Stand Out By Telling The Truth | Ep 847
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Being believable is more persuasive than being persuasive. If you demonstrate and speak forth your biases prior to making a claim or making some sort of teaching thing, more people will believe you. And I would encourage you that if you want to stand out in this marketplace, the thing that you can do above all else to stand out is to actually tell the truth. I have exciting news for you today. And that exciting news is that it's Monday.

And for those of you who are brand new, welcome. Now, before we get going,

I actually wanted to set the tone with something that I shared on Le Twitter, which is French for Twitter, actually French for the platform formerly known as Twitter. So Le X, maybe just Lex. I don't know. We'll go with it. All right. And I think this was a really exceptional read and I think probably applies to many of you today. All right. So I will begin and then we'll get into the fun and shenanigans. All right. So differentiation is survival and the universe wants you to be typical.

This is my last annual shareholder letter as the CEO of Amazon. This is by Jeff Bezos, by the way. And I have one last thing of utmost importance I feel compelled to teach. I hope all Amazonians can take it to heart. Here is a passage from Richard Dawkins' extraordinary book, The Blind Watchmaker. It's about a basic fact of biology. Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself, and that is what it is when it dies, the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment.

If you measure some quantities, such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content, or the electrical potential in a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure and its surroundings. Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than the surroundings, and in cold climates, they have to work hard to maintain the differential. When we die, the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up at the same temperature as our surroundings.

Not all animals work so hard to avoid coming into equilibrium with their surrounding temperature, but all animals do some comparable work. For instance, in a dry country, animals and plants work to maintain the fluid content of their cells. They work against a natural tendency for water to flow from them into the dry outside world. If they fail, they die.

More generally, if living things didn't work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die. While the passage is not as tended as a metaphor, it's nevertheless a fantastic one and very relevant to Amazon. I would argue that it's relevant to all companies and institutions and to each of our individual lives too. In what ways does the world pull at you in an attempt to make you normal?

How much work does it take to maintain your distinctiveness, to keep alive the thing or things that make you special? I know a happily married couple who have a running joke in their relationship. Not infrequently, the husband looks at the wife with faux distress and says to her, can't you just be normal? They both smile and laugh. And of course, the deep truth is that her distinctiveness is something that he loves about her. But at the same time, it's also true that things would often be easier, aka take less energy, if it were a little more normal.

This phenomenon happens at all scale levels. Democracies are not normal. Tyranny is the historical norm. If we stopped doing all of the continuous hard work that is needed to maintain our distinctiveness in that regard, we would quickly come into equilibrium with tyranny. We all know that distinctiveness, aka originality, is valuable. We are all taught to, quote, be yourself. What I'm really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness.

The world wants you to be typical. In a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don't let it happen. You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it's worth it. The fairytale version of be yourself is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don't expect it to be easy or free. You'll have to put energy into it continuously.

The world will always try to make Amazon more typical, to bring us into equilibrium with our environment. It will take continuous effort, but we can and must be better than that. So I felt particularly moved by this passage.

And I'm sure that at least some or maybe all of it may have resonated with many of you. And I know this to be true at all levels, because as I've continued down the entrepreneurial path, which I believe is the single most efficient path at personal development, is that the market will always give you direct and unkind feedback, right? There is no political correctness with results. It will tell you whether your stuff is good or not. Customers will shout at you for not being good enough.

And you may shout at yourself when you aren't making the amount of sales that you want, or you're not getting the amount of advertising, or your ads aren't working, or people aren't saying yes on the phone, or at the end of the month after spending all your money, there's nothing left. That stark contrast of reality is what makes entrepreneurship, in my opinion, a driver of change and ideally improvement. And so I see this letter. It's really great. You can find it on my ex. It's one of the pages of the shareholder website.

And you can scroll down a second to look. Ah, well, Jeffy B action. I was kind of cool. I actually forgot. I honestly was just really moved by the thing. But I did forget that kind of dope, right? Anyways, um, no big deal. You know, me and my compatriots, we exchange tweets. Sometimes, you know, me and Jeff, we go back and forth. Jeffy is what he likes to be called behind the scenes. No, but anyways,

Very, very cool. I thought it was really distinctive and it caught my eye and I figured I would share it with you because it's definitely like the energy that I have right now is that it takes a tremendous amount of effort to be you. And I know we're going to do a breakdown, I think, but I want to talk about something that's super top of mind for me right now. Being believable is more persuasive than being persuasive. Said differently.

If you demonstrate and speak forth your biases prior to making a claim or making some sort of teaching thing, more people will believe you. And so many people in the info world rely on unsubstantiated claims and sometimes outright lies.

And I would encourage you that if you want to stand out in this marketplace, the thing that you can do above all else to stand out is to actually tell the truth. And the people that tell the most true thing will stand out the most.

And so imagine a world where you got on a phone call and someone said, if I buy your thing, will I learn how to paint? If I buy your thing, will I learn how to code? If I buy your thing, will I learn how to make $5,000 a month extra? And then to that, you would say, I think that would be amazing. But to be clear, I promise you no guarantees and no outcomes because I cannot control what you do. And would it be reasonable for

for me to promise something or guarantee something that I have no control over. With that being said, what I can help you do is state the facts and tell the truth. I will give you access to the materials that are the best breakdowns of how to paint, how to X, how to Y. And there are people like Sally who says that this was amazing, but her results might not be typical. There are other people who haven't been satisfied.

How different of a frame would it be on your sales call to state the facts and tell the truth? How different of a frame would it be on your webinar to start that way? How different of a frame would it be in the ads to say that? And so this has been something that's been very top of mind for me, which is like, to what degree? Because truth, like, obviously there's objective truth. One plus one equals two, right? But there's also degrees of truth, meaning I could say some people

have been satisfied and other people haven't. But I could take it a step further and say, 98% of people have rated this a four and a half or above, right? Like how, how true can I make it? I would say that the second statement is more true than the first, or rather how precise with our truth can we be? And I think that in a world where everyone is promising the world and guaranteeing everything, you will stand out by simply telling the truth.

Because the truth is, especially everyone who's listening to this, you know, has education and community as the primary things that they monetize. And the truth is that you cannot control the outcome for your customers. You can increase the likelihood that these things occur, but you cannot promise them. And I think that you would do well to state that up front. And I think on top of that, this is what will happen. And this is what you don't believe, but let me borrow some of my conviction.

Let's say that there's a spectrum of customers, which there is. On one hand, you have broke-ass people. Brokies, serfs, plebeians, the poors, muggles, non-magic folk, normies, these folks, one-star reviewers. On this side, you've got rich folk, the elite, the superior, those whose credit cards do not decline, Amex black holders. All right? This is our spectrum.

Currently right now, the more you promise, the more you guarantee, the more you sell these people. The less you promise, the more upfront and transparent you are, the more you will sell these people. But here's the really fascinating thing about this. You will probably sell the same amount of people. You will just shift what slice of the demographics you convert with. Because I can promise you the more experienced a business owner is, the higher and more finely tuned their bullshit detector is.

And nowadays, consumer like the reason that the info space has the terrible reputation that it has, I would say is is two factors to it. Factor one is that some people deliver terrible stuff, meaning it's just absolute nonsense. There's nothing valuable inside of it. It's just it's just not good. Straight up. That's a that's that's a thing for sure.

The second category is people who promise a lot. And you basically have four outcomes there. It's a four box. High promise, low promise, good shit, bad shit, right? And so the worst scenario is high promise, bad shit. I would say the next worst scenario, and this is where it gets really interesting, is high promise, good shit. The next

worst or second best, it's a four box, so there's only four, is low promise, low shit, or bad shit. And then finally, the best combination is low promise, good shit. And so you might be wondering, why would I say that big promise, good shit is bad? The reason I say that is because the nature of education is

No one has cracked the fact that there is differential outcomes in cohorts among education. You probably haven't cracked the code. You have not cracked the code to human motivation. You probably haven't cracked the code to everything they have in terms of a history of knowledge, skills, and experiences that they come into your sales call or your funnel or your advertising with.

And so when you set very low expectations, if you set low expectations, then you basically promise nothing. And if nothing occurs, then you have met expectations. And so there's really only one realistic long-term solution, which is and has become a marketing moniker that is quickly ignored under promise over deliver.

But a lot of people say that, but they don't actually do it. They literally say under promise, over deliver, and then in the next breath, promise like crazy. And so reality is that you just get head nods and high fives and likes on Facebook for saying under promise, over deliver, but in no way do you change your behavior based on that statement. And so I believe, and I'm going to try, you will see this over the next however many months, I'm going to try and become the epitome of this.

So you guys will see this. Some of you guys might have seen it with the last YouTube video that I put out. I'm putting it everywhere. I am going to try and become the world's most compliant advertiser. And the way that I believe that, like my goal here, honestly, like for real, for real, is that my life was changed by the alternative education world. I have learned so many of the skills I have from what many would consider under the pejorative term of guru, of info marketer.

But I've learned a lot of what I've learned. Some of my most valuable skills from other people who have been in this space. Now, that being said, my results are not typical. I am not typical. And so me saying that doesn't guarantee that you will have those results either. But I think that if all of us collectively, everyone on school, if we were to advertise in a way that was more truthful than anybody else, we would collectively raise the conversion of this platform

And here's the fucked up shit. The first people to do it will stick out the most. You will get first mover advantage because the thing is, is that so many people, many of you who are listening to this right now are afraid. You're afraid of telling the truth. But when you think about it from a customer's perspective, you would always be more inclined to believe somebody who told the truth and disclaimed upfront, gave damaging admissions. It's one of the most fundamental ways of persuasion. I teach this.

Say all the things that are bad and then say the things that are good so that when you say the good things They're more likely to be believed. It's to your benefit.

to disclaim the things that are not true or could potentially not be true. And what I mean by that is saying, the reality is not 100% of the people who join your community are going to lose weight. Not 100% of the people who are joining your community are going to get a six pack. They're not going to learn how to paint like Van Gogh. They're not going to even learn how to paint like you. Why is that? Because their backgrounds, their effort, their experience will differ. Their results will vary. So say it and you will become significantly more compelling.

The people who state their biases up front are more trusted by people despite the fact that they have disclaimed their biases. So if someone says, hey, Alex, do you think Layla is a good CEO?

I would say, I am biased because she is my wife. And so that will weigh in my decision. That being said, I care a lot about making money. If I didn't think she was the best CEO, then I would probably make moves to not have her as CEO. And so if you deem me an intelligent individual who's motivated by external goals and trying to achieve things, then you might reason that I would have maybe even a higher bar.

potentially, for my spouse because it's a reflection of me. But by me saying that, and by beginning with my bias, it makes what I say afterwards more believable. It also happens to be true. And so what I want you to think about here, okay? What I want you to think about here is there's a few situations where you can correct these things, all right?

So the first is in the advertisements, right? Number one is how people find out about your stuff. That's in the outbound messages. That's in your YouTube videos. That's in your paid ads, right? Or whatever, wherever your Instagram or TikTok, whatever. That's place one. And by the way, you telling your story, despite it being true, is also still a claim. You are testimonial number one.

And so your story is actually to be treated the same way as anyone else's, which is that your results are not typical because the likelihood of the amount of things that you did to get the result is different than what you're selling your customers, right? They're not going to go through what you went through to figure this out.

So they're going to have a different experience. And if you disclose that, they will believe you more. The second place that this will occur is on the landing pages and on your school about page is what am I putting in there? What images am I showing? And I should be clear about, hey, I will show you these stories. Now, if you guys want a life hack of life hacks on this stuff, essentially in the United States, the Federal Trade Commission has essentially made earnings claims illegal. They have made them more or less illegal.

This was news to me, which is why I'm sharing it to you. And so there are four things that are required for an earnings claim. I will share them with you. And so you can make them. If you can do all four of these things, you can. But let's just pretend you can. So number one is that you get permission from the person. That sounds about fair. You're like, okay, that feels okay. That feels legit. That feels right.

The second is that you disclose the context under which this has occurred. Now, this is all the stuff I'm talking about. What are the unique situations? What are the circumstances? How is the data collected? Right. What kind of experience did they get? Was it different than everyone else's? OK, that's the disclosures. The third piece is substantiation. Now, you might think, well, I have a screenshot. That is actually not sufficient substantiation. Even if they gave you a screenshot of their Stripe account, not sufficient substantiation.

you would actually have to show three things in the substantiation. Number one is you'd have to show their bank account or actual downloads from their Stripe, actual PDFs from their processing or their whatever, right? That's thing one, before your intervention. Second, you'd have to show the PDFs and actual downloads from the bank account or their processor after the intervention.

And number three, a causal relationship between the two gaps that shows that what you did is the reason that it went up. That's number three. But wait, there's more. Number four is that, is it typical? And if the answer is no, and if you're like, well, how would I show typicality? You would have to substantiate those claims for everyone, which means that you would have to track that for every customer you have. Now, one of the advantages that school has is that we are a platform. And so we can substantiate.

The claims because we own the processing. Very unique for us. But if you're trying to... So essentially what I'm trying to say here is that earnings claims, likely the way you're making them, are probably not legal. Okay. Now, there's obviously... Some of you right now are like, you're hyperventilating. I won't say more about that. I'll just leave that there. Now, you might be asking, well, then how can I show proof that my stuff is good? Great follow-up question. How?

The way that you do that is that you show satisfaction. And so the way you do this from a persuasion perspective is that you say, you might want to know ROI, but I don't want to talk about that. What I want to really talk about is the question behind your question. This is an intention close, by the way. Someone asks for an answer to something that you can't answer either for legal reasons or for whatever reasons. And so rather than saying no, you say, I'm guessing the reason you're asking that question is because you want to know intention.

Because you want to know, will you be happy after you made this purchase? And if that's what you want to know, let's talk about that. Here's Sarah. Sarah is in a similar situation to you. And she's very satisfied with this purchase. This was the best decision of my entire life. It totally changed how I saw painting. I see it as an artist now. Like my painting skills have completely transformed my life. Phenomenal. No earnings claims, no specific outcomes, entirely subjective.

Who can argue? Alex is the best painting teacher on the planet. Best is subjective. Who can argue that based on what, right? Amazing, exceptional, tremendous, huge, whatever.

All of these things are subjective. And then what do you have to say? But her experience is probably not typical because her experience was influenced by the past things that she came in on. And so your results and experience might vary. So I promise nothing for you. But there are people who've had exceptional experiences. And you can say as many of those as you want. And with each time you say, hey, to be clear,

Sarah's superiors to social snowflake. She had a different experience coming into this than you did because she lived a different life than you. And so your results will likely vary. You can't have the same experience as Sarah because you're not Sarah and the world has changed. Right. And so this is how you can still layer in proof and do it in a compliant. So I said, there's the advertising component. There's the about page component. This obviously factors into those of you have videos on your, on your about pages. Same thing to be true there.

And then finally on the actual sales calls themselves. And the way that you do that is you would still say the same, the same, the same pieces, right? And I'll walk you through the three places that you want to watch out for the most or maybe four. Okay. Is that all right with you guys? Is that okay? All right. I want you to set up this frame because what it does is it gives you the moral high ground. It's a very strong frame.

That's why I'm bringing this up. All right. So the first thing you have to say on a call, if you want to follow the law in the United States, is you have to say four things. You say, this is my name calling from this company in regards to topic. And by the way, this call is being recorded. All right. You can say for quality assurance. And that's to protect you that I don't say some crazy shit. All right. That's how you train your guys to say it. If you want to say it a little shorter, because if you want to get it out faster, you say, hey, this is Alex Crawford from Acquisition on a reported line in regards to the thing that you just said you wanted.

How you doing today? That's it. We got all four of them out. Not a big deal. You say that first. That's the first thing you say on the call. In the United States, anything that happens prior to you saying it's recorded, you are liable. Number two, once you said they say hi, you say hi, you say great. Do you mind if we just jump in? They'll say sure. You say, hey, here's the agenda for the call. One, two, three. This is what we're going to do. Sound good. They're going to say yes.

At that point, you put in disclosure. You say, hey, before we get going, before I talk about your metrics, before we talk about your history of painting or your history of weight loss, I just want to make sure that we're 100% clear. We at Insert Company 123, we don't promise that you're going to lose weight. We don't promise you're going to get a specific outcome. And the reason we can't do that is because we can't control what you put in your body. We're not the ones who are going to be doing the work. You're going to be the one doing the work. And all of your results are going to be completely dependent on the effort that you put in.

Does that sound fair? That sound reasonable? Yes, they're going to agree. So what do we do here? One, that's compliant. Two, it sets the frame for the conversation. So they're not going to come out later, but like, can you, how many, how many, it's like, Sarah, I said at the very beginning, I'm not going to promise something that I can control. Do you think it would be reasonable for me to do that? Would you trust me more if I promised you something I can't control? Of course not, right? Now, the third thing. So that's one, intro. Two, disclosure. Three, here's what you do on the third thing. The third thing you're looking for

And I want to be clear here. Check with whatever attorneys you have in whatever countries you have to make sure that whatever you're doing is compliant. These are just some rules, some tips, okay? Number three, this is where you get in trouble, right? Is that someone or a salesperson will get down the line and they will say something to the degree of, okay, so you're saying if I did this thing, I could lose weight, right? So they're going to reframe what the salesperson said. They're going to restate it back to them with an implied claim. They're basically going to try and get you to promise it.

And so there's a three-step answer to this. I'll walk you through it. Number one, that would be amazing. But I just want to remind you, we promise nothing, right? I make no guarantees about your specific results because they'll vary based on the stuff, the work that you put in, right? And your background and other experiences. But that being said...

What we can do is state the facts and tell the truth. We will give you access to our painting mentors and you'll get three one-on-one sessions with them. And you'll have access to our library of painting materials. And we'll be with you over the next 12 weeks to help you out. So I'm not saying that wouldn't be amazing. It would, but I'm going to promise absolutely nothing there because it depends entirely on you. So let me just restate again what we actually are going to do. And you have to just exactly, ardent,

It's about the inputs. So you will talk about what you can do, not about what might occur as a result. We talk about inputs, not outputs from a compliance perspective. Now, that's thing three. Thing four is false urgency, false scarcity, things like that, false qualifications. Most people claim that they're qualifying people, but really they're just looking for a credit card and a pulse. If that's you, then that's also considered not. It's another thing.

All right. So I'll just, I'll just put that in there. If you want to just say, I just want to see if this is a fit, totally fine. But don't, don't say, Hey, why should I accept you into my thing? That frame, um, if not true is highly suspect. And the other part of it is like, it may be true. Maybe you do deny some people. Um, but it's still a red flag and probably just worth avoiding overall. So that's, that's, you might be like, well, Alex, what can we talk about?

Well, you know there's two sides of persuasion, right? There's promise and there's pain. Pain is compliant. Talk to someone about where they're currently at. Talk to them about their current struggles. If you can articulate the pains that they are going through better than they can, they will trust that you can help them solve them.

Imagine if I said to you, your exact issues that are going on in your business, and I just said them to a T and you're like, man, he just like, he knows exactly what's going on. If I said, I think I might be able to help you

And I think you might see some value from it. That being said, I can't promise anything. You might be like, shit, I just, I mean, you know these so well. I feel confident that he could help me out. And so I would lean more, and I feel like this is a forgotten thing in the world of advertising. And I talk about this in the offer's book, is that a lot of people talk about the top side, right, of the value equation. They talk about outcome. They talk about perceived likelihood of achievement, right? But the more time I have spent

in advertising and persuasion and selling, the more I look at the bottom side of the equation, which are basically the antitheses of pain, delay, effort, and sacrifice. And so if we can pinpoint the things that they're experiencing pain on it. So it's like, okay, let's think through this. What are the things that cause someone to have motivation? So if you think about what a salesperson is, is they're fundamentally a one-on-one motivational speaker. It's what you are. Because you're trying to get someone to take action, trying to change their behavior.

So if we're trying to motivate somebody, which is what we're doing as salespeople, then what is how do you motivate? You have to show deprivation. And you can show deprivation in two ways. Let's say that they are a point on the map here. Right. We can say, look how far away this thing that you really want is. And then we create deprivation between where they are and where they want to go. The other way is that we can say you're actually not here. You're way back here.

And that's based on pain. And so this is why in most selling scripts that I have, I have something called the pain cycle, which is where in seat closer, I see L-O, the O is pain.

a nice little cycle there, where you ask the same questions. You say, what have you tried so far? How did that work for you? What did you like about it? What did you not like about it? Got it. What else did you try? And you keep asking those four questions. So what we're doing is we're increasing the relevance of the pain that they have experienced getting here on the phone or here on the webinar or here on the whatever conversion event you have, right? And so what we want to ask are questions like, what have you not been able to do

as a result of this pain in your life. And to be clear, I'm not promising that you will be able to do that. I just want to understand. All right. Second, what have you had happen that you didn't want to have happen because of this issue? So think about it. I think a lot in plus plus minus minus and plus minus minus plus. And he's like, what the hell does that mean? So when I'm thinking about persuasion, I have these four boxes in my mind. Okay. So plus plus is more good stuff.

So as a result of this decision, we want to talk about more good stuff. We're in the hope that more good stuff could occur, right? So if you didn't have access to me, now you have access to me. If you didn't have, you know, you didn't have these materials, now you have access to the material. These are plus plus, right?

minus minus is less bad stuff. What is what? And if we're thinking through this, what is this? What is that? What is some of the bad stuff? Overwhelm, confusion, not knowing where to start, less of that now. So if you're suffering from those issues, we might be able to help remove those. Okay. Again, we make no promises, blah, blah, blah. Okay. What is the plus minus and minus minus plus part? How does that work in? That's what I call selling against the don't.

Right. Which is the path not taken. And so a lot of marketers, a lot of salespeople, they get lost because they spend too much of their time only on the decision in front of them rather than looking at all the alternative paths.

So if you get off the phone today, plus minus, you might have more overwhelm. You might have more confusion. You might have more delay between where you are and where you want to go. That might be a riskier path. And then minus plus is if you decide not to move forward, you might not get these outcomes that you wanted.

And so when I'm thinking about writing copy, I use that as basically framework one. And then in the book, I talk about who, what, when as framework two. And when I layer those two things on top of each other, that gives me endless variety of things that I can bring up that can be persuasive. And if you're like, what book am I talking about? This is the leads book in the, um,

I'll find the section. I think it's in the paid ad section. I think it's section one for paid ads. And in there, I talk about writing copy and it's the who, what, when framework. So what we're looking at right now is looking at page 140, this framework, 140 in the leads book. All right. What, who, when?

And so what I just went over was the what side. That's my plus minus box, right? Now I've got my who side, which is, okay, well, we talked about how this could affect you, but how does it affect your family? How does not doing this affect your friends? How does not doing this affect your colleagues or your rivals, your frenemies? How are they affected by this decision to do or not do? And then third is when.

Is okay. Well, we're talking about present, but let's talk about the future. Let's talk about the past. What will your wife think about you under these new conditions? Right. Would that be, would that be valuable? And so, you know, all of that being said, if you're like, well, what do I do if I don't promise everything else in persuasion? And so hopefully that gave you guys a little bit of context. This has been top of mind for me because I'm,

I don't know. I feel really, really passionate about this because I think that I mean, I'm a gym owner guys. Like I came up as a, as I went online training and then I started a gym. Like it's not like I went through some branding school or some marketing school to figure any of this stuff out. Like I found this out by reading books and buying courses and attending conferences and going to masterminds and doing all sorts of stuff that right now gets shit on. And frankly, probably rightfully so. Um,

because of the things that I just described, because there's a lot of people who promise high and deliver low. They do the opposite. And some of you guys are listening to this right now. And so if you want to stand out in a very crowded marketplace, just tell the truth. And the thing is, is that prospects know. They already know. They know. And so when you tell the truth, all it does is get them to trust you more and make it, it increases the likelihood they buy from you.

But here's the best part of all of this. When you sell this way, you get better customers. You get fewer refunds. You get fewer chargebacks. You get people who get better results because their expectations were lower. They're not expecting you to save the world for them. Anybody who asks you for a guarantee on something that they control is asking for you to be their savior.

They're asking for you to eat the food for them and work out for them. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the satisfaction guarantee or whatever. But that, again, satisfaction guarantee is that you're going to like this experience. And so I put that out. Take that how you want. We probably won't have time for the breakdown, so we'll probably have to push it until next week. But this felt...

Super timely to share with you guys because it's been really top of mind and I feel really passionate about it. I think if everybody on school, if we collectively decided we're going to advertise differently, and all it really takes is for you to do this one time and realize the same amount of people buy and they're better, that you transition for life. You transition over and you're like, I'm just going to do this that way from here on out.

it's also what gives you kind of a big brand feel. There's a reason that Blackstone doesn't say, here's John. John invested $1 million and he's got $10 million. Have you ever seen that? Of course not, right? Of course you haven't. But it's not like Blackstone's struggling to make money. And so there's this big fear that exists that if you were to operate this way, you would make less money. But what I find really fascinating about that is if you look at the biggest companies in the world, they all operate this way.

And I'll give you a fun little corollary. There was a business owner I was talking to not that long ago who was like, hey, I want to come on Cash Cows, which is the show we've been putting on on YouTube. I don't know if you guys have seen it. It's where we do these big breakdowns of businesses. It's a lot of fun. Anyways, so there's a guy who's going to come on and he's a restaurant owner. And he's like, you know, I don't really want to share my numbers because I think my employees will leave if they know how much money I'm making.

And I'm like, okay, so big picture, your goal long-term is to keep opening more locations. Do you think when you have 10 locations that they haven't figured out that you are making money and taken to the national extreme has this limited businesses in the, in the past? Well, every publicly traded company is literally forced to be transparent about all of their metrics. And yet,

people still work there. And so there's a lot of these limiting beliefs that exist. One of them is that if I share my financials, everyone will leave. And maybe some people will leave. And guess what? Maybe they shouldn't be there because eventually if you do succeed, they will find out that you make money. And guess what? So what? Find somebody who's happy about you making money instead of angry about it. That's

That's probably a great first place to start for people on your team. But second to that, if the eventuality is that everyone's going to find out anyways, and you're going to have to work this way, and that's what the biggest people in the world do, why not start now? I see that as a measure of success. And so I promise you, you can absolutely advertise and sell in a way that is compliant and truthful, and it will improve your business. And it will make you stand out in a marketplace full of scum and sewage.

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.