6 Levels Of The Money Ladder And How They Effect Your Business | Ep 856
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The wealth or money ladder. There's six levels to this and I'm going to break it down. This fundamentally changed how I saw, how I priced my payment terms.

and fundamentally how I saw money flowing through a business. Welcome back to the game. I have an old concept that has reemerged. This is something that I thought a lot about in the year that Layla and I were selling Gym Launch. And it's basically just how the flow of money is prioritized.

And so I think if there were like a wealth principle or like a woo-woo idea that I have ever subscribed to, this would be it. I don't really know what would make it woo-woo, but you know, wealth principle certainly has that ring. But it's actually that there is, there's some mechanics behind how money flows within the economy and the privileges that certain types of businesses or agreements set in motion that

Cause a disproportionate amount of money to stick to those entities that follow this structure. And so I see this more as a continuum than I do, you know, a specific rule. And I'll break it down, but it's basically the relationship between payment and work.

There are kind of six varying degrees along this continuum that I've, you know, kind of identified. I have noticed that as I have become wealthier, I've moved up kind of the continuum here towards the ultimate extreme. Let me take this out of the theoretical and put it into the actual or real life.

So at the lowest end of this continuum, you would have somebody who works now, takes on tremendous personal risk, and gets paid later. Now normally you'd think, oh wait, isn't that delayed gratification? Well, not when it comes to the flow of money within an economy. And so I'll kind of explain. And so what's the word for somebody who falls into this category of rules?

Well, the answer is an employee, right? They will front, you know, two weeks of work, sometimes a month of work. They'll work up front and then they'll get paid later, right? And that's a pretty standard agreement that's existed for a very long time. As I walk up this ladder, think about both of those variables, the payment and the work, and you'll see how they shift. And obviously the goal or the ideal is to go as high up the ladder as you can.

And so the level above that would be an independent contractor. So this is somebody who functions like an employee. They do work and they get paid. But sometimes the nature of the payment and the timing of that payment can be altered. And so, you know, a common setup might be half now, half later. Right. And so you can see how how this works. So they get paid half now, they work and then they complete work and they get paid the other half. And so it's a little bit more smoothed out.

compared to the employee situation. Now that would be the second lowest on our rung of wealth. Ah, the plot thickens. And so what are these remaining tiles above this? So above that, I would consider the in-demand professional. And so what happens in this situation? So this would be a specialist of some sort, or you go to a heart surgeon, or you just go to a doctor in general, whatever. You pay first,

And then they do services. And sometimes, depending on the leverage, you pay now and get services later. You know, if you have a surgery, just to use that to keep that example going, you might pay today and your surgery might be for three months, you know, from now. And so from a cash perspective, that business's advantage compared to one where they have to, you know, work first and get paid after, right? So we're plotting along here. Now, hopefully the goal isn't to really like think, oh, I need to,

I need to jump to this next rung. It's more like, how can I alter how I ask for money within the business that I exist or the services that I sell so that I can

make my money flow more advantageous and ideally have more of that money stick to me within the economy. So now we go what I call above the line. So those are kind of like the three levels as I see it for an individual, right? But as you go up the ladder, you have the leverage of organizations, right? And so I would say the level above that is banks. So let's play it out.

So a bank gets paid immediately and they always get paid first because

Meaning if there's something called a capital stack, but essentially if you buy a house, you don't really buy a house. The bank buys it for you and they get the house. And if you're a good banker, typically the rule of banks, if you didn't know this is that you should be able to recoup your money in at least three ways. And so that creates collateral for the bank to do lending. And that's typically how they do it. They'll be like, you have a personal guarantee. We also can, we also have the house, which is payment. And if they can, they'll get a third way. Right.

There, it's like they kind of cover their downside and they will get paid no matter what. And they take on some risk at a later date. Right. And so you can see how work shifts. It's like, how much work is there? Well, less than in some of the other the first three scenarios I gave. Right. And you continue to pay for that thing every single month and they get more than the money they put in.

Now, what level is above banks? Ah, I think there's two. And so I will break them down. The next highest up or second highest, if you will, on our money ladder or continuum is insurance. So the reason I think this is interesting is because banks, insurance, and the final example that I'll give you are establishments that are hundreds of years old.

And when I see something that's lasted for a very long time, I think that they must have some superior setup or agreement implied or explicit for how money should flow to them. And like this is just stuff that I think about on Sunday afternoons. But insurance, if you think about what it is, it's like let's say I buy insurance, right? So I buy insurance, I pay today.

And I may or may not receive something back in the future based on the agreed upon terms. To use the simplest example for insurance is like if I buy life insurance today, I'm literally just going to give money for a 100% margin box of air that may or may not be redeemed at some point in the future. If I do this for 20 years and then I stop, they literally just got all the money for nothing.

Like, wild. And in the unfortunate circumstance where something does occur, and some of the terms of the agreement for some reason were broken, they still get all that money for nothing. And all of the compounding and growth that occurred as a result of that. And not to mention, insurance, the float that they generate is tax-free.

Which means that all the money that they have to keep, which insurance companies basically act like, you know, investing accounts, except they don't pay taxes because they predate the tax code. This is why I look at very, very old businesses because, like, they have survived wars. They have survived different, you know, leadership, you know, within the world. And when I see that, I'm like, they must have a robust system for getting paid, right? Otherwise, these things wouldn't exist.

And so you're like, okay, well, what's even better than getting paid now and getting paid for a long time and maybe or maybe not even have to pay anything back? Well, I think the final is, I would say, three categories, government, God, and franchisors.

And what do these companies get? What do these establishments get? They get, which is a term that is more commonly used, royalties. And the reason I think they're called royalties, I'm going to make a bet here, is that they were given to royalty. They were given to the kings of the kingdom, right? The nature of a royalty is kind of interesting because you get paid always and you get paid off the top and your work is questionable, right?

So what does the government do for us, right? Now, this is not intended to be some sort of political point, but I just like to see how money works, right? What do we get for what we give? To the same degree. Religious establishments, right? You tithe off the top, right? God gets paid first. Again, not a statement for or against religion, just noticing how the money flows, right?

And then you have setups like franchisers where they set up some sort of royalty agreement and they get paid off the top.

Right. And so when we're looking through this lens of this money ladder, this wealth ladder, whatever you want to call it. Right. And at the very lowest levels, you work now, get paid later. The level above that is you work now and you get half now and then you work later and get the other half later. You've got the in-demand professionals who get paid now and then they work later. You've got banks who get paid now and then maybe they take some risk later. You've got insurance that gets paid now and maybe pays money later or doesn't.

And then finally, you've got government and royalties that get paid always off the top and first and maybe never work at all.

And so when we think about how we set up our agreements for services, for products, for how we do business, the goal is obviously to keep these two things in mind. And the work really functions as the vehicle for risk. So when you have time, you risk time in the process.

in the vehicle of work in order to get paid later. But it's fundamentally just money versus risk and how that gets shifted over time to the ultimate expression, which is you take no risk and you get paid up front versus you take lots of risk and get paid later. And everything in between is just little Meyer markers that I like to use as examples. But for us as entrepreneurs, I would love to see how can we model a

the companies and establishments that have been here for millennia, for hundreds of years or thousands of years? And how can we apply that to our businesses? Because they've clearly been able to stay around for a significantly longer time than the vast majority of businesses do. Like as crazy as this is, if you look at the S&P 500, I think there's two companies that have been around 100 years. I think it's GE and Ford, right? That's it.

That's it. Everything else booms and then busts. It disappears. And what's fascinating about the U.S. is that we look at fastest growth. We look at biggest as metrics. But if you look at different countries like Japan, for example, their determination of what a valuable company is, is all about endurance. It's about outlasting. They brag about companies that have been around for 50 years, for 100 years, etc. And they do have many companies that have been around for very, very, very long time. Third, fourth, sixth, eighth generation type businesses.

And it's because they think about business differently. And I think that, and typically they have a significantly different view on growth and risk, which is if there's the possibility of going to zero, they will not do it, right? Whereas in an American company, we tend to value kind of rapid growth significantly at a higher premium than other places. Now, notwithstanding our economy grows faster than theirs does, and they also have population dropping issues. So I won't even get into that. But the takeaway for me is that

I want to, at all times, position myself like the royalty of old, like the insurance companies, like the government, whenever I can, so that I can take as little risk as possible, get paid up front, off the top, and do that as fast as I can. And ideally, do it as many times as possible. And if there's a way to guarantee those things, all the better, aka collateral. The collateral for government is that they throw you in jail because they have a monopoly on violence. The collateral for banks is they take your stuff.

The collateral for insurance, really interesting on this one, is actually the money you already gave them and the risk that they're able to calculate. So kind of fascinating there. But anyways, this was just a Sunday thinking chain that I thought, to me,

was worthy of sharing with y'all because I think every business could improve by simply saying, how can I shift from where I'm at to the other side a little bit more? Even just a nudge could have a dramatic shift on how durable the business is. And at the end of the day, I think the point of the business is to stay alive and fight another day. And so the more we can do that, the more we win. Appreciate you all. I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast.

Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all eight functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you've got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, you've got HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale

and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com forward slash roadmap, R-O-A-D map, roadmap.