Was ist eine Marke wirklich?

0:00I said the second lesson was brand. And so, I had to look at a company or brand as a learning tool. As [music] what are people going to learn to associate my brand with? The tangible and the intangible ideas. There are many people that I associated with when I was younger that I would never associate with today. [music] Even though I would say, "Well, I don't act that way. I don't live my life the way they live their lives." People would still make that association. If I did nothing but talk with porn stars on my show, people would still make a very different association with me. [music] And so, I want to embody certain values that I want my brand to associate with. And anything that is not those things, by default, detracts from it because it dilutes the association. Branding is like creating a garden where pretty much anything but the flower that you're trying to grow there is a weed. Even if it's a daffodil, even if it's a sunflower, even if the flower itself is fine. Like I said, I have no issues with porn. I think it's a sunflower, whatever. But if I'm trying to grow roses, then anything that's not a rose doesn't belong. Being so vigilant about defending [music] that garden of association and reputation gives you so much leverage because the reason Warren Buffett now can just do deals that no one else can do is because his handshake means more than the US government's. If he says he will pay, we know [music] he will pay. If he says he will be there to insure your entire city, we know he will. He can do a deal on a one-page agreement for billions of dollars because people trust and they know that his reputation matters more than anything to him. And so, [music] trust is leverage for deals, it's leverage for sales. The first experience I had with having a strong brand was when we were probably a year, year and a half into Gym Launch. I launched what would become Allen, my software project. [music] And when people heard I had launched a new thing, the clients that I had were sending screenshots of their credit cards

1:46>> [music] >> to my customer support team saying, "I don't know what it was, but if Alex made it, I'll buy it." And so, all of the ideas and the obsessions around how I was going to market it and how I was going to position it, the thing that mattered most was what they had already received from me and how much I had delivered on my first promise. [music] And so when I realized that, I was like, all of this sales and marketing stuff gets you one sale. [music] Delivering exceptional product, exceptional reputation around your products gets you every other sale after that. And you can always be able to sell the next thing provided you delivered on the first thing. And that's where there's this obsession with marketing because there's always more people to sell [music] to.

2:22It's a very, in my opinion, tiring life. You always have to go get new customers. If you make sales to get customers rather than >> [music] >> get customers to make sales, you make the customer the goal. And then you get to keep that relationship. And then next year you still have that customer. If you got a customer just to make a sale, you have to go get another customer to make another sale next year. But if you make a sale to create the relationship of the customer, then next year that customer will buy again and the new customer will buy. And the third year you get the first two years and the third customer. And then that is how you create a compounding vehicle. And so both of those things, brand [music] and product, are actually underlying one concept now that I'm saying it out loud, which is I didn't understand compounding. I thought that it was normal to have to go out, bang doors, call phones, DM, run ads to get customers every single month. And [music] that next month I'm going to have to get another 20 just to keep the lights on. Rather than having spent more time on my reputation and the quality of my product so [music] that when I sold the first 100, they would never leave again. And then they would send me the next 100 and I wouldn't have to do anything. And then I would be able to fend people off. And then then I'd be able to raise my prices and be able to take people on my terms. But I didn't understand any of that. And part of that is because I wanted money so fast.

3:30>> [music] >> And building a great product takes longer. Building a great reputation literally never stops until the day you die. Leaning into that lesson, you know, the first book I launched and I think it did two or 4,000 copies sold its first [music] month, something like that. You know, the second book that launched two years later sold 250,000 copies in its [music] first month. Which for context, the average New New best seller sells between 10 and 100,000 in its first 12 months. And we sold 250 in the first month. The only way that that can happen is if the people who bought the first book buy the [music] second book. And everybody they tell also buys. And that book still continues to sell at twice the rate of my first book today. Real quick, if you are a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift.

4:11So, 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 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 de-constrain 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.