Tu einfach MEHR

0:00More better new. Now, this isn't going to be a new concept for anyone who's listening to my stuff, but I will have a slightly different take on this. New is incredibly risky. And so, this is the best analogy that I've I I visualized this year that I'm probably going to take with me for the rest of my life, which is I want you to imagine Here we go. Actually, look at this. If I have these these candies, all right, and I throw them all over the place. If I keep doing this, how likely is it that all of them are going to end up in the exact position, separated by color, and stacked together?

0:31Very unlikely. I would have to hit refresh and keep doing that many, many times until eventually all of these are lined up, stacked up on on each other super nicely in a way that's organized, right? This would take a lot Like, could it happen? Of course, it could. It is statistically possible. Is it likely? No. And so, when you think about this, this is six pieces of candy, right? There are variables within your business that create the business that works, right? And so, when you have your business and it is stacked, it is working, it is generating revenue, the likelihood that you changing one of these variables makes the building or makes the stack or the business better goes down. And the taller the stack is, the more evolved your business is, the more bricks in that building have been properly placed. And so, the higher the likelihood the next move is the wrong move if it's something different. So, I'll give you a marketing version of this. If you have something called a control and you have a variant when you run a split test, AB split test.

1:34If you have a control that you've run 36 split tests on and it has won 36 of those, it is the number one control, the likelihood that you changing that resulting in an improvement is low. And so, if you think about your business as it currently stands, there's many different ways to align these variables. Almost all of them are not profitable businesses. You happen to have one that actually works. And so, if you have that, then the highest risk-adjusted move that you can make is that you do more of the thing that already works. I will keep doing more bricks in this order because that has worked before, right? You might try and do better, which is a tiny variation of what what you're currently doing.

2:13But something truly new rarely works. And so, and it also usually takes the most resources. And so, for us, if we're going to do something new, I give myself one new thing a year. One. So, what was the one new thing this year? It was the book launch. That was this year. Next year, you'll find out what it is, right? But I get one. And it's because I know what the tremendous drain of resource it is, one big thing, one new thing. And so, I would say that the bigger the companies that we have, the more resources we have, the fewer new things we're doing. Because when you when nothing works, you want to hit refresh as many times as you can. You want to do lots of new [ __ ] cuz nothing's working. But as soon as something works, then you start to have direction. You want to have less and less deviation from that unless you really believe there's an existential risk that would require you to change everything, which is significantly less likely than you really think it is. In fact, I would say many business owners will destroy their businesses in reality for problems that they have manufactured artificially. Problems that have not even yet occurred because they are afraid of them happening. When in reality, when that problem happens, it's not going to happen overnight, and you're going to have some some some some heads up, probably. And for those of you who were old enough to have businesses during COVID, so if you had business at least for at least 5 years, right? Or 6 years, you know that you'll survive.

3:33You'll adapt just like you always have. And so, do not try and change the business to solve problems that do not exist because there is more than enough problems that absolutely do exist today that you should be solving. And so, going back to more, and this has been something that's been just I feel like I've got another layer of paint on the more better new, is that often times the highest return question is why can't I do more of the thing that's working? Now, there's usually a much deeper, harder problem that you have to solve once you do the easy mores, but there's always a way to do more than you currently are. And it's just that once you realize that the level of difficulty of what it takes to do the next more is harder than doing something better or new. So, instead of you bucking up and and and saying, "I'm going to focus on this very hard problem." You then distract yourself with reasonable problems that no one will blame you for solving. Because the biggest risk to the business is not like a stupid decision because those are unlikely to actually occur. The real risk to your business is the second, third, and fourth most profitable things that you could do rather than the most valuable thing that you can do. This is a very important lesson for me this year. And so, when you get clear on what the harder question is that you need to ask of why can't I do more and now it's getting hard for me to do it, then we have to remove every distraction that you have that makes you think about anything besides solving that problem. That's it.

4:53And sometimes the answer to that hard problem isn't a one-week, a four-week, or four-month solution. Sometimes you realize that your culture is [ __ ] and you have to fix the culture. And that's going to take you 18 months. And when you're 6 months into it, things will feel worse than they did when you started, but it doesn't make it any less of the correct decision for the business. It just means that your reinforcing event or the reward for the work that you're going to have is far in the future and it doesn't mean that 6 months in you should now change course because it hasn't started working yet.

5:27Because you knew when you started and you realized that this was the true constraint of the business that this was going to be a long and painful road ahead of you. And so, you do not want to then solve try and come up with a new solution when the first solution never had time to bear fruit. Because sometimes the most productive thing you can do in the business is give time time. Let the solution actually work. This has been a very hard lesson for me many times as an entrepreneur and I just want to pass it to you guys many of you guys have many half-built bridges. You You had a way to get across, but you knew it would take 4 months, but 1 month in you were still suffering you thought, "Well, maybe I'll do this." But it's like you never let the first bridge get finished. And so in a real way for me, I realized that I needed to build a brand.

6:06I've had I'll give you two examples of this. So one, early days of GymLaunch, Leila and I realized that we had an entire tier of directors that were not competent enough. And so over the next 12 months, we had to turn 11 out of 11 directors. Very painful. And when you turn directors, what do you think you also have to do? Sometimes you have to turn the teams underneath because they had a low bar and so they brought in a lot of low bar people. There was obviously some good people they brought in, too. But like very, very painful process. Kind of killed morale for that whole year.

6:36But we knew that we weren't going to be able to grow the business because the level of skill of that team was not sufficient. And we Our bar was too low. And unfortunately, we can't fire ourselves. And so we had to do the next natural thing. That was very painful. 6 months into that, the culture is worse and we haven't turned the whole leadership team. Was it the wrong course of action? No. Should we change course? No. But it means that you have to learn to suffer because sometimes the correct course is the most painful path because the highest leverage move often is the hardest problem that you're not choosing to allocate attention towards solving.

7:06In a more recent one, I was at 30 to 50 million a year for 3 years for GymLaunch and the big aha that I had was that I needed to build a brand. And that took years. And so when I went into it, I was like, "This I will have to keep doing this for many years before I'm going to bear any fruit from this." And my income, when I made that call, went down for the first 2 years, by a lot. And so I think you have to be willing to stomach that period of time or you will never be able to do the real solutions that are really going to move the needle because most business owners will do the second, third, fourth thing, the incremental improvements rather than the order of magnitude change that typically take order of magnitudes in terms of time and effort. So, number 11, it's okay to just make money. So, hear me out. There's something that I like to call the third marshmallow fallacy. And so it goes like this. So, many of you guys have probably heard about the research study of like, okay, we they videotape kids and they said, "We'll put one marshmallow in front of you and then if you wait, you know, whatever, 10 minutes, we'll give you a second marshmallow." And the kids that wait, you know, 10 minutes, they're more successful in life because it's you know, proxy for your ability to delay gratification. Okay. What's interesting about that is that people then assume that delaying gratification is always the best course of action. And this is why this is very interesting lesson. If you delay gratification indefinitely, then you will work your entire life for nothing because you have delayed gratification and then you will die.

8:25Said differently, if you were the ant that always saves up your money for the winter and you keep saving, keep saving, keep saving and then you die, you have a big stack of crumbs that you will never have done anything with. And so, the question is no longer like, once you have learned to delay gratification. So, this will be me talking a little bit more to the winners in the room. Once you have learned to delay gratification, you then have to learn the even harder task of the appropriate time to accept gratification. Real. So, this is incredibly difficult, especially for winners because in the earlier part of your career, you you get reinforced, you get rewarded for delaying gratification.

9:01And often times it is there's a dose relationship. As in, the longer you delay, the bigger the outcome. So, you just continue to learn to delay more and more and more. But, there is a time where it comes to reap because you cannot sow forever. And so, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who was like, "Hey, I don't want to do this thing because it's not going to add enterprise value." But, the amount of money that we were talking about for this particular deal was like hundreds of millions of dollars.

9:26And I wasn't even that confident that the the other thing was going to happen and it would be like 10 years in the future from now. And so, we need to allow some risk adjustment for outcomes to make their way into the decision. If you can get paid today versus getting paid in 5 years, there is a value to that money because you have 5 more years of being able to use those resources to acquire more resources.

9:53And so I would say that something that has shifted in me particularly was that it's okay to make money. Like you can also just make money for the sake of making money and I think that's fine. And I'll say this differently which is like in a business perspective let's say that you have a service-based business or you have a software business, whatever and you don't want to sell your own time one-on-one. Totally okay. And you you don't want to do it because you do not want to get any revenue that doesn't have a high multiple. Okay, that's fine. Well, let me tell you the story.

10:26So when I started my first gym I had one personal training client who paid me in cash every month. He paid me about $4,000 a month in cash for personal training. I did personal It was like 90 minutes a day 5 days a week. So it was it was a lot of personal training. But that guy giving me that cash every single month even though it was not scalable, it was not something that I could sell someday, that money paid for me to eat. Right? And it allowed me to delay gratification of the rest of the business. But somebody who would be a purist of like, "Well, you shouldn't you should eat even more [ __ ] You should you know, you should suffer even more during that period of time."

10:57would have said, "You shouldn't have taken that distraction. You should have just worked even more in the business." But I just I don't I don't think that's true. And so I I say this only to the winners. If you're somebody who's never learned to delay delay gratification, you've never learned to save up for the winter, you can't you still overspend your income, ignore this entirely. But for those of you who are the savers, who do always live under your means if you're means, who are willing to delay thing 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, you have to then also be able to make the decision when do I ask? When do I reap?

11:27And I'll give you a one more example and then I'll I'll move to the next point. Which is this is super common in content creators. And I think this is why I ended up writing this. I've seen a number of creators. I remember I had a conversation with a guy who who said, "Hey, I have this Twitter following that I've built over the last how many years?" And I said, "Okay." And he said, "I would like to better monetize my following." And I said, "All right. Well, how many times do you like do you do you like what CTAs do you have? Do you you know, what do you what do you tell them to do?" And he's like, "Oh, nothing. I never want to sacrifice the goodwill I have with my audience." And I was like, "Okay. Why did you build this brand to begin with?" He said, "Well, I wanted to make money." And I said, "Okay. How do you expect to make money if you never ask for it?" Because he had been taught, "I have to delay. I have to delay." And to be fair, of course you have to delay. But at some point, you have to make the decision now is the time. And to be clear, it doesn't mean that like now he has to ask every single day. It just means we have to begin the process of reaping. And so, for you forever soars, and I put myself in that bucket of always wanting to under under under spend and and always delay to the future, there is a line that you need to be able to draw for yourself for today's the day. I will begin reaping now. And I think that is it is a it is a entirely personal question because it's also fundamentally answering the question, how much do I invest versus how much do I consume? I think the answer to that question is entirely individual. But I think most of us can agree that invest forever consume nothing is probably not the way. And consume everything invest nothing is also probably not the way.

12:55And so, it's somewhere in the middle where you will have to pick what's right for you, but it is in the middle somewhere, which means you will have to consume at some point you will have to reap, and you need to know that it is okay. You might also die. And so, you know, there's that too. 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 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.

13:26And 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 book a call with my team, and we will look at your 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.