Das erste eigene Unternehmen starten

0:00I say there's basically four steps to starting a business. It's like you have to get an LLC, you take the LLC to a bank and then you get a bank account and then you connect that bank account to a payment processor and then you go ask a stranger if you can do something in exchange for money. If you do all four of those things, you have a business. That's it. >> [laughter] >> Right? And so a lot of people like spend years being like, "I'm going to start a business one day." It's like you can do it tomorrow. You literally do all of this tomorrow. And then it's like, "Okay, well then how do I get the person to exchange money?" It's like, "Well, you reach out to people you know, right?

0:31You open your phone, you look at the 400 contacts you have there, you open up your Facebook profile, you have 300 friends, you you look at those friends and then you just say, "Hey." You send a personal video, send a personal text and say, "Hey, I am starting this thing. This is what we're doing. This is what I'm solving. Do you know anybody?" That's it. And so it's not even like you're asking your friends to buy something from you. And what's interesting though is that 90% of the time the person who responds is "Oh, you know, you could do that for me if you want." But that just gives you the easiest way that costs $0 and because we're all connected with the internet and phones, it's like the barrier to entry has never been lower than it is now. It's just the problem is that the barrier to distraction is even lower. What what stood out to me there is the personal text, the video and the email and then the fact that you're asking your friends to introduce you to people who may want to not asking them directly. That first part, the amount of emails I get and I'm sure you get as well of people pitching their services to you, but none of them are personalized.

1:23>> Yeah. Walk me through the difference of that personal video, that personal because it's it's it's life-changing. Like when it's done right. So I mean, these are your friends or at least your contacts that you've met at some point in your life. And so trying to recall when you met that person, literally just stating their name and asking that it's hey, I'm going to be doing this and I would say consistency is the currency of credibility. So what people don't want to do is refer a friend to somebody who's fly-by-night. But if you can actually just demonstrate that hey, he's still doing that, the likely that they're going to refer someone goes way up because the relational capital is not nearly at risk. Cuz if I'm going to introduce somebody to somebody else, I'm risking my social capital on the hope that the third party, or whoever's sending this original text, is actually going to do a good job. And so, you can also include a little bit of risk reversal in that, which is like, "Hey, I'm doing the first 10 for free, and the reason I'm doing it is because I just want to get some testimonials, get some reviews, and also just so that I can learn, too."

2:17Um and I think just being really up front and really being really honest about it makes the stakes feel a lot easier. And so, then those first 10 people, you do exactly that. And the thing is is that you're going to be better off than they will. For those of you who are like, "I don't want to work for free." It's like you're not working for free. You're earning and then you're Sorry, you're learning and then you're earning. And so, we got to go through the learn phase first, and the best way to do it is people who aren't direct connections of yours, maybe one step step removed. And then at that point, they're going to give you very real feedback. And if you do a good job, then after a certain point, my goal is to get people to basically shift supply and demand in their favor. Like I say, the two the two laws of business that I am the most moved by are supply and demand, which is this I see here, and then leverage. So, that's a fulcrum for leverage. And so, I see those as the two biggest forces in business. And so, I want to create artificial demand for somebody who's starting out by just saying, "We'll do a lot of stuff for free." And then what happens is when you have more no more time to give, and if people still want you to do stuff, and you say, "Hey, I can't take any more people. If you want, you can pay." And if you're like, "Yeah, that's fine." And then boom. And then you make your first sale. And so, and you'll have confidence because you're like, "Well, I just did it 20 other times, and look at the results from those people." And and but and the first one you'll be embarrassed about. The 19th one, you're like, "Wow, you're going to already pay down 60 70% of all the mess-ups that you were [laughter] going to do." And then at that point, you're going to start feeling good. And then from there, my way of doing it is just you just keep bumping the price by 20% every five people until eventually people start stop saying yes. And then I'm like, "Okay, this is the price I can do for now." And that's basically a very seamless transition into how do I go from nothing to making my first dollar?

3:49How do you get over with block of I don't want to work free. I actually think it's entitlement. I think it's believing that you deserve something for nothing. Like to to flip the flip the roles in reverse, imagine somebody comes to you, they've never done anything ever in this particular space, and they say, "Hey, will you pay me to do this thing?" Would you immediately Now, maybe some people would be like, "Sure." Then it's a charity thing, which is different. But would you be like, "You know what? I I really believe that this guy is the best person that I can get this problem solved from?" Probably not. And so, to carry some of that risk for yourself, you say, "I'm going to front this, but if you want to not do it for free, thing number one is that you're getting educated." So, like you're you're getting free education, which I see as absolutely valuable. The second thing is that you can make terms that don't necessarily mean that it's free. Like there's the price, and then there's the terms. The terms of the agreement can be "If you do this with me, you have to give me feedback uh throughout the entire process. And at the end, if I do a good job, you leave a review." Right?

4:46And on three different formats, and leave me a video, and leave me a you know, a a text version of it. That's now absolute like I'll say it differently. A business owner they do illegally, and and so therefore they're very willing to pay people to leave them testimonials. And so, if you'd be willing to pay $500 to get an amazing testimonial, then they're basically you're they've paid you that $500, but I promise you those first five 10 reviews will make you so much more than they could ever have paid you and not giving you a testimonial. So, if we if we flip it and say, "Hey, would you rather get a $1,000 from this person and have them not leave a review versus free and a glowing review?" I promise you you will make so much more from one glowing review than you will from the $1,000 long term. So, you're just building up the stock pile, the foundation to then build whatever you want to build on top of it.

5:31>> Yeah. It's really It's really strong advice. It's I I hope everyone who's listening watching right now is like going, "This is what I'm going to do right now." Like 10 hours for free because that's where we're blocking ourselves. We don't have the experience, and therefore we don't feel comfortable selling more because we don't even know how the service will look, right? So you're trying to sell a service and maybe you sold one, but you haven't been through the full life cycle of what it feels like to deliver that service.

5:56Now you don't know how many website revisions or edits there's going to be. You don't know how many app updates there going to be. You have no idea. And now you're actually less likely to go sell another one because you're scared that you don't even know if you can do it. And I feel under that entitlement is an insecurity of I don't actually even know how to do this. Like [laughter] I know a lot of friends who are like really talented, really skilled. They they actually would do a great job. But because they've never just done 10 clients for free, they don't know how it's going to be if they went and got 100 clients tomorrow.

6:26So they're scared of getting 100 clients. Not because they're not capable, but because they haven't taken 10 clients through the process. So I want to give you something super tactical for the audience. >> Yeah, please. Just 10 by 10. So give 10 people 10 hours. And so you can say, "Hey, I'm going to do 10 hours of work for free." That is a really compelling offer. And you're going to do it one-on-one and ideally with them. And so if you want to build the website, build it in front of them for the 10 hours so they can give you real-time feedback. If you want to you know, write email copy, you still meet with them once a week or not ideally multiple times a week during that so you can pay down that 10 hours faster. If you're worried you can do you can do five people for five hours. That matters less, but it's more that one-on-one, so the least scalable thing possible, and it's free labor that they can track. The reason that's such a compelling offer is that everyone even at in in every country even minimum wage has value. Anybody can understand that five hours of work is a material amount of work that you're choosing to give away for free. And so even if you have no expertise labor at base price is still worth something. And so if you add on expertise it becomes a very compelling offer. But the beauty of that setup of having five or 10 hours that you choose to spend is that there's basically if you're doing it one-on-one, there's almost no technical you know, component to it. You don't have to like build all these calendaring and and schedule it's just like you're just going to text these five people, "Hey, you want to do same time tomorrow?" Very simple. And then for each of those, you know, calls that you'll take with them, um by the in the very first call, you just say, "Hey, I want to be clear, what's the problem? What do you want to you know, what do you want to solve? And do you mind at the end of the five hours we spend together, if this was good, if I can tell you about what I do?" If you just set that that that pre-frame up front, and then you do the hours on the fifth call or the fifth hour or the 10th hour, you can say, "Hey, remember I said at the beginning? I was like, has this been good so far?" It's like, "Awesome.

8:06Let me just recap what we've done over what we've covered and the progress we've made. Do you feel happy about that? Great. So, this is what I think it would look like." Cuz also, you spent those five or 10 hours getting as much information or ammunition from them of all the other problems that you could potentially solve. And then at that point, he says, "Hey, I think that I can solve problem one, two, and three. It'll take me maybe six months, but this is what kind of an engagement would look like. How does that sound to you?" That's all you have to do. And the thing is is that after you give someone five or 10 hours, there's so much reciprocity that's built up. They're like, "Well, shoot. I mean, sure." Now, if somebody on the first call says, "No, I don't want to." Then it's like, you don't you don't even need to get to like continue.

8:40And so, one of the big things that I I'm a big proponent of is absolutely give stuff away for free to people who are qualified. Yes. And so, we're like, "I don't want a lot of tire kickers." It's like, "For sure, neither do I." But if I had a room of 100 of the most qualified people, which if you're like, "What are a qualified person?" It's it's bant. So, uh IBM made this figured this out like 70 years ago and it's really never changed. So, bant is budget, authority, need, timing. Do they have the money to spend, the ability to make the decision, they need the thing right now, and is now is is it now a priority?

9:09And so, if we had a room of 100 people who met all four of those criteria, wouldn't you want to do something and spend five or 10 hours for free? I mean, my god. Like, if you had if you could sign like the reason they sell time shares over six-hour blocks of time is because it just takes time to build trust for a higher ticket sale. So, if anything, it's like, you're choosing to say that I'm going to give you five hours, but they're giving you five hours to influence them to ultimately prove that you're good at whatever you do. And so, I think that is the easiest way to get started. You can make that your front end offer. You can put that in the video. And I think there the beauty of that specific offer is that you don't need to even figure out what you're going to sell because you'll figure it out during the time you spend with them.

9:46And so, you can figure out the offer in real time with them. And also, because you're doing it one-on-one, you can basically you can you can permutate it. You can you can tweak it every single time you you you pitch it to somebody on the fifth or eighth call or whatever that ultimately gets you so many faster iterations that are low risk. >> Yeah. Real quick, if you're business owner and you're 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 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 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.