Geh ins Feuer, das andere meiden

0:00So few people want to go into the fire, right? And the fire could be entrepreneurship. The fire could be content creation. The fire could be starting a new product. The fire could be doing outreach and knocking on doors or quitting your job and and and starting another job in a completely different industry. That's the fire. It's the thing that other people aren't willing to do. And they tell you not to do it because it helps them justify the risk that they chose not to take. It helps them feel better about the risks they aren't willing to make. I remember thinking about this at long length when I was younger and I thought about the word exceptional, right?

0:29So buried in the word itself is the key point which is that you cannot expect to be accepted. If you want to be exceptional to become exceptional by definition you have to become the exception which means you have to be unlike other people you have to do what they don't agree with. If they agreed with you if everyone agrees with you you can be sure that it's the wrong path. When I quit my job every single person in my life told me it was a bad idea. I graduated in three years from Vanderbilt. I had a nice white collar consulting job. I was set up to go to grad school to one of the Ivy Leagues. I aced my GMATs. Like, I was set up. I'd done the path. And so, for me to quit and be like, I'm going to I'm going to be a personal trainer for minimum wage at a gym, that was not a happy news for the vast majority of people that I knew.

1:12But the thing is is that I've had those conversations multiple times in my life. When I ended up leaving the gyms and started the turnaround business, every person was like, "You finally made this thing work. You finally, you know, now we finally agree with you again." And it was right at the point where they accepted me that I was like, "You know what? I think I want to do this other thing and I'm going to sell all these gyms for basically nothing in 90 days to then start new. And they're like, but you spent so long on this and they see sunk cost fallacy. And the thing is is don't listen to the people who are closest to you. Listen to the people who are closest to your goals. And so a lot of people like to think about how they have these mentors and these heroes, but the most important group is your reference group. And your reference group is who you compare yourself to.

1:52But the thing is is that people think they compare themselves to their mentors and their heroes, but they don't. Who you compare yourself to is who influences your decisions. So the voices you hear, the voices you listen to when you're about to make a big move, those voices are your actual reference group. And if those voices are not close to your goal, you should not listen to them. If anything, sometimes the best advice in the world is do the opposite of whatever it is that they did to get in their life. if you don't want what they have, don't listen to what they say, even when you're an entrepreneur.

2:24So, let's fast forward a couple years. So, there was a point where I started uh the outbound team. So, this is going to sound super tactical, but I'm going to zoom out for you. So, we at Gym Launch had we were all paid ads for the most part. We I made content, I had a book, like there were things that were out there, but still 70% plus of my of my new customers came from paid ads. And I knew that if I wanted to sell the company, I would have to create a second acquisition channel that was very different from the primary one so that I could create more stability so you don't have one itis, one point of failure within the business. And so I remember reading this book about how to set up outbound. And it said it will take a year. And I said, I'm really good at marketing. I'm really good at sales.

3:00It'll take me 12 weeks. And it took 12 months like the book said. And so when I walked through that, what was interesting is it took 90 days for us to get our first sale. And the whole time I'm investing in this team, I'm investing in software, I'm investing in training and consulting to like learn how to get all this stuff going just to get our first sale. But that's not very good for the amount of time and effort we put into it. And then 3 months, you know, after that, we started getting a couple sales trickling in. Still not a lot. And I actually had almost like an intervention for my my executive team that were like, "Hey, we think this is shiny object." They were using my words against me. They're like, "We think this is a distraction. It's it's not, you know, yielding a result for us. I don't I think we should, you know, cut our losses and and move on." And I just I kept thinking to myself like, "This is what hard feels like." Like we have to just keep inching our way through because we have made sales, which means we could just we just need to get more efficient at it. And then we did another 6 months and then we got to the point where we became 50% of revenue. But here's the thing that you you don't see.

4:01And so whether you're starting a new acquisition channel like I was, you're starting paid ads, whatever, is that if I tell you in one year I could double your business, right? Let's say you have to pay me $100,000, right? And in one year I will double your business. Many people would probably be like, "Yeah, sign me up. I'll do it. Maybe I'll take a loan, but even for the 100, like if I know I'm going to double my business in a year, I would do it." Okay. But then what happens is month one they drop 5K and then they lose 5K and then month two they lose 5K again and then they say h ads aren't for me. H outbound's not for me. But the thing is is that the way it actually feels is that you lose 5K you lose another 5K you lose another 5K and then all of a sudden one month you make 25K and then the next month you make 50K and you make all of this back and some but it happens all at once. And so there's a saying on Wall Street that I like which is it happens slower than you expect and then faster than you can imagine. And they talk about that when it comes to market drops and market explosions. It's like we should like this. We should be crashing. It hasn't adjusted yet. It happens slower than you expect and then faster than you can imagine. And so you have to be willing to forego that period of time for a long time understanding that you just want to make progress. And so I think the thing that separates masters from beginners is that masters have more ways to win. So you can measure your expertise in anything by the ways you can measure equaling the number of times and ways you can win. And so if you're an expert at making videos, then throughout the entire process of a really long project, you have many wins on the way, you know, all the little progress markers that occur to create some big outcome. And you approximate those little progress markers for the ultimate goal at the end. When you're a beginner, you only see the output and all you see is I'm doing stuff and nothing is happening.

5:49but you just aren't able to mark progress well. And so if you want to increase your expertise, then you need to increase the number of ways you can measure so that you can increase the number of wins you have in a given time period. 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.comroadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstrain 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.