Der Lebenszyklus des Unternehmertums

0:00This is the entrepreneur life cycle until you learn how to break free from it. And so there are six stages. You have stage one, which is uninformed optimism. This is where you see your friend or you see something online and it looks like they're making money or it looks like there's some opportunity and you think, "Oh my god, that sounds amazing." And you have optimism because it looks great, but it's [clears throat] uninformed because you have no idea what it entails.

0:27So then you dive in and you say, "Okay, I'm going to pursue this this thing." Whatever. Is it baking cupcakes or I'm going to I'm going to do lawnmowing or I'm going to do trading, whatever. >> Second step is you get into it and you're like, "Oh my god, I don't know. There's so many things involved in this and this is significantly more complicated than I I expected." So then you become an informed pessimist. [laughter] You now know uh that it's hard or significantly harder than you expected.

0:50The third stage is you have your crisis of meaning or the value of despair. So you're continuing to do this stuff. It's continuing to not work and you keep working and it keeps not working. And so this is the step and this is the this is the point of truth and this is the cycle where the the paths of the entrepreneurs split and the vast majority of people take this next step which is they then say you know what there's that thing over there that my other friend's doing.

1:18Maybe I should do that instead. And so then they hop back to uninformed optimism and then they go boom to informed pessimism and they just go around and around and around and they live the same six months uh for 20 straight years. Now the other path of from the valley of despair is sticking with it. And so then you become an informed optimist because now you understand you still understood all the bad stuff but you also understand the good stuff and how to avoid the bad and maximize the good. And then once you're there, you do you stick on that path long enough and you end up achieving what you originally thought was really easy and fast. And so that cycle, this is more or less the um the Alex Ramosi life story, [laughter] which is why I can so intimately describe you to the steps, is that I call that loop and that uh the person on the other side the woman in the red dress, which is probably my favorite part of the Matrix movie, which is Neo, who's the main character, is in a program to teach him one thing. And so he's walking uh through the crowded streets of what looks like a New York City with Morpheus leading him. And uh he's drawning on about something that he's supposed to learn. And he says, "No, were you listening to me or were you looking to the woman looking at the woman in the red dress?" And and Neil was looking at the woman in the red dress as Morpheus is talking. And then he says, "Look again." And he looks back at the woman in the red dress and it's Agent Smith with a gun pointed at his head. And in that moment, he's like, "Freeze." and he explains that you're either one of us or one of them and they are the people who are sentinels sent to destroy us. And so what appears to be the woman in the red dress is actually a d agent from the system meant to destroy the opportunity that you're in right now. And so I love the woman in the red dress so much because it's so real because you're in this thing. You're in this relationship with your business and you're like, you know, this girl seems great. And then you get to know her and you find out she snores when she sleeps and all of a sudden it's like, you know, uh, you know, you see you see the sweatpants and no makeup in the morning and you realize that sometimes she's moody, whatever.

3:24But you get to you start to get to know, you're like, I don't know if we're going to get married, but like, you know, this is kind of where we're at. And then you see a woman in the red dress and you're like, you know what? I think that's the girl. And so you quit this relationship with your business and you get into that relationship. But then you realize that that girl has crabs. She has a crazy ex-boyfriend. And you're like, "Oh my god, I didn't want to deal with any of this stuff, right?" And so my CFO, so was one of the first people that you're like, "Oh my god, I hired that person. It changed everything." So my CFO in Jim Launch um had taken four companies from 0 to 100 million. Um she had done over 40 M&A transactions. Her largest one was 5 billion. Super experienced. Um she was at the very end of her career and she was like, "I'll take you guys I'll I'll take this one last ride with you guys."

4:04And so, you know, mind you, Laya and I'm 26 or 27 at the time. Laya's 23, 24, and we're sitting across the table from a very experienced business person being like, "Please help us." And so, one of the things that she taught me that I I'll never forget is she said, "The grass is always greener on the other side. You just don't know that it's fertilized with shit." And she and she she's southern, so she had this deep southern accent. She's like, "There's always [laughter] everywhere." And so she's like, "I've been in enough businesses to know that all businesses have shit." And so you just have the you don't know about and the you do know about.

4:40And you're in this business and so this is the you know. And that has been so profoundly impactful on my life because it was so hard for me to break the cycle. Really hard for me. Um I mean I gave you my my life story of the many businesses that I've been involved in. And so like the entrepreneurial ADD has been so real for me. And I've made some of the biggest career mistakes by just pursuing and splitting my attention between multiple endeavors.

5:03And I can say truthfully that this 2024 was the first year and this is now 2025. The first time in my life where I haven't experienced FOMO, so fear of missing out. And it was one of those things that I just always had. I would see somebody doing really well. I was like, "Oh man, I mean I should be getting into that like that. I should be doing this. I should be doing that." Um, and it was it was one of those things kind of like being happy where like you don't realize you're happy. You just look back and you're like, you know what, that was a really good year, you know, like you kind of like you kind of see it in retrospect. What I realized was that now when I hear someone say like, oh my god, I crushed it with this thing. I think that's amazing for them.

5:37I'm sure there's tons of problems that I don't know about and that's amazing, but I'm going to keep doing this thing because this is the only thing I know how to do pretty well and I'm just going to keep compounding my information advantage against everybody else who thinks this is easy and wants to get into it. And so, um, I think that that every any any massive company that you know of has existed for multiple decades. And in order for something to exist for multiple decades, the founder has to stay focused on that thing for the whole time. And I measure focus by the quantity and quality of things that you say no to. And I measure commitment or I define commitment as the elimination of alternatives. And so if you think of marriage as the ultimate commitment, then it is the ultimate commitment because you've limited literally every alternative besides this person. And so I think that many business problems and many entrepreneurs would 5x 10x their business if they simply gave themselves no way out.

6:30This is what I'm doing. And I'm I mean the term, you know, burning the boats, but I'm eliminating all alternatives and structuring my life such that I I make it very difficult to pursue the alternatives. And I think by doing that, you can actually conquer this this cycle and make it past the split where you go uh crash and burn and then restart the doom loop or make it to informed optimism and then eventually to the achievement that you want.

6:56There's so much there. There's so much there, but it's such an important point. Um so where shall I start? So at that moment here, this crisis of meaning moment, >> what I see so much of is entrepreneurs not necessarily quitting the old thing, but just taking on something else. >> And I get entrepreneurs will come up to me in the gym and they'll say, "Hey, Steve, um, just want to let you know what I do and see if you can offer me any advice." And then they'll list three things. They'll say, "I'm starting this crypto thing with my friend Dave. I've got this hair business where we're selling on ecom and I've got this other thing." Yeah.

7:28>> And they almost assume that the more things they're doing, the higher the probability that they'll be successful in something. [sighs and gasps] >> My mom was that my my mom has started 30 businesses. And I watched for my whole childhood how she would start a hairdressing salon and then the person down the street running an estate agents would come in and say, "We're making loads of money as an estate agent." She'd start that. That business would suck. She'd hit this moment of crisis of meaning. She then start and she so she jumped between 20 to 30 businesses

8:04>> and it's kind of still happening now where they last 6 months they eventually go bust. She sort of like you know like the monkeys that swing to the next branch swings to the next thing and there's never been the escape velocity that comes from this informed optimism part. >> So yeah, this it really rang true for me in every sense of the word. this idea of like of focus going against all of your instincts and your emotions but being pivotal to achievement.

8:28>> Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage 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, and it works. And it's my gift to you.

9:00It'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.