How To Progress Way Faster Than Anyone Else (Answering Your Questions Live)

you doing? Happy uh my head's a little little nappy there. Happy uh what day of the week is it? Today is uh today Friday. Happy Friday. Oh, I've got a I've got a meaty one for you guys today. Hopefully you're you brought your you're not you're not vegan today because this one's going to have lots and lots of meat in it. Um I've I've had something on my mind and uh if you're curious because I had a couple questions on the last live that I've been doing. I've been doing 30 lives in 30 days to uh to see how this actually works, to see how this does. Um, and yes, seek more. Uh, I am indeed live. Um, and so some of you guys had questions about how uh I come up with the the live stuff or if these are off the dome. I would say it's like 90% off the dome. Um, but I have a loose outline of like the things that I kind of want to hit because I think some of you guys are making videos your own. You're like, "How do I do that?" Um, I would say that I've also been making ads and videos for like a long time. uh like many many long time. Um I actually did the math on this, but I've made over a hundred ads before AI per week for 15 years. So you look at that, that's 100 ads times 52 weeks, it's 5,000 ads a year times 15 years, it's 75,000 ads. And so uh I have a decent a decent amount of rep counts on this. Um but I wanted to talk about something different today. Um I want to talk to you about focus. Um because I think it's going to be the thing that's going to probably make you the most money in business. And it's also because it's one of the hardest things to do. Um, and so I will read some of the stuff I wrote for you u in preparation for our time together. All right. So, a focused fool can accomplish more than a distracted genius. Lack of focus is a form of cowardice. You don't believe in yourself enough to go allin. And the world will reward you in proportion to your courage, not your intellect. And so, in my early days, I felt like I had to numb myself. Like there was so much work, the amount of work that you can only measure by weighing it, not counting it. And if I stopped to think about how unfinishable the amount of work that I had was, I wanted to quit. And so I did the only thing I could do. I took the first thing off the stack and I would start without thinking about how shitty or alone I felt in that moment. And so there's a reason that raceh horses wear blinders, right? Focus only on what's in front of you and you will get through it and you will keep going. Because at the end of the day, focus beats intelligence, consistency beats intensity, and action beats intention. And so losing does not make you a loser. Quitting does. And that's fundamentally the difference. And so you'll be rewarded far more in your life for your determination than your intelligence. And the problem is determination just looks like a long string of failures before it actually works. And so the hardest lesson in business is learning to grow through subtraction. So I'll say that again. The hardest lesson in business is to grow through subtraction, right? And it's the hardest lesson because cutting hurts far more in the short term than adding. Adding new things, new people, new initiatives, new projects, etc. But adding new stuff hurts far more in the long term. So it's easy today, hard tomorrow. And so we tend to act humanly about these things. we default to solving through addition, right? Because that one feels significantly easier. And whenever you're stuck, so right now, if you're not growing as fast as you want or the business isn't doing what you want it to do, it's almost always because you're doing too much. You're spreading your very limited resources across too many objectives. So David Senra, who runs the Founders Podcast, which is a great tech podcast, by the way, um said that if you could consolidate 400 episodes and every biography that he's read up to this point into one word, it would be this, which is focus. You simply don't have enough of it. You're not nearly violent enough in the quality and quantity of ways that you say no. The number of things that you desperately in your soul want to do but choose not to because of the thing that matters most. And so the result is you simply do not have enough surface area of thinking. You think that you can compete with other people that have 10 times your resources focused on onetenth of the number of problems. Right? They can blow through doors that are much smaller because they focus all of their effort on these single points. That's how they gain leverage. That's how they move faster than you. And so, look, subtraction is needed for a multitude of circumstances. And since humans, our tendency is to add in order to solve rather than subtract, our job, your job as the boss is to regularly cull, right? You have to keep the tree healthy. You have to weed the garden. You have to do the cutting that no one else will do. Otherwise, bloat will happen. And so, you have to protect the business and the tribe. And if you don't do it in the short term, the market will force you to do it in the long term. It will happen either way. It just depends on whether it's your term from a healthy business that's going in the direction that you want or an unhealthy business that gets corrected or sometimes dies. And so, one of my proudest stats that ever happened for me is that when COVID hit, we actually didn't cut anyone during gym launch. Mind you, I had a gym company, right? I would have been have had the easiest excuse in the world to cut people. And the main reason is that because right before CO things were going good and we realized that we had a little bit of bloat after kind of a hyperrowth phase and we needed to trim down, right? And so we decided to cut, [music] prune, remove the offshoots that were draining resources but not bringing their bang for the buck. They weren't growing the tree vertically, right? They were growing. These outgrowths were happening in a lot of different forms. And so sometimes for you it might happen in the form of talent that's decent but not good enough, right? And the bar is raised on the company and you need better people to get to where you're trying to go. It can come in the form of uh a department that is you largely automated a bunch of the tasks but you haven't really rights sized the people yet. Like the amount of work that they're doing the headcount is the same but the work itself has gone down. Um it can come in the form of vendors or subscriptions that you've upsold or you've been upsold into in terms of levels of service or seats that you don't need anymore. Right? Trimming can also come from uh the meetings where too many people have been added to the invite, not enough are actually continuing it, right? Uh or it comes from Slack threads where you just keep adding people for visibility, right? And they don't actually need visibility. In fact, your visibility is taking their eye off the ball. You're saying, "Hey, I need your eyes on this one. Really, they should just be focused on the thing that matters most." And it comes from too many different revenue streams. And this is the very dangerous one. And realizing that seven streams of income for millionaires is a line that is used to sell [ __ ] by people who sell [ __ ] not reality. People don't get rich with seven income streams. You get rich and then you diversify. And that is how millionaires have seven income streams. And so focus is subtraction. And so my favorite quote comes from Jack Dorsey on this, which is that perfect every detail, limit the number of details. Now to drive the point home, unrestrained growth has a very different name in common speak. It's called cancer, right? You have to be willing to cut out cancer. And if you're not, it will kill you. And it means you have unrestrained allocation of resources. And when resources are limited, how you allocate them is how you get rewarded. This is the essence of strategy. The curation and prioritization of resources. Good strategy, which is what we're going for here, right? Is the curation, prioritization of resources to get the highest return to the business. People who are moving faster than you aren't actually moving faster than you. They're doing fewer things better. They're using the same resources as you directed towards the main trunk of the tree to grow it the fastest upwards instead of in all these different directions. And so even though you see growth and things happening, it's actually not going directionally where you want it to go. This is a misunderstanding of how growth happens in a business. That is not from activity. It's from vector. It's directional. Right? And so counterintuitively it means that pruning the tree, cutting off outgrowth is how you actually grow it. And so let me repeat that. Pruning your tree is how you grow the tree. Cutting things off is how you direct resources in the direction of growth that has the highest return. This is where the return capacity comes from. And so what makes cutting so hard, right? Why is this so hard for us is that you have to pierce the surface, right? You have to cut through the skin. You have to cut through the bark. You have to you have to actively inflict pain. And you have to saw something that you helped grow. This is why this sucks so much, right? You have to admit that you made a mistake. And not only do you have to admit that you made a mistake, you have to hurt someone else to make it right, whether it's a vendor, it's a it's an employee, right? And that hurts twice, right? Because you'll feel bad when you do it. And you have to fight this psychological bias on top of all this. Not only that it hurts you and your ego because you made the mistake and that you have to hurt somebody else when you make these decisions, but also you have a psychological bias against this, which is called the sunk cost fallacy, right? And it's called a fallacy for a reason. It's faulty reasoning. And so we're we're already we've already invested in our minds money and time and effort into this project or this person or this this this whatever this thing is, right? Maybe you put four months into your project and you're like, "Oh, we're almost done." But all you're doing is throwing good money after bad. You're misallocating resources. You're putting bad [ __ ] where good [ __ ] should go. Right? And the thing is is that you will be compensated accordingly in time either with a slow growing business, a no growing business, or a going out of business, but you will be compensated. It just comes at the longest delay when you're the entrepreneur. But that is the job, right? It's your job to make the hard calls, to make the cuts, and it's literally what you get compensated for, for taking risk and responsibility and doing jobs that no one else is willing to do. either because they're too complex or because they're too emotionally comp difficult, right? Which more often is is the real reason. And so Elon said this, which I like a lot, which is that entrepreneurship, I think he's quoting somebody else, but is is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. And so said differently, it's uncertainty and hopelessness in the future paired with intense pain in the present with no promise of it ever relenting or improving. And so I think he also said this. If you need a motivational speech, entrepreneurship might not be for you. And so let me make this real because a lot of you guys are in this position. And I know this because I talked to so many of you on a regular basis. I had a successful business owner who's here here in person with me yesterday. And so he owns the fitness business. And so they have a school group. Uh they have an in-person location. They have uh they have a high ticket coaching thing. They have an app and they also do peptides and HRT. So a lot of different stuff, right? all with a 30 person team. Now, if you have a 30 person team, that's roughly the size company that if it's poorly optimized, it should do about 10 million a year. If it's well optimized, it should do 30 million plus per year. But they're not doing those numbers. And they're generating revenue, but like not a lot, and growth is kind of stop start and profitability is not what they want it to be, right? And so, what should he do, right? Why is this happening? He already knows the reason just like you probably already know the reason. He doesn't need me to say it and neither do you. He knows it. But the hard part is doing something about it, right? You will be compensated most for your ability to shrink the gap between information and action. Right? Power is the distance between those two things. Think about it. Think about it like a completely powerless person. Somebody who is impotent, right? You can give them all the information in the world and nothing will happen. Now think of the converse of that or the inverse of that. You think about your your God figure, right? As he thinks, so it becomes. Thought and reality are are one and the same. And so there's zero gap. And so we will never achieve godliness obviously, but it's an ideal that we can strive towards in terms of defining power as we see it so that we can make these thoughts, this information, and then shrink the gap into reality. Now, you may justify staying the same and saying, "We're going to keep this project. We're going to keep this person." Even though I know that they're not the right thing for the business, even though it is my responsibility. It is my job. I get paid to do this. This is what the job is. This is the shitty part. This is the part why people don't grow, right? The hard part is not the complex problems. It's the personal problems. It's the emotional things. It's the hard calls, right? And so, you justify it, right? You start thinking maybe he'll turn the corner, right? Is it is it fair that this person should suffer for my mistake? And the like the honest answer is no. They shouldn't. It is not fair. And yet you can't get fired. It's your business. And so you still have to make the call even though you feel like [ __ ] about it. And this is the real hard part of entrepreneurship. Other people will suffer for your incompetence, for your mistakes. And you will have to carry that with you. And as the things actually start to work, you will have them work without those people. and you will know that you had to make you had to crack eggs to make the omelette. And so what's interesting is a lot of people love to to uh romanticize like the complex decisions that happen in entrepreneurship, right? They like to talk about how uh like some really complex thing, these models, these lots of math and all this other [ __ ] but like the things that actually are the hard part about entrepreneurship are not intellectually engaging. They're emotionally draining, right? The ones that sink the ship, that kill the tree, right? Are the vines that wrap themselves around the trunk and strangle you to get to death. They're the outgrowths that take all the resources, right? They're the weeds in the garden that prevent anything else from growing, right? They use up your valuable resources. And if you do not pull the weeds, if you do not cut the branches, if you do not kill the vines, nothing else is able to grow. And if nothing else is able to grow long enough, it begins to die. And so if you can show me a flawed human tendency as in like we're going to optimize for this versus that and I'll give you the simple one for focus is delaying short-term hardship for long-term payoff. Most humans are not willing to do that which is why most humans are not successful. And if you take that and extrapolate it out, I'll show you a streak of recurring mistakes that happen with humans specifically in business. And so the problem is that no one holds you accountable to making hard calls, right? your team, as long as they get paychecks and you have some vision towards the future, will basically just write it off as that's just how he does things or how that's how she does things, right? And so you have to hold you accountable, right? Ideally, before the market does. And you do that out of respect for your customers, you do that out of respect for the business, and out of respect for the team. And in the real world, side quests do not add up to main quests. and they absolutely will kill you without any chance of coming back unlike video games. And so this is your charge. This is your responsibility. This is the job of the entrepreneur. Like your results are your scorecard on whether or not you stayed the course, that you kept your north star, your actual north star, that you did what you said you would do and you finished what you came to start. And so focus is subtraction. It's doing more of less. It's doing more of fewer things. And so this is the single word lesson that Senra talked about in uh in his 400 or whatever podcast. If you listen to jobs, you listen to you listen to Basos, you listen to these unbelievable entrepreneurs who've just built amazing companies that have fed, you know, thousands or millions of people that have created huge amounts of wealth. Um but they create that wealth by creating utility. And you cannot create utility when you try to solve all problems. And this is difficult. So, you have to accept that that's just not your problem to solve. You have to stay constrained. And that constraint, especially when no one else is your boss, especially if you don't have investors, you don't have board members, and it's just you making the calls. I'm telling you, the amount of businesses that I see come and ask questions that have cancer all over them who are looking for tactics. It's like you're looking for tactics, and you have three [ __ ] businesses and there's one of you. It doesn't work. And I know that the the response is, "Well, what about Elon? He's got multiple businesses. First off, you're not Elon. Second off, he's the only guy. Third off, and most importantly, in terms of tactical answer to that question, he's not the CEO. He's the owner. And this is a fundamental [ __ ] that happens with entrepreneurs, is they conflate, especially small business owners, CEO and owner, is the same thing. And that's because they happen to have both hats when you start because it's your business. You're the founder. You're founder/CEO. But there's a reason there's a [ __ ] slash there. because that's actually another job, right? If you I don't I don't have any role at Apple. I own stock in Apple. I have no role at Tesla. I own stock in Tesla, right? And when you were the owner, you just it just signifies that you own stock. But you cannot be CEO of multiple companies. It's not a thing. You will fail. And if one of you tries to find one [ __ ] example, congratulations. Why don't you look at the other billion examples to be fair million examples of people who actually focused on one thing? This is the hard part. This is why no one wins. It's it is the it is the obvious and difficult things in front of you, not the nonobvious and tactically irrelevant. It is the obvious truth. Why does your restaurant not grow? Because the food sucks. It's not because of a hundred marketing tactics or you know you weight staff training or whatever. Like the food sucks. It is the hard obvious truth. And because the obvious truth is so painful to endure, our egos hide it from us. And so instead, they distract us with another thing that we actually think we could be good at but aren't. Right? We think we'll start another business and that's somehow going to solve the [ __ ] problem. when in fact all we did was spread was spread our resources even thinner. Right? It's like if you've ever had a I don't know peanut butter and you put it on a piece of bread. If you only have this much peanut butter, it would be better to just put it on a corner and have one good bite because that's the reality of business. If you try and not enough butter on too much bread, it's not that good. And so business is a lot the same way. And to those of you who are asking, is this live? Yes, this is live. Um, and so yeah, this is just like I had that conversation with that entrepreneur yesterday and it was just like it was so it was so clear what the problem is. And he's like, "Well, what do I do about it?" I was like, "I think you know what you need to do about it." I was like, "The question is whether you're going to do something about it." Right? That's what's real. Are you actually going to do something about it? And the thing is that right now, everyone who's listening to this has an employee, a teammate, right? You have a project, a pet project. you have an investment that you spent money on, right? And you have this fear because you're like, if I if I cut my loss here, my team is going to think I'm dumb. They're going to think I made a mistake. I'm going to have to admit that and I'm going to have to backtrack. They're going to feel whiplash. Yeah. I mean, would you rather that or them continue to build a bridge to nowhere? Would you rather keep watering weeds? Would you rather continue to let the vine strangle what life you have out of your tree, whatever growth potential you have? Like think like just running a business on its own is hard. Growing a business takes whatever excess capacity you have and that's what goes into growth. You have to do your normal business and then take the extra resources to grow. If you're doing constant new [ __ ] there are no extra resources left over. And what most often happens is you doing the regular business starts to suffer and now the main thing can't even grow because you're not even doing the basics. These are the obvious truths that anyone who actually is running a business will tell you. It's just that it's very again this is not intellectually challenging. It's psychologically challenging. It's emotionally challenging. It's emotionally draining because it hurts your ego. And you have to have hard conversations. You have to admit you were wrong. You have to admit that you made mistakes. And then you have to look stupid in front of people that you're supposed to look intelligent in front of who are trusting you with their livelihoods from your team. And then with their businesses or or whatever or their business um if they are customers and yet you still have to [ __ ] do it. That's it. you still have to do it. You still have to just look it in the face and say the food sucks, right? Our service isn't fast enough. We actually don't get clients good results. Uh, you know, we just like we don't do the thing. And so I think everybody tries to distract themselves with all these shiny tactics. And don't get me wrong, I'm all for teaching the tactics, but real talk, it probably applies to like 10% of you guys who actually tactic constrained. Like 90% of you guys are constrained here. You've got hard decisions that you need to make. You've got hard conversations in front of you that you're unwilling to to have and as a result, you cannot grow because you're trying to try these tiny tactics when you've got a [ __ ] lid on top of your of of your business that cannot it it prevents it from growing. All the abundance, whatever extra you have, you can't even put back into the business because you're just blowing it on [ __ ] that doesn't matter, that you already know doesn't matter. And so, let me give you the symptom and then I'll I'll open it up for Q&A. If you don't know why you're not growing and it feels like there's always fires, there's always whack-a-ole, you feel like you can't get ahead, it feels like you're barely above water, profitability is is suffering, you feel like you have two, three, four different initiatives and it's it's like you're spinning plates, like one thing goes up and then something else goes up and you're constantly fighting fires all day long and you don't get a chance to get ahead. If that is how you feel right now, it is likely that you have a big obvious problem that you're choosing not to confront. And so I promise you, you will grow the business through subtraction, not addition. It is counterintuitive. Many of the things in entrepreneurship that require you, the actions that you required to take are counterintuitive. They're the things against that go against your nature. You want to add to grow, but you need to subtract to grow. You need to put the resources all in one place, right? Not spread it all over, right? You have to concentrate your bets. And that means that you have to have courage. And I started this I started this little section here with um lack of focus is a lack of courage because you're unwilling to go allin. You don't believe in yourself enough. And so if you can take one message away from this is that like you need to believe in yourself enough to make the hard call and to know that you will figure it out and that you will [ __ ] survive. You will not die from making this decision, from having the conversation, from cutting off the vendor, for right sizing the team or whatever it is, or for cutting off projects that you know you shouldn't have been doing, or that investment that you put two quarters worth of cash into that you now realize was a huge distraction. You don't have the team to do it for that call that you know right now if I'm talking to you, you're like, I know what decision I need to make. Make it. Put it on your calendar and make it. It is a great way to show yourself in a very short tactical way that you are more powerful than you think you are because you have shrunk the gap between your thoughts and reality. So with that all beautiful people I wish you much wealth and abundance and um let's do some uh let's do some Q's and shall we? All right let's do um let's see here. Uh, let's go. Big Alpha Anders. All right. I have a noob question that's always being drilled by my Asian family. If you delegate everything, how are you not scared of your employees just taking your secrets and becoming your competition? That is uh first off, I don't think it's a noob question. Um, I think it depends on the nature of what your business is. And there's also like how many keys are in the castle. So for example, if I give one person all six keys to the castle, then they still have to take something which is they have to take risk uh which a lot of people are unwilling to do in order to start a business. Right now some people are going to do that but they think they have all six keys when they really have three keys and this is what happens all the time in businesses where employee thinks they have the whole playbook. This is so easy. I could do this so much better and then they go off and they don't do any better. Right? So that's normal. Um, but in terms of the prevention, like there are permanent assets. It's like that that will typically only come up in a service business where you're doing one-on-one services and you're hiring people to deliver this one-on-one service. And so then and only then the only missing part uh is the acquisition side, right? So if you hire these experts, let's say you have a nail salon or whatever, and see then they're still going to need a salon, they're going to still need materials. So, it's like it's it's like businesses that have almost no capital to start and one person does the delivery. Massage is [clears throat] one of these, therapists is another one of these. Um, trainers is another one of these. Um, but even then there's still some barriers in terms of like you have to have a gym, you have to nail sign, you have to have materials, you have to have equipment. So, there's some capital requirements, but assuming that the person has done it long enough that they can save up the capital, they can take or steal your book of business, but until they know how to generate more business for themselves, it doesn't really matter. Which is why when you're a small business owner, you need to learn how to promote. You need to learn how to sell. You need to learn how to market, generate leads, because that will always give you something that you can control. So, how do you prevent it? Just don't give all the keys of the castle away. And or have a business that more or less prevents it, right? Like if you have a big brand, somebody can work for me and then try and start their own thing. They're not going to like really compete with me. Not realistically, right? Somebody can try and do a dis like I I worked at Disney. I'm going to start a Disney movie. It's like there's a lot of pieces, right? So the more complex the business, the more capital requirements, the more assets that are used that are existing or compounding assets, the less likely it is that you're going to you know create a competitor. Like if you work at if you work at uh you know Chase Bank and you're like, "Okay, well I'm going to go start a bank." It's like yeah, I mean there's a lot of [ __ ] that it's very hard to do. Like you can understand it. It's just you just got to go [ __ ] put $100 million into something and then you're like, "Okay, there you go." Right? So hopefully that that that adds a little bit of uh color to the fear. The fear is justified but also very avoidable. And it's largely for one-on-one service businesses and most other businesses not so much. Uh Bob Roberts, Alex, how do you juggle so many different variables and important elements of running a business? I struggle to juggle everything at once. Honestly, it's probably because you're doing too much. Like I I have taken so many times in my business career where I look at everything and I'm like, "This is too complicated. I got to cut stuff." And so it's it's a very constant eb and flow of pruning of it's it's this is a cycle. It's growth and then bloat and then cutting and then efficiency and then growth. It's the same as the economy, right? It's like in some ways business acts a lot more like biology than it does a machine from uh like how we describe it. Um and so we have to be willing to make cuts in order to save the whole and those cuts come in the form of focus which is very thematic for today. Uh AO Connell when you when do you know to abandon a business? Is it ever okay to take a step back and recover before taking another bet? Better at selling than I'm at business so far. That's okay, man. Um I mean, dude, I started only really figuring out how to sell and figured out everything else backwards from there. If of things to learn, knowing how to sell is probably the most important one because if you can't sell people, you don't have a business, right? If you can't get people to give you money, there is no business that we're actually talking about here. Um is it okay to take a step back? Yes, totally. I think it's totally fine to take a step back. Um how do you know when it's okay to abandon a business? I mean I think I think there's a big difference between abandoning a business and abandoning business in general. It is normal to learn from your mistakes and say the next business I have I want to change these certain elements of it. Right? That is how a lot of innovation happens. And with with very few exceptions your first business will not be your last business. Neither will your second neither will your third. Neither will your fourth. You will start businesses and sometimes businesses will spawn from other businesses as in like this one will die and the next one will come in its place. What I would encourage you not to do is have multiple concurrently. Right? If you say I have now realized there's a version of this business that is a better version of this business, you should shut one down and then go all in on the next one again. Focus. Lack of focus is a sign of cowardice which is that you are unwilling to go all in. Right. Uh Kian, it's an interesting name. Senor Hormosi, thank you for speaking to me in my native tongue. Uh do you have a specific rule of thumb in terms of the salaries that you advertise in your job posting to insure qualified pipeline of bay players? Um we we advertise ranges depending on experience and so we tend to pay above market in general because I still this is a little right or downer for you. One of the best arbitragees that exist in business to this day is that A players cost one and a half times more than B players but are worth three to five times as much. And the higher up you go the more an A player is worth. And so it's weird, but like so many things again are counterintuitive business where spending a million dollar a year for an employee is crazy, but you might get a higher return on that million dollar a year employee than you do on your $100,000 a year employee. So like said differently, if I get $300,000 out of a $100,000 a year employee and I get $10 million out of a million dollar a year employee, what's the better deal? The 10 the million dollar a year employee. But which one costs more? The million dollar year employee. And so one of the things that I would say that has been like an interesting leading indicator for growth for us is IQ per square foot. So thinking about what if I had to look at the whole team is when we hire somebody does IQ per square foot go up or down? And there was a really interesting theory that I heard a long time ago about the es and flows of the economy but basically when economies go down or shrink right when there's you know recession or whatever typically IQ per square foot goes up because people companies cut the bloat they cut the excess. So IQ per square foot goes up and then all of a sudden businesses start growing again. And so that's kind of on the macro cycle of the economy, but if you think about your own business, you're going to do these little waves throughout seasons as well. And I would say the longer I've been doing business, the more I think about this. And there's a just from a metric perspective really worth always tracking is revenue per headcount. Number one, and number two, profit per headcount. Right? So let's say you have, and I said this earlier, but I said a guy came and he's got a, you know, 30 person business. And let's say he's making $5 million a year. $5 million a year on on 30 people. It's not not ideal, right? And so you can think about it. How much revenue is that? Is that per let's do six million because it's simpler math. It's 200,000 a year per employee. And you're like, okay, well, if I pay on average, I don't know 70,000 a year. And you're like, okay, I've only got 130,000. That's just from payroll cost. I still have all my other costs in the business, right? Um said differently, it's like if there was a million dollars a year per employee, right? Then that's going to be a much that's a super healthy business, right? Um, and so that's kind of the that's kind of the difference there. All right, let's see the next punta. Um, so one of the things that no one tells you about delayed gratification is that once you learn how to do it, you keep doing it until you die and then whatever you were delaying never actually happens. And so what this ties into is something I call the third marshmallow fallacy, which is everyone's heard of the thing where there's one marshmallow and if you wait the kid gets two marshmallows and the kids that waited for two marshmallows are more successful in life. But there is a fallacy around the third marshmallow, which is that if you wait so long eventually the marshmallow is going to be so big that it's worth it. And the thing is is that it actually doesn't uh map said differently. If you can get uh two marshmallows if you wait 30 minutes, but you get three marshmallows if you wait two years, is it really worth the wait? In my opinion, no. And so there's it's it's one of those uh vicious cycles or virtuous cycles that ends up happening for entrepreneurship and people is that we learn to delay gratific. Most people can't delay gratification. But once you're in the top 10% of people, so this is who I'm talking to. I'm talking to the players, right? The winners. If once you get in the top 10% of people, you actually have to fight the opposite side, which is that you always delay gratification indefinitely. And you never actually experience the gratification you're delaying. So sometimes you have to learn when to take and you have to learn when to cash in when you have to learn how to how to uh take your chips off the table and uh and pay yourself, right? Take take eat the marshmallow because if you literally continue to collect marshmallows, you can still starve to death at the end if you never eat them. Uh ROAZ Labs currently running an agency stuck on 20 to 30,000 a month and I feel like Solomon too. I really help clients get much bigger than me. How do I fix this? Really good observation. By the way, if your clients are getting bigger than you, then it means that they have something inherently better than you have. So, it might be that they have a better model. So, I don't know, you might be e-commerce or something like that. Um, but if you are in a specific niche and you are actually noticing that your clients are getting better you than you, bigger than you with your skill, then it means that their opportunity vehicle is superior to yours. And so it's like if you are unbelievable at e-commerce marketing, then it's like maybe you should just start an e-commerce brand that's similar to your most successful uh customer because you know how to do that well, right? Or if you're really good at HVAC, lead genen, and sales, then maybe you just partner with a guy who's got the delivery of that and then you go 50/50 on it and you have a great partnership, right? So like it's absolutely true that like those are superior opportunity vehicles because they have more revenue retention. And so if you're curious like what's a good vehicle versus a bad vehicle, unique, expensive, sticky air, right? How are things that only I can do that are sticky that people keep paying for? um expensive relative to cost uh in terms of uh expensive so high gross margins uh air in terms of that has high operational scale right unique expensive sticky air right that's that's what you want um from a business perspective all right 92 rich starting to get warm in here uh hold on that's right only Alex today uh with a biotech company I have multiple revenue streams in R&D projects about 75% of income come from one revenue stream uh oh would you cut everything else and just focus focus on the one see revenue stream not necessarily customer um it's a really good question so when I'm thinking about focus I'm not actually against multiple revenue streams I am against multiple workflows to create those streams so said differently if I let's say I I promote or I endorse something right which of course like I don't do that often but if I were to do it what what does it actually change about my dayto-day right what does it change about what my team has to do on a day-to-day. If their actual behavior does not change much and I'm able to get more from the same, then I'm all for it. If I have to now begin another cycle of actions in order to get some sort of potential reward in the future, those are things I very heavily think about and usually say no to. And so, right now, if you have one revenue stream, as in one service or whatever, that's doing well, um I'm not against the other one as long as you can as leanly as possible deliver it. But if it's like a whole another workflow, a whole another talent flow, and it's more difficult to find those customers, etc., then I think doubling down on the one revenue stream probably makes a lot of sense. All right. Give you a little uh let me give you a little how to stay poor. All right. How to stay poor. Number one, think someone else winning means you losing. Only learn from people who look like you. Start many projects, finish none. Get married to someone who spends more than you make. Keep starting new things rather than getting good at one thing. Do what your poor friends do and expect to get rich. Follow advice from people behind you in life on how to get ahead. Blame anything besides yourself for your problems. Prioritize looking smart over being smart. Tolerate mediocre people. And don't forget, quit. How am I so energetic at 38 years old? Well, I'll tell you. I'm not 38. I'm uh 37. So, uh you know, that's how I'm doing it. It's uh the fountain of youth in this in this lovely California sun. Um I don't really think I'm that energetic to be honest with you, man. I think I just kind of like show up. Um I I really don't think I'm that energetic. Honest truth, dude. So, maybe that resonates with some of you. But yeah, I get [ __ ] tired all the time and uh like at the end of the day like I'll melt into a couch and um it's interesting because a lot of people think that like I work every hour of the day and that's not really true. I think I work about 12 hours a day um right now when I have to work 16 uh for like extended periods. It does start to drain me. And maybe it wasn't that way when I was in my 20s. I would say now for sure at 37 it I do feel that way. like I can work 5 to 5 like pretty solid and at that point I'd say anything after that it might be like checking some Slack messages but I'm not doing like real real work and even within 5 to 5 my like heavy thinking work I almost always do before lunch so it's like 5 to noonish is where I'm getting my like heavy lifting in and then I do more like meetings and touch bases and things like that decisions uh more a little bit more in the afternoon um but even even decisions themselves it's more communicating the decision I make the decisions in the mornings and so um I also to recognize that that has changed in terms of like the nature of the work that I do because of the role that I'm in. Um because right now like acquisition.com doesn't really need me to do anything besides like make content and advertise and promote the business. Um but in order and so I would say for me in order to stay sharp on this stuff that is why I'm still in it is so that I can stay cutting edge um and not get too clouds and I can stay in the dirt. So, but yeah, the actual business uh more or less runs and it's it doesn't it doesn't start that way though, right? I think I started today by talking about like there was a period of my life where it there was the amount of work that I had to do was so much work that I couldn't count it. I just had to weigh it. Like it was just it was just an insurmountable and unfinishable amount of work. And it was just like I just basically would alternate between rest and work. Um, once my my my work per unit of time output decreased past a certain point, I was like, I need to rest again so I can increase my overall output. And I know that some of you guys or maybe many of you guys are in that chapter right now. I would just encourage you to power through and not judge yourself for it because like again, the shitty part is that it's like sometimes that lasts years. And like that's the part with I mean I've said this before, but like the rocky cut scene lasts 60 seconds in the movie. It could be six years in real life. Um, and I would say most of the people that I know who are in entrepreneurship, not like raised venture capital and, you know, had somebody who gave them a bunch of money or something like that to start, but people like self-funded, bootstrapped it. It takes almost everyone 5 years to figure out what the hell's going on. Um, and it's because you don't have the perspective from which to make a judgment. And so, let me give you an example. Like, when I was in fitness, one of the hardest things that I had to fight against was I would explain, you know, how how fitness and nutrition work and how lifting and resistance training. And now, good news is with social media, a lot more of the good stuff is out there. But, you know, 15 years ago, you got some guy who's ripped saying, you know, egg yolks are bad and somebody else says egg yolks are good and somebody else says bacon's bad and somebody else says bacon's good. And everyone's just walking around confused as hell because they don't understand the nuance and the context between each of those things. And so, uh, when you don't have the perspective in which to make a judgment, everything seems very confusing. And so, one of the only ways you can learn is through trial and error. And there's a lot of error when you're doing trial and error as your primary way of learning. And so, you try and and like I would say I'll give you one more piece of advice, which is um, even though you didn't ask for it, I'll give it to you. Um, try to find sources with high signal as in high high tactic per second. Um, and ideally as closely related to what actually changes your current life um, and ideally from a source that has achieved whatever it is that you're looking for and then perfect world achieve many of the thing that you've looking for plus helped other people like you get to where you're trying to go. If you put all those things together, the likelihood that they are a good source, even if they're imperfect, I would encourage you to just take everything from one person for a period, uh, go all in on that and then once you kind of understand it rather than just follow the instructions, [music] like replicate before you iterate, duplicate before you iterate, like do exactly what they do, get the same result, and then once you've gone through the reps, think I think I could do this a little better and that's when I would be willing to experiment. But hopefully that uh that helps clarify that. Um startup SAS pricing for Shopify shops price point research 60 to79 euros single feature competitor 99 and outside Shopify network with 99 of 83% margin fear is pricing too low dude this is just super testable I mean honestly that's it I would encourage many of you guys if you can solve a problem with a spreadsheet and a test you should do that because like I don't know I just test it there's I mean I have been wrong so many times times about price tests. It is it's not even worth trying to make a guess. Just test it. Make your best bet and test it. Now, I will make one counterpoint to this, which is this. You still like you still want to use common sense because your model of reality is what allows you to move faster than people who rely on data for every single decision. So, said differently, if you need to have a test for every single decision that you're going to make in the business, you're never going to succeed because you're relying too much on data and not enough on your ability to predict. Right? And so if you do not know how the world works, like your reality quotient is low, like you have a very bad you do a bad job of predicting what is going to happen, what people are going to do, then business will be very hard for you because you have to learn everything the hard way. If you can extrapolate, no, I don't think people are going to say yes to this, you don't need to run the test. You can just run a simulation in your own mind and say, yeah, I don't think it's going to work. Right? And founders who have a good knack for this are people who have accurate models of reality. And that's why I talk about some of this what feels like more amorphous stuff. Um because these are the actual patterns that allow me to make decisions that have yielded good outcomes and you can't possibly have all the data because by the time you truly have complete data, the opportunity is already gone, right? So you have to operate with incomplete data and you have to make gut-based decisions which really is a fancy way of saying I have to look at my history with reality and project into the future and make my best guess. And the people who who are who are good at making best guesses on that are able to move faster because they don't need to wait for tests because tests are actually incredibly slow at getting you the result that you're looking for in terms of the truth. Keith Gall, hey Alex, how do you approach list quality? Okay, scraping enrichment vendors best practices frameworks. I remember you talked about this regarding gym scaling uh days lead agency. Um, so I have saw for list quality. I would say the way we did it then versus now. Um, back then is that we just had a lot of different list brokers and list sources and we would just test them all. And so we, you know, I'd buy five different lists from five different sources. And maybe I'd scrape one or I'd buy some others. And then I would just look at what's our connect rate and what the percentage of the people who are actually answering the phone are the ideal customer. And then I just optimize for truth. The places where I got the best quality leads is where I just got more of them. I know that's like a simple answer, but that's what that's what we did. Which means that you have to be willing to blow some money on lists and and scraping processes that aren't effective. Um, now with the addition of AI, there's some enrichment that you can do the leads that we wouldn't otherwise have been able to do before. We had to do manually. Um, which is now super helpful. [sighs] I think many of you are afraid of making the hard decision that's in front of you, but you should be more afraid of being in the exact same position a year from now as you are right now. Said differently, if you were in the same position now as you were last year, that should freak you out more than the scary decision or conversation that you have to make right now. Yeah. Uh, do I look smack? Um, well, I I will take that question as a compliment. Um, am I blue stealing enough? Am I brooding enough? Uh, I I I'm honored by the question, but um, no, I I probably say it looks min technically. I think I need to improve my my uh Yeah, this this beard's getting a little scraggly and these hairs are going a little little wild. Um, I think the only thing I kind of do is I just work out and eat, eat, okay, but that's about it. Besides obviously the foundation and makeup and eyeliner that I put on every day. Um, besides those things, then yes, of course. Uh, I'm looks smitten. Uh, Marcel, okay. When cash is low, I decide fast and execute when I feel safe. I overthink the best move, delay reps, and coast. How do I make execution independent of urgency and certainty? Um, really good question. I think that if you look at some of the best entrepreneurs out there, they have a maniacal sense of urgency and they have it at all times and they usually have something they're framing it against, which is why the mission is so important, which is like when you're already rich or you're already successful, and that depends on you. Like that could be $5,000 a month, it could be $5 million a month, whatever. Um, if you're more missiondriven, then you feel like you have more of the customers that you're going after to help that are waiting for you to grow in order to do it. and there's people that are getting ripped off or there are people that are getting disserved or they're suffering from this problem because you have not chosen to grow fast enough. And if you instill that level of urgency in the team, um you will drive the car a lot faster. And so I think um it's more urgency comes from the top. Like the speed of the boss is the speed of the team. And more specifically, the speed of the boss really comes down to speed of decision-m and speed of decision-m comes down to um your model of reality and your data input sources. And so basically the quality and quantity of data that you have plus or multiplied by the number of models of reality that are accurate at predicting. And so if you have really good data, a lot of it, and you have multiple accurate models of how reality works, you can make a lot of decisions really quickly and have them be accurate. And then those decisions roll down the hill and it allows your teams to execute. Like I'm telling you right now, the vast majority of slowness in businesses and organizations has to come down from the top of people delaying decisions. Just saying like I'll like let's circle back to that on Monday. Let me think about it. It's all that when the reality is that most times you're not going to get more information. And so like that is one of the biggest uh flags that I use is am I going to get more information about this thing in order to make the decision? If I'm not going to get more information, then I try to make the decision right now with the only outshoot is that if I feel like I'm emotional. So, if I feel like I have some emotions that are kind of spinned up with whatever this decision is, then I want to wait till my kind of emotions subside, which if it's like anger, you need to wait at least 20. If it's something more than that, then I give it 24 hours. Um, but that's just like a little hack. So, it starts with the data, then it goes into your projection models of the world. And your ability to make those decisions quickly is what predicates your speed as a business. Like, that is how fast you move is how fast you can make decisions. Because I'll give you the analogy that I like for this, which is if you've ever played a video game and then replayed a level, you beat it way faster than you did the first time. Why? The character itself can't move any faster, but you can beat it in like a sixth of the time. Why? Because you know exactly what to do, right? You've already pre-made the decisions. There's zero contemplation. And so when someone is moving orders of magnitude faster than you, it's because their ability to make decisions is just superior to yours, which usually means they have a combination of superior data and/or superior models of the world and how this works. So, if somebody's already built a $100 million business before, their second and third comes pretty quick because they already know the levels. They know exactly what has to happen, right? And hopefully I try to transfer as much of that um those those models of the world as I can. The difficulty and this is what I started I talked about all today was that like I can translate those models of reality to you and many of you like and I get the Q&A all the time like I think I know what you're going to say and I'm like right if you know what I'm going to say why aren't you doing it? And it's because there's other stuff. There's, oh, it's hard. And the hard is that I have to have a conversation that I'm unwilling to make. My ego is hurt by having to admit that I made a mistake. That's what sucks. That's the part that no one wants to do. And that's why most entrepreneurs stay stuck. They don't grow. Um, what's up, Marissa? >> You want my phone? >> Yes. There you go. Hold on. There you go. Okay. Um, what are your thoughts on seaweed extraction and algae production for cosmetic product in the Red Sea? I have no [ __ ] idea. I I actually I don't think there's anything I know less about than that entire sentence in its entirety. Like literally every word in that sentence, I have no idea. So, I didn't even know it was a thing. How about that? Um, next. [laughter] Uh, I live in Belgium, make 300,000 a year. Sorry, 300, excuse me. I live in Belgium and live 300 and make Jesus. I live in Belgium and make 300,000 a month in profit flipping vacant Florida land on a 99% profit margin. Public records. Congrats. Would you move to a Caribbean tax haven and pay 0% tax or Florida and pay 40% but be local? You ask a lifestyle question. So, it really depends on what you're optimizing for. If you're optimizing for the most income, then obviously go to the place that you don't have to pay income tax. If you want to optimize for your lifestyle, then go to the place that you like living. And I will say as somebody who went to Puerto Rico and then moved out, um sometimes you're like, I just need to make 30% more money. Because Leila said this and I like it. She was like, why have all the money in the world if we can't live where we want to live? like where you live has a very big correlate with your subjective well-being. And if you make money because you want to like enjoy life to some degree, then it's kind of like saying um it's like it's it's I'm trying to think of of a better analogy, but it would be like I will give up all of my freedoms in order to have money, but it's like the whole point of the money was to be able to create the freedom. So, you're giving up the thing that you wanted to get from the money in order to have more money. So, for what it's worth, Jimmy Yun. Hey, Alex. My family had a restaurant that was Michelin and New York Times and during rapid expansion we lost six of our restaurants. We barely get it getting by. Any advice in rebuilding the brand? Um I'm going to give incredibly simple and difficult advice which is you got to make the food good again. Like you need to go back and retrace your steps of what built this brand to begin with. And knowing why you failed is also equally important. And so typically overexpansion is not actually a thing. It actually means that you were undertalented. Not just you, but your team. So, the people you hired had insufficient skill, which either means you didn't buy good enough skill or you weren't good enough at training or both in terms of transferring your way of doing things at the store that obviously worked to the new stores or restaurants that, you know, you got expanded into. And so, you quote diluted the brand because the core product was no longer as good as the original. And so, how do you rebuild the brand? you go back to the things that everyone loved and you make sure that you are militant about keeping those standards because now you know what it looks like when it's not played out the right way. How does one scale in a market where everyone is out to outbid you commercial cleaning business? Um really good question. So two things. Number one is you want to have proprietary deal flow. So if you're bidding out projects on like a deal site or you're in a competitive process in terms of everyone gets four or five RFPs or RFQS or whatever um that is going to make it shitty. Um so ideally you want proprietary deal flow which means you want a unique way of getting customers other people don't have. The second is that you want a unique offer which is what which is what the grand slam offer is all about in the offers book. Um and so if you have the core service which is like you clean stuff, we have to look at all the other ancillary benefits and costs around the business think what are the other elements that that still confer value to the ultimate product or service. So how fast are we? How how good is the service? Does everyone speak English? What kind of guarantees do we have? Um in terms of like how how good it is um what degree of cleaning are we doing? So there's there's lots of basically it's like you'll win in the nuance um and try to win on a local versus global frame meaning your competitors will always try to undercut you and so if you're not planning on being the cheapest which I would encourage you not to be if you're in a service business in at least in the US with US labor um then you want to say hey these guys will be cheaper today but when you look over the long haul you will end up paying more and so you always want to be able to sell that story and have it be through um and you solve that by solving all the other elements of cost and value outside of the core thing and that is fundamentally what a grand time offers. Nail coup your recent advice on focusing on quality of the content and care less about other stuff like editing was so helpful. Thank you for me every concert recording session requires three hours of prep, hair, makeup, etc. Yeah, no one cares. Like except I do have a badass background right now, but um no one cares. Like people only care about what you can do for them, not how you look when you tell them. Um if at the end of the day, like it's funny because I made I made a piece of content where I talked about this and someone was like, "Well, you're already famous now and so you can make a video where you're just, you know, live streaming without any kind of filter." It's like, how the [ __ ] do you think I built this brand in a closet where I had a webcam and a shitty microphone that started this whole thing to begin with? And so the thing that worked was the value, right? Is that you have to make sure the stuff inside of the box is worth the trade. Like at the most basic level, what is good content that is educational content? It is a good deal. It's a bargain. So what is a bargain is that I will consume this content and in exchange for the time because there is a cost. There's time that you're putting in. In exchange for that cost, I'm going to save more time from mistakes that I won't have to make or from progress that I will make faster than I otherwise would if I had not consumed it. And so the idea is that as succinctly as possible, if you can deliver that value, people will always get a positive return on consuming your content. And by doing that, they will want to come back because you always give them a good deal. You always give them a bargain. That is the nature of good content. Whether you have nice lights or makeup or good music matters very little compared to what someone actually gets out of it as a result. And this is fundamentally what differentiates entertainment from education. So how do you get filthy rich to your core? You have to have higher standards than your customer and charge a lot of money for it at the core. Like if you have higher standards than your customers do, which is incredibly easy to say and incredibly difficult to do because customer standards only go one way up. And once you've delivered to that, your blowing them out of the water becomes their expectation from that point going forward because that is how humans are. We always want more. And so you have to consistently raise the bar above the expectations of your customers, which means that you will always be dissatisfied with your core product and service and always be looking for ways to make it better. And so if you have that level of obsession, whether it's over your content or it's over your products and services, that one trait, I would say 8020 above everything else and then making sure you charge enough is probably the secret to making a an an ungodly amount of money that people will ask you if it's legal. Ghost donkey. All right, here we go. Hemp business owner, 25 years old. I make two million bucks a year for the business. transitioning into the recreational market soon, looking for investors, but classic investors are hard in this industry. Any advice on raising 4 million? It's going to come down to the same things as a normal offer. It's like, what's my return? What's my risk? What's the timeline? I I don't like one thing that I think Shiron said to me that I really liked is that assume there's unlimited capital for any opportunity that we want to pursue because if the opportunity is good enough, unlimited capital will appear. And so I really mean that and that has just 100% been become my perspective um on money and wealth in general is that if the opportunity is good enough, money will appear. And if money is not appearing, the opportunity is not good enough. And when I say money will appear, you got to go obviously seek out people who got money. But people who have money are pretty good at finding things that make money. Timothy Hein, have you always thought with your current clarity or how do we develop mental models and frameworks that you have over time? Mental models are developed through mental shortorthhand from doing excessive amounts of volume and then over time through that volume discovering what the shortcuts are. And so if I talk to one business owner and try to help them, I will not have a model. If I talk to a hundred, I will have a handful. If I talk to a thousand, I will for sure know it's going to be one of these five things. And it's typically A, B, C, or D. And if you have B, you do C. Right? And so models come from repetition and they come from volume. It comes from clarity of thinking because you've had to think and solve the problem so many times. It's like this is what every like it's not like there's some like elegant consulting book that says draw triangles and squares, right? It's if you do something so many times you get bored of doing it, bored of solving the exact same problem. You come up with shorthand ways of solving it. And when you've actually done it for real, those shorthand ways of solving it actually work. And when other people apply those shorthand ways of solving the problem and they work for them, they will believe your future models. Don't get bored. Be violent. Create your own enemies. Break your own records. Leave no doubt. At the end of your life, you're not going to want to be the guy who gave up early. And that is a promise. Many of you guys are 6 in from gold. You're you've been working at whatever you've been doing for a long time. And sometimes you just need to put in more unreasonable effort. You need to put more volume in. You need to put apply more violence to the opportunity that you're pursuing right now and be ruthless about your prioritization and your willingness to sacrifice some things for a short season for the things that you want more. Because if you're unwilling to say that you want one thing more than another, then you will never be able to make the sacrifices required to get what you want most because you haven't even defined it. And in the pursuit of everything, you will get nothing. House of Wang. Okay, here we are. Hey, Alex. My brother and I want to buy my dad's business, but my brother doesn't think family can start a business or work together. How can I tell him how to work? Honestly, you just got to communicate just like as you were strangers. Like, I don't I don't agree that you can't do business with family. It's just that you should do it the same way you do with anyone else. And if the And here's the thing, you can't make bad deals with anyone, including family. And so if you're expecting your family to work forever for nothing, a stranger wouldn't do that and neither will family eventually, right? And so the idea is treat your family like strangers and you will be able to do business for a long time because you're family, right? So it's just it has to work even if you didn't know each other. And I'll I'll tell you a story that like might actually drive this home. So when Leila and I were dating in the very beginning, um I think on our first or second date, I pitched Lelo on quitting her job and she basically said no. And I continued to like up the offer in terms of like how good the offer was. And right as we were beginning to date, I just said like, "Hey, to be clear, this has to make sense for you even if we're not dating. Like this job offer has to independently make sense so that if we break up, it still works cuz I also want you to stay. I don't want you I don't want to lose like a key player because it was super early days and I really needed the the help. And that was what ultimately allowed her to to take the job because she was going to make two and a half times as much as she was making at her current job working with me doing the sales stuff. And so like even though I was dating her, the money had to make sense. The incentives had to make sense. Um, and so I just think that like typically family has a harder time saying some of the hard truths than you do to a stranger because the stakes are higher because you're more afraid of losing the relationship. But if you are afraid of losing the relationship, then you can't afford to hide anything. You have to tell the truth about everything. And that means all the ugly stuff. And I promise you this, if you are unable to to confront the hard truths now before you're in business, it's a great warning sign that you're not ready to get into business. But it's not because of family, but it's because you couldn't talk about the hard stuff. Good [ __ ] Good questions. These are fun, right? Is this fun? This is a good way to spend a Friday. Okay. Michael Munoz, please explain running effective ads for new service business like I'm a three-year-old. All right, dude. You ready? Pick an attraction offer. Buy x get free giveaway grand opening. Uh win your money back. Um take one of those wrappers, wrap it around whatever your service is. So, free cleaning, free lawn care, whatever the thing you have to put the word free in there. Wrap it in one of those money models, which is an attraction offer from the money models book. Record yourself doing it the service or your customers where you're doing it for free. So, give it away to five to 10 people for free. Record yourself doing it in exchange. They you can use their testimonial. That's the trade. Use those as your f first five to 10 pieces creative. Take different angles of it. Do different cuts of it, different pictures of it. alter the copy in terms of the offer and the creative, upload those onto Facebook. You can run those into an instant form or aka old school lead forms, which means you don't even have to have a landing page. And then as soon as the lead comes in, you call the lead within 15 seconds, 5 minutes at most. And you can just Google, how do I set up a Facebook ad, walk me through it step by step. Um, and then how do I connect uh meta lead forms to a Google sheet? And then how do I get a notification when a new lead comes in on the Google sheet to my phone and then have the text message with the number that the lead comes in on? So you can tap and dial. Here you [ __ ] go, man. That's it. This is how it works. All right. But I'll I'll restate it again for you because I really want to make sure that this is bulletproof that you have no way of saying that you did not know how to do this. Giveaway service to 10 people for free in exchange for being able to use videos. Capture those videos and then upload those as your creative for the marketing that you're going to use. Put a local call out saying looking for Talson moms or Talson residents who want X. The X is going to be your attraction offer which is going to be giveaway buy X get Y free win your money back. any of those variations from the attraction section in the money models book which makes a more attractive offer. Tie those into meta lead forms or instant forms and then Zapier or whatever automation you want those leads into a Google sheet and then when you get the leads make sure there's a notification that pings your phone with the lead's phone number and you can tap to dial any lead that comes in within 5 minutes and you want that Zapier to trigger on a minute basis. It'll cost a little bit more, but the speed delete will make up for the fact that you're pinging to make sure that no leads came in. That's the answer. Okay, Luke, when running a business like a game studio, how crossd domain relevant is your tactical business advice that you typically give for things like service businesses? Love your content. Thanks. Um, the fundamentals of business don't change, man. I mean, do you think like the fundamentals of business apply to school? Yeah, of course it does. It's a marketplace. I mean like uh supply demand will still exist, pricing still matters, gross margins still matter. It's just that it's just that the return profile will be different in terms of how you invest time and capital upfront. So for example, it's just it'll function like more like a software business, a traditional software business. Um but now with AI and vibe coding and things like that, you should be able to get more leverage and will cost you less um capital to start the business, which means you can retain more equity than you would otherwise. But at the most basic level, like all we got to do is build a product and then let people know about it. And so 100% of that stuff applies. It's just that the uh building the product part sometimes costs more in the beginning for a game studio. Um and so you just have to factor that in and how much runway you're going to need um and how many people you need to build that thing and how much they're going to need in terms of a combination of equity and cash. And that's basically how much you have to dilute yourself to build a quote more scalable product that as soon as you do sell it, you can sell a lot of them. Okay. Uh, what do you think about such destinies as John Lennon, Cobain, Sid Vicious, skyrocketing stardom and riches and then burnout or to get wasted? I don't think much about it at all to be honest with you, man. Um, I think that there's also a bunch of people who don't get stardom and richness and then still burn out and get wasted. I see them as not necessarily related. Um, as much as people say, "Ah, you know, when I was famous and rich, like, you know, the drugs came easy and the girls came cheap or whatever the actually other way around, drugs." You know what I'm saying? All right, slow down. Um, I certainly know a lot of poor people who still did that same thing and didn't achieve the riches. And so, I think that it's just like addiction is a risk for humans independent of your level of wealth. Um, and you should be mindful of it and that more so that if you are rich and famous that you have no more protections than you do if you are poor and unknown. You should treat it with the same level of respect that it is a danger. Uh, killer will. How would you build a rule for deciding what opportunities to say yes to when you're naturally good at finding value everywhere but say yes too often is costing you your focus? [sighs] [gasps] Well, first off, you're saying opportunities to say yes to. And so that one I'm already kind of like red flagging. Um, if you're naturally good at finding value everywhere, it means that you have more skills, which is a good thing. And I promise you, like as somebody who also is pretty good at finding the stuff, um, you just need to pair that skill with an equally strong skill of saying no and saying it is not good enough. And so I would say that the the 8020 or the 999 991 rule on this is that many opportunities look attractive to you because your goals are too small. If you make your goals bigger, fewer of those opportunities will get over the bar and it will be easier for you to say no. And so what's difficult is that if you in the beginning you're poor, right? And so like not being poor is the goal. And so a lot of things make you not poor. And so then you make a little bit more money. You're making, you know, 100 grand a year or a million dollar a year, whatever your number is. and then all of a sudden uh there's still plenty of other things that make you a million dollar a year and those all become attractive. But if you're like, "Okay, I want to make a hundred million a year." All of a sudden that number of things that are opportunities that are worth it shrinks to maybe one or not. And so having much bigger goals will be a much stronger forcing factor um on what to say yes to. John Baird just got a thousand bucks for ads from an angel investor and I'm setting up the meta campaign as we speak. I have 43 image ads, but want your opinion if video creatives are a better option, dude. There's video campaigns that like image will outdo bad video. Good video will outdo image, but there's like right now we run tons of image ads. Um, and we also run tons of video. Like it's just ads and both work. So, if you suck on video, then you'll probably do better with images. If you're great on video and know how to edit and know how to script and all that stuff, then you'll probably do well with videos, too. It is definitely not a uh a one-sizefits-all, like here's the the six secret, you know, hacks or whatever. Um, how do I know I'm hiring dumb people? You are making stupid rules that you can't believe you're making. You are doing their work for them and you can't believe you're actually doing it. Um, the speed of the team is slowing down, not speeding up. Revenue as a percentage of uh per headcount is going down. And over time, you will like the people that you work with less and less. And so if you have any of those things or all of those five things, you are probably hiring people who are too dumb. And maybe they were the level of competence that you needed 5 years ago and not for 5 years from now. Or rather to get you to where you want to get 5 years from now. Do you know if freelance marketplace need innovation? Not sure if it's your domain. I mean, I wouldn't start a freelancer marketplace as my first business idea. Um, I think Upwork and Fiverr seem to be doing pretty okay. I don't know if something's really disrupted them. Um, but yeah, I mean, if you like I think in those types of games, you'd have to be niche, right? I think there are freelance marketplaces and they try and find niches that have high specialization that are difficult to find, but if you pull all of those specific avatar together, um, then you can create a marketplace, right? Um, but marketplaces are tough because you need supply and demand. And I know this because we literally own a [ __ ] marketplace. So, I feel like I can talk a little bit about it. Um, sorry, I thought a bird was flapping behind me. Um, hey Alex, what do you think about the risks of unregulated AI and how close we are to reaching the singularity? I'm not even I'm not even going to go into it. It just it would just be it I would not add to the conversation. I'll say that. Anything I'm going to say, you've already heard from somebody else. And then I I'll say something different which is that what does my answer change about what you're going to do? And so I would encourage you when you're thinking through, you know, how do you differentiate different differentiate signal to noise when you're consuming content? Ask yourself the question while you're consuming, what will this change about what I do? And if you cannot answer that question, you should probably stop consuming it. Now, if you want to be entertained, there's a purpose for that because the point of the entertainment is to give you rest, right? is to not increase your unit of output per per time in the moment, but to increase your your total output over the next day, right? You relaxed and now you can hit it harder afterwards. On the flip side, if the point is education, then the question is, what am I going to do as a result of this video? And so, if you see yourself cons continuing to consume doom and gloom AI stuff, what how does this help you, right? What is it going to change about your day-to-day? Are you going to get into another business? Are you going to change the way you're operating? If you're not, then move on. Like the only point of consuming that stuff is if it is going to change what you do. Period. Full stop. Otherwise, it won't change your life at all. Sorry, got a little sneezy. Um, what is the best framework for speaking to ensure the listener understands and retains what you say? Um, speak in observable terms as in what will this affect about their lives dayto-day? How will it affect their bodies and their brains and their mouths, right? Uh, number two, you want to reinforce the same point from multiple directions, typically using multiple different narratives. So, it's like I might give a statistical example and then I might give a narrative example and then I might give an analogy and then I might give a personal example. Right? So, if I want to make one point, I want to make the same point four or five ways. And I think this is probably one of the biggest misunderstandings about how to make content in general, which is really just how to teach or speak, which is you don't want to have 10 points with one thing each. You want to have one point with 10 different examples. You want to give make one point and then give 10 reasons for why it's right. And so a lot more of content and teaching is actually selling because what do you think what do we think sales is? Right? We're trying to maximize the likelihood that someone changes their behavior in a specific direction towards buying something. Right? And so if we're trying to get someone to change their behavior then we are educating. Selling and education are the same thing. Right? Right. And so if you can sell someone on an idea, then it means that you've changed their behavior, which means you've taught them. And so I think there needs to be far more focused on what is someone going to change as a result of this thing. And then ruthlessly remove everything else. And that's the hard part. Like I was talking to an executive of mine this morning about a memo that he had written for uh his team because we're doing something internally for our leaders, which is we want them to define what good looks like in observable terms. So like we've done this at the at the top level, but it's like let's make sure the directors and the managers each of them at the at that level explain in intricate detail what does what does being on time look like, right? So be on time actually means nothing. But if you say be 2 minutes early, then that's very clear, right? If you say, "Hey, I want you to respond promptly," promptly means nothing. We have to say I want you to respond within 15 minutes during work hours uh on Slack and if I call you I need you to pick up immediately during work hours. That is what respond promptly looks like in observable terms. And so whenever we're having any kind of communication and to be clear here the point what is the point of communication? Fun fun fun quiz for you. What's the point of communication? To change behavior. It's the only reason we do it. I say hi. So the other person says hi back. I change their behavior. They weren't going to say hi. I say hi. They now say hi. Da da, we change behavior. All right. And so the point of communication is to change behavior. Now, here's the thing is that we are reinforced for communicating in general. Some people just like talking, right? And so if you like talking, sometimes you talk because other people reinforce you talking, but you don't do anything to change their behavior, right? Or you did change their behavior, but not in the way that you wanted more often. And so we have to just be very clear like what do you want them to do? So don't give the explanation, just tell them what you want them to do. And so usually it takes two or three steps of inference. But for example, if I say, "Hey, in order to work with me, um, you have to deal with, you know, me being direct." That actually doesn't give anyone anything. So if I say, "Hey, working with me, uh, you got to be able to handle that I'm direct." Or like, "Hey, I'm not angry with you if I give you criticism." That's not actually telling them what to do. Instead, we have to give if then conditional statements. If you hear me do this, then you need to do this. And so thinking conditional statements have conditioned behavior. Conditioned behavior. And when you do that, you'll be able to teach far more effectively, right? And so like I literally just did that. So when you're trying to make something, give a condition and then a behavior. And then you are going to do that which is then your condition and then behavior. Right? Okay. Um now if you're going through a hard time, just remember that there's a woman in the 1800s who birthed eight kids naturally, did this before the invention of weekends, and was considered soft. Like you're going to be fine, right? However hard you think you're working right now, there are people a 100 years ago, 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago who worked a hundred times harder because they didn't even know that it was considered hard work. It was just life. And so I would encourage you to adopt this frame, which is that the vast majority of people are incredibly soft pansies, right? And so do not compare yourself to their standards of what hard effort looks like because you will beat their standards and still go below your potential. Because we are capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for. The human body hasn't changed very much in a few thousand years, right? Probably more than that. But our behaviors and societal norms have. And so we are physically capable of 10 times more than we currently are. But the thing is is that the rules of society of what we've told ourselves is good enough or hard enough has now neutered our ability to push because we've given ourselves narratives of of moral judgments on what is good and what is bad about work. People will people will cast a finger and point it at you and tell you that what you're doing is wrong because it is not the way that they would do it. And that is ridiculous. But because we have social media and because you can have a million people tell you that you suck, it does change your behavior. But I don't think it makes you better. What should the conversation with customers be? Post- purchase pre-ely. We make custom car parts and the lead times are three weeks or more. People get antsy fast and we post lead times online. All right. So, what you need to do is adopt the airline delay method. So, if you ever have an air flight that's delayed, right? And let's say it's delayed, it's going to ultimately be delayed 10 hours. They don't just say, "Hey, it's going to be delayed 10 hours." Often times, they'll say, "It's delayed an hour. Here's an update." Or there is no update, but they still update you saying there is no update. And so, the idea is that you want to increase the amount of communication cycles that you have with them. literally just telling them what's already happening even if there is no change because they want to make sure that you're paying attention to their thing more than they are. So increase comm cycles, state the facts and tell the truth. And if there's no update, you can still update them on the fact that there is no update because it shows that you're still caring and still trying to make sure that their thing is getting to them as fast as possible, which is what they want. And the nice thing is that all that's automatable and it's not going to cost anything. It's onetime work. Um, I'm going to do one more and then we're going to wrap this. B. When's a good time to start ads? Podcast agency. 850,000 a year. We sell and do for ourselves. Podcast has a funnel. Interview your ICP. Uh 45 interviews a month, two hosts. When should I start ads? I mean, you can start ads whenever, man. Um, if you're getting customers right now with your current model, um, I'm guessing that you don't want to do more podcasts than you currently are, and that's why you're thinking about doing this. Um, fundamentally, you just want to get the highest return on incremental effort. So, if it costs X dollars to get another 10 clients a month in terms of podcast costs or Y dollars to get an extra 10 10 customers per month on ads, then if X is less than Y, do X. And the difficulty with the Y or the second one is that you haven't done it before. So, you have to expect that the first time it's going to cost a lot. It's kind of like developing a pharmaceutical drug. The first pill cost 10 billion dollars. the second pill cost 10 cents, right? So, it's like cracking a new acquisition channel is where the cost is. Once you get it, then it's much easier, right? Um, but if I have a way that's certain of growing the business and a way that it's uncertain, I will typically almost always take the certain way first and exhaust every means possible. That is how I do business. And that model of reality has worked well for me. So, with that being said, happy Friday. Hope you slay your goals, slay your dragons, accomplish all the missions and the objectives. You guys are awesome. Appreciate you all. Bye.