Throwback: How To Get Ahead of 99% of Entrepreneurs | Ep 841
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Hey guys, welcome back to the game. Today's episode is a throwback city of one of our top episodes of all time. And so if you are new to the channel, then you will probably like it. It's titled How to Get Ahead of 99% of Entrepreneurs. But it's really a podcast about leverage, which is about the skills, beliefs and traits required to get more for what you put in so that you can move faster towards your goals. And I think it's one of the better things I put out. So enjoy.

One in every 250 businesses does over $10 million a year in sales. And that means that 99% of entrepreneurs never hit it. Every business that I've started since I was 25 has crossed $10 million. B2B services with Gym Launch, B2C consumer products with Prestige Labs, our supplement company, Allen, our B2B software, and Acquisition.com, which is an investment firm for all of the money that we made during those businesses to invest in other ones.

I feel really confident that I can talk to the points of helping you go from zero to a million, million to 10 million and beyond. And so this is just a visual, put this in context. 90% of businesses never hit a million dollars a year in sales. 90%. It doesn't look that way on Instagram, but this is the vast majority of businesses, right? Now, 9% of businesses cross this million dollar threshold, right? And then only 0.4%, which is one in 250,000.

do 10 million plus. It's so rare. And so the nice thing is that success does leave clues. I want to kind of separate this into two major categories. One is the entrepreneur and the other is the opportunity vehicle they're pursuing. You'll notice I said leverage rather than opportunity vehicle, but fundamentally leverage is the difference in what you put in and what you get out. And so you want to have the best entrepreneur getting the most out of what they put in. And so if you have those two things together, then you create a $10 million plus business. And if you've

Consumed any of my other content, I used to talk about how entrepreneurs has three main things. You've got skills, you've got character traits, you've got beliefs. I've thought about this more and I've actually simplified it to one degree, which is I think you just have skills and beliefs.

Character traits, if you think about this, you're like, I want to become patient. Patient is just a general term for lots of little skills. And so if you want to become more patient, you want to do things that patient people do. And that means that if I can train someone to become more patient, then patience is a skill.

And so as a total side quest on this, what's interesting about this is that you've probably heard people say soft skills and like hard skills. In my opinion, hard skills are just skills that are easy to measure. Soft skills are just hard to measure, but they're both 100% skills that you can train and improve.

And so if we say, man, I wish that guy had better people skills, what we mean is 100 micro skills that are like, I wish he would smile when someone walked in the room. Can I train someone to do that? Absolutely. If I said, hey, I wish you would greet someone by their first name immediately every time they walk in the door, right? Boom, that's trainable.

I wish someone wouldn't interrupt. It's like, okay, well, we can just give someone a cookie every time they don't interrupt someone and let someone finish their statement. And then we train them. And so all of these soft skills are just soft because they're hard to measure. Doesn't mean that they're not skills or they're not important. And oftentimes most of us know that like within an organization, like the way that you gain influence is the soft skills that are hard to measure, but incredibly important. So if we're talking about how do we make the highest leverage entrepreneur, we want somebody who has lots and lots of skills and

And really, it's about beliefs that don't limit them. If someone had no limits in terms of what they believe they could achieve, then the only thing that would limit them was their skills. But most of the times, the beliefs that we have are things that just decrease our potential. And it's not really our fault because most of the people that were around us when we grew up, just by statistics, were poorer than you might want to be. And so they told you how they see the world. If there's ever something that's going to be on my tombstone, it's this quote, which is,

We question all of our beliefs, except for those that we truly believe and those we never think to question. And so like the things that you actually believe, they're so invisible to you because that's just your lens through which you see the world. Whereas when you're like, oh, I want to debate this point. It's like you don't really believe that. You just have an opinion on it or you have some assumptions that you're willing to back.

Right, but the true beliefs of like well no one would be willing to pay for something like that or like that doesn't exist I didn't know that was possible You don't even question those things because they weren't even in your mind to begin with it's the unknown unknowns that are things that limit us the question is how do we up level someone's beliefs so let me give you a Quick example here. So there was an entrepreneur that I know who had a fitness app he was a super high level CrossFit Games competitor and

And he started this app and he didn't want to tell anybody about it because he never placed top three. He placed fourth place in most competitions, which is insane. But he had a belief that if he wasn't the winner, he didn't deserve to have an app. Like, think about how crazy it is. But he didn't question that. That was just what he believed reality to be. He was like, well, of course. Right?

Of course I wouldn't want it. And so he built this app for himself and just the members of his gym, but the app was so good that people started sharing it. And finally, a client of his was a marketer and said, you need to start marketing this. You need to start posting about it. And he wouldn't post. And finally, she convinced him to just make one post and he like doubled his revenue. He'd gone from like $20,000 a month to $100,000 a month with his app simply because he

He changed his beliefs. And so like fundamentally, he had all the skills. He was already a really good CrossFit Games competitor. He already had the product that was really good. And he already had the skills to be able to market it. He was just choosing not to. Unchaining an entrepreneur is figuring out the reasons they give for why they can't do something. Those are known experiences.

limits, right? Well, I can't do it because of X. That's the things that you know because you can even explain it. I can't do it because I'm not number one. I can't do it because I'm not in good enough shape. I can't do it because the app doesn't load well enough. I can't do it because it's only on one platform. I can't do it because insert whatever, right? Now, the dangerous ones are the unknown unknowns, all right? My whole goal when I started my chain of gyms was

was that I wanted to be America's next gym. So I bought the trademark United Fitness. I was really proud of it. I had six locations. I joined this group of internet entrepreneurs. Now, mind you, the reason I think this is funny is because

I was sold by the sales guy that there was other gym owners in the room and they were all like doing well and doing stuff on the internet too. Got in the room, not only were there no gym owners, there weren't even any brick and mortar business owners in the room. And so I was like, wow, this is a shock. And so everybody's going up there explaining their like ads and their funnels and their upsell prices and all this stuff. And I get up there and I'm like, I own six gyms.

And I was like, but these are the ads I run to get members into my gyms. The thing is, I gave this whole breakdown of everything I did and how I opened every location at full capacity on the first day without taking cash out of the pocket, all this stuff. And I remember the guy who was running the whole group said,

And I really looked up to this guy at that time because he was the first person who was like way more successful than me that I actually had access to. And so I think at that point he was doing a million dollars a month. And I remember thinking like, whoa, like, and so I go through this whole presentation. I'm talking as fast as I can, explaining all the stuff that I do. And he stops and he's like, Alex, I don't think you should be in the gym business.

And I remember hearing that it was like time slowed down because I felt like he like punched me in the gut because this was like my whole plan, my whole dream. This is what I was going towards. But I like paused and just like heard him out. He said, you have a level 10 skill set and a level two opportunity. I don't think you should be running gyms. I think you should be teaching people how to do what you just walked through. And I had a belief and I still do that.

If someone's further along in the game of business, you always have things that you can learn from them. And if I paid to be in this room, if I don't take the advice, it's the closest thing to me burning all the money that I paid to be here. And so...

When he told me that, to me, that was an unknown unknown. I didn't know that there was another opportunity vehicle outside of me just owning gyms. Like, I didn't know it was possible. So I hadn't thought, like, I didn't know how franchises worked. I didn't know how licensing worked. I didn't know how any of, I didn't know how to B2B national, any of that stuff worked. Now, there were some skills that I would have to learn in order to enable it, but I couldn't even start on that skill path or see the deficiency of skills that I had because I didn't even think I could pursue it.

And so these are the ones that, in my opinion, are the most powerful to overcome. It's the things that you didn't know were possible. I'll give you a different example. In Chana Ferrys, which is one of our portfolio companies, amazing business, super successful single location. And the founder had an agency when he approached me saying like, hey, I want to do what you did with gym launch, but with photography studios. And so we talked and we talked and we talked and his model was so good. I was like, wow.

I don't know, man. I think like one of the things that I didn't have with gym launches, they're like, I couldn't control delivery. With photography, you can control delivery. And so that means that we could actually centralize a lot of stuff. I was like, what if we just owned all of them with like a hybrid model? We actually took the agency from what it was doing, which for most people watching this would be a very good business for you, to zero.

To start this next thing. We had such good rapport that he's like, if you really think so. And we walked through the math and he's like, I mean, this makes sense, but like, I'm going to kill something that makes a lot of money. I was like, yeah, but I think it's going to be for something that's going to make way more. And then for the next six months, we worked and tweaked the original model to get this new model off the ground. And 30 months later, that business is two and a half million a month with 30 plus locations, because I said, let's just own it all.

He didn't think that that was a model that was really available. And then as soon as we made that switch, everything took off. Even in my own personal story, when I switched from having my gyms to doing a done-for-you-fly-around-the-country model, that took the same skills that I had as an entrepreneur and put them in a better vehicle. And then, even from doing the gym turnaround business for two years, I understood.

accidentally fell into the licensing model because I didn't want to fly out. Somebody asked me if I could just show them all the stuff that I did so they could do it for themselves. And then at that point, he bought it and it was all margin. And I was like, holy cow, this is insane. That's when everything took off like a rocket. And so I had my brick and mortar gyms and then I scaled to a done-for-you turnaround business. And then I scaled to licensing and each of those were higher leverage opportunities. And it was because I didn't know it was possible. And so once I learned that it was possible, that unlocked a

all of the potential value that my skills could have. Because fundamentally, in every one of those examples, I knew how to do the same stuff. I knew how to market and sell for a local gym. I knew how to build them more profitably, create the workouts, the meal plans, all that kind of stuff that got people results. That's what I knew how to do. But at each level, when I went from gyms to turnarounds, the leverage increased from each of these things. And so the same skill set put into a new bucket or a new vehicle unlocked huge value.

And that's why a lot of entrepreneurs don't get past a million or even get to 10 million is that they're in the wrong vehicle. So I talk about leverage a lot, and it's actually one of the core concepts in our logo. So we have a supply demand curve, and then we have a fulcrum, which is the acquisition.com logo. And it's because it's core to everything we do. If you think about leverage,

You've ever heard Archimedes? He said, give me a long enough lever and I can move the world. This is our lever. And we'll put our little hand here. That's my arm. If we grab the lever here, we have the most leverage on something that is here.

If we grab the lever here, we still have the most leverage on something here, but we have less leverage overall compared to how much we have on this side. And the main difference here is how much force goes up the other side. All right. And so leverage is the difference between what you put in and what you get out. That's it. So let me give you an example in the real world. If you are really skilled at cold calling, skill itself is leverage. Because if somebody who doesn't have the skill makes 100 phone calls, that's their input.

And somebody who does have the skill puts 100 calls down. And the guy who doesn't have the skill gets zero appointments set. And the guy who's amazing at it gets 10 appointments set. He has, well, let's just say the first guy had one for sake of math. He has 10 times the leverage on that skill compared to the newbie. Getting and acquiring skills gives you more leverage because it gets you more for what you put in. And so if you're a more skilled entrepreneur, being a skilled entrepreneur is a big bucket for...

for hundreds of smaller skills underneath of it, because it means that you know how to prioritize what to do next. And so one of my favorite quotes about leverage comes from Warren Buffett, Uncle Warren. He and one of his closest friends graduated Columbia Business School at the same time, same year. And he said that guy was smarter and harder working than him. Now, they then went their separate ways. Warren ended up getting into investing with Ben Graham and his friend goes into the steel business. Because that was back in the day when like American steel was like a thing, which it really no longer is. What he learned from that experience is that you fast forward 30, 40, 50 years.

And he said his friend, you know, did okay. And he said, mind you, this is a guy who was smarter and harder working than him. He said he did okay. He did pretty well, but not close to what Warren did. And he said his biggest lesson from that was it's not about how hard you row. It's about what boat you're in. And I love that because it really encompasses the concept of leverage, which is Warren got more out for what he put in than

than his buddy in the steel business because the steel business had a lot of headwinds. A lot of things going against them. They had globalizations that started happening. You had other imported steel that was cheaper from China, blah, blah, blah. And so those forces, he had to roll harder against the wind than Warren did while riding one of the best

growth curves of the US economy overall. And so he got higher returns. And so over my career, I make more now than I did before because I've moved further back along this lever. So I have more leverage now on what I put in than what I did before. When I was selling one-on-one in person and I was doing 20 consults a day, I was working more hours probably than I do now. But I get so much more for what I put in.

So I'm going to show you two triangles that show increasing amounts of leverage. Now, one of these I've stolen ruthlessly from Naval Ravikant. And so he talks about the four types of leverage. I've renamed them so they're Cs, and it's mostly just so I remember them more easily.

But you've got collaboration, which just means other people working for you. Then you've got capital, which means other people worked for you and gave you the fruit of their work so that you can invest it on their behalf. So for example, if I get people to give me a billion dollars, which I could do, just raise the money, and then I invest that money, and I say I get 20% of the gain, I didn't have to work all the time to make a billion dollars, but I still get 20% of it. That's the idea of using leverage of other people's money. So capital. So you've got collaboration.

Capital, you've got code and content. If I'm a genius coder and I could build one piece of software, I can build it once and people, a million people can use that same piece of software.

With content, Joe Rogan can make one podcast episode and millions of people can listen to it. And so he gets more for what he puts in, right? So if you think about each of these things, it's like you have the influence on someone else. I trade me selling for 40 hours a week to me managing a salesman for two hours who then sells for 40 hours a week. Or higher leverage, I spend a week or two weeks recruiting the best sales recruiter

And then I do that one time in my life for two weeks. And then that sales recruiter works 40 hours a week to get new salespeople in every single week on my behalf. And then those salespeople on my behalf then sell every single day. And so I did two weeks of work for a hundred salespeople over the lifetime of that one hire. More leverage. I get more for what I put in. Compare that to me taking 20 consults a day. Higher leverage skill, but same concept done at scale. Capital we went over, code, content. Those are the four types of leverage. Now,

This is where this gets interesting because like once I learned this, I was able to put words to what I kind of knew intrinsically and I can now explain it. So if you look at my career trajectory and one of the key points here is that

You can actually just max out one of these things. So you don't need to have all four. Now, if you have all four, cool. But if you think about what leverage is in general, it's just you get more for what you put in. And so if you get a thousand X on any of these, it's still a thousand X. So somebody can just be an amazing private equity guy or amazing at raising money and become a billionaire. They don't need to do any of these other things, right? Somebody could be amazing at galvanizing people and creating movements and they wouldn't need any of these other things.

If someone's amazing at writing software, they don't need anyone else's capital and the software does the collaboration on their behalf, right? And so all of these things, like even though they're structured like this, you don't have to have all of them. If you do have all of them, well, you look at Facebook that is code about content. He raised other people's money and he has people working for him. But let me show you how this changed for me. So in the beginning, I was an employee, right? And I made four figures a month.

Then I became self-employed. I gained a little bit of leverage just over my own time. So I went from having someone else control my time to me controlling my time, which was leverage. All right. I got more for what I put in and I went to five figures a month. All right. Then I went to employing other people.

Right. Which is then I would say the first level is me now having the first level of leverage. So I went to six figures a month. All right. And this is right as I I would say first when I started my my gyms and I had multiple gyms. And then when I transitioned that to turnarounds, I still stayed at six figures a month. But fundamentally, it's because I actually didn't change leverage. I changed how I was structuring it. But fundamentally, like it was people doing the same work. So this was both me being a gym owner with six locations and me doing the turnaround business with other people.

You're like, how do you go from six figures a month to seven figures a month? Then you start licensing. Now, what is that? I made content fundamentally, and then I made it once, and then many people could have access to it. And so when I did that, I went to seven figures a month. Now, the question is, how do I get from seven figures a month to eight figures a month? Because that's what we have at acquisition.com. What did I add into it? Capital.

So now we buy into companies that have other people working for them. I use content to attract those businesses. Now, I don't have any code right now. I have one software investment, maybe two, I think, that are major investments. But the rest of my stuff, really, if we're talking about it, is that I made content. I had capital from the things that I'd done before. And we have the ability to get other people to help us get to our goals. And so this is acquisition.com. And that's eight figures a month. Now,

What do I need to do to get to nine figures a month? I may just need to add time to the existing thing that I'm doing. Key point is that leverage is about getting more for what you put in. People who move faster in life don't actually move faster. They get more for their inputs. They get more for every step, right? I'm not like frenetically moving to move faster. You just get more out of every move. And so that means that if you're getting more out of every move, it's a function of time.

And so if I had, for example, maybe some code that was implemented within everything that I do at acquisition.com, I might be able to get to nine figures a month faster than I currently am. But I feel confident with these three that we'll get to nine figures a month faster.

eventually. And so you might say, Alex, that might be a limiting belief. It might be, but that's, that's kind of how I'm choosing to play it. And so, and let me, let me like reverse the clock here. If I had just kept my gyms from the time I started my gyms until now, I might have a hundred locations and I might also already be doing nine figures, not nine figures. I probably be doing eight figures a month from the gyms. And so you're like, well, wait a second. So was it the best move?

I can't go back and replay time. I don't know. But that's where, to me, this is why the game gets interesting is that every time you switch vehicles, you start at zero again. So the pace that the leverage affords you for each step you take has to be disproportionate because year four of a business, you'll typically grow more than year one of a new business. And so that's where doing the same thing for a longer and longer period of time, you still get more leverage. The guy who owns Panda Express opened 600 new locations this year.

Because he has done this because now he has enough capital, he has enough collaboration that he's maxed. No, he doesn't do any content and he doesn't have any code, right? But he has these two at such a high degree that when he adds 600 locations and each location does $3 million a year, right? Or it might even be a month. I don't know. It's a lot. And just to give you context, Panda Express in 2021 did $3.7 billion in top line sales, right?

And he owns 100% of it. No outside investors with his wife, Peggy. And...

They took home 27% net margins on brick and mortar food. All right, so let's do the math. That's $935 million in income. Like, that was his distributions from owning this thing. Now, if you're like, wait, but did he pay taxes on it? Sure didn't. Why? Because he owns all the land in the dirt for most of the locations that he had that are freestanding. So he depreciated all of that against his income. So he took all of that tax-free. So, point...

Point being, he did this and you're like, well, how did he do it? He's been making chicken and orange chicken and Kung Pao chicken for 45 years. So even though he might not have been in the highest leverage vehicle, he was able to stick with that vehicle for 45 years. And being able to stick with something for 45 years makes it really hard to suck.

And when you do that, you start unlocking multipliers on the leverage you have, rather than thinking I need more leverage in terms of more types of leverage. Maybe you just need more of the one that you've been using since you started with. Remember I gave the little phone call example of like two people doing the same thing. One person has more leverage. Well,

Well, each of these things are big buckets with many smaller skills underneath of it. So collaboration is I have to know how to recruit talent. I have to know how to recognize talent. I have to know how to onboard. I have to know how to train. I have to know how to manage. I have to know how to grow talent.

talent. And I have to know how to run meetings and I have to know how to have one-on-ones and I have to like, you know what I'm saying here? Like all of those micro skills chunk up to collaboration for capital. It's like, you have to be good at math. Being bad at math is probably not like it'd be tough to raise capital if you really can't do math. Right. It's like, okay, well that's a skill you need to know. Well, what else do you need to know? It's like, well, you need to be able to reach out to people and get rejected. Why? Because when you try and raise capital, you get rejected a lot more times than you get checks. Right.

From there, it's like you also probably have to have an understanding of legal because you have to learn how to set up a fund structure. You also have to know how to negotiate because every single person who writes you a check is going to want different terms. You then have to structure it in a way and negotiate so that you can get mutually beneficial terms for both parties. So these are all other skills that go into raising capital, right? Making content, it's like you have to understand the different platforms. You have to understand how to tell stories. You have to understand how to...

Have I mean, and even understanding here is just like you might even have to just do the work to have credibility to make the content about whatever you're making it on. And, you know, I'm going to side quest this real quick. A lot of people make content right now and they're trying to hit it big. But what they do is like, in my opinion, you've got entertainers and you've got educators. The thing is, is that a lot of people who haven't done shit are trying to educate on things they haven't done.

And so they have no credibility. And so the thing is, is that like the reason Mr. Beast was able to get so big is that when he was 15 years old, he wasn't teaching people about business. He was being funny and being cool. People were like, oh, I want to be like him. And so then they say, oh, I'm going to educate people on house flipping, but they're 22 years old and they haven't flipped that many houses.

And so they have no credibility in their content. And so in my opinion, when you're doing this content thing, if you're going to do it, then make sure that you have the backing of experience and proof. Because then I promise you, like when you get shit on from the public, because you will, because they don't know who you are and most people are lying, you'll be able to know that what you're saying is true because you lived it. And so then you won't second guess yourself. The people who like tank and self-implode because they're like they can't handle the hate is because on some level they believe it.

So, if you want to be an educator, then I think that the middle ground, the pre-education stage is the documentation stage where you just say, this is what I'm doing now, check it out. Like right now, I can't educate really on nine figures, not really, excuse me, I can't educate on nine figures a month. Haven't been there. I know what eight figures a month is. Don't know how to get to nine figures a month. I have my theory, which is that I just have to add time to this equation. The math spells that out.

But I just got to wait. Once I get there, then I can talk about how to build a billion dollar portfolio. And you can imagine how my content might change, right? And so if you're making six figures a year and trying to talk about how to make seven and you've never made seven,

Then you're full of shit. And you rightfully should get the hate that you do. Right? And so these are skills that you have to learn how to acquire to make content. And to make code, you have to learn how to go code. And this is how little I know about coding. This is it. So I would even give you examples of micro skills. But like, you have to learn HTML and JavaScript and Ruby and Python.

That's about it. That's all I know. And data architecture. And yep, that's it. That's all I got. And so you have to learn these smaller skills to then say, I'm very excellent at code so that I can then have more leverage on the things that I do. And then you can walk yourself up this income ladder with more leverage, right? And again, leverage is about speed. Any of these vehicles that I had done, if I had done it for 45 years like Mr. Panda, you could get there.

Because my N on input is so high. If I spend 45 years doing something, I might not have the strongest arm. But I've done it 45 times more. So I still get more out than the guy that's over here that does it two times.

This is where strategy comes into play, is making sure that you're picking the right vehicle. Chris, for example, made less money in the first nine months scaling Enchanted Ferries than he did before. But at month 10, he matched it. At month 24, it was like so small in comparison that it didn't even matter. But I can tell you this.

Really easy to say this really hard to do that for nine months eat shit and feel like you're losing and always knowing that you could always go back and that's the hard part go back to what you were doing before that was comfortable and made you x versus staying the path and I can tell you it was I mean it's hard for me. I mean my team does that like going from making what I was making a gym launch to doing acquisition.com the first year I was like this sucks and

Like i'm used to being able to run any personal expense for this business and not even blank I'm, like oh, I actually have to look at cash flow Right And so like these are things that you have to like take in but I do believe genuinely your 10 of acquisition.com I think is bigger than your 15 Of gym launch to make the apples to apples comparison because the thing is is that you actually never get an apples to apples comparison Because you can't go back in time And so you have to look at what your 10 of one business is compared to your three of another And so if you're at your sixth year

Maybe you should just keep riding it out because whatever you started with is the thing that you have the longest lever on number of times that you got reps in. And people want to change industries. And I'll give you a little tidbit from Y Combinator. One is they don't take solo founders as a side note. Now, mind you, they're only interested in billion-dollar companies. So if that's not you, then you could totally be a single founder. But it's just harder to be successful with one person's skills versus three.

The second interesting thing that they have, they have many things they select for, but one of them is industry experience. And so if someone says, hey, I want to get into this industry, if you don't have any experience in that industry, and then second to that is personal experience, like you suffered from whatever problem you're trying to solve, then they're not interested. And so you might have six years of experience in the mortgage business. I wouldn't recommend getting into weight loss.

I would say maybe you take a half pivot so you're in the same industry because it's so hard to make up those six years. This hopefully gives you a more nuanced view to making the right picks to making the most money.

By the way, if you guys like the whiteboard of me drawing with markers, this is a throwback to what I used to do. I finally got another board because I love these things. But if you like this style, let me know. I love this style, but I just try and do the things that the data suggests that you like the most. I'll do what you guys want so that I can hopefully transfer the skills that I have to you faster.

I said earlier that the unknown unknowns are the most expensive thing in business, right? Because you don't know what you don't know. And so I want to give you a quantifiable example. I remember the first time I heard this, it changed my life. And so it was actually a whiteboard just like this. So you get to like, I'm getting goosebumps. You'll have the same experience I did. So a guy was on stage and gave this whole presentation about learning skills and about how you have to invest in yourself to get better, right? And he called somebody in the audience and he said, ma'am, and as he's saying this, he's doing what I'm doing. He says, ma'am,

How much money do you make right now per year? She stood up and she said $50,000 a year. He was like, okay. So what would be the main reason that you wouldn't want to invest today? Right? So he was closing. This was actually a close. But as a side note, I think the reason I like sales so much is because many of the obstacle overcomes that you learn to overcome are actually self bullshit. And so in a way, like learning how to sell other people for me was learning how to sell myself.

Because I had so much head trash of like why I couldn't do things or why I shouldn't start now or why I had to think about or why I needed permission from someone else or why the universe was stacked against me to be successful. Like these are all things that I had to learn the arguments against to convince myself to do stuff. And so he asked the lady, he says, okay, so what would make you not want to invest in this? And she says, well, I don't have the money. And he said, okay.

Well, you probably don't have the money because you've been paying a really expensive bill every single year. And she's like, what do you mean? He's like, well, right now you've been paying $950,000 a year, not knowing how to make a million dollars. He said, this is the cost of your ignorance.

Hey guys, love that you're listening to the podcast. If you ever want to have the video version of this, which usually has more effects, more visuals, more graphs, you know, drawn out stuff, sometimes it can help hit the brain centers in different ways. You can check on my YouTube channel. It's absolutely free. Go check that out if that's what you are into. And if not, keep enjoying the show. This is the debt that you carry for the rest of your life until you learn how to make a million dollars. And so

The reason I'm so heavy on learning skills and becoming educated is that right now I'm paying down ignorance debt. I'm paying down $950 million a year, not knowing how to make a billion. It's the debt I'm paying. We all pay ignorance debt. And so the idea is how quickly can I pay this down so that I can have more cash flow to continue to pay this down faster?

Now, strategy, like I said earlier, is about how you allocate limited resources against unlimited options. That's the fancy word of just saying prioritizing. All right. And so right now you have limited resources. You have time and you have money. Now, you might have more time than money, but either way, you have some limit on what you have. And so for you to move faster, you have to identify, prioritize priorities.

the thing that you're going to allocate your time and money towards, right? And you want the thing that gets you the most for it. Remember the input output that we had earlier, the leverage? So you want the thing that gives you the most leverage. Now, one of the tough parts about reality is that the things that you have access to when you have fewer resources are less than the things that you have access to when you have more resources. Like Mr. Panda can go buy a building for a billion dollars and flip it for $2 billion in a year or two

And make a billion dollars. Because he has more resources than you do. And you can't do that. Right? Not right now. But you do have things that could get you there. Which is why Charlie Munger talks about how

Do whatever you can do. Big borrow steal. Eat ramen. Walk with your lunch pail both directions. Do whatever you have to do to make your first $100,000. It's because he understands. And mind you, him saying $100,000 is probably like a million dollars today. Because he knows that once you get that, you can actually get a little bit more leverage in terms you get way more for what you put in because you can't only put your time in because it's so limited in terms of how much you can do. All right? So, this is why...

I talk about investing in the S&P 500 more than the S&P 500. So if you don't know this, it's standard and poor 500 companies on the stock exchange. It's probably like the gold standard index that we track how the US economy is doing. It's really just the stock market in general is doing. All right. And so if you dollar cost average in the S&P 500, you get 9% to 10% a year for life. Or at least that's what it's done historically. All right. So the question is, rather than investing in this, we just have to say, can we do anything that gets us more than 10% back?

Great. Now we can quantify this. And so if I have, let's say, $1,000, right? And here's the magic of this, is that when you invest $1,000 into the S&P, you have nothing else that you add to that $1,000. Like you can't juice the $1,000. You buy in at the same valuation that every other investor buys in at. And so I'll tell you one of the magics. I'm going to open up the curtain here for a second. One of the magic of what we do at Acquisition.com is that we pair capital with know-how.

And so we can buy a company at a decent valuation and have a big margin of safety because of our skill set. So we know that we can triple or 10X the business when we invest in it. So we don't have to pick amazingly. Like Warren Buffett, the better picker always will be than I am, right? At picking businesses. But Warren Buffett doesn't work in the business, right? So that's the advantage. That's my advantage over Warren Buffett right now. Mind you, he has way more advantages over me, right? Made 90 billion on his Apple trade. But...

But this is the game that I'm supposed to play right now because here's the leverage that I have on him. I have 60 more years of life than he does, right? He's 93, I'm 33. So I have a lot more of these left on my move set, okay? Now, we have our $1,000, we get 10%, meaning at the end of the year, we're at 1,100,000.

roughly. Okay. Or let's say you buy a sales training course. They teach you how to sell and you get implementation from that where they review some of your calls so that you can improve. And all of a sudden you take your income from $40,000 a year to $220,000 a year. Okay. Well, what does that mean? That means that that thousand, think about this return. All right. In scenario one, you have $1,100. In scenario two, and here's the crazy part, you have an extra $1,000

180,000. All right. So compare this to that. But here's the crazy part. This is every year. Because once you have the skill, you only get better from there. And so one of the things my dad used to tell me that when I was growing up,

Was that he was always really big on education because he came here a thousand dollars didn't speak the language And he learned English like that was a skill He didn't have like we take so many skills for granted like the man didn't he couldn't even speak the language of the country Right in a thousand bucks and he was able to take his medical school education and apply it here in the US because he fled during the revolution in Iran and He said the one thing that no government can take from you and no wife can steal from you in a divorce You can't get sued out of is your education. I

they can't take it from you and he had relatives who were actually really well off who actually owned the lottery in iran so it was a private company so they made a lot of money but they were like second third generation and they hadn't learned the skills and so when they fled during the revolution they could only take what they could carry because all of their assets got seized by the government and they never were able to go back to what they had because they didn't have the skills

Because the government could take their assets, but they didn't have the education. Right. And the guys who were who were businessmen from Iran straight to L.A. became businessmen in L.A. and crushed it there, too, because they understood the game. Right. And so this is why, like, if you think about it from actually an investment perspective, like education can't go down. It can't be taxed. It can't be taken from you. It only gets better over time. Right.

Right. And it compounds unto itself because when you learn the next skill, so let's say this is, this is what the lift we got from, from sales. Then you learn lead gen. And then all of a sudden this, because then you five X the demand on your sales skills and you just paid down your ignorance debt with two investments. And so like, is that worth it more than putting the money in the S and P in my opinion, every fucking time.

Is going from 40 to 220 realistic? If you're a killer and you're part of Mosey Nation, abso-fucking-lutely. If you do it the way we tell you to do it, which is you look at the top guy on whatever company, whatever team, and you do twice what they do. Because you know why? Because they're going to be better than you. And so you've got to make it up in inputs. It's like, but Alex, does that mean I'm going to have to work harder and longer hours? You bet.

Welcome to the world. Like, because think about it. If you work the same hours as that guy, that guy always has the advantage because he's already better than you. And so if he puts a month in and you put a month in, he's going to get further ahead than you because he already has skills through which to judge his own performance and improve. And so you have to put way more inputs in to get the same output than that guy. And so that's why Kobe spent five summers doing two-a-days when everyone else was doing one-a-day because he knew he had to make up for the guys who were way better than him naturally.

And so I would like to think of everybody in Moza Nation as mini black mambas from that perspective, is that we're willing to put in twice the work, three times the work, four times the work, despite the natural talent deficiencies, to make up for it. Because on a five-year or a 10-year or a 25-year timeline, you become unbeatable. Do I think you can get to 220? Hell yeah. But if you were to just look at average, which I don't want you to be, but if you were to look at average, you might make 100 a year or 120 a year.

it would still triple what you were making before. And if you don't adjust your living from what you were making at 40, Mr. Smart Cookie, then now you have even at 120, if this was 120, you have 80K a year extra that you can then invest in more skills to pay down your ignorance debt. A key point here is I said that there was an advantage that I have with Warren Buffett, which is I got money and time slash effort, right? If you go spend the money, but you don't put this in,

then you lose your advantage. And so it's not just about spending the money because here's an interesting factoid for you. When you sell someone, you understand that the moment someone buys, they actually feel like they've solved the problem emotionally. And so you can sell that because you learn how to sell.

But the reality is that that just gives them the license to begin solving the problem of whatever it is, especially if it's a skill or it's education based. Here's my ask for you guys. One of the beliefs that I think has served me well is that whenever I joined a group or I joined a community or free or paid or otherwise, I always wanted to become number one.

And the way that I thought about that was, and I always wanted to join groups of people who are all ahead of me. Like when I joined that internet group that I was talking about earlier, everybody there was making more money than me. How do I get status in this group? And the way that I did that was like, be good. You know what I mean? Make more money. And so what I did was I talked to every single person in the group and I had only my small skill set and I gave it to them for free. And I want to fucking hit on this because I get DMs every day about this. Guy this morning even said it. He said, Alex, I want to make you a hundred videos for free and

If you're willing to employ me the amount of times that I get this request whether it's I want to make you this website in exchange for a job the point of Mosi nation the point of everything that it was our acquisition calm that I hope to live by example is that you give first without asking you're doing it wrong right you think cuz like in the rest like hey in the spirit of Moses like you're not doing in the spirit most issue in the spirit of John are you doing the spirit of you and

The way that you do it is that you give and then you give and then you give and then you give and you keep on giving until that person is like, dude, what can I do for you? And then you make your ask. Like whenever I get frustrated and I think like, why do I even bother doing this? Like I think about giving up. I just think this is where most people stop and this is why they don't win.

It transitions into one of my most used sayings to myself. I don't say it a lot out loud, but to myself, it's like, I won't do my best. I'll do what's required. And so right now, what is required for you to win or get a job or get the skill might be better than your best. And so it just means that your best just needs to get better.

All right. So you might be riled up and be like, I'm going to go do this and take over the world and make all the money. So, but you're like, fuck, I got to pay bills. So how do we take this and then put it into reality? Number one is like, and this is how you transfer any skills in general, by the way, a little sneak peek from the book that's coming out. All right. Coming soon. Is that you have the person who's teaching you documents the skill. That's step one. Step two is that they do it in front of you. So they demonstrate it.

And the third piece is duplicate. You do it in front of them. So document, demonstrate, duplicate. Now, I can do this and I can do this, but you have to do this. I can't duplicate it for you. You have to take the stuff and actually execute on it. And so if you're like, okay, Alex, what does that actually look like in my life? I'm actually a big, big proponent of having jobs. And I think that's probably taboo nowadays. But yeah, why not get paid to learn shit?

And if you're like, well, the place that I work at doesn't teach me anything, then you should absolutely go apply for other jobs. Like change your conditions. All right. So I'm all about get paid.

to learn. And as an aside, the reason that keeping your living expenses low is so important is because if let's say you make a hundred thousand dollars a year now, and you're like, Alex, I've got a pretty good white collar job right now, but I really want to get into this. Then it might mean that you have to go from a hundred thousand dollars a year to $30,000 a year to learn the skill. Because right now you go from earning to learning. All right. And like, I want to, I want to tell you, like I walked this walk. So I was a management consultant at a boutique strategy firm in

In DC, like we did, like I had a top secret clearance. I was 20. Like I did, I did shit that people could brag about. All right. And then I went and became a personal trainer at a gym for $14 an hour.

Think about that. I went from a high-rise condo that I owned to renting someone's bedroom for $400 a month in their house, all right? And I went from having Hugo Boss suits to wearing Beast Mode Engage t-shirts, all right? And showing up at 4 a.m. ready to teach Nancy how to lose the last five. You know what I mean? And so I had to swallow my pride on this because I wanted to

I wanted to get learned. All right? And so you have to be willing to relinquish getting paid for getting learned. All right? Once you get yourself in an environment where you actually have a business that is investing in you, and it doesn't mean that they actually have to write checks, to be clear. Now, if you have a company that's willing to do that, awesome. Level one is...

You communicate to them, this is the skill that I would like to learn upon working for you. And so you're like, these are the skills that I bring to the table. This is what I would like to learn. Is this a place that I can do that? Any business owner loves clear communication. It's like, if you want to learn that, and if they're a good business owner, they'll be like, let me help you support. Now, if they're like, my job isn't to teach you, wrong place. And I'm going to be real, a lot of business owners are like that.

And so if you're like, well, man, it's not fair. It's like, well, I mean, getting paid to learn is a pretty good deal. It's just that that's not always what happens. And so I would say switch your conditions. But let's say you finally get into a business that teaches you stuff and you feel like you're getting better, you're moving faster. I would say once you feel like, and this is a big caveat, this is like fucking caveat. Once you have nothing left to learn from the current position, you communicate to them that you feel like your learning has slowed down. And then they may give you another opportunity to learn more.

And if they feel like they can't actually teach you internally, they might say, I'll pay $10,000 a year for you to go through these programs or workshops or seminars or whatever, or certifications, so you can continue to level up your skill. A good employer will do that. And if you look at big corporate America, as much as people shit on them, they usually have pretty strong corporate reinvestment programs. Why? Because they want their human capital

to appreciate. And so if you can pay $10,000 because they do the same SME 500, except the SNU 500, right? They invest in you $10,000 and they get a three times more valuable person. Like one of the biggest arbitrage opportunities, side note, this is me talking to business owners, that's out there in the marketplace is that you can pay 25% more for an A player versus a B player and you get five times the output.

So like you think about value arbitrage, like instead of paying 100 a year, if that's the market, pay 125 and get five times the output. Why would you never make that trade? Once you've done this, here are the three steps that you can transition from getting learned back to getting paid. All right. Number one is that you live below your means. The less risk you take in your personal life, the more risk you take in your business life. Let's say that I own a business that does $10 million a year in profit. Okay. If my living expenses are $800,000 a month,

then I'm not leaving much for the business to weather a storm. And let's say that it's all fixed. It's like mortgages and cars and jets and all the other stuff that I do. Well, if there's a hiccup, the business might go under. But if I live on 400,000 a year, then I have 9.6 million every year that I can go on the offensive. And I can take huge swings. I can be like, I want to buy this company even though it's risky, but it might 10x. And that offense is what you have to do as an entrepreneur because you have to take calculated risk.

But you don't want to introduce multiple risk if you can control it. And this is controllable risk. Okay? So you live below your means so you can stack cash. Okay? Level two is that you take this cash.

And I want to be clear, I'm actually kind of against side hustles as a long-term thing. I'm pro them as a way to transition. Again, this is how I play the game. I'm a maximizer. Like, I want to win big. And so I think if you follow my stuff that you probably want to win big too. And so if you're doing a side hustle, it's because you want it to eventually become your main hustle, not because you're just looking for side income. I'm just not that guy. There's other guys who will talk about that. It's just not me. All right? And so you stack the cash so you can start your side hustle. And you keep doing this until...

you have matched your income. So you start your side hustle and you keep doing it until you match your current income. And if you're like, wait a second, for me to match my current income, I'm going to have to work 40 hours a week in my job and then work another 40 hours a week at this thing. Yup. And the thing is, and this is just, you know, one man's caveat. There's

If you're not making more money on 40 hours a week of the new thing, you're still not doing it right. Remember, I went from employed to self-employed. You have a level of leverage. So those 40 hours, you have more leverage than the 40 hours that you're working for someone else. And if you're not making more there, then you're like, you still need to keep doing it until you've matched at least, at least matched your income.

And then once you've matched the income, I would say sustain it for six months. Two reasons. One is because now you're going to be making double time. You're going to be making money on your job. You're going to be making money. So you're going to be doubling your actual income, which means you might be like three or four X in your savings. And the second is so that you don't just quit on the one good month you had because you sent out three clients. Okay. We want to make sure that it's not seasonal. We want to make sure that we get like, it's not just normal volatility because really small businesses, super volatile, right? If you're selling two customers a month, if all of a sudden you sell zero, your income goes to zero.

Right unless you retain the people etc etc and then cut bait cut the cord and go out on your own Spread those wings like a beautiful butterfly and a lot of people look at this thing the side hustle and they're like But this isn't Facebook like this isn't sure it's not but I think a lot of people put undue pressure on themselves by expecting their next thing to be a trillion dollar company and

The likelihood that it happens, super, super, super, super, super, super small. But again, it's like, what are your goals? If your goals are just like get out of poverty, get above the middle class, get above, get into the upper class, like a lot of businesses can get you there. If you want to be a trillionaire, there's only a few.

And also what we don't see is the zillions of not Zuckerbergs who put everything into their social media thing and it didn't work. I'm a big fan of service businesses because it costs you nothing to start. It's just your time. You have no overhead in the beginning. Those ones are harder to scale, but you'll usually learn a lot of other skills during that process. Like I learned more from running a gym that allowed me to do gym launch. Like if I hadn't run the gyms, I don't think I would have been able to do gym launch.

And so think of whatever this is as the stepping stone. And again, we're still trying to get learned like that doesn't change. We're just going to also get paid as we do it. And that's one of the beautiful things about entrepreneurship is that like once you get past a certain level, you get to get paid to learn more. And I think that's like for me why I love the game so much is that you just keep getting better and get paid to get better. Don't judge yourself on the side hustle and especially don't

Don't listen to other people's judgment on your side hustle. You know how many people, like I was like Vanderbilt, Magna Cum Laude, you know, white collar consultant job, like had a above Harvard, you know, GMAT score say like, and you want to become a trainer.

Like the amount of people that like I used to compete against frenemies, whatever you want to call it. They were like, oh, great. He's he's out of the race. You know what I mean? Like he's he's doing stuff to make himself happy. Right. You know, I was younger and I probably had more fucked up shit in my head then than I do now. But like I used to just think about them all the time when I'd be sleeping on the floor. I'd be selling where I was like, they're not willing to do this. They're not willing to do this. They're not willing to do this. And then you come from behind.

Right. And you do Kobe and you work twice a day. And while they're working their job and they have their three series BMW and they're, you know, going out to dinner and they have the football on the weekends and their fantasy league and you have none of that.

Just know that you're doing your two days during the summer or your three days during the summer. But because your rate of input is so much higher than theirs is, you will catch up and you will surpass them. And that's if you want to compare. And the main reason I don't think you should judge yourself on whatever you do is because in my opinion, like I'm married to the game, right? More than anything. Like I'm going to keep playing the game because...

I love the game. And so if you want to play the game a long time, then it's the game itself that you want to stick with rather than the vehicle you're in, right? Most entrepreneurs start more than one business over their career. You are above the business. The problem is that people identify so closely, like their identity is their business, but you have to just think about it. And this is me just trying to give you like a, you know, big brother, what do you want to call it? Piece of advice. But like the further you can separate your identity,

and your self-worth from the worth of the business, the better off you'll be as an entrepreneur. Because you also start to see it as an asset that can be sold, can create value in the asset. You can make hard decisions. Whereas if it's you, you're like, what will people think? It's like, I made a decision about a business that I own.

That's okay. Simon Sinek has a great piece on this, but when I learned the difference between infinite and finite games, it really changed my perspective. The infinite frame will always beat the finite frame. And there are finite games within every infinite game. And so you have quarters, you have years, you have goals. These are all finite games that we play in an infinite game. And so when the US invaded Vietnam, we lost. Why did we lose? We lost a war of attrition, which was that they were willing to play the game longer than we were.

All right, and so the difference between a finite infinite game is that a finite game has known players, agreed upon rules, and an outcome, and an end. That's why it's finite. An infinite game has known and unknown players, has no agreed upon rules, and the point of the game is to keep the game going. And so the problem that most entrepreneurs have is they approach an infinite game with a finite frame. They are the United States trying to invade Vietnam, and you will lose every time.

because there will be players who are playing with an infinite frame. And so let me give you two more examples of this. If you want to get healthy, right? You don't win at health. There's no end goal to being healthy. You're like, okay, I'm done working out. I did it. I've achieved it, right? Of course not, right? Same thing with marriage, right? Like you're not, the point isn't to get married. The point is to stay married. The point is to stay in the game, to keep the game going. Most of the games worth playing are infinite games, not finite games, which means the point is to just play, right?

And so business, you don't win. The point isn't to finish because even if you were trying to say finish first, it's like by what metric on what time period? Has there anyone who's been the richest man in the world for all time? No, of course not. Which means that anybody who would try to do that is coming from a finite frame. And so but there have been people who've won the game of business in my perspective because they played their whole lives.

If you want to be a stronger player and be somebody who can succeed as an entrepreneur, then the day you start playing is the day you win. And the day you stop playing is the day you lose. And so the goal is to find games that you don't want to quit. That's where learning what you are into happens.

from executing is the mega win here. So for me, I found out that I actually liked business more than I liked fitness, which is crazy, 'cause I loved fitness, getting into fitness. But like the day I started my gym was the day my love for business outpaced my love for fitness. I was like, this is amazing, this is so cool. And so you have to find whatever that thing is. And I'm gonna be clear, like business sucks all the time, but it's just that if you're willing to play, and like there's plenty of times marriage sucks, there's plenty of time you don't wanna work out.

but it doesn't mean that I'm going to stop working out. It doesn't mean I'm going to stop being married. It doesn't mean I'm going to stop being in business. And so I think if you can unlock that frame that you want to play until the day you die, even if the vehicle changes, even the players that you're playing with on the court change, then you'll be the guy who stays on the court the longest.

You might think, oh, I don't like video editing or, oh, I don't like, you know, dry cleaning or I don't like mowing lawns. I don't like washing cars or whatever it is. Right. But the higher up you get in business, the more all businesses are the same. Right. You're going to have marketing. You're going to have sales. You're going to have product. You're going to have customer success or customer support. You're going to have IT. You're going to finance. You're going to have legal. Like all these departments are going to these functions will more or less exist in every business.

And so my advice is like a lot of people quit industries when they really actually just quit a function of a job. And so like, they're like, Oh, entertainment wasn't for me. It's like, do you know how many jobs there are in entertainment? Like you might love sales and like sales in entertainment and you were in,

And the actual like product side, right? Or the production side or the support side. And so again, remember I said earlier that like if you stay in the same game longer, you'll be likely to get more reps in and you'll do better. Well, then maybe stay in the same industry, but switch roles. Now in a micro business like your side hustle, you'll get to taste all the roles and you'll find out the things that you like more.

And that's where you can shift some of your attention there. And then you backfill people who are, because you have a little bit of context, good enough to do what you do better. You demonstrate, sorry, you document, you demonstrate, you duplicate, they duplicate, and then they run with it. Right. And so, um,

Today, for example, what I do looks very different than what I did 10 years ago. What I did 10 years ago was the highest value scale I had then, which was just closing. That's all I did. I had consults all day because I got trainers to train for me. I knew how to run the ads and that didn't take me that long. It took me two, three hours a week to run the ads, make them and manage them.

The rest of my time was sitting in appointments and closing. And I had somebody else make the phone calls and texts for me. So I would just sit there and close because that was the highest value thing I could do at the time. But the thing is, is that your baseline skill will continue to level up. If I lost everything then, like if I lost everything, I knew that I would sell cars during the day and I would strip at night.

Right. Once I had that skill before I had the skill of sales, I would drive Uber during the day and strip at night because I had the skill been in shape. Right. And so your baseline continues to grow, like being the best car salesman, make 400, 500, maybe even a million a year at some of the best dealerships. Like if you're an absolute savage and I would consider myself an absolute savage if I was going to do that. Right. If I lost it all, I'd be there 12 hours a day for sure.

And then once I learned how to market, marketing and sales together, my new minimum was a million bucks a year because I knew that I could sit in front of any brick and mortar business and I could get them leads and I could close it. Once you have that, you can make a million, two million, three million. I can't go below that because I have skills that are above that, right? You keep learning these skills as you keep doing your business and you might, you'll start ping-ponging in different directions until you hone in on the things that you're best at. And so I think if you can find that game, make it the meta skill of continuing to learn, right?

Then you won't stop and then at that point it means you win by default So we had talked about a lot of stuff, right? But the question is like what's the next thing you're gonna do? And so I'm just gonna give you advice that I followed which is like what was the first thing I did to get myself out of this million dollar or below million dollar category to the above million dollar category and then to eventually the point four percent ten million dollar category and it was actually just learning how to sell and

Because if you can't sell anything, you can't make money. It's the first part of the equation. Number of sales times. If you have no sales, it doesn't matter how good the lifetime value is. If no one buys it, zero.