$250M Lessons in Bite-Sized Chunks | Ep 879

Your husband has to decide whether a short-term rift in the relationship with his father is a sufficient price for the growth that you'd like to have in the business. If you think that the relationship will be permanently damaged forever, then the follow-up question to that is, how valuable is a relationship that gets damaged like that forever from a one-time thing? Good morning so far. Yes. Okay, good. All right, let's do the first one. So you sell fitness coaching, you're doing $250,000 a year, and you're not sure what you want to do with your life. Okay, go for it.

So, yeah, I mean, I'm preparing for medical school next year, entering, and I— yeah, I'm running this fitness company as well, which I'm passionate about. And ideally, we would like to be at, you know, 7 figures, you know, just running it. And the medical school process is slowing that down. But my endgame is, is really looking at the branding, the long-term play. Like when I see what you've done, true ads to branding around making the greatest impact preventative health and medicine possible. So that's kind of where I'm at, trying to figure out how to think about it all, the timing, the sequencing.

What's the question?

How do I go about this process of balancing both? Is that even possible? And achieving both?

We already are achieving both.

That's true.

Yeah.

The business has been declining though.

Declining.

Yeah. So it's, it's, it went from like $320,000 to $270,000-ish last year. It's still, yeah, small.

So it might be the same size and, you know, you missed a week or two. It sounds like I'm going to say back to what I think the question is, which is like, should I quit medical school to pursue this fitness thing all in, or does it make more sense for me to forego some income today to have MD next to my name so that I could potentially make more in the future?

It's not about making more. I think it's, it's also about, you know, my vision would be to write books, speak around the world and be an expert in preventative health.

I've had to say all that without an MD. Wow. I mean, can you name me some of the big health experts that aren't MDs?

Not at the level that I've thought of, like Dr. Hyman or Peter Attia.

Okay. How many years left you have?

Oh, I'm just starting next year. So that would be the plan.

Yeah.

Do your parents want you to be an MD?

They don't care. After all the success I've had with the business. Well, before I started the business, I was pressured immensely, but after all the success where I'm in a place where with the assets I've accumulated gratefully, I don't have to do it, but it just, it's calling me. I've been volunteering in nonprofit space and with—

what are you so split about, dude? I mean, you're going to, you give what, 7 years or 6 more years and then you're an MD? I mean, if you, if you, if Dr. Attiya and The Amen Clinic and, you know, Huberman and all that stuff. Well, Huberman's a PhD, right? He's not an MD. And Tia, is he an MD or PhD?

He's an MD.

Yeah. He's an MD.

Yeah.

If it's like, I want to be a doctor, then go be a doctor. Okay. You know, like the trade is that you're going to give 6 years and you're going to under-earn for the next 6.

Uh-huh.

And then you'll earn more later.

How would you build a brand around it in the greatest, in the best way possible?

Being a doctor or being not a doctor?

Going down that path, would you document the whole journey? What would you do for like brand leverage in the long, like the best long-term way possible?

I mean, what's gonna matter more is that once you become a doctor, then that's like you're using the establishment as your brand credibility. Mm-hmm. So it's not a fair comparison if we're being real, right? It's not a fair comparison to say, uh, would me with an MD be more successful than me without an MD? It's more, would me with an MD starting with a 6-year not head start, whatever the reverse of that is, be more advanced than me with 6-year head start without an MD? So which of those do you think? But you don't wanna make money. I can't remember what was the whole thing. The, the goal isn't like making This is why, just so you guys know, my biggest pet peeve in the world is that because, and I'll tell you why, I'll tell you why. This decision is so hard for you because you have nothing to optimize against. You're like, solve my life decision. What do you want? Don't know. Hard to solve. Right? If you said, I want to make more money, cool. Easy leverage to pull. Make big number go up. Happy face. Right? If you're like, I want to have impact, then it's like, cool. Make the number of people that we're, you know, interacting with go up. Happy face. If it's, I'm just not sure what I want to do with my life, that's a you thing. Once you figure that out, like figuring out what to do is the hard part. Getting it's the easy part. And I think way more people get stuck in the just years of like, I'm not sure what to do. And it's because they're afraid of making a decision. They're afraid of the path not taken. And so if you think about what deciding is, decidere, it's Latin, right? Which means to cut off. And so the question is, which future do you want to cut off? When you're 85 and you look back, which one do you regret more?

Not doing MD path.

Done. Yeah. That's it.

Great.

So you just have to eat shit for 6 years and realize you're just not going to make as much and that's the trade. Cool. Thank you. Cool. Do it. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yes, sir.

Hi, Alex.

Thanks so much.

I just wanted to follow up to your question. You don't need to be an MD to do all that stuff. I'm an MD. I went to Harvard Medical School. There's nothing new. Before it was an indoctrination center, by the way.

Um, he knows that though.

Yeah.

He has his own thing. He's got, you gotta, you gotta do that for himself.

Yeah.

You don't need an MD.

Yeah.

Um, but my question is, um, so I, um, he's already making money.

Yeah, exactly. You're doing great. He's already making more than the starting salary working part-time. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, imagine if he worked full-time, right? That's his journey.

Yep. Um, so I, I, I run, um, a clinic that's, uh, does mostly telehealth and part of it is, uh, in-person, a highly technical procedure called TMS for depression.

Okay.

We do about $3.5 million in revenue. It's our 8th year. I started right after residency. I would like to be about $5 million in revenue. And what's stopping me is, first of all, the in-person procedure is a highly technical procedure. It requires a lot of training and not a lot of other referral sources know about it.

Right.

A lot of people are depressed, but nobody really think— people think it's ECT or you're getting electroconvulsive therapy. It's covered by insurance. We take all insurances.

Hmm.

So my, for, for that, it's finding referral sources, getting trust from clinicians who wanna refer or direct-to-consumer marketing.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and then for the telehealth portion, retention of clinicians who often quit and finding patients. So, uh, it's very hard to hire a nurse practitioner even who makes $190,000, $180,000, by the way, great career, a lot of money if you get right outta school. But when they leave, we are devastated cuz they have hundreds of patients and we have to hire again really fast. So that's limiting our growth just off the top of my head.

Okay. So what's stopping me is you would like more patients, not sure what source to get them from. You do have some issues where if staff leaves, that limits your supply and you wanna grow by 30%.

Yes.

Okay. So right now, can you handle more customers or not?

Yes.

Okay. How many more customers can you handle? Can you handle 30% more customers?

Yeah. Balancing act between like, I'm hiring 2 or 3 new clinicians a year.

Okay.

But we can never fill them and then they get angry and they want, they're like, I had, I signed up for full-time and you're only giving me half-time and we won't pay you per hour. So the way we compensate needs to probably be thought out.

Okay. Yeah. I don't have any MPs that work for me, but I would probably try and ask like, what do you want? What would make this opportunity compelling enough for you to stay? Because we want to just continue to invest in you. Mm-hmm. It makes it difficult for us to do that if we're not sure if the investment walks out the door within 12 months. Now that being said, someone stays 5 years, you won. You know what I mean? Like you had a pretty good, pretty good stay. So you are demand constrained. So it's basically you need to get more patients. If you get more patients, you can fill up the NPs. If you fill up the NPs, they'll be happy to be more likely to stay because they actually have a full roster and they're making as much money as they want.

Yeah.

Okay. So we have a demand constraint just from a focus perspective.

Okay.

So if you demand constraint, then you alluded to earlier, we can do, uh, you know, there's obviously, you know, there's an affiliate path. That's one way, which is you can find other providers who send you, send you business. Uh, but you're saying a lot of them don't know what you do. Obviously you could solve that with education and outreach. We could do direct to consumer.

The question is, the thing is, is that we do Google and Facebook ads currently.

Yeah. I mean, I like direct to consumer personally, just because most people in that space suck at advertising. So it's like not that hard. But the reason, so something of this is I'm going to go like underneath of your question to something that I think will be more valuable for you, which is you have the Harvard medical, et cetera, background. And you're probably a very bright guy, you have to take how you advertise down 100 fucking levels. I'm being super real with you.

Yeah.

There's a reason that I run every single piece of copy through Hemingway and I get it, you know, below 5th grade, ideally below 3rd grade reading level. Because if someone has to pause when you say a word, you've lost them because you're already onto the next word and they're like, what did that other word say? And then they're trying to think like, what does this mean? They're not listening to what they're, they're trying to decode rather than just immediately absorb. And so I'm, I've, the more I've been doing this, the more I'm an advocate of clear over clever. And for your marketing, you said, uh, not your marketing for, for the business. You said it's highly technical. It's very advanced. It's hard to train people up on this thing. It's hard to explain, uh, how this works. Insurance covers it. If I'm the consumer, I care about sad face, go happy face. Mm-hmm. Right. And I care about insurance covers. So if you say I'm Harvard medical doctor, I tell you, you sad face, I can make you happy face and insurance covers it. And it's more effective than talky talk, I'd be like, fuck yeah. Right? Yeah. And I think honestly, that's probably what's missing in the advertising and sales process, which is you need to strip away everything that you currently say that's medical and just speak to what the avatar, you know, the customer who is depressed, what they meet them where they're at. And I think that if you, if you can advertise in that way, any of these channels will work. But I do think that if I were you and swapping places, I'd probably go the ad channel personally.

Okay. How about telehealth? Is this something different there?

No, same, same.

Yeah.

Yeah. I would say local is, if I had to pick like what's the easiest button, local services that are high ticket is like, like it's hard to lose money. Okay. Because you have, because in person you have so much less sophistication in a local market and local competitors. And so it's like if you, if you study the stuff that we do, when we're competing on a global level and you put it in, you know, Kentucky, you crush everyone. It's like not even close. You just drop a pin on the map. You say, okay, you know, 25-mile radius. And like, you're just competing against everybody in the 25-mile radius. You're probably the only Harvard guy who's doing this in the 25-mile radius. So you literally—

I'm in Boston, unfortunately. So I have MGH, Brigham, Beth Israel. They're all there.

Whatever. Fuck it. It doesn't matter. So like, I stand by my original statement. But like, but the thing is, is here's the good news. Is that the thing that makes you great, right? You're very smart, did the medical stuff, all that is actually, is going to be everyone else's weak point, right? Because all of them, you probably know this, all of them have massive egos and all of them are like, well, every, if they can't understand me, then they're too dumb to be my patient. It's like, yeah, and you'll just be poor, whatever. So as long as you can just basically quiet that part of, you know, your brain and turn on the, how do I make this as simple as possible so they understand it? You'll still crush them and then they'll be upset and assume you're doing something wrong or you have somehow made money in a way that they would not prefer. Right. And so I will translate because you will start advertising and the more of my stuff that, you know, you go through and work with us on it, the better it will work and the more they will hate you because you're doing something that they don't do. And then they're just going to decide that morally they're superior to you because you've lowered yourself to advertise your business. Just as a prep. Thank you so much. Thank you. You bet. By the way, if you ever get like hateful comments, the easiest translation in the world is you live your life in a way that I would not prefer. It's just the easiest thing. Like that's how I've gotten over many, many, many, many negative comments. Like, I can't believe it's a, he lives his life in a way I would not prefer. Okay. You can live your life whatever way you want. Yes, sir.

Hey Alex. Uh, name's Zach. I sell, uh, property damage repairs. So emergency services for, uh, residential and commercial clients. So. Pipes break, wildfires, hurricanes. We do that kind of stuff. Do $13.5 million in revenue.

$2.5?

$13.5.

$13.5.

Yeah.

Nice.

Want to be at, well, $100 million is long-term vision. So that's the plan. What's stopping us right now is insurance covers most of our clients' bills. Right now, landscape in California is they're exiting, dropping a lot of coverage. We've noticed over this last year alone that a lot of clients that have property damage aren't being covered. So we're having to, we're going from being able to just start work to low-cost estimates and price bidding wars. I'm watching the landscape turn into kind of a red ocean in my my, my mind and I am wanting to launch, kind of get out of a red ocean, wanting to launch into a kind of Costco-like membership where we sell subscription access for low-cost services. Um, just as a way to try to swim uphill.

You mean like a home services membership?

Yeah. Home services membership. Yeah, exactly. As an alternative to insurance, as most people aren't, or less and less people are being covered. I guess where I'm going with it is I've heard a lot about focus in this conversation or in the last couple days, and I'm trying to figure out balancing focus versus needing to pivot when I have big questions about our industry and the viability of it.

Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across across all 8 functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you've got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, you've got HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but and narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, R-O-A-D map, roadmap. Are you all in California right now?

Majority of our work's in California. We travel a bit for, but that ends up being in Florida for hurricanes.

And so you're national?

We travel nationally, yeah, but I'd say 70% of our work is California.

Okay, got it. Are you growing this year?

No, this year we, we've taken a, a hit.

What was last year?

Last year was 13.5. This year it's a bit seasonal, but this year we're probably gonna be closer to 10.

Okay. What are margins?

Bottom line's 35%.

Okay.

I mean, do you have a lot of fixed costs or is it mostly variable so that like at 10 you'll just still do $3.5 million in profit and at 13 you did 5 or whatever, 4.5?

It's, yeah, a lot of variable cost.

Okay, got it. And so to restate the question, it's Should I change my business model from what I'm currently selling? And how do you get customers right now?

Right now, most of it's online. So like Google PPC.

So PPC is the primary source. Like people search, I have an emergency, blah, blah, blah.

Water break, you know, someone come help me.

Yeah.

They call us.

Got it. That's how you're getting customers now and you want to switch the whole business to the membership model.

Yeah, because we had customers orig— originally calling years ago, covered by insurance, price insensitive clients. Yeah. We could charge premium rates. Make our margins. Now without being covered, they're, you know, price shopping a lot more of their work. Our model isn't working well for that low cost.

So two possible paths of solution and, you know, changing the entire business is typically, is like, in my opinion, like the Armageddon button of like, let's blow the world up. So it's like, are there other things that we could do beyond that that's not blowing the whole business up? And I think the simple one is like, is there just another place I need to get customers? Who already have full coverage. Now, if you think that all carriers across the US are now changing all of their policies, then that's a systemic issue. So then it's like, okay, then maybe, maybe we have a model thing, or is there a way that we can test sales process so that we can just get, basically, if we have first contact, we can just close. And if we can do that, then it's like, okay, great. So we're going to do a blend of cash and insurance. We accept cash up front and then, and then we'll get insurance on the back. So the cash covers our cost to acquire and then, you know, basically we make our nut on the back. The difficulty of switching to what you were considering, just so that you can kind of see like, Okay, this woman's really cute. She seems nice. And then you get home and she has pictures of every guy she's ever dated on the wall and you're like, this is weird. And then she like keeps little clocks of their hair and you're like, that's not what I expected. So the issues with the, the model that you're getting into or the considering is like, if you think that it is hard and competitive to sell when part of it is being covered, it is even more competitive when none of it is being covered. And selling a one-time solution when someone is in pain is way easier than selling a recurring solution when someone's not in pain. And I have, I've seen a, I've seen a huge, huge number of businesses in the home services space, typically venture-backed that are trying to do this membership model. I've yet to see someone who has done so profitably and well. What I have seen is guys who will come in to fix the HVAC and then get people into memberships. That works especially well. And so I think the easiest like 1.0 test for you would be continue to respond to the increase that you're getting that are emergency-based, but then don't let that be the only sale. So once people, you know, once you do the work or whatever afterwards, it's like, hey, by the way, let's get to like, let's make sure that this doesn't happen to you again. And that would actually make a lot of sense. And if you can't close those people, then definitely don't switch the model. But I'll bet you that there is a very compelling offer that can be made on the backend of the emergency thing, because the thing is, it's emergency for you is there's like levels of emergency, but if it's Vegas and your AC goes out in the summer, it's a fucking emergency. Right. And so, um, in terms of sellability, it actually, the whole sales motion works the same way, which we can walk you through.

Cool. Thanks.

Yeah, you bet.

My name's Tyler. I'm the founder of Fluence, which is just an influencer relations agency. We do about a million a year in revenue, but we'd like to get to a million a month, so $12 million a year. I think the biggest thing that stops us is that we're trying to We're trying to get our name out there a little bit more. So a lot of what we've been doing has been kind of just behind the scenes. We do influencer relations services with marketing agencies, companies, like we just provide them with influencers that they need. And on the back end, we manage influencers as well. And I feel like we're struggling to have more companies find out who we are and what we do.

And having—

You should use influencers.

We're struggling to get influen— Well, yeah, right. And we're also struggling to have influencers find out who we are, what we do. And I think a part of it is just because If you're a company and you get a lot of success from us, you're not going to want to go tell other companies, obviously. And if you're an influencer, you're getting a lot of deals from us, you don't really want to go tell a bunch of other influencers as well. And so I think we're struggling a bit to just get our name out there a little bit more. And, um, I think that's our biggest constraint.

So you're domain constrained. Cool. So we just gotta like run ads. Why aren't you doing that?

I don't know.

Yeah. I just haven't thought about it. I think that would work pretty good. And all you have to Be the influencer in the ad, tell their story, run it to everybody else. And I'll bet you with targeting, you can get, you know, people over X followers, things like that. Because the nice, the thing is, is like, in a lot of ways, you have like the easiest offer in the world. You have following, you don't have money, I give you money. And then marketers, it's like, hey, you have no brand. We have people with brand and audience. Let's have fun. Like, I feel like the offer is like really straightforward. It's very easy to understand. You can say it quickly. It's something for almost nothing. Like, this is a really easy business to advertise. You just run ads.

And so I, right. And I guess one question, so I, we considered it, but obviously we were kind of thinking of the more better new sort of thing. And so the previous year we did about $250,000 in revenue and then we 4X that.

So you 4X. So what was, okay, so how did you get customers last year?

Just organically, really just word of mouth type of thing. So there were some influencers telling each other about us. Kind of.

4 times.

Yeah. But it was more that the influencers we worked with, we just figured out ways to make them more money.

Okay.

And so we were trying to like, I guess I'm just trying to figure out is if it, do we keep doing that? Do we go into ads? I guess it's just a weird.

Yeah. So with the business that you're in, like more word of mouth is tougher. Like if you were a software and we could just like know that what's our viral coefficient and be like, all right, this is what we need to optimize towards. And then we're, you know, we're blowing zillions of users through there. Then like, yeah, I'd be like, we can just compound off of word of mouth, especially if it's like a consumer product, right? Yours is B2B on both sides, kind of, which does make kind of word of mouth a little bit more difficult. I would lean towards like my initial gut is just immediately doing the ads thing. If there was a strategy that you were using to, to get the referrals, then obviously we would juice the hell out of that first. But I'm going to guess, this is just me guessing, just having seen a lot of companies similar, there's going to be a limited runway for that. It's just more likely you're going to have to develop a sales motion. That's, that's, um, that's to cold traffic.

And I think we can, I think we can make it happen because like on the million we made last year, we profited like $900,000 or so.

So amazing.

We can make it happen.

Okay.

All right. Thank you then. Yeah, you bet.

Hi everyone. I'm Shaggy. I—

Shaggy.

Yes.

All right.

See, you won't forget that.

Yeah. Scooby-Doo. Let's go.

My real name is Shariella, but Shaggyella.

Yeah.

People go with Shaggy. So I sell beautiful custom porcelain veneers to anyone with healthy teeth. So we don't do dentures. It's like the smile makeovers. Uh, last year we did $2.4 million, and I would like to be at $5 million revenue for each location across the nation.

How many locations do you have?

We have 2 right now.

Okay.

Our second one is struggling, so I, I know Alex, like, you— I was like laughing so hard because you're like, oh yeah, the— we just have to open up the third. And I want to open up my third here in Vegas.

I know. Right. And so it's like if the first one was here and the second one and then this one came up a little bit, now we're less profitable, then the answer is definitely to add a third.

Yeah, it totally makes sense, right? I know I'm crazy. So originally, like, you know, I came in here because I was like, I just need to find the perfect team to get me like across the nation, right? We're going to open up so that way people have someone that they can trust and then doctors don't hate their lives because they're changing people's lives instead of just drilling, filling, you know, drilling and filling. Solve.

Yeah. Well, yeah.

And so that's originally what I came here for, and now I'm focused on revenue. Oh, so now I have to figure out how can we increase the revenue? More Google Ads, more LinkedIn posts. Yeah. Do I become the Alex of cosmetic dentistry? You know? Yeah.

Yeah.

So first off, great, you know, kudos on focusing on making more money. For a model like yours, it's absolutely a, it's a, it's a mousetrap thing. So there's going to be a brand. So you being the face of the brand, I don't think it's a bad idea. I think that's fine. But most of the people who I, who actually really succeed in that space are, they're basically doing very regular collab posts with people who are prominent, semi-prominent, um, showing off their, their results. You, if you want, you know, offering some sort of discount in order for people to do that, you might be able to just get away with it anyways and not offer a discount because some people are very happy with it. I don't know the space as well. I don't know the sensitivity in your space to showing off the smile. In the plastics world, some people, depending on the plastic surgery, you know, some women aren't like as apt. Obviously it's co-ed for what you're doing, but yeah, collaboration posts in terms of building out the brand long-term. But in terms of increasing revenue, you gotta get more customers cuz I'm guessing average case is what, $20,000, something like that?

Yeah. $15,000 to $50,000.

Okay.

Yeah.

So, you know, when I hear $2.5 million, I'm like, okay, so you did 100-ish cases last year. So that's 2 a week between each location. So it's 1 person per week per location. Feels super slow.

And we can do it like every day, right?

Yeah. So you have like, It's like instead of being like, okay, I wanna get across the nation. It's, I think the obje— how long does it take to do one of them? A full day?

Just 4 hours.

4 hours.

Can you do 2 in one day?

Yes.

Okay. So you have the potential to do 10 a week, right? So you could be at a million a month per location. So you have $25 million just within your existing capacity and you're doing $2.5 million. So you have a 10x without increasing any capacity. Like when you're like, I wanna open a third location, it's like, for why? It's like, we, it's like, let's go from, you know, $2.5 million to $25 million with the 2 we've got. And until we're at 25, why bother? Like, let's just milk this. 'Cause fundamentally all we have to believe is that you can get 10 people in a local market to say they want to fix their teeth all cash, correct?

Yes.

Okay. So you just have to have a local ad strategy and you continue to make the content. 'Cause it's, it's gonna be a combo. It's gonna be a combo. 'Cause the brand is gonna be for sure a huge source. You know, Instagram DMs, people saying like, oh my God, I've been following your page for however long. Just making sure that in your stories you're regularly doing CTAs so that you can, you know, siphon that. The next thing is that people who follow you, you should immediately have your staff DM them. Just like a, a quick triage question. So right now, how many people do you have on Instagram follow you?

6,700.

Great. Do you know how many you get a month?

No.

Okay. Worth looking at.

Okay.

You can find out in exactly 10 seconds. So 10 seconds from now when you know what that number is, let's just say that you're getting 100 followers a month net. Basically those 100 followers, that's 3 a day. You just have your front desk. You know, DM them all and say, hey, 3 new people every day. Are you here just to like look at the smiles or because you're actually thinking, considering this, you know, for yourself? And right there you just created yourself 100, you know, leads a month. Maybe 1 out of 4 says, yeah, I'm kind of interested. Cool. Well, there's 25 qualified leads per month or 25, you know, interested leads. So it's like, okay, well there's 25 consults a month. That's just from, that's like, boom, there's that. Right. Sorry, I was just watching you take notes to make sure I was—

Yeah, sorry. No, yes.

Thank you. So basically, the great thing about your business is that it's easy as shit to advertise and 'cause it's so visual, right? It's so, you know, like it's literally like sad face, happy face. Like it, it works, right? It also is so easy to do collaborations with. And the, the other thing that's amazing is that the margins are insane. And, and the other thing, if, but wait, there's more. Everyone you compete against is not a business person and sucks at business. So it's like, my God. So yeah, all that to say, yes, go from 2.5 to 25. Don't open up a third location. We need to increase demand. One of them is you can milk your Instagram way more by doing collaborations, you know, doing regular CTAs and then having people who follow you, DMing them for to see if they're interested. That's like level one. And the second is getting the ads going, which you need to do, and we're happy to walk you through.

What's CTA?

Call to action.

Thank you. Sorry, I do know that. And then the other, as far as the collaborations, do that with my personal page or with my business page?

You can do all three.

Because I do have other doctors.

You can do all three.

Okay.

Because you can do, I think, I think, did anyone know how many? I know you can do at least for sure you can do 3. You can do 5. Yeah, you can do 5.

You can do up to 5.

You can do your, your doctors, you, the location, and the person.

Okay.

Do it all.

Cool.

Have a dance.

Thank you.

Yes, absolutely.

Uh, yeah, so my name's Dominique and I'm with the Deep Pockets team. Um, we essentially, yeah, we've essentially made $20 million in revenue across all our different companies. So we have quite a small, um, core team that kind of sits in the company.

The company's called Deep Pockets.

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

But we've, we've started like a bunch of different businesses.

It's a holding company.

We have an umbrella company called Swaggy Inc, but then we just start different businesses that we essentially have been doing really well in.

Okay. So you guys start companies and incubate them. Yes.

Yeah.

Right now, Deep Pockets, this is our financial literacy program where we just sell educational, um, content to traders and anyone who wants to like branch out for that, for forex. But we have a small core team, and what I was essentially asking, for any business other than the CEO and like the founder, what would be the 3 core members or roles that any business would need in order to succeed? Because right now we do have some employees that kind of are flexible in what their roles are, and they're looking at like just being a key asset to the team, but don't have an actual job description or name for that?

The first thing I'll do is I'll just kind of challenge the question, which is that it's not like, what are the 3 key people? So I could just be like, I'll reject the premise. It's more so what are the functions, what things must occur in a business and whether one person does them or 20 people do them, these things have to happen. At the most foundational level, you have to have somebody who can promote, right? Someone who can advertise, let people know about the stuff right now. That also technically includes conversion. So that one person who goes and gets customers, The other person is the person who builds the thing, right? Who's the one who's at head of product or the service, making sure that it continues to be exceptional. And then the third kind of function is who's running the day-to-day, who's operating, who's leading the team, who's continuing to basically build the culture, who's the one who's, you know, recruiting the people in, setting the standards for how the company runs. Now there's the things that have to occur. One person can do all three of those things. It's difficult, hard to find, easier to find three people. Sometimes you find six people. who can do those things and they have, you know, varying degrees. Like I can build product stuff, I can also advertise and I can operate to a degree, right? Operation's not my strongest suit. That's where Layla's, you know, a G, right? And she can also obviously advertise. She has multiple million followers that she has and she also like can do product stuff, but she probably, if I were to pick two of those three buckets, she's probably more advertising and ops with ops being the primary. And so if you're asking the question of like, who do we need to hire for each of our portfolio companies? I would just say, where's the deficiency with each of those companies? And does that deficiency tie to the constraint of the business? So if you're demand constrained and no one in the company knows how to advertise, that makes sense. If you are demand constrained and someone, I'm sorry, you're not demand constrained and no one knows how to advertise, who cares? It's not the constraint today. So we still always start with, are we supply or demand constrained? And if once we know which one we are, 'cause you really, can for the most part just be one of the two. We basically ignore everything else on the other side. And until we have a, you know, once we've cracked demand enough that we now are, have supply constraints, then we fix supply and then we ignore demand. And basically there's a very, there's a cadence, kind of a rhythm to it of alternating between the two. And so Layla and I joke, which is like, one of us is always killing ourselves. Never both of us at the same time. Same time. So it's like, I'm like, oh God. She's like, Hey, we need to, you know, fill up these calendars. I'm like, all right, I'll, you know, I'm gonna go drum my, drum my whatever and then get, you know, get these calendars filled. And then after that I'm like, we're good. You know, great. All right. And then I just hang out and then she's like, oh my God, we need more people to deliver so we can expand the calendar availability. Right. And so it's really gonna, it's gonna be normal that you alternate between those things.

It's a little bit of a drama, but, um, I've asked two other reps and they said, you know what, this is Alex question.

Oh, great.

Okay. So my name's Annie Hernandez.

The nasty ones. Okay, great.

I'm here on behalf of my husband that we, he owns, he's a CEO licensed for Capital Direct Funding, a lending company.

Okay.

Right. So I've actually pulled up every trick I can to get myself here.

Okay.

Because he went to your acquisition and he was spilling information. I love listening because I support him. I didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. So, so then I said, okay, so what I want to get into on this, I like this, Alex. So we stalked, I had to stalk you and listen to you for 6 years with Leila. I'm sad that she's not here, but it's okay. You're, you're still just as—

I appreciate it. So, well, I take the credit. She's better, but it's all good.

So initially, the problem is, which I asked, his dad's a problem, and he is too, because I said, well, what happens if you die, right? Um, what am I going to do? He's like, well, CDF will go to you. Hopefully you are going to be licensed to take it over. His dad was like, no, because you're a woman, you should stay home, take care of the kids.

What's wrong with that?

Well, because he grew up with different— he grew up with different culture. Um, my mom, we came here, worked hard. My mom was like, hey, you know what, women can work and keep their job and keep their money, we're staying here.

Okay.

Um, so I've worked all my life until I met him. I was like, oh, I don't have to work, but I still worked. Uh, just made it on my own way. Um, now actually you're gonna probably see my father-in-law. He will be here next month.

So I'm in the full family.

Let them know. So initially the problem right now is we found out my husband's the risk man because he does too much and no one can do his job. I said, so we need to automate a lot of things. And most of the time I cannot out-speak him because he'll be like, well, you don't know anything about the job. You're right. But I understand when I look at someone, they're not doing what they're supposed to.

Yeah.

How do I— so basically from $130,000 a month, um, I was able to cut his expenses down to $75,000 because we fired 5 people.

Awesome. One of them was his sister because, um, Just one by one, you're just taking 'em out.

You know what I mean? No. So I mean, I don't know what's a nice way of saying embezzlement. So I found that out and for the last 3 years, and believe me, did she lie about it? She blamed the dad.

So she, so it's fraud and embezzlement.

Little, little ones.

Yeah.

They're, they're like kind of doing this blending, this toxic relationship going on.

Yeah.

So we're like, so most of the part, his dad's a closer, so the bottleneck is him. You know, the, so we, we had no problem getting leads in. The problem is we have problem closing them.

Okay. Father-in-law. Yeah. He's not good at closing.

He is good at closing.

Okay.

The problem is we just had to get the deal in front of him, which he does it so old school because I have to print out everything.

Sure.

Right? But the problem is the leads that get to him are good leads. They're clients waiting to help me. I'm give you my money.

Yeah.

Take it. Right? But he's still choosing out of those, right? Mm-hmm. The easiest one or whatever that he vibes with. So the problem now is that I said, well, Why not hire somebody, right? And we already solved that 'cause I had this whole, my husband's freaking out right now. He's like, you're, he's probably gonna say I'm stupid. I'm like, probably. So I said, don't let your dad hire the person. Let me, even though I don't know what exactly I'm hiring.

Okay.

But according to Tim and a few other reps, okay. Hey, why don't you look, uh, ChatGPT, our life. Grok, Claude, everything you think of, we use it. Find, interview 10 people and then I will know what the job is. Why don't I hire someone through that?

That's good advice.

Right? Find somebody to assist your dad to put it in front of him. Then the problem now, he's like, well, what if, right? What if he comes here?

Uh-huh.

And he has this whole idea because I'm not gonna present to him. He was totally against me coming, by the way. So that's another thing too. I got my husband to get life insurance.

Yeah.

'Cause he's like, okay, so if I die, you have this. I'm like, well, what about the company?

Yeah.

Oh, it's gonna go to Annie. His dad didn't like it. So now I said, I didn't do his laundry for a whole week.

Modern warfare.

He had no underwear. And he said, you know, I said, I need to come to this.

Yeah.

So we hired a nanny part-time. I'm here, now he's there, everything's all taken care of.

I'll tell you, probably one of the highest ROI decisions you've made.

So now is, if he comes, there's the ideal of what if my father-in-law comes and takes everything he can and tries to create his own thing and try to cut me and my husband out.

So do you just need a closer?

We built capital. We basically scaled Capital Direct. So we have no problem income, but it's just him.

Yeah.

And I was like, why not?

So your father-in-law is the problem and we'll meet him and he'll have his story. It'll be exciting. But, but we'll make this, we'll make this a 3-parter. Yeah.

So another thing that I realized when I looked, I'm like, okay, scaling is easy. I can scale my brother's gym. And that's something that I've done on the side and I stepped away. Okay. But yeah, so I, wanna know if I can—

What do you do?

A little bit, because I wanna help scale my brother's gym, pull my brother away because I trust him. Mm-hmm. He's not gonna try to do me wrong like his sister.

Yeah.

Did.

What about apples and trees? Mm-hmm. No, just saying, something to think about. Apples falling far from the tree. Sorry, keep going. Yeah.

Yeah. So I've been the backdrop of my husband's voice to like, hey, why You know, and I use the Ironman thing.

What was your first, what was your first name? Annie. Annie. Okay. So we've got Annie, we've got bro, right? We've got dealing sis, right? We've got hubs, right? We've got father, right? Father-in-law. Right. In-law. Right. Okay. So this is, this is our, this is our family org chart. Okay. So we've got Jim here.

Uh-huh.

And then we've got Capital Direct over here, right? Yes.

Okay.

Got it. This makes more money than that, right?

Yes. That's what's sustaining our life right now and our lifestyle.

Okay. And all your father-in-law does is sell.

He closes.

Yeah.

He, yeah.

He doesn't even work the leads. He just gets presented the cherry-picked leads.

Yes. We give him the deal.

Yeah.

And he just looks at it and underwrites it the way we want to so that we make and help these people.

Sure.

And that's it.

If you had somebody who could do what your father-in-law does, and maybe it's two people who can do what your father-in-law does, would that grow the business?

Possibly.

I mean, I don't know. Well, you say that he only cherry-picks the leads that he vibes with. So what about all the other leads?

They either, so we, the, the, the system that we're using to scale now is approaching notice of sale and notice of default people. So, but they have a limited time. So by the time they get to those other deals, either they lost their home or they foreclosed or they just took the deal.

To me it sounds like you need more closers. If I have something that's timely, you need availability.

I need more. My father-in-law, the problem is he's not willing to hire and pay that because my father-in-law acts like he's a CEO, but he's not.

Right.

Yeah.

So that's where I'm trying to like, so did your husband hire your father-in-law? No. So Capital Direct was originally my father-in-law's company.

And your husband bought it from your father?

No, we came in, right? My husband came in to fix all the problems around it.

Yeah.

And instead of like netting, like how they made, I think my father-in-law was like making under $200,000 to $300,000 a year. Yeah. We've made it now over like $1.3 million.

Yeah.

Heard.

So, so are your names on the documents or is it 100% your father-in-law's?

It's 100% my husband's.

Cool. Wait, huh?

It's 100% my husband's 'cause everything is under his license ownership. That's why he's afraid that if I step in, I'm gonna take everything. Yeah. And I said, to me it was as a family, 'cause my core family, family core values are different. I said, well, I still need you, dad.

Yeah.

I still need you to run the company because I don't know, How to do this.

So, so actually it's funny you say this cuz we had young girl, his daughter, similar situation. Father had been running the business for 35 years. She helped like 4x the business, but the father's getting in the way of getting, you know, what, what needs to happen, you know, going forward. Super old school, you know, all employees steal, blah, blah, blah, that kind of perspective. Right. And so the advice I gave is this, is that you are in an ultimatum situation, which is there's gonna be a trade that has to get made. Which is you either trade the growth that you want and you basically stay in the existing construct, which is going to probably be frustrating, but maybe you'll just accept it and be like, well, how many years is, how old is he?

50s.

Oh, he's got time.

Early 50s.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know, I know.

Yeah. That's another thing Mark said. If he's like 78 or whatever, he's like, wait it out. Wait it out. You know what I mean? Yeah.

I was like, he's still, yeah.

No, path one is you wait for 30 years until, you know, he decides to move on. Right? The other alternative is that you just have to confront it, which means that you have to say like, if you don't, we will.

And what do we do with investors that they were both like, like our, like you look at our website, it's really stupid 'cause it's like, I tell 'em this 'cause I was like, oh, we value, oh, we're a family-owned business. I'm like, no, we're fucking not. Because you guys are like fighting, like his dad's creating an issue. That hasn't even happened yet.

Yeah.

And I was like, you're assuming that my husband already died and you're not even gonna help me.

Yeah.

And I didn't even say I was gonna kick him out. I assumed he was gonna sure stay and, you know, do all that. So I, I don't know.

Well, I'll have, I'll, I'll get your father-in-law's side of the story, you know, when he comes. But he's like, dude, you Alex Springer over here.

He is the guy, he's the bullshit of the bullshit. He's not.

So, you know, I've, you know, heard things before, so I, I get it. Fundamentally, you have all the leverage. You have the license and you have the ownership.

Yeah.

So everything that exists in this company is your choice.

Husband's choice.

It's your husband's choice. If your husband tomorrow said, I like, fundamentally your husband has to decide whether a short-term rift in the relationship with his father is a sufficient price for the growth that you'd like to have in the business. That's the price. If you think that the relationship will be permanently damaged forever, Then the follow-up question to that is, how valuable is a relationship that gets damaged like that forever from a one-time thing? I, this is also unpopular from just being real, but some people, you know, a lot of people are like family above everything. I think it's people who love you above everything. Very different. And I define love by what someone's willing to give up in order to maintain a relationship. And so what am I willing to sacrifice? And so one of these things you will love more than the other. Like, do you love the the future, the life that you would like to have, or do you want to maintain the relationship? There's no right answer here. I'm just saying, like, some people will say, I really, this is more important. I never want to risk that. Then fine. It just means that there's a trade, but you, like, I understand. I know we could go round and round on this for longer. That's not the point. The crux of this is that there's a hard conversation that has to be had with your father. It's probably your husband who has to do it. Right. And that conversation is gonna go one of two ways. It's our way or the highway. I'm being real. Seriously. Layla fired her sister.

Okay.

Right? Super hard. Super fucking hard. And you already did it once. Right now you had cause, different, right? But like, it's hard. Like, this is the, like, the hard part about business is the people. It's not, it's always the people.

Yes. Okay. I think I have an idea.

No, but for real, you gotta, like you said, it's not me, it's him.

Yeah. Like I, I think to me, I, I believe in my husband 100%. Yeah. He said jump. I said jump. Let's go.

Yeah.

Let's see what happened. I think he can start over the company and create a whole new Ironman suit. Um, the problem is the tension between that and the investors and the borrowers.

That honestly solvable investors and borrowers solvable. They just wanna find a way to get their money back and you can find that way. Also, when you're an investor, you take on risk. That's part of the game. The crux of this is the conversation that your husband has to have with your dad about how things must happen, which might just be, we need to hire more salespeople and we're going to do that. And I'm going to do that, period. You can choose to be offended by that and leave. You can choose not to and support us in the growth that we're trying to do to set up our entire family. Which father would you prefer to be?

The one where we work together.

Right. I'm saying that's what I would say to him.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, I will ask him that after he comes here. Yeah.

But that's fundamentally, that's the question is what type of father do you wanna be? Weird. 'Cause the thing is, is you can do, we are doing this. I have the license, I own the company, we're doing this. And you have to approach these as we've made the decision, not we're thinking about and we're considering. We've made the decision. That's how you start this. We've made the decision to hire another salesperson. We're doing this because we wanna grow this company. For our entire family. The question that I have for you is, would you prefer to be the father who leaves out of being upset for this, or the one who's gonna support us so we can make this a 3-generation thing?

I don't know. I feel like he's— my husband's idea that he threw at me right before I came up here was, what if he says, yeah, I wanna work together as a supportive husband.

Yeah.

Or supportive father, but still go do his little thing in the corner.

Well, it depends on how much of a wall you can put in that corner.

Yeah.

And how many resources? It's like, yeah, that's totally your corner. You can't call anybody. Yeah. It's like, great. Then if you wanna go paint pictures in the court, you can do that. Just don't call anybody who we pay to actually do the rest of the stuff.

Thank you so much.

You bet.

Thank you.