Einer meiner größten Fehler 2025

0:00What's a mistake you made recently that may have either cost you time, money, or credibility? >> I invested in a company um that I didn't do enough due diligence and um they were doing some things that weren't compliant that I found out about later and I just said I don't want to be associated and I lost millions of dollars and I just said I I just I will give you the equity back. I don't even want it. I just don't want to be associated. >> What could you have done differently?

0:25>> Could have done better due diligence. What do you look for when when >> we probably could have reviewed, you know, reviewed reviewed the internal data better. Probably could have done more in-depth interviews with some of the the the key employees. Um could have done more, you know, customer call reviews, uh both on sales side, marketing side, and also on the delivery side. We probably could have done more of that. If you were to observe all of the mistakes that acquisition.com makes and aside like a pie chart, would you say the largest slice of the pie would be lack of due diligence or where do you think you lose the most return or value?

0:56>> Honestly, I think the biggest mistakes we make are hiring. I think it's people, but it's really pe I mean fundamentally it's going to be people at all sides like people on the deal side. It's going to be people like even with when you're bringing in talent like it's a deal. Like you're signing an agreement between two parties in exchange for money, you know? So like it's I mean you're just you have the thing is the number of deals that we have to do um every day, every week, every month, every year is a lot and so we're just going to make mistakes. Um we're going to try our best to learn from them and we're ultimately going to be rewarded by the quality of our decision-m but we're going to mess up.

1:27>> When do you know how to cut the business or try to fix it? Like in that case I would be looking at that and thinking well is is it worth trying to or is it just we can't work with these people? It's a good It's that last thing you just said. >> That's really what it comes down to. So, if someone I think is um knows about it and hasn't done anything about it and then we find out about it and say, "Hey, you should do something about it." And then they don't do anything about it.

1:52That's where I'd be like, "Okay, this isn't going to work." If you know a founder's made aware of it, it's kind of like the TCPA thing. Like, if let's say you had optins on a page and you just didn't have like all the disclosures that you're supposed to have to make it compliant to like text somebody or call somebody or whatever, right? If someone did that, I'm not gonna be like, "Oh my god, this guy sucks." I'd be like, "Oh, he didn't know." Like, "Let's let's fix this stuff." And so that's kind of an example. It really comes down to the willingness of the founder to make to make things right.

2:19>> I think that's anybody. >> Yeah. Do you have assessments of ethics of the people that you end up partnering with and how important would you say ethics are? Do you not really consider it and you just kind of look at you [laughter] look at the data as you suggest? Cuz because you can ask someone why they do something and they could say whatever they want, but you don't necessarily know until you've known them for a while. I feel like there should be a personality test like the Jordan Peterson personality test that you have. He does paid 10 or 15 bucks or something. Understand myself.com I think is what it is. It's interesting because you can also with this data compare how two personalities will interact with one another. So for example, Graham and I, we were pretty different in a lot of categories, but it did say that we had good cohesion.

2:58>> Oh, sweet. >> Yeah. >> But they had studies for like business and for personality and for relationships. With large data, you could probably get a pretty good approximation. >> Interesting. >> I don't think we have enough data to actually do like big data like analysis for that. If you're thinking 20s, 30s, like it's not a lot. It's not enough. You need like 30,000. You need a lot more and to have statistical power. Um, we actually used to do a lot more tests uh earlier on and I think we ended up um foregoing them. Same on the recruiting side. We used to do a lot more like personality testing, things like that.

3:28mostly because um the recruiting team ended up being like over reliant on tests and then would just like have a star candidate and they would be like well they they scored I'm like this guy's a stud like bring this guy in and so we ended up doing away with it. Um, I think everybody wants a test to tell them the answer. And so I think in a in a in a job where you have a lot of decision-m that has to occur, it's hard to not default to tests because it's so quantitative that you want to just like it's just kind of like trading algorithms. Like if the algorithm says like you want to have that and so fundamentally either it's like

4:01>> you know I tend to be somewhat binary in this but like >> either we believe this 100%. Or we kind of don't. And the only times um and I'll quote Laya on this one, but um like if we do have a test that we're gonna have somebody take on like a recruiting side, the only time that we would really use it if it's a red flag uh in that it seems like it's completely contrast from what we're seeing. And so if someone's like, "Oh, I'm really deoriented. I'm really timely. I'm really whatever." And then they get on, they're like, "I'm a creative and I'm so all over the" and they're like, "No,

4:31>> that doesn't make sense." So then we're just like, "Okay, now it's just an ethical issue. They're just lying." So you're saying you don't want to focus on qualifying someone because if you're testing them that means you probably have some dissonance between what you think about them and what they say about themselves. And if you Yeah. >> Yeah. I think you will like by this is me talking more as a as a you know company owner than anything else which is like >> if you tend to give a team a tool and they have to make a lot of decisions and the tool supposedly helps them with the decision the the law of least effort will typically rain and they'll just start using the test to make all the decisions and I think that makes for worse decisions than actually just using everything else. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage road map from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so, I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, uh, service businesses, brickandmortar, all of this.

5:35And it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.comroadmap. Just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you.