Arbeiten in, an und über dem Unternehmen

0:00And you talk about working, so there's above the business, in the business, you know, on the business, right? What's What What's the difference with above? >> In the business is like I'm taking sales calls. Um I think on the business is like I'm in leadership positions. I'm managing, I'm leading, I'm casting the vision, I'm inspiring the the team. And then above the business is the business is you you look at many businesses and they are all almost like product lines or clients as I was saying earlier. Um that you you you don't sit anywhere on the org chart for these businesses. And that's probably the easiest litmus test is like do you have a direct report from the company? And I have zero. Yep. For any of the companies. Yep. Um it's funny. I So Neil sometimes will call me in the middle of the day and uh he'll be like, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "I'm working on stuff." He's like, "I'm bored." Yeah.

0:48He's just [laughter] like Right? But that that's It's not like that. But he he he works really hard. Um but I I think the other other good comparison here is the the difference between like a parallel entrepreneur and a serial entrepreneur because a serial entrepreneur actually waits to the next level. A parallel starts multiple things. And to your point, how are you supposed to compete? Yeah. I mean, the focus the one person who's doing going all in on one thing is always, in my opinion, going to make the most money.

1:13And if you look at the wealthiest 50 people in in the world, they all went all in on one thing. >> Yep. And you know, and there's a couple private equity investors who are at that that top now. But I would make the argument that they're they were they got into the business of private equity and that was their one thing even though they bought and sold companies, it functioned the same way as having a marketing agency except the unit size was bigger with more zeros. >> Yep. Do you think when you had the nine different company Was it nine?

1:40>> Yeah. >> Okay. When you had the nine A, it felt frantic, right? But did you feel like you were really close to losing it all? Every day. Yeah. It was horrible. It was like the It was so stressful. Because I mean, I had I had nine companies worth of employees. I didn't I just didn't understand how operate. I didn't understand how leadership worked. I didn't understand understand management. I didn't have one-on-ones. I didn't have a communication cadence. And I was the rainmaker for all the businesses. Like it was so ridiculous when I think about it now. Like it's so obviously stupid, but you just don't know when you're ignorant. Before we move on from here, what do you say to all the people now that want to start a whole cuz they're just like, "I'm going to go buy businesses cuz that's what cool people do. And I'm going to go hire an operator." Do you have any words for those people? Well, right now buying businesses is like in vogue. I don't really know why it got in vogue, but my best guess is that we have so many people retiring right now that there's just a huge supply spike. And then a lot of people who'd never made their money buying businesses selling courses on how to buy businesses. Um cuz the thing is is I mean, this is kind of for the audience. It's like if you make your money buying businesses and you're really good at it, you don't need to sell a course. Like the best people at buying businesses buy businesses and hold them and invest. Like I think Naval said like the best investors don't sell courses on investing. You know what I mean? Cuz like if you're really good at it, you don't need to. Um and I just I like I kind of stick by that. Um and so it is kind of shitty and there's a lot of marketing dollars that are going behind that and a lot of content being made cuz it's like sexy. And the idea of buying a business for no money down that makes $500,000 a year, which is absolutely possible. You totally can do that. But the thing that they miss is that I can buy a business for $0 down that makes 500 or a million dollars a year and know how to run it.

3:21If you've never run a business and even if you do somehow magically pull off that deal, you're still screwed because you have no idea how to run a business. And so it's like you still lack the skills even though you can close the sale. Like I could sell I could sell that I could build a skyscraper. And if I somehow manage to BS my way through the negotiations and close the contract, I still have to build a skyscraper. And if you've never built a building before or even a house, very tough. And the likelihood that you then lose your ass on because like you're not You'll get the business that does a million dollars in profit per year for $0 down, but not for $0. And that's the piece that I think a lot of people miss. It's like it's not free.

3:57Like you have a liability or you have a debt if you use some sort of seller financing, creative financing, whatever. It's like, "But now you owe this person." >> Yep. 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. 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 fly you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.