14 Jahre Business-Wissen in 60 Sekunden

0:00Here's 14 years of business advice in 60 seconds. Sell to the rich until you have the money to sell to all the poor people. The middle is where you get killed. You lack priorities, not information. Most times it's not that you lack insight, it's that you're solving the wrong thing. Business as a whole will only be as strong as its weakest link. Your best talent you have Your best talent is in the future. You haven't hired them yet. Lots of rules means you have dumb people. If you start making stupid rules, it's because your standards are too low. Every person you hire, you want to raise the average bar of the team. A lot of money that you want to make is on the other side of a few hard conversations. I would rather pay 50% more for somebody who can move me 10 years forward than some 50% less for someone who keeps me the same moves me 10 years back. If you want to get bigger, get better. Better leads to growth, bigger leads to blow. If you're going to enter a new marketplace, you want to be an order of magnitude better than the existing solutions. It's 100 golden BBs, not one silver bullet, that creates the outsized returns. You have to let some buyers burn. For the first for for I work uninterrupted for the first 4 to 6 hours of my day on the things that I think have the highest leverage. If you allow everything to be urgent, it means that everything's a priority, which means nothing is.

1:08Priority literally means prior, which means they come first. Entrepreneurship at the highest level is always hiring ahead of where you're at. Branding is simply an association people make between something they know and something they don't know. Between what you say, what other people say, and what customers experience themselves, what customers experience themselves is always going to be the strongest thing. State the facts and tell the truth. Do not make promises you can't keep. Brand gets you higher returns on advertising, allows you to price far above the market, and get people that once they buy from you, they keep buying from you.

1:38Always ask yourself why you can't do more. Why can't we 10x this? It's so much better to spend 100 hours making one exceptional thing than doing 100 things mediocrely. What they want is value per second, not seconds of value. The magic you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding. We need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. >> Why do so many entrepreneurs get stuck chasing the next shiny thing instead of fixing what's right in front? >> I think it's a misunderstanding of the difference between problems and opportunities.

2:07What people don't realize is that your problems are your opportunities and the opportunities often become your problems. Meaning, if you have something that's broken with your existing thing, fixing that will make your existing thing better and then will ultimately strengthen the business. If you have something that's weak within this business and then you try to pursue another opportunity, you now have less attention to the things already causing problems and this one you just are unaware of the problems that are going to come as a result. And so now you have more problems and less bandwidth and so as a result, you're less likely to succeed. And so the best way to create the outsized opportunities is to solve the problems that are in front of you that you don't like solving, but that is what the business requires today. So the framing question that Leila always asked me when I when we think through this, she says, "Is this a problem Is this a missed opportunity or a problem to be solved?"

2:53And just codifying like that means that oh, this is missed opportunity means we don't have to think about this now because it actually only exists in my mind and not in reality. The problem exists in reality and that's what you need to solve. >> How do you decide what to focus on when everything feels urgent? >> It's a prioritization issue, not an urgency issue. And so and so imagine a pilot has a flickering candle Sorry, I should So imagine a pilot has a you know, a cabin light that's flickering while they're landing with one engine.

3:21Okay, well, we see that we need to change the bulb here, but there's also a one engine that's on fire. We should focus on that, not the flickering light. Like if you go to the emergency room, it's what they call triage, right? Which is okay, do you have a broken ankle or do you have a heart attack? Broken ankle, you can stay here. Heart attack, go straight in. And so fundamentally like you have limited resources and so you have to be able to prioritize um and you have to let fires burn. We have to accept the fact that there's going to be problems, they're going to occur, the business will never be perfect and we have to say that's okay.

3:49>> What separates a top 1% entrepreneur from a top 0.1% entrepreneur. >> Most entrepreneurs think about strategy the way they think about what they want to make for dinner. And so, they will go to the refrigerator, open it up, and say, "You know, what's inside of here? Let me see what I can whip up." Rather than opening their hands and looking up and saying like, "What the [ __ ] do I want to eat?" And then go to the grocery store, going out to eat, and looking at all the potential options that exist. And so, strategy is the curation and prioritization of opportunities. And so, the curation part is that most of them are looking just with their head in the fridge and looking at six options. So, you have to be able to see all the potentialities.

4:27And then when you have all the potentials, the prioritization it says of all things, which of these is the most important? And I think this is This is where you get your 100x differences in entrepreneurs um because of what they'll call deconstrained thinking. >> People who say you should just bet the bike to go to Poland, is that actually the right way to to take a big risk? >> Yes, so the I'm a huge fan in plan of plan B's, but I want my plan B to continue to level up. And so, I remember that when I started my business, my plan B was that if this didn't work and I spent all my savings on my gym, that I knew that I could drive Uber and strip.

5:03And if I could do that, I'd be able to make another $150,000 a year, take the extra cash, and then try over you know, try to start over again. Once I learned how to sell, that was the first real skill I learned, I was like, "Okay, well I could start selling cars and probably make, you know, 200, 300, 400,000 a year depending on what kind of cars I was selling." And I could do that hustle really hard for a year, and and then go back out if I really wanted to. And then once I learned how to market, I knew that I could make a million dollars a year because I could just go get leads and and sell them myself, and then ask for a significantly larger portion of the business. And so, what happened is like with every risk that I've had to take in business, the skill set has basically given me a backstop to fall back to, knowing that I can take this bigger swing because my worst case scenario is still fine. And I think that knowing that your worst case is actually not death is what unleashes you to go take big swings.

5:53So, I'm not a fan of like you know, my wife and kids need me and I have a really stable job and I've never done business before and I'm going to quit everything with no savings and you know, make this work. I mean, you will certainly have high motivation, but you might still not have the skills. And so, there's a chance that you will do a lot of damage when you could have otherwise still taken the same upside with a little bit of consideration.

6:19>> Yeah. What's a red flag to watch for in business that artists that most people miss? >> Well, if I have teammates or employees or even customers who come to me with a problem for every solution, then they are literally making my life worse at every interaction. So, here's a solution and then they give three more problems. And here's another solution.

6:43Here's three more problems. I want solutions and you can show your work if you want to, but unless you have something to add, this idea is the best bad idea we have. And so, we use that as like, this is our best bad idea and unless somebody else has a better bad idea, this is the bad idea we're going with. And I think you want people who can come forward with best bad ideas because it's so easy to sit on the sidelines and critique, but not be willing to put your own ideas forward that are kind of in the arena for other everyone else to attack. And so, I think that is a huge red flag green flag that I think about. It's like, are is this person always offering solutions to my problems or they offering problems to my solutions?

7:19>> Do I need to go viral in order to build a brand? >> I am living proof that you do not need to go viral to build a brand. I think you need to do tremendous amounts of work and demonstrate expertise over a long period of time in different conditions that shows a specific avatar that you can help them with their specific problem. That's basically it. And so, in a lot of ways virality, and there's tons of people who have clips that hit lots and lots of views and I'm sure if you go over their profile, they don't actually have many followers at all. And so like if you're a one-hit wonder, uh that nothing really happens. Like you have to be able to turn that attention into something meaningful for you. And so the big difference here is that there are entertainers and there are educators.

7:58Educators are typically going to show that they can they can solve a problem for somebody, and then that leads to services or products of some kind. Entertainers, the entirety of their goal is to simply get attention, and then sell your eyeballs to an advertiser in the future, and that is the media business. And so people think of like of like okay, I should copy these entertainers, but the vast majority of businesses do not need entertaining content. They need educational content, and then as a result have that lead to products and services. So no, you do not need your brand to go viral. A brand can go viral if lots of happy people talk about your stuff, which is I think the slow grow or even fast grow way of getting where you want to go.

8:38Like I think the top video I have in total has like 7 or 8 million views. That's not mega viral, but I have made like I don't know, 100,000 pieces of content. >> Should I focus on quality or quantity? >> We actually internally call this qualume, which is how do we do quality volume? And the I think the answer to that is more around capture than manufacture. So what does that mean? You have certain things that you do in the regular course of business every day that's you living. And the answer is not let me just capture all of this and then post it up there, cuz that's not going to be quality, right? And so it's more being deliberate about how you can choreograph or structure or pre-package the way you do things in a way that creates content from doing what you're already doing where you're going to have significantly more volume than you otherwise would. So I'll give you an example. So like if I'm a dentist, I want you cap like let's say you say you see 50 patients a day. I'm making it up.

9:40Well, we know that they're going to get greeted at some point. We know that they're going to get worked on at some point. We know that they're going to walk out and probably have some sort of uh experience before and after, right? And so, all we need to do is set up a camera on the before, during, and after, three-term contingency, by the way. Before me or like bad, me good. Very simple. All right? And so, you structure your life so that you can demonstrate that relationship over and over again, so that you can create a high volume of high-quality content.

10:08>> How should I be thinking about making content in 2026? >> So, we're at the convergence of paid and organic, and in each of those settings, the people who are succeeding the most are making the most total content overall. And so, there's a number of strategies that you can do to make [ __ ] loads of content. So, number one, you can have AI in-house making tons and tons of statics, doing tons and tons of posts for you. So, you can have a team of 10 that works like a team of 100.

10:36That is a centralized approach to this. The decentralized approach is where you have an army of people, UGC creators, etc., user-generated content, uh who do reviews of your stuff. They post it organically, and they do it for a commission. And so, the goal is basically, how can I build this community of call it super affiliates or affiliates that are making, you know, five posts a week times a thousand of them, it's 5,000 posts a week. That allows you to decentralize it. I think that is the better of the two, um but you'll have less control, which is a downside and depends on the type, you know, business you're trying to build.

11:07And so, functionally, it's either decentralizing externally or AI enhancing internally, and those are probably the two primary strategies for hitting volume. In terms of brand, I would be thinking about live and interactive and demonstration. How do you do things that AI cannot do in the real world and do in a way that your competitors will have difficulty cloning. >> Is AI going to replace all of us?

11:33>> I don't think AI is going to replace all humans. I think it'll replace some of the work that humans do. But if we look at, you know, let's take a simple example. Uh chess, right? Robots can do chess better than humans can do chess. They can beat everyone. But chess has grown in interest over the last however many years. And so like how can that possibly be when there's a robot that can then beat everyone?

11:55Because people care about stakes. They care about like real drama. And so to put a different example to this, like will AI replace Mr. Beast's videos when he says, "Here's $5 million and I put 10 people on an island. Uh let's see." Well, if you had an AI exact clone of that video with 10 people who didn't exist um and the $5 million wasn't real, no one would care because the stakes is what makes the video, right? And so that means that right now in the future it's going to be leaning more towards things that are reality-based, IRL-based. Like are there real life stakes? This is where live streams will always be recordings. Like there there's going to be experiential like concerts aren't going anywhere, right? People still want to go to that stuff. If you want to go to a stand-up comedian show, like people want the experience. And so those things AI will not replace uh anytime soon. And so I think it's just knowing what are the things that we're doing that uh do not have stakes, that are not IRL. Those are the things that are most at risk.

12:59I also think that the industries that are most likely to get disrupted from a content perspective are inversely proportional to the amount of risk that the consumer takes on by listening to the influencer that is talking. So for example, uh a pure entertainment like meme style thing, yes, I think AI can replace that. Uh hot girl on beach with butt pictures, absolutely can uh get replaced with AI.

13:27Then you start crawling this way. You're like, beauty influencer who's now doing reviews on stuff and give you tactics on how to put makeup on. The risk of buying lip gloss or eyeliner and then using it based on what this influencer said that's AI, pretty low. So, do I think that there's a high likelihood of disruption there? Yes. Now, you move on to personal finance, like how I spend my money. Okay, the stakes are a little higher here. What about taxes? Okay, if I mess something up here, I could go to prison, right?

13:53You go into business, and then you go to enterprise, right? Like the further up you go this way, the margin for error goes down, and the more likely you want an influencer who has real-life proof. So, for example, if you look at even on the personal finance space, like there's tons of UGC beauty beauty influencers, and there's already AI that's disrupting that. AI has disrupted porn, right? Or is actively doing that. But, if you look at the biggest influencers in the personal finance space, almost all of them have huge credibility behind them of things that they've done, things they've accomplished, etc., that gives their advice credibility, right? And the thing is is that AI will not have credibility in the real world for a while. And so, you just need to lean on proof, which decreases the stakes for the end user. So, everything comes down to stakes.

14:33>> Forget >> How do they keep themselves from being lazy and placing tools? >> I think you should totally be lazy and complacent with the tools. I just think you should take all the time that you get back and then just do like 100 times more using the tools. So, it's like, let's say I work an 8-hour day using a shovel. If there's a bulldozer, should I only work 10 minutes to, you know, dig the horse grave, or should I work 8 hours using a bulldozer and do the entire field and have like the next year of work done? You just get 100x leverage.

15:04So, what's interesting is that there are psychological and logical solutions. And so, most of the time when we are in business, we always try the logical solutions first. If you've tried two or three logical solutions to solve a problem, you might want to consider a psychological solution, which is something that is irrational or illogical, but still solves the problem in terms of a human behavior change. And so, the simplest example I think Roy Sullivan brought up in his book um is it if you have people complaining about elevators being too slow, you can try and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a faster elevator, or you can put mirror in the eleva- uh you can put a mirror in the elevator, and then people stare at themselves, and they pick their teeth, and they forget that they're in the elevator while they're riding it. And they did the same thing with uh you know, the the trains uh in the UK. It's like you spend a billion dollars trying to make the trains faster, or just simply telling people how many minutes they have to wait until the train comes allows them to not feel like their time is wasted cuz they know exactly how long they have to do whatever they're going to do. And so, in those situations, it was a psychological solution rather than a logical solution that solved the problem. And so, if you're stuck on something, try and think of something totally crazy. Like, "Hey, what if I just put something on top of my pricing menu that was 100 times as expensive? Let's see what happens there." It is irrational, but it still could absolutely work.

16:15>> What business should I start in 2026 to make >> So, this is how I think through opportunities at each income goal level, which by the way, starting a restaurant that's really successful and building a billion-dollar software company takes the same amount of life. Uh one just has a much more capped upside. That said, if I wanted to make $100,000 a year, uh sales career is probably the easiest thing um that you could get into. Uh if I want to make a million dollars a year, I would probably look at a local business uh or an education business. Those are both pretty straightforward to start um and can make a million bucks a year without huge amounts of skill.

16:51Um if I was trying to get 10 million dollars a year, I would try and pick a low-churn uh business. So, basically, you do the same activities you do in the $1 million business, except you just have a product that people keep buying, and then 5 10 years later, all of a sudden you have a $10 million business. The difference is that that that local and sometimes it's education businesses are faster to make that million. They just never get to 10 or 100 because people your your work never stacks.

17:19Uh if I was doing if I want to go for $100 million a year, uh it's the same thing as the 10. You're picking a permanent revenue vehicle uh that you're chasing after, but you now have a monster uh front end in front of it in terms of your ability to acquire customers. Uh and then finally, if I was trying to get to a billion, um there's a number of ways of hitting a billion. Uh the fastest way to hit the billion is software.

17:42Surest way to hit it is just having a low-turn vehicle like insurance premiums that go over time um or buying, you know, through M&A and combining businesses that are of similar kinds. Um Brett Jacobs has a great book. Uh you know, a few how to make a few billion dollars uh where he talks about this. Um but yeah, that's that's how I think about this. But what's interesting is that like what changes your activities is literally your goal. And so, I think someone else said this, but $100,000 goals are the most common goals, which are actually why they are some of the most competitive um because everyone's competing for them. And so, like going after billion-dollar things sometimes it's like you're only competing against 20 people instead of 200,000 or 2 million.