How To Get So Rich You Realize Money Isn't The Point | Ep 822
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When I was 27, I had just over a million dollars in my bank account in cash. By the time I was 29, I had over 20. By the time I was 31, it was more than that. Here's how to get so rich you realize money was never the point. But first, you have to get rich. There's three strategies, and the first one is building a brand.

So I remember this point when I had launched this new product called ALN at the time, which is supposed to be automated lead nurture. We had a big distribution base of gyms that use our model. And one of the big pain points they had was that they wouldn't work their leads or it was very time consuming and costly to continue to follow up and call and set appointments and remind people to show up for their gym workouts.

and their sales appointments. And so we put together this like Zapier Frankenstein product basically that automated the texts based on responses and it was this massive decision tree that took like six months to build. And when I did the release of this product, some people weren't able to be live for the release because they had classes, they had sessions, they had whatever.

And one of the most interesting things that had never happened to me before is people started calling into our support team and saying, "Hey, here's my credit card. I know that Alex launched something. Just like bill me for it. I'm in." It was the first time in my life where I had people just say like, "I will buy whatever he has based on his reputation, not based on anything else." In a word, Steve Jobs describes brand as trust. And I define trust as

predictive power based on past experiences. Just as much as you can trust someone to do a bad job, you can trust someone to do a good job. And so the idea here is obviously to build trust that we will deliver on our promises. And so fundamentally, you build that by making promises and keeping or over delivering on the promises you have. But brand is a big amorphous topic. And so how do you measure this in dollars and cents?

And so there's basically three things that brand translates to in terms of economics for a business. And so the first is conversion rate. Now, what does that mean? So conversion rate is the percentage of people

who when presented with your offer choose to buy it. And so let's say that you have a bad brand or no brand at all. So that would mean that a bad brand would be that you have a past history. People trust you to do bad stuff, right? So you have lower than neutral. If you have no brand, then they would act as though you are some, basically it would be based on their experience with other businesses that look like yours.

And so this is also why quote good branding, even if you don't have a history of reinforcement, can still be important because if you walk, talk and quack like somebody who is a scam artist, you will have people treat you like one.

It's not just your experience, but their experience with people like you. Fundamentally, this is what racism is about. But people prejudge people because that's how we go through life. If we had to start at zero for every single person we met, we would use up all of the cognitive load that we have. And consumers, like all humans, try to use shorthand. We want to learn based on the things, put a label on it, put it in a bucket, and not think about it as fast as possible. And so from a conversion rate perspective, a good brand means that, let's say, neutral,

would be, let's say you close 20% of people who you get on the phone with at a specific price point. At negative, which actually, I'll just put a zero here, negative one, and then positive, right? Maybe, and the thing here is that this could go as high as you want. Like, if you have an unbelievable reputation, like plus, plus, plus, maybe you close 80%.

And what's interesting about this is if you look and maybe here it's 0% because no one, everyone hates you. Uh, and you basically have to rely on people who don't know who you are.

So basically, you have to keep finding more, you have to advertise wider and wider to find people who have yet to meet you, which is a terrible way to live. Brand gives you an increased percentage of people who will buy when presented with your offer, just like the guy who didn't even need to get presented with the offer, just knowing that I had an offer, he was willing to buy it. And the reason I use Apple as a great

litmus test for this is that I think Steve Jobs is one of the best brand builders of all time. I mean, people lining up to buy whatever his next product was because of his past history of keeping his promises and over delivering on it. And so number one is conversion rate. And this is like, if you had nothing else, this would be worth it. If you could 4X the amount of people that bought your stuff at a specific price, that would give you a material advantage over everyone else. But branding doesn't stop there in terms of its business benefits.

The second is CTR. Now it's like, okay, how does click-through rate, what does that really mean? So it's actually conversion rate again, but just earlier on in the funnel. Let's say, again, you have eyeballs. You've got people who see your promotions in whatever way you advertise. So that could be making content, that could be outreach attempts,

responding to emails, but it's basically the number of engaged leads. Having a higher click-through rate means people take the first action, they then convert on a landing page or a Shopify page or whatever. They're either buying a product or they're scheduling a call, and then on the call, they have a higher conversion rate as well. And so basically you can think about this as conversion rate throughout the entire process, from the beginning to the money, and then obviously if you continue to do a good job, on resells, repurchases, et cetera.

so let's say that generically at negative one and then zero and then plus right here you might have uh you know a point five percent click-through rate and then here maybe you have a one percent click-through rate and then maybe here you have something like a three percent click-through rate and this is super standard like this happens all the time especially if you're going after markets that already know who you are when i launched my leads book

We had never run ads before, and so this was all novel, and there was a past history of the first book. So the first book has, I think, like 26,000 five stars at the point of making this video. There was a lot of anticipation for the second book.

And so the CTRs were like 6% for our ads. And so people were signing up for the book launch for something like a dollar, which is crazy. And I'd never had anything like that before, especially at scale. And so I was like, man, these are some of the benefits of building trust with an audience. Now the third big brand benefit

is price point and so this is one that i think is probably more commonly touted and warren buffett describes it like this he says if you have to say a prayer before you raise your prices by 10 you have a bad business and so the idea is that if customers love your product they will be more willing to pay a premium to get it because they are paying down the risk of buying somebody else's product and so they

buy your product with the existing promise and then the extra is basically their insurance that they pay you knowing that they're going to get exactly what they expect. I can't overemphasize how important it is to pay down people's risk.

Like, risk is one of the three primary levers in terms of value creation. And so this is why McDonald's, for example, even though their product in and of itself is not that good, it is consistent. And consistency in and of itself reduces risk. And people just like to have their expectations met.

Now, what's interesting about this is that to meet everyone's expectations, it means that you'll have to go really high because some people have high expectations, some people have medium, some people have low expectations. And so if you want to meet the expectations of a large percentage of the audience, you will have to try to over-deliver when the people who are the most demanding, you will simply have delivered. Now, other people you will have over-delivered for. But I think this idea of like,

you're always going to over deliver, I don't think is true. I think you just have to try as hard as you can and a larger percentage of people will be satisfied. So let's say that they have the same base economics. So the cost of doing business is the same between these two businesses.

but this business can simply charge 10% more. By doing that, they basically double the amount of profit that they're able to make as a result of their brand. There's one more point that makes brand make you even more money. And it just took me way too long to realize this,

because I got really good at marketing and sales early and I came at it from the perspective of like I just need to go find more people when it's so much more profitable to find the existing people that you have that you already have done business with and they want to continue doing business with you and so I solve now for how do I get people to always want to do business with me again rather than how do I find more people the fourth piece is

repurchases. And so just like Apple, like I was mentioning earlier, they have such an amazing system of getting people into their ecosystem and then buying again and again and again. And it would take a tremendous amount of effort to get someone to deconnect all of the products they own, their phone, their computer, their music, whatever, their app stores, from their existing ecosystem of digital products.

of digital hardware. The fourth benefit is that not only do you get more people to respond, more people to convert at higher prices so you can make more profit, that profit then gets multiplied. So if we have our neutral example, I'm going to have to put the other one over here. Now we already have a higher price point, so we're already making more money than this guy. But not only that, the next year some of these people might buy again.

What do you know? Now our cost basis is going to go up because obviously they're buying something else, right? But so is our absolute profit. In those four ways, building the brand makes you so much money that you will have the first step taken towards realizing it wasn't the point to begin with.

And so from the conversion rate perspective, if you think about those guys who bought at the ALN launch who weren't even presented the offer, they just found out that I had something to sell. Those are people who otherwise in a neutral or negative business certainly wouldn't have purchased. They would have either need to be convinced if they were neutral or they just would have not wanted to buy to begin with if they were at the negative side of the spectrum. And so that's how you can just demonstrate visually what the experience of having a higher conversion rate looks like. More people buy when they're presented with the offer.

And I'll give you another really tactical example. So my offer is book on Amazon. The actual page itself converts at 30%. So basically a little bit less than one out of three people who visits the page buys the book. Now I think there's a variety of reasons for that. One of them is that many people who go there got referred via word of mouth, which we'll get to one of the big compounding things from that later.

But the second thing is that even if you don't have word of mouth, when you have a 4.9 rating and you've got 26,000 people who rated at that, then you have high confidence that it's going to deliver at least a decent product. And so you convert at a higher percentage. And so the first and baseline way of understanding how brand makes you more money is the boost in conversion rate.

And so let me give you four visual examples of how branding even came to be. And so back in the day, you'd have bulls and those bulls would originally be unmarked. And so people had no way of differentiating between their bulls and other people's bulls. They started branding, literally searing their own logo or whatever into the bull. And so let's say we've got our

our nike bull here great now let's say that now we recognize that as a logo and we like that person if we have that experience then we're going to treat the cow differently than if it were unbranded

Now, let's say that there's a brand that we don't recognize. We would then treat this bull like all other branded bulls in that it's a category that we just know that it belongs to someone else. The third scenario might be, let's say that it belongs to somebody that you hate. We have branding that you recognize and like, well then you'd be nice to the cow and take it home. Branding that you recognize and hate, you might capture the cow, kill the cow, and eat it for yourself or steal it.

branding of somebody you don't recognize but know that in general it belongs to someone which would then change your behavior and then finally a cow that was unbranded in general and you treat it like you treat all cows that have no owner the reason this is important is that fundamentally the point of branding is to change behavior of the person who sees it

And all of this is an indication of past experience. It's saying, hey, treat me like you would, treat me like you'd want to be treated. Treat that cow like you would want to be treated, which is exactly the point. No, but the owner is communicating something to anybody else who sees the cow. That's the point. We want to brand our products so that they treat it ideally,

like something that people like and love which might mean that they buy it quickly at higher prices and over and over again and tell their friends versus not buy it tell people terrible things dissuade their friends from buying it versus i don't know maybe i'll take a risk on this thing and then it's going to be the quality of the creative that's going to have to communicate and this is again why if you had a really fancy brand and it looked

high end then they're just going to extrapolate what they know about high-end brands in general to the purchase okay this looks like a premium brand i understand why they're doing these things but i don't have history now if you make the purchase and they have history then it would shift into one of these two uh categories i want to talk about something that i think a lot of people misunderstand so

There's a concept of the give to ask ratio, and I talk about it here in my Leads book in the content chapter. And the reason that this is such an important metric is basically this is a history of reinforcement. Is how many times have you reinforced positively before you ask for something? But this is the part that people miss.

is that, and it's because most people's products aren't that good. Their ask in their mind is perceived as a negative and the give is obviously perceived as a positive. And so you make this media, you give out this free stuff, that gives you more and more pluses. Some people like to think about it like a bank account. You add more deposits and then you can withdraw. But when listening to jobs talk about this,

He actually purely talks about it from an asks perspective. And so he says, if people buy our product and they absolutely love it, then we have provided more value. We put a deposit into our relationship. He said, if people buy our product and they hate it or it's just mediocre, then we've withdrawn from that relationship. This whole idea of give ask, many people talk about this in terms of like content and then monetization. It actually extends all the way through the business. And in the perfect world, you give in the content and when you ask for money, it becomes money.

a give because as soon as they buy the product, they're like, Oh my God, this is amazing. Which is why, for example, I think that like I try to get people to start with the books because it's the thing that I've spent the most time on and cost relative to value is pretty insane. That allows me to give yet again and create a positive history of reinforcement with an audience. Brands compound,

over time, not because necessarily media compounds, but media is just a measurement tool for word of mouth. Because like your audience will grow because people will share your stuff. Like try and get it down to the people when analyzing these kind of like amorphous ideas. Like what happens when a brand grows? It means you did a good thing and then that person tells another person. And then that person experiences the benefit themselves and then that person tells another person. And so the output of the brand is the trust with an audience that grows rather than

Logos and color schemes and fonts like it's none of that It's just how many people trust me but the reality of building a brand is that it's kind of like a friendship like imagine meeting somebody and being like we're best friends if they said that the first time you met you'd be like that's a bit weird

And so building a brand is a lot the same thing, which is like, it takes time to build trust. And trust is predictive power based on a past history of experience. And so you have to develop that past history of experience. If you do something nice once for you, you're not immediately going to be like, oh, I trust this guy with my life. It's like, well, he did one thing, you know? But if he does thing after thing after thing after thing after thing for an extended period and then makes an ask, you're like, well, I kind of owe him money. He's done a bunch of stuff for me, right? And so that's the idea is that it just takes a long time. Now here's where it gets...

where there is high arbitrage with brand is that with media and technology one person can give to a million people at once in a very small way and so the idea is okay how can i give to a million people at once over and over and even in a fractionalized manner such that

in 10 gives or 20 gives or 50 gives i have now given effectively three full gives or four full gives to somebody so that they might be willing to quote return the favor based on their cultural rules the second way to get so rich that you realize that making money was never the point is to know the inputs and outputs of your money making system and you want to break those down to the absolute smallest action that way you can scale it while sustaining your margins

And so think about it like this. You have a money-making system. You have a box. Now, in that box is your general activities of doing business. So you sell tables, you sell books, you provide services. Whatever your thing is, is you have a cost of delivering that thing and you have a price that should be above that cost. And then that discrepancy between those two things is how you make money. And you spin that wheel as many times as you can.

Where this gets important is you have to understand the inputs into this system and you have to break it down to activities. And like I can't explain to you how incredibly powerful this is to both understand this for yourself and explain it to your team and be able to revisit it on a regular basis because the inputs will change. And so for example, if I were to say, "Hey Alex, what do you do? What are the inputs in the Acquisition.com money making system?"

There's many things that occur in Acquisition.com, but you as the founder or the entrepreneur, you're basically pushing the first domino over and then there's many subsequent activities that happen after. And sometimes there's two or three dominoes that are occurring that you're pushing. But what happens is when we describe what we do, we use lots of amorphous words that have very little connection to what we actually do. And so for example, my inputs for Acquisition.com. So I script stuff, okay, cool.

I record, that's something that I do. I check in on status of stuff. I review things.

and give thumbs up or feedback. I review deal metrics for deals that we're considering doing in acq.com or ACQ Ventures, which is our venture arm we just started. I present to the team when we have kind of like new direction that we're taking. When we look at this, I also review port co metrics and decide where the money goes.

both within acquisition.com and then within the portfolio companies. When I say money, I say generically like the resources that we have. So we're gonna allocate this person here, we're gonna allocate these resources here. And so this is like what it actually is and this is today. Now these things shuffle over time, but you can notice here that these are me describing actual activities, right? So what you need to do is now if I'm gonna look at this,

There's going to be some things that feed them this machine and then there are going to be some things that are me actually doing the stuff in the machine. Big picture, we've got these feeders that feed into this machine and then we kind of have what I would consider these are all the things of delivery. Right? These are how I how the actual machine works and makes money. The reason that defining the inputs is so important is that many times when you look at what you actually do, you

aren't doing things that drive an increase in number of customers or an increase in LTV. If you think about this, like this is the LTV, this is the number of customers,

And you can basically drive growth in only those two ways. And so you have to dial in what is actually the thing that makes money here. And whenever you have a deadline, for example, all of a sudden your ability to focus gets really clear. And I think the reason for that is because you have no time to waste. And so most people do like spend like 90% of their time on stuff that doesn't actually drive the needle. And then only 10% of the stuff when they actually need to make money that does it.

but what would happen if you actually spent all of your time on the inputs that mattered most? For example, I write two emails a week for the Mozi Minute, which is what I send to the whole list, which is kind of like very tactical business concepts. It's very high leverage for me. It takes me about an hour-ish per email that I send,

And that is something that drives awareness, it drives business, it drives value, it drives portfolio companies, it drives everything, right? And so that's an input, right? And so it's betting very clear on most of the things that people do that are just not that. And so whenever you scale an input or like the inputs that you have in terms of your money making system or the inputs of what you do in order to feed that system, you essentially have three options for scaling.

Option number one is you can automate. So you can get a machine to do it. All right, now some things are very difficult to automate. AIs can automate a lot. Now sometime in the future there will be an AI version of me that can probably make content better than I can. We'll cross that bridge when we get there. But that would be something that could happen.

The second is that you get other people. So that means that I'm having somebody else then make this content for me. Now, I want to be very clear. There's degrees here. A lot of people like to think in binaries. It's like, okay, well, can I get somebody else to script this stuff? Can I get someone else to check in? Can I get someone else to record and record

review and give feedback so then the only thing that I would have to do is record. Yes, of course I could. And so the idea is you don't necessarily need to replace every single part of what you do, but you can just basically chunk down the inputs into, okay, this one someone else can handle, this one someone else can handle. And then the final component of this is that you can do one to many. Now, what does that mean?

If this is already a very leveraged acquisition system, right? Because it's me one to many you're watching this. It takes me one time to say it, but many people can see it. But if you had a one-on-one method of reaching out to people, say cold outbound as your way of getting people in, or maybe you get affiliates one-on-one, then you're either going to have to automate that way of getting affiliates one-on-one. You're going to have to get a team of people to do it, or you're going to have to switch to a mechanism that allows you to continue to do it, but do it to many people at once.

And so I think through this whenever I have to kind of scale any kind of delivery or marketing is, is this something that I can get other people to do? And this also works on the back end right here. So it's like, okay, can I get other people to review portfolio metrics? Can I get other people to decide where the allocation is? Again, these things are very high leverage for me, meaning I don't have to put a lot to get a lot from it. And so it's worth me developing that skill set even deeper rather than potentially delegating it. But long term, in my opinion, every business can be delegated.

It's just that you have to find stars and you have to find people who are better than you. And oftentimes that's tough. Like, could Steve Jobs delegate being Steve Jobs? Well, I don't know. I mean, they have yet to really make anything as good as what he made. You know, if Elon died, would all of the companies do as well without him? I don't know.

And so that's where it's like, okay, he has to automate or get other people, as many people as he can, to do all the other stuff, and the stuff that matters most to him, like for example, he says, "All my companies have zero marketing." Except for the fact that they have the most popular men in history being the person who's running them. And when I say popular, I just mean it from an absolute perspective. People know who he is. And that when he makes a tweet,

a gazillion people see it and so if we were we probably could add this up and see what his total impressions are per month both directly on x and then also in terms of shared volume of the amount of pages that share his interviews and the rogan stuff and youtube and so like there's no marketing department because they have a one-man marketing department that in of itself is worth i mean

billions of dollars. I see everybody as an individual contributor at the most basic level. Like everyone does things and they're just either directly tied to some sort of outcome that gets customers or makes them worth more or they're not.

Right. And so I would encourage you, this is especially for, this is me talking specifically to business owners right now. There's three questions that will frighten every person that you ask them to. Number one, what do you do? And they will use amorphous terms. And you're like, no, no, no, like not analyze. What do you do?

Like, what does that mean? Right, until they can define it in a way that like, okay, you look at numbers on an Excel sheet and you try and then you see if some are above a certain threshold or below it. Okay, got it. So that's what you do. Now, do you know what I do or what we do as a business? Now, a lot of times people can't even explain it back to you and they work for you. So if they certainly can't explain it to you, they're definitely not doing something necessarily that's going to help it. And then here's the third question. How does what you do help what we do?

And it ties what they do to the outputs of the business. And so fundamentally, so whenever Layla and I get overwhelmed, right, 'cause it happens all the time, you basically clear your plate and then you add more stuff to your plate and then you're like, oh man, I'm overwhelmed, then you clear your plate again. And that's, honestly, I think a lot of that is just like entrepreneurship. And when we look at our plate, what we do is I look at every single activity that I'm doing on a weekly basis and I say, how does that tie to how we make money?

And it's trying to understand what are the inputs that I'm pushing into our money making system. And are there things on here that are either too indirect or just not actually driving anything at all. And so for example, I took over a department recently and I canceled all meetings that were recurring where people were just sharing data. And the main reason was that that data was not being used to change behavior.

And so either the data is not correct or useful or we need to learn how to do something about that data.

And so if we spend all this time going over data and do nothing about it, then that time is completely wasted, both in the collection, storing and analysis of data, but then also the reviewing it with a team of people. And so unless something changes what we do, we don't need to track it. And so this gets you much more targeted on the few things that matter. And so a friend of mine has

So Sharon Sravatsa, he's a public CEO. He and I talked about this at length, but he basically posits that for every company, it's one tenth of the employees that are actually creating the majority of the economics in the business. Like there's a core team that really is the one that moves the whole machine. And a lot of the rest of the people are there more or less for the ride. The idea is what is it that those 10 people do? What are their inputs that drive this machine? And I think that being able to identify what

those activities are, not the general amorphous words, but what the actual activities are, like is it writing an email? Is it writing ad copy? Is it filming? Is it filming content or filming ads? Is it reaching out to a certain amount of people? Is it reaching out to customers?

Is it hopping on a certain number of sales calls? All of these are activities that will drive revenue in the business. You basically look at a lot of other stuff that many people fill their counters with and the majority of it doesn't make money. And if the point of a business is to generate a profit through providing value to a marketplace outside of the cost of delivering that value, then you want to put as much into the value creation as possible, as little into the cost basis as possible, and do it as many times as you can.

And everything that's not those things ultimately detracts from the efficiency of the system. I'll give you three major money sucks that people do that are not this.

So number one is they will work on projects that are not going to drive the main objectives. So it's like they want to reorganize Asana in some way, right? Or whatever your project management thing is. Okay, we have this massive reorganization, fine. Okay, great. Now it's taken up a lot of time. Or you redo your entire website, which takes you a ton of time. But is it really the constraint of the business? Is it the thing that's going to generate money? Or should you just split test your headlines on your landing page, right? Like there are other things that will drive more customers

And so basically, like I can give you a list of a thousand things that you could do to grow a business. The question is which one of them will grow it the most? Most people spend time on activities that they enjoy, that drive very little business to the business, but they can mentally masturbate to the idea that they're being productive because it's business-ish, right? It's related to business. And so it's like, it's almost like they're doing like arts and crafts and hobbies while they're doing business.

but those aren't the main drivers. The second thing is that they spend too much time on meetings. And this is a really common one, which is that people are social. People like to talk to each other. And so if they get an excuse to do it, they will do it. And one of the most frightening things in the entire world, which I recommend you do, is actually look at how much everyone makes per hour. So look at their annual pay divided by 2000 and then look at a meeting when you have 10 people on it, right? And then all of a sudden you're like, I paid $500 for this meeting.

And if you went out to dinner and took everybody to dinner and then you paid $500 for dinner, people are like, oh my God, thank you so much. It's so generous of you. It's like every meeting is that. And so unless you can show how this is going to generate us $500 plus, now mind you, you need to get a return on that. So you probably need to get something like four or five times that amount of money from that meeting. Then you probably just shouldn't have it.

And where this gets really, really nasty is once your business gets big enough, employees in general start meeting with each other. And so it's like you're not even involved and these losses are occurring on a regular basis. Sometimes people call it time theft. I don't think the intention's there, but I do think that the end result is still the same, which is that

hey guys real quick this podcast only grows from word of mouth quite literally there's no other way to grow a podcast in word of mouth if there's some element of this that you think somebody else should hear or would be relevant to them it would mean the world to me if you shared this via text via instagram via dm whatever way you like to share stuff with people you love thank you the business becomes less efficient and bears more cost to deliver the same product the third big kind of like hole that i see a lot of times is

People who spend an inordinate amount of time on data that doesn't change what they do. So I'll give you an example.

I could track what the temperature is of every room that I walk into. I could track the amount of words that I say on a meeting. I could track, I mean, you could track anything, right? Some people, especially small business owners, and sometimes even on your team, will just love to show you all these Excel sheets of all this data that they've tracked. It takes a huge amount of time, and they get all these percentages and all these ratios, and then you just have to ask the question, why should I care about this? How does this change what we do?

And I ask this question over and over and over again because so many people love to be like, oh no, we're data-driven. It's like, are you data-driven or are you data-distracted? Basically, and this is the limits test. This is the very easy limits test. If this number goes up, does it change what we do? If this number goes down, does it change what we do? If this number changing doesn't change what we do, we don't need to track it.

When you ask that question over and over again, because people are like, well, we want to keep an eye on that. I'm like, why? Let's take it to the natural extreme. Why? The world is increasingly quantified and being able to, with automation and software and wearables, like there's so much technology out there that wants to quantify everything because they know that people have an obsession with data. Not all data is useful.

And so most businesses, you can figure out the metrics on the back of a napkin and figure out if you like it or not. That back of napkin way of running a business, in my opinion, is an exercise in thought discipline of the entrepreneur. If you know the clear inputs that drive the business, which for you might just be, I have to script, record, and edit content. It could be I have to script, record, and edit ads.

It could be I have to do a certain amount of outreach attempts or manage a team to hold them accountable to doing these outreach attempts. There are a certain number of things that actually drive the business. If the data that you collect does not change what you do with your inputs,

then you don't need to track it and so you can reverse engineer this to figuring out first what are the inputs that actually drive the output and then secondarily what data would change how i do these inputs if you find out that the ctr dropped on your ads then you would probably change your hooks you change your targeting that would change what you do so it makes sense to track that like number of tags on a social platform you could track it let's say it goes up in general over a month what are you going to do

Now you might say, well, I'll make more of the content I made that month. But if you made a variety of different pieces of content, would you then have to track it daily and see if there was a spike? Okay, I got more tags in this. Okay, okay, wait, stay with me.

How does getting more tags translate into us making more money? Because I can show you a number of people who get lots of tags and lots of likes and lots of views that don't make more money. And so again, it's not only like maybe it tracks to what we would do, but does that track to us making more money? And I'll give you a three-stepper that I had recently. I was talking to a specific manager of one of our platforms. I said, what do you do every day? And so we listed out all the things he did.

And then I said, okay, how do those things that you do every day grow this platform? And that was a very different and probably more difficult conversation. It was like, okay, now let's say that all these things that you do does grow the platform. How does growing this platform grow the business?

And so this is what you need to walk through with your own self, right? Of what do I do and what does that affect and does that thing that it affects affect the business? Sometimes it's direct, sometimes it's indirect. And so you have to basically walk through as many of those steps as you need to. And the more steps you have to jump through, to be clear, the more indirect it will be and the higher risk you have that the work is wasted. If you want to get so rich that you question the meaning of making money,

then the first thing you can do is make sure that all of the work that you do makes you more money. And stop spending time on things that make you nothing, although they are fun distractions.

Which leads me to the third way of getting so rich that you realize that making money was never the point, which is get other people to advertise for you. I remember the first time I ever had someone else sell for me. So I had to go home for Christmas. This was the first year of owning my gym. And this is while I was still going home for the holidays. And while I remember I was driving home and I got a call and I had...

hired this sales gal and I had taught her my script and we were still running ads even though I wasn't the one selling and I had I was the one who had done every single sale since the beginning of the business and she sent me a text that was like oh I went two for four and I remember I like I got so emotional in the car while I was driving that I felt like I almost had to like pull over because I like I got choked up because I was like oh my god like I

this could actually work without me. And it was like the first time where I realized that like this could actually be a thing. Like it's not just like Alex working really hard and I have to make the money if no one else makes the money then like it transitioned, it was the first like leading indicator of transitioning from a job to an asset.

Once I had that loop, I got really addicted to it. I was like, man, I wonder if there are people who could train without me training. I wonder if there are people who like, and I just looked at all the things that I did. And that obsession has not really ended since then. You have to get other people to advertise for you in order to have more leverage. Okay. So leverage is about getting more for what you put in. And fundamentally, like in my opinion, all of entrepreneurship is mastering leverage. It's why it's core to our logo for acquisition.com. This is a fulcrum.

Because all of us have the same inputs at the base level, which is time. And so the people who get the most for their time are the ones who get the most money for their time by doing activities that generate most revenue per minute or second, right? Imagine I had to just get customers. Well, at some point, I would max out the amount of hours per day that I could spend doing it.

No matter how efficient I get, I'm going to have to trade time to get it if I'm doing it on inputs/outputs that are directly correlated, a one-to-one ratio. I can do the ratio faster, but I'm still going to have that connection. I can be more efficient in terms of getting better at that skill, but as long as the base metric is still there, I will be capped based on hours per day. And so I'll walk you through four levels of this.

So I'll walk you through four levels of this, and I talk about this in my leads book, which is the second half, which is talking about lead getters. So basically, at the very beginning, imagine that you are getting leads for your business. So this is just you. And so let's say you get 100 leads a day that you're calling or you're reaching out to or whatever. Now, you can do this. Now, your work's going to be high and your throughput's going to be fixed. There's nothing more you can do to it.

Now, the next level here is that you do this thing, but then instead of getting leads, you get a lead getter, meaning you get other people to advertise on your behalf. And so functionally, instead of getting, like you reach out to 100 people, you then get someone else. Here's someone who's not you. Ta-da. Let's make him smiley. There we go. He's smiling. He's very happy to make you money. Okay. So this person now spends their time getting you leads, right?

Okay, so we just had to do this once, and then this created this node, how I like to think about it, of lead generation, right? And so, boom, this one day created this node ongoing. So who's more efficient? The guy who just continues to work here, or the guy who works, gets one person, and then that person works on their behalf and doesn't even have to do this? He still gets the same output, all right? You sticking with me? Like, look at our return here. Return was $100,000.

versus 300 in terms of units of effort versus return, but here we're getting way more. And every single month this guy does more, we still keep getting a higher return on this initial base. Now, let's say

that the next month you do this and you get another guy and this guy gets you more leads. So now you're working the same amount you were before, but now we've tripled the amount of, well here we've doubled it because you're getting lead getters first, but the third day you would have tripled it, right? You keep getting more leads via these other people that you've been attracting. And so there are different types of lead getters that you can bring into a business.

You can bring employees into a business. So imagine I recruit somebody and then I pay them to help me make content. I recruit somebody, I pay them to help me make media, right? Of course you can do that. The alternative is that you can go recruit an agency who does this work on your behalf. And the only real difference there is just the nature of the pay relationship, but it more or less works the same way. Now, I will say this, the businesses that grow the fastest will typically have two different types of lead getters.

they will have the lead getters that come naturally from their existing advertising activities. And so you, let's say, are continuing to advertise to get customers. But these customers now become lead getters on your behalf. They then are the ones who are bringing more people into your world. And that is what will end up compounding because over time, you can't scale media indefinitely.

Like at some point, like you will get such diminishing returns that it won't make sense anymore. You have to eventually rely on word of mouth. Mind you, this is if you want to get super rich. If you want to just get medium rich, like you can make $10 million just knowing how to market and sell and just find people who don't know who you are. You can absolutely do that. But I'm trying to talk about getting mega rich.

And so you have to get leverage over basically lots of other people in a decentralized manner. All right, so if you get employees or you get agencies, those are centralized. Those are people you have direct relationships with. You have to scale those relationships, right?

if you had affiliates which are other businesses that basically operate independently that have your have your customers and then send you business or customers that operate independently and then bring you more business that decentralizes the activity so that they continue to advertise on your behalf far beyond your ability to manage them if i had to if no one shared the content that we have

it would be very difficult to grow a brand. I would have to go one-on-one. And you can do that, it's just tough. Right now, the people who don't understand social media, so sometimes you've seen these old school business guys who just haven't realized the world moved on. I see them all the time. And they will do one to many

they'll just do like a circuit of in-person events. Now, that's 'cause they realize that they have to get more leverage, so they just try and attend as many of conferences as they can, and it totally is effective, it's just a different way of doing things. Now, if the LTV is high enough, you can still make a tremendous amount of money in that setting. But if you are a business, a consumer business, you're typically going to need a decentralized manner of acquiring customers. So like for example, school,

needs a decentralized manner. Like we have to have affiliates, which last year, 55% of all of our customers came from affiliates or referrals, right? People with on the platform referred other people, which is awesome. And so we're like, you know, like, Hey, what if we actually like tried to do this a little harder? And so that's what we're doing this year, right? The whole point is you can either do it and you will get capped or you can find a system that allows or enables other people to do it on your behalf.

So I'll say the two biggest mistakes that people make for trying to attract lead getters, so either referrals or affiliates specifically, is number one is that their product simply isn't good enough. Imagine you go to a restaurant and the sandwiches are mediocre or soggy or not that good, right? And then they say, "Hey, we'll give you 50% off your next sandwich if you tell your friends to come here." We were like, "I mean,

I just, I don't want to tell my friends to come here. It's just not that good. Right? And imagine this, let's level up from a soggy sandwich to just like a mediocre sandwich. If they say you get 50% off a sandwich if you get somebody else, are you still like, are you going to refer somebody for a mediocre sandwich? Like,

I don't know, probably not. And so the big thing is people try and jack more into the incentive when like the most efficient thing to do is just make the product better because you want to get it so that they, this is just my, this is my two cents on this. I want people who are like, I'm about to refer all my friends because your product's really good. Is there some sort of incentive that you have that I can get paid for it? It's like, I want people who already want to be doing this anyways,

And then maybe reach out and ask so I can just lubricate the incentive system more so than go from zero to one. I want to go from like one to end. Like I was going to refer people already, but with this incentive, I'll refer everyone. Right. Like that's that's where this really gets magical rather than trying to use the incentive as the zero to one. And I think me too, like me personally, I also probably in my earlier days spent too much time on like, how do I give even crazier incentives rather than how do I just make the thing better?

So that's thing number one is like if people don't want to refer your product, it's typically because the product's not that good. And so like we can obsess, you can read every referral book in the world you want, but it's always going to still come down to how good the sandwich is. The second is if you had to ignore the first point, right? Because like these are like these points operate independently. I think that it's better to have a better product. But if you don't have a better product, how would you still try and get referrals? Well, you have to make a crazy good incentive.

And I think that most people think their incentive is good and it's just not that good. Like you giving 20% to somebody or 50% off the next sandwich is just not that good of incentive. Now if I said, if you get a friend here to try my sandwich that's mediocre and I'll give you sandwiches for life,

I'll probably get people to prefer more people to get sandwiches, right? But the thing is, it can't be so big that people are like, hey, just eat the damn sandwich for me so that I can get this incentive. Because then you're circumventing the whole point of this. The point is that they buy the product, they try the product, they like it, and they buy it again, right? That's the point. And so a lot of times we try and jerry-rig our way around

solving the main thing. But the core economics of every business are always going to come down to how good the product is. And so like this is something that has taken me way too long to realize. And I think the reason it took me so long to realize is I got really good at marketing and sales early.

And so that was kind of my foray into the business world. I mean, obviously I had my gyms, but the first offer I ever really ran was still the greatest offer that's run in the gym industry for the last 12 years or 13 years. I rode a rocket as my first try. And so in some ways, I got lucky on my first shot. I did what most people would do, which is I had a very fast feedback loop of reward for doing that. So I did more of that thing and I did it harder and I did it better.

You can only spin the marketing wheel so many times because at some point you will run out of customers and if your sandwiches aren't good you'll have just told the marketplace very quickly, very aggressively that you're mediocre. And that's what you want to avoid. And so like

Remember hearing people talk about this who are further ahead of me saying like marketing is just gasoline It'll just like let it'll do whatever you're doing faster So like if you suck, it'll just let more people know that you suck faster The problem is that it doesn't take into account numbers Meaning like you can tell a lot of people that you suck really fast and still make a profit and this is fundamentally why I think like I

the education space, the information space gets a very bad name. It's because like if once you know how to market and sell you absolutely can make millions of dollars.

and you can deliver a pretty bad product, which I try to do my very best to try to reverse that trend and deliver a very good product. But big picture, I am a product of the alternative education space. I didn't learn all these things from college. I learned these things from other business owners who taught me specific skills that I was able to cobble together and piece together into building businesses that made money.

The thing that I didn't learn until much later, and honestly, the best people to consume product stuff from is in Silicon Valley. Listen to software people talk about product. They're obsessive about product. And there's a reason that some of the biggest companies in the world are all product-driven tech companies. And it's because product gives you the most leverage.

Right, because if you think about it, you can like you could conceivably not do any promotion You have to do enough to get the first users, of course, right? But once you have those first users if those users then continue to advertise your behalf these so like this is where you get the most leverage what people don't realize about Referrals is that they typically are not like a one-to-one ratio. So it's not that like every person refers a person It's typically like one out of ten people refers ten people. So

And so we have these kind of like micro influencers within their network that they have enough trust that people will listen to them. Like if Alex goes and gets sandwiches, like I'm a bit of a sandwich aficionado, if you will. I do love me a good sandwich.

And so if I'm like, dude, this place is great, I don't give cheap compliments. And so if I say that, then a lot of people are like, well, one, he's had a lot of sandwiches. Two, he doesn't say that most sandwich shops are good. And he has the means to buy whatever sandwich he wants. And so he probably has high, his recommendation carries weight, right? And if I recommended a sandwich shop in the past and it was good, then they will even be more likely, this is where brand comes in, more likely to listen to my referral again. The problem for the business owners is that we don't know which guy is going to be the 10th.

Like which of the 10 is going to be the one guy? And so that means that you just have to over deliver for everyone understanding that nine out of 10 aren't going to be the person who's the magic referrer. I got very lucky with my first store. I think in the first 10 customers, one of the customers that I signed up in that first two weeks, I think brought me like 20 more customers.

And I'm telling you for a small business owner, like it was, I mean, it was like the difference between making rent and not making rent. And it was a nurse who knew all these other nurses and she brought her hairstylist in, she brought her friends in, she brought other nurses from work in, like she brought everybody in. She brought her, like she brought everybody in. And I was like, man, this is so cool. You just want to look at what happened with that person

that happened on accident and do it on purpose for everyone so that when that next super refer comes in you're ready the third big mistake is uh not reinvesting and so i'll explain what i mean by this so if you decide that you're going to have a referral strategy or an affiliate strategy is the prime way of getting business which i honestly think that you should figure that out with a business like it is the way that you create a compounding business that is viral in terms of its acquisition

And as you scale any company, especially B2C, you need word of mouth. And at the very least, the nice thing is that word of mouth for product also translates into retention.

So if somebody refers somebody to you, the likelihood that they stay and continue to pay you is pretty high. And even if someone doesn't refer to you, if you structured something that was so good that most people do refer, the likelihood that people who don't refer still continue to stay and pay is still also high. And so you end up solving for both acquisition and retention with the same core activities, which for me is like high leverage, right? Like if you fix the product, you get more customers and you get the customers who stay to buy more.

But once you find an affiliate system or referral system that works, it's just letting it go on autopilot. And I think that is a mistake. And so, like I mentioned earlier, school for example, we did a lot of things this year to promote it, and then we saw that 55% of our customers came from affiliates, and so now we're doubling down.

How can we make this even easier? How can you lubricate the process? How can we remove steps? How can we give them more training? How can we just make this even higher likelihood that people who already have a low threshold because they like the product, we just lower the activation they need even lower so that more people can hop over and bring business our way.

I told you at the beginning that I would give you three ways to get so rich that you'd realize that making money was never the point. And so the first way is that you build a brand. And the translation of that into making money is that you get more people to click on whatever you do for your advertisements, you get more of them to buy, you get them to buy at higher prices, you get them to buy more times. All of those compound into

lower cost per customer and more lifetime value per customer the two primary ways of growing a business the second way is that you track your inputs and outputs so that you do more of the things that actually generate more customers and get your team to do more of those things that actually generate more customers or get them to be worth more and basically remove everything else and avoid all the mistakes that that and pitfalls that people get time sucked into that don't actually move the needle and

The third is getting a higher leveraged way to get customers, which is getting lead getters so that they can get customers on your behalf.

And basically every Mondo business you've ever seen has this. And if you're like, man, Alex, that's hard. Welcome to becoming super rich. There's a reason that not many people have it. And so you have to find ways to get leverage. And the strongest way is to build an exceptional product. The second strongest way is to have an amazing incentive. And then the third best way is that when you have a great product or a great incentive, that you reinvest in the thing that's making it work.

And when you do all three, you will make the amount of money because you have this amazing brand, you know the inputs that generate those types of returns, and you will continue to reinvest in higher and higher leveraged ways of getting customers to get you more customers so that eventually it's decentralized and it grows on its own without you. It becomes a monster that you have to feed rather than dog that you have to pull by the neck to grow. They say this in Y Combinator and I just love it, which is, "In the beginning, a startup feels like pushing a boulder up a hill.

And then as soon as you get product market fit, which is where the customers tell other customers about the product, you start getting referrals and that wheel starts spinning. It feels like you're chasing the boulder down the other side of the hill running after it. And so I love that visual because that's where you want to get. And to be clear, it's painful on both sides. It's just most people would prefer the pain on the other side of the hill. I remember when I was in college, the Powerball lottery had gotten over a billion dollars. And so I went and I bought a ticket with my girlfriend at the time.

And it was more just because it was like fun. It wasn't because I thought I was going to win. But when the drawing actually happened, I remember having this moment of sheer dread where I was like, what if I win? And the dread was that if I won, no one would ever I would never have had a shot to prove that I was good enough and that the only reason I was successful was because of luck. And even if I built success with the cash that I got from the lottery, it it would basically be meaningless. And so

Now, you could talk about all the self-work you want there of like, well, you should take a billion dollars if someone offers you a billion dollars. Yeah, I think you should. But I still wanted to have the shot of being able to prove that I could do it. And I really wanted to prove it to me, I think, more than anything else.

And when I did lose, I remember feeling relieved. Of course, I didn't hit the billion dollar Powerball. But selling my company for a material amount of money so much that I didn't have to work anymore, it did help me realize that making money was never the point.

It was just a way of measuring whether I was doing a good job in the thing that I was building. And so it was over basically an entire year of me being relatively sad because I didn't know what to do. And so sadness is, as I define it, a lack of perceived options, which is you don't know what to do. It's why I feel so hopeless. You don't know what actions to take, which is why you just want to stay in bed and do nothing.

Anxiety, by the way, is the exact opposite of that, which is you have many options and no priorities. That's why it's like you have many things you could do, but you don't know which one to start with. And so for me, it was definitely sadness at that time. Hard work for me was the goal. And so I want to take this quick second to make this point, which is that I get a decent amount of flack for talking about how I work. And I want to be clear, do whatever you want. I just know that when I didn't work, I was very sad. And when I work, I'm much happier. And so I work.

And if you aren't that way, then that's amazing. Like you won. You know what I mean? I talk about what worked for me. And I talk about that because it would have been helpful for me to hear somebody else who was like me say these things. Like it will be hard regardless. I mean, I think a big part of the suffering that I've had has come from thinking that

things should be different than they are. Like, I should be happier. I should be... Like, I think most of human discontent comes from thinking we should be happier than we are. Like, we just have an expectation of the universe that life should always be happy. But it's like, it's so rare that that occurs. And I've gotten significantly more feel-goods out of looking back at what I've done and being proud of myself.

And I think that that's something that I can kind of chew on day after day after day, even if what my day to day is

isn't always fun and games, you know what I mean? Like if I have to record another piece of content because I'm like, oh, okay, we got to do that, then I do it, you know what I mean? And I'm okay with that. But it's because I like the output of that. I like the amount of businesses that I see that have come that have been like, dude, I had my job, I read your first book, and I made $100,000, and I read the second book, we got $2 million this year. Like I love that stuff. And I'll die, and no one will care, and we'll all move on in weeks, and that'll be it. And so I live this way

Because when I looked back on the years when I was at this point, I knew I didn't need to make any more money. I looked at the happiest moments of my life when I looked back and the happiest moments was when I was going through it. It was like when I was working and I had this very, there's this saying that I really like a lot, which is like, you're always going through the good old days.

When I was going through it, like, you know, I could tell Layla, like, man, remember when we were, like, broke as shit and trying to make this work? It's like, yeah, it's like you look back nostalgically on those moments, but, like, during the moment, it's tough. But when you look back, it's actually, like, some of the fondest memories you have. And so reframing the fact that, like, all of my fondest memories were during my hardest times, I then was like, well, shoot, maybe I should reframe how I see hard.

Maybe I should pursue hard things. And so that's what became my kind of like my life thesis, which was hard work is the goal. Like I want to leave nothing in my tank. I want to leave one empty, right? I want to have nothing left. Like those are the days that I enjoy the most is that I worked at the end. I'm like, I know I can look back on my day and be like, I moved all of these things forward.

And to me, that's meaningful. And to other people, it might not be. And if you're like, well, I don't want to work there. Like, don't. Like, by all means, don't. For the love of God, don't. Do whatever you want. If I had one big message, it's like, do whatever you want. The Queen of England died a year ago or whatever it is, and you haven't thought about

her but she was like one of the most significant female monarchs of all times she was one of the wealthiest people to ever exist and you haven't thought about her until me saying this right now think about your great-great-grandfather you probably haven't thought about him until right now in this moment and no one's gonna think about you either like it takes three generations for you to be completely forgotten where you see pictures of your relatives you don't know anyone in the picture

They're just humans to you, right? And we're going to be humans to other people. And so I think in some way it actually is a really nice like humanitarian angle, which is that like in four generations, like one, everybody who's in your progeny is so far removed in terms of gene pool that they've been mixed with other people. They are so much greater not you than they are you.

That like it's just humans, like in some ways, like we're all family, not to get all kumbaya on you, but like in a lot of ways we are. And so I'm good with making stuff that helps a bunch of people and using whatever unique genetic predisposition I have, which is like I'm willing to work for a long period of time. I don't lose focus very easily. I can keep kind of working for extended periods of time without losing energy.

And so like I do that and there's some people who are painters and there's some people who are musicians and like they contribute in their way. But I think that I will always have respect for anyone who works their ass off. I was talking to a friend the other day and he brought this up. He's like, "Hey man, I think your content is sounding like a little hardcore right now." And when people meet you in person, he said like the number one thing they tell me is

Like he's a lot nicer than I thought he was. And he's like kind of funny and cracks jokes and stuff. And I heard that and he was like, I think when you started out, like the content, like people think that you just do this to make money now. And I also say that to be clear so that I have brand coverage.

Which is if I just say I'm only here to make money, then no one can get ever upset that I make money. I think where people get in trouble is where they're like, I only do this because I want to love humanity. It's like, well, if you do that, then never make money. Fine. Just give it all away for free. Like you basically set yourself up for a trap to be destroyed later. So that's why I say that. Now, is it possible to both make money and do things that help people? Yeah. I think that's the nature of capitalism. Like when I had this period of time right here where I was like, what am I going to do with my life? I

I originally thought I was going to start a charity. That was my whole, that was going to be my whole angle. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought that charities were not sustainable. They can't feed themselves, right? You have to keep always asking for more money, really begging people for money so that they can care about your cause. But basically, it's an inefficient allocation of capital. Like you take from one side, you give to another. But in order for something to be sustainable, it has to have a cycle, right?

And so then I ended up reading this book by John Mackey called Conscious Capitalism. And to be really clear, I think I only read the first third and I was like, this is whatever. Anyways, I like, I was like, I get the point of the book. So basically it's just that in order to have something be sustainable, it needs to benefit all stakeholders. It has to benefit the investors. It has to benefit the employees. It has to benefit the environment. It has to benefit the customers. It has to benefit everyone. I essentially like re-derived capitalism

from base units of like, how do I do good? How do I do good in a sustainable way? Oh, I need to have a business that does good, but because it does good, it generates a profit because there's value to all stakeholders. And so fundamentally, like, that's why I had this whole like, okay, well then I'll just give lots of value here, which then will create these businesses or attract businesses to then invest in. And then that will be the cycle. And so I would encourage you to like, if you can think about it, like,

I get when you're broke, like it's very hard to think about other people, but you will end up getting to that point. Now, everyone's number is different. Some people are like, I just want $10 million. Some people just want $1 million. Some people want a billion dollars. Like everyone's different in terms of your requests of the universe. But I will say something that Bezos said, which is that small expectations are a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And so like if you shoot small, you win small. And so if shooting is going to take the same cost either way, it's going to be hard and it's going to take time and years and effort. I think Peter Steele said this, he said, "If you want to compete, open a restaurant in Chicago." Right? Like you can just do that if you want. If you also want the monetary goal, which I just like because it just shows me how if I'm improving in the game,

And back to what my friend was saying at the very beginning, he said, I don't think a lot of people understand that you just actually just like love business. I think that's like, I just so happen to have fallen in love with something that rewards financially. My litmus test for this is that I actually don't have tremendous affinity for any one business. Like I'm not like, oh, I love sneakers. I love insurance. I love whatever. I love software. Like I just kind of like love business.

I think trying to fit myself into a box caused me a lot of pain and suffering. When I think about the moments where time stands still, it's when I'm talking to a business owner about their business, about how it works, and I get to ask like a million questions. I'm like, "Oh, what are the margins on that?" Oh, and like when I ask questions, they're super invasive because I'm just like, "How much profit do you make?" Like, "What are your return on ad spend?" Like, "What's your conversion look like?" What's the, like, and I ask all these things and some of you think I'm like, I'm trying to steal their stuff. I'm like, "Oh, I have no desire."

I just want to understand it. I think that's why I write books about this stuff. I make videos about this stuff. I draw pictures about business because it's what I love. And it just so happens to be something that makes money. If I were playing video games all day, no one would care.

And it's just because there's a wider percentage of people that can play video games all day and people understand it. It's just that fewer percentage of people understand that I would work all day and talk about business all day. Because why would you ever want to do that? Well, it's just like, I feel like I have this very odd, like I have this like business fetish that, and I remember because I was very obsessed with fitness for like over a decade. I competed, like I was very into fitness, like, and I'm a pretty obsessive person. And so enough that the people that I worked with were like,

dude, like please quit here and start something fitness related. And so I ended up doing that because they were like, dude, I can't hear you talking about fitness anymore. Like it's so annoying. But the thing, here's the crazy part is that like two weeks into starting the fitness business I had, once I had my gym, I realized that I loved business more than I loved fitness. And I love fitness a lot. And I still work out to this day, but I loved business even more.

And that was weird for me because I was like, I'll never like anything more than fitness. There's no chance. And until I found it. And so if you are fortunate enough to love a specific problem or love a specific avatar, by all means, like my hope is that you just lose yourself to that romantic love and just go all in on it. I am hardcore. I'm willing to be hardcore in my content, even for the soundbites, even though I know it makes me look

More binary more black and white than I really am because I think that for the younger version of me that was out there That was like I felt very misunderstood. I felt very lonely. It was like I just want to work all the time and

I want to work on weekends and I want to work in the morning and I want to work while I'm awake basically and it's because it's the thing like it's the thing I'm into I had a lot of suffering when people would judge me on it and would tell me that I was doing something wrong and that like I was unbalanced or like and it's really tough when you don't have the proof to show that you're good at it yet and that's what it was for the I mean like these are years guys like this isn't

This isn't like six weeks, six months, like these are years. And I started here, right? Like years. And so I bring this up because like you might be on year three. Year three is before this graph even starts for me. To put this in context, like this is year four for me, like 26. This was year four, I started 22. And so I bring this up because like you're not on the wrong path. You're just early.

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.