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0:00Delegation is the price of scaling, loss of control, right? And so I believe that the the the spiritual path of entrepreneurship is a consistent relinquishing of control. And so we were employees at some time, likely for many people, and then you stop doing that, and then you decide to start a business, and you typically do that because you want to quote have freedom. And so then you say, "I will have complete control." But in order to have true freedom, you actually can have no control. You have to accept that's true freedom, right?

0:27And so at every level, in the very beginning you do everything, and then you say, "I'm going to have somebody who helps me with this." So you give up a little control. And then the next level is like, "Okay, well the doing I've I've I've delegated, but the management, no one can manage like I can manage." And then you give the management away. And then you're like, "Okay, well no one can direct or lead like I can lead." And then eventually give the leadership away. And then it's like, "Well no one can think of the vision of the future like I can." And then eventually maybe there is somebody Steve Jobs wasn't able to be replaced, but many of us aren't Steve Jobs and are replaceable. And so delegation is the price of scaling, losing that control. And so hard-working people, and this is what's really interesting about this, hard-working people have a hard time coming up with non hard-working solutions. And so this has been particularly difficult for me because like I I will look at problems and say, "Oh, I wonder if I can outwork this problem." When Bill Gates talked about this saying, "It's really good to have lazy executives because they will try and think of non high-energy ways to solve problems." And so the hard worker won't feel like delegating because they want to feel useful.

1:25And it's incredibly difficult, but if you draw the line, you have to say that you will not do anything in order for it to scale. Because otherwise you will absolutely be the limiter of your own growth. And I don't think we are as special as we think we are. And so you might kind of just have to give up some profit in the short term, but you'll make more in the long term. And so this has been kind of like a a thingy process for me, which is at this point the razor I have is if it requires me, it doesn't work. That's how I think about it now.

1:54And so I use the term internally for my head, and Leila and I talk about this if it scales zero. Like we have to scale me down to zero so we can scale it up to infinity. Otherwise I will always be the limiter. And so this is kind of just like a a a great reminder or reminder or artifact that I've gotten from the year is scale zero. And I've been reminded this at at at this level now is that nothing can rely on me because the business is just too big. The other little little tidbit I'll I'll add in there as well is if you're at equilibrium within your business, that means that like your supply and your demand are fixed. Like I can't I can't take in more customers because my supply is like I my team can't handle it, but I also don't have more demand, right? So it's like, "What do you do when you're at equilibrium?" When I was in my earlier part of my career, I would have said increase demand, and then force the team to, you know, pull from the cracks, and then with the ex- extra cash flow, you'll be able to afford, you know, the the next person you need to hire. That was what I would have said probably for the first 10 years of my career, 12 years of my career. And I would say that I have flipped that thinking probably this year, which is that I would say increase supply. And I'll explain why. When you're at equilibrium, whatever your next step is, you're going to have to bear a cost. And the cost will either be your reputation or your profit. And so if I increase demand, the cost of that increase will be my reputation because my team will probably not be able to deliver at the same quality they otherwise would have because they are overextended. If I increase supply first, then the bandwidth of my team will improve, and in the short term they will have to train this new person up, which will be a cost in the business. So I'm going to almost have a double cost. I have to train this person up, and I have to bear the cost of the person to begin as well, but once that's done, I will have dramatically increased the capacity of the business, which will then give bandwidth back, which will then allow us to push to fill up the demand side. And so the reason that we were even able to do the book launch this year, we actually originally were going to do it in February, couldn't do it cuz we didn't have the bandwidth, and then we were able to do it in August because 90 days prior we hired four directors and leaders in the business, which expanded the capacity of the business so that we could do the launch.

3:53So that was the that was just some of the lessons of this year from that. 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 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 into 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 decontaminate 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 fly you out to Vegas, and we'll do this in person live.