reality, like humans can only manage so many humans, right? And so things eventually split off and become their own units of business and it's very difficult for a CFO of a holding company to know how much front-line customer service person needs to spend at this particular company. They're too far away. And so that's why I don't like centralization if you're building a very large business and I say that with with with the this the exception of software from a shared services perspective because basically the operations of that scale, you know, better than just about any other kind of business. But the way that revenue lines are are imagined within the software world is basically feature sets. And so you have a team that's in charge of these features and it's kind of like a director, a CEO of this feature, a CEO of this feature. So still more or less works the same way even if the revenue is consolidated with one membership or something like that.

2:57But if you have a service business, typically the revenue will not be consolidated that way. You'll have different lines of of services and different pricing associated with that, different sales teams, different marketing, but it's still brand will still be the same, but the leaders and what they're selling and how they deliver will be different. And so that is a huge unlock for me and it is it I I feel like we're finally I mean we've been doing this now, but this is me me kind of uh distilling down that crystal so that future me can be like, "What was I thinking right then?" That's what I was thinking and that I think was the the big um the big W. I'll give you a couple tidbits on the leaders to do that. You need leaders who can who can drive the revenue lines and are incentivized on bottom line and if they need you, they don't deserve the incentive. If they need you to drive the revenue, then they are not the driver. You're still the driver. If you really want to build something big, you have to be able to find people who are exceptional, compensate them well, and get out of their way. Now you've heard people say that. I've I've people say that. And I I I want to say this in a way that somehow I can like make it real because it's real for me now. It's the the thing that I was missing was the was a pattern recognition on what high quality talent looks like. That was what I was missing.

4:02If that person Actually, here's a different way of thinking about it. Here's a good one. If you have a $100 million business, you might have one or two founders or three founders who have nine-figure founder, you know, skill sets. But the people who are going to run within that is the next tier of people are all, call it, eight-figure or multi-eight-figure entrepreneurs. And so, in order to create the $100 million business, you might have two $25 million entrepreneurs and then and then five $10 million entrepreneurs who run the next tier. And then underneath of them, you've got many seven-figure entrepreneurs, right? And so, it's almost like the aggregate of the the aggregate revenue in the business is the added up potential of all the skill of all the players within it. And that was just a bit like if if you don't think that your head of sales could go do sales and be like if your if your person in marketing could start a marketing agency, then they're probably not that good at marketing.

4:57Right? And so, that's that's kind of thinking process. It's like if none of the people that you have could go do it on their own, then you probably don't have good enough people. And that's the thing cuz you have this fear of like, "Oh, what if I If I bring somebody in who can do it on their own, they're going to steal my stuff." It's like, "Or if you don't bring them in, you will literally do it for the rest of your life." We have to create the vision and the opportunities that are big enough, and this is where the design This is your job. How do I get the opportunities are such that it still makes more sense for the person to work here because they can have uncapped earnings. So, there's a difference between like somebody needs to own the whole business, which the biggest business in the world, no one owns the whole business. Well, I mean, to my knowledge, right? The biggest I'm thinking like, okay, publicly traded, whatever. I'm sure there's some secret Arabian oil factory that I don't know about, right? That one guy owns. But like, the vast majority of businesses, many people own them, right?

5:42But what's more key is that someone has unlimited earning capacity. And I think that's the key. That's how you can get the A players and if they are true A's, they'll [ __ ] light up because the thing is is it makes sense because the return on effort is higher because of the aggregate infrastructure that has already been built from the brand recognition, from the reputation, from the delivery mechanisms they might have in place. That person it's like they're like, "I don't even want like let me just let me cook. Let me crush what I'm really good at and be able to do that a higher level than I could do if I did it on my own because I couldn't even use my whole superpower to the greatest degree that I can because I would get bottlenecked much lower along the line doing something else that I don't want to do.

6:21So, huge unlock for me and for the bigger business owners that part was probably the most valuable for you. Real 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 dollar 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 in 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 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.