How To Make Money So Fast It Feels ILLEGAL | Ep 789

The last 3 companies I founded and sold grew so fast it felt illegal. UseAllen got to $1.2 million per month at the end of the first year. Prestige Labs got to $1.5 million per month by the end of the first year, and Gym Launch got to over $2 million per month by the end of the first year. And I'm going to show you the strongest growth levers I used to get these results so that you can too. Let's start with the first one, which is nobody knows you exist. So here's what most people think when they think about their given marketplace. So let's say you're a local dry cleaner. All right, you see that you're advertising on Facebook and so you see you have the whole pie and so you're happy. So that's just you. Then you have you plus one other person. Then all of a sudden you've got half of the pie. Then it's you plus 3 other people in the marketplace and now you feel sad. But the reality is the marketplace is significantly bigger than you ever give it credit for. There are so many humans on earth. And so this is what it looks like in reality. You're actually only advertising on 1 of 4 different methods and the way that you're doing it is only on 1 slice of the medium and then within that you have your tiny little quarter that you're taking up. And so the marketplace has so many different ways they can communicate using each of the methods of communication. So for example, if I'm talking about content, I'm like, oh, there's somebody else in my marketplace who's marketing on Instagram. Okay, cool. So there's that, but isn't there also other platforms you can do it on? And don't you think that maybe there's enough people in your marketplace to satisfy your business? Probably. The amount of times that I would have a gym owner, for example, who'd come to me and say, hey, there's this other guy in the marketplace who's now running Facebook ads. I'm like, you only need 200 people in your gym to be incredibly profitable. And right now, last time I checked, you've got 1 million people in your city. And so you just have to get 200 of them. And so if there's 10 others or 100 other gyms that are advertising your area, even on the same platform, you still just need to get 0.00002% of that audience to just come to you. And so you think that as these people enter, you're losing market share, but the reality is you're this tiny little speck and most people don't even know you exist. Now the reason that I talk about advertising more so much is that advertising is a boom. And if you're like, what's a boom? It's actually a term that I started using internally for our business, which is a business order of magnitude change. Fundamentally, if you think about a business, there are many things that you can optimize. You can increase your close rate by 10%, you can increase your, Your conversion rate on your opt-in page by 10%. You can increase your email follow-up. All of those things are optimizations. And so the problem is with optimizations, you can only go to 100%. They're capped. But with advertising, you can in a very real way 100x the amount of people who find out about your business. And one of the keys that small business owners get stuck in is they get in this little optimization mousetrap where they're like, I need to move this. Oh, I was at 10.1 to 1 and now I need to be at 10.2 to 1. It's like, dude, just get 100 times the leads and your business will grow. And if you're under $1 million in revenue, I can virtually guarantee that basically everyone on earth doesn't know you exist. And so the first 4 hours of every day should be dedicated to solving that problem and going from obscurity to being aware. And so we do that by doing the Core 4 More, which is you have to do more outreach, cold or warm, you have to make more content, or you gotta run ads. But the thing is, is you don't need to do all of them. You pick one, you go all in, and that's what you spend your first 4 hours every single day on. So the next growth principle is instead of trying to beat your competition, shrink your competition. What you want to do is overwhelm the marketplace so that you drown them out. You want to be so loud that no one else can hear them. You shrink them into irrelevance by comparison. There's two ways that you can become the tallest building, right? You can knock everyone else down or you grow so that they become smaller in comparison to you. And so everyone sees their little building and thinks, oh no, I should knock all my competitors down, right? When in reality, all you need to do is build the biggest absolute building there, and the thing is, is that you're going to block out the sun, and your shadow will be so big that no one can even see these people. And let me tell you a story about this. When I launched my last book, $100 Million Leads, I spent a tremendous amount of time and effort across, I think at the time we had 7-ish million subscribers, or, you know, audience size across all platforms. I emailed a bunch, I made a ton of content, we spent money on ads, we did outreach, we had affiliates going. We had all these different channels going to get as many people as possible to the launch. And when I walk around Las Vegas, because I live here, I will usually get stopped about 3-ish times when I do about a 60-minute walk. Mind you, I walk in a crowded area, so it's not like I'm just walking in the neighborhood, 'cause then that would just be weird. Anyways, and of course you should be recognized by your neighbors. But I'll get stopped by 3 people, and every time for the month leading up to the launch, I would be like, hey, You go to the book launch? 19 times out of 20, the people would look at me and be like, "What's the book launch?" And I was like, "How do you not know about this?" Right? But it was this wonderful reminder that most people, when you get tired of your advertising, most people don't even know your first name. If you have deluded yourself into thinking that you should only have to say something once and somehow everyone in the entire world has heard you say that thing, you are kidding yourself. You need to become a master of variety in terms of how you can re-say the same thing in different ways. Taking the natural extreme, there's this fallacy that most small business owners think, and myself included, for years I thought this, was that repetition in and of itself is somehow bad. So let me explain. There's probably people on the internet— I personally follow a bunch of philosophy accounts. Most of the philosophers are dead. And yet I still love to see the quotes they have because they remind me of the things that I want to follow, the way that I want to live. And it's not like, oh, another Seneca quote. Does this guy never give up? It's like, he's dead. He hasn't come up with a new quote in 2,000 years. And yet I still like seeing the quotes even though I know I've seen them before. And oftentimes you serve that role for your audience more than anything else. We think that it's like, oh, I've said this one thing, therefore they have all changed all their behavior immediately and they never need to learn that again. But the biggest lesson that I've learned is that people need to be more reminded than they need to be taught. And in the off chance that you've received hate or you have a competitor who's talking crap and it happens, this counts double. So instead of trying to beat them or prove them wrong, you only have two options. Option one is you grow so big that no one can even hear them. The alternative is that you kill them with kindness, which is that you do not beat them by proving that you are right, you beat them by proving that you are kind. And then by comparison, they will look bad. I can— only thing I can tell you about having dealt with plenty of it in my day is that on the occasion that I do choose to respond to hate, I try to respond with kindness. Someone can just absolutely tear me one and just say, "This guy sucks. He's terrible," whatever. I will then usually say, "Hey, you're right. I'm a super flawed person. That being said, it seems like you've developed a big audience here and they seem to like you, and so congrats on your success." When someone sees that, it's very hard for everyone to be like, "Man, that guy sucks." It's just like now if I were to try and list out all the points, all I do is invite more back and forth, which I don't want to do and it's a waste of my time. Instead, you start all hate responses with, "You are right," because it's all they want to hear, and there's really nothing else to say after that. Eminem has responded to hate in two ways publicly that I absolutely love. The first is that when Will Ferrell confronted him about some things that Afrojack had said to him, he said, "Hey, Afrojack's been talking trash. Do you have anything to say about it?" Eminem just said, "Who?" Then Will Ferrell repeated the statement, and he just looked at him and he was like, "Who?" And he was like, "Okay, yup, that's what I thought." And so the first is, I'm so big I can't hear him. The secondary is that you kill them with kindness, right? So you either grow so big that no one can see them or hear them, or you meet them where they're at on a different game, which is you play on kindness and grace. And so in 8 Mile, Eminem tries to claim all of the flaws that he has so that no one else can say anything. And so I get hit on a lot, not like that, for talking about working a lot. People are like, that's not healthy. And of course I try to put disclaimers in every video. I'm like, do whatever you want. I get hit on for like, oh, I think he's trying to make money. Duh, I try to say it all the time, but people assume that I am trying to hide this from my audience. Of course I'm trying to make money. I'm in business, that's the whole point I do this. And that way, if I always start with I'm here to make money, when I do something nice, then people are like, "Oh, well that was nice of him," rather than me claiming that I have to be this super kind whatever person, then when I try and make money, people are like, "Ah," shake their finger at me, like it's not good. I try and learn from Eminem and just take all of the negatives that I can think that somebody would possibly say and then just claim them as my own, because yes, we are all flawed and none of us are perfect, and so for some reason, we are bothered when someone else points out our imperfections that we would readily state ourselves we know we have deficiencies. If I had one thing that I wanted my life to represent, it's do what you want, but don't complain about what you've got. So if you're not willing to do the things to get what you want, don't complain that you don't have 'em. You know, in this particular instance, it's like, could I have tried to say, hey, you know, we make your annual revenue every other day? I could say that. I could say that our goals are not the same. $1 billion is not the same as $1 million, right? It'd be the same as you making $200 a month at a lemonade stand versus somebody who's doing $20,000 a month. To give a proportional comparison. So of course the effort that I have is outsized. And so what's interesting is that oftentimes hate, if you boil it down, comes down to, "I do not prefer the way this person does things. I have a different preference." And it's like, "Great," right? Like, "I make money one way. He makes money another way, and therefore he is wrong." It's like, "No, you just do the way you want, which is awesome because you do it your way and they do it their way, and the people who are attracted to that will do that, and the people who are attracted to you will do yours, and great." I mean, of course there's engagement baiting and things like that because, you know, people, people want to get views and all that. And I respect that. I get it. But big picture, I think you can't take it— you can't take it personally because whenever I fall into that little trap, I think to myself, I'm a relatively developed monkey that is sitting on a little blue marble in a solar system that's in one of a billion galaxies, and I'm worried about some screen that has words on it of a made-up language that we had in the last 1,500 years of how we communicate face noise to each other. When I think about that, I think, you know, this would be pretty silly for me to like ruin a day over. So the third big growth lever, and this one's massive, is clear, not clever. Alright, so what do I mean by that? Well, when I looked at the highest converting ads that I had run, and I do this pretty regularly, I look for different components. Sometimes I'm like, what's the hook? Sometimes I'm like, what's the color scheme? What's the visuals that are being displayed in the first however many seconds? In this one particular pass, I just looked at the grade level of the language that was being spoken. And the reason I looked at that, it was, I think it was, you know, 1 or 2 election cycles ago, I had heard this research study that had stated that the president who spoke in the lowest grade language was the one that won the election over and over again. And when I heard that, I see presidential elections fundamentally as massive brand campaigns. I see that as they were able to communicate a message to a higher percentage of the population because they lowered the barrier to entry of comprehension, meaning more people got what they said. And so when I hear that, I thought, man, I like to use all these big fancy college words and no one knows what I'm saying. And so all I do is feed my ego, not my bank account. I made one of my big marketing rules: clear, not clever. And so you want to take whatever communication is, look at your landing pages, look at your ad copy, look at the words you're saying in your content and say, does a third grader understand this? And the point that some people try to make as a counter is like, Oh, I don't want to talk down to my audience. No. When you speak in a more broken-down manner, you help the experts understand it more easily and you help the beginners understand it for the first time. And so it's not that experts are all of a sudden saying, oh no, I don't believe that. 'Cause listen, we get tons of very big companies that come to acquisition.com for investment and the guys who run those companies, very intelligent. I try to make my videos in a way that people can understand them because who do I prove? When I use a big word and then all of a sudden 3/4 of the audience can't understand it. And if the point of me making these videos is to make real business education accessible for everyone, part of making it accessible is making it interesting, making it fun, and making it comprehensible, which is just a fancy word for understandable. What you guys don't see behind the scenes is that I will typically self-edit. And so I said distilled earlier in a sentence, and then I said broken down for experts, is because I said distilled and I was like, I have to use a different word. Broken down. And then I said comprehensible, and then I said fancy word for understandable. And so I try to constantly catch myself in this, and it's also made me a significantly more effective leader. So if I'm trying to communicate with my team, I'm not trying to say big words. I don't want to impress them. I want to change what they do. It's a great litmus test to show whether you actually understand what you say you understand, because if you can explain it to a third grader— and this is Richard Feynman who said this, this famous physicist— he said, if you can explain it to a third grader, then you understand it. If you you don't, and you need to understand it better so that you can break it down. And so the broader the audience, the broader the analogy, and the simpler the language. I'll give you an example. One element of this is the, is the gray language of, uh, of the words you use. The second is what visuals or stories you use to depict them. If I'm talking to mechanics, I might use an analogy where I relate something they understand, cars, to something they might not understand, a business, right? If I wanted to teach a specific concept. If I was talking to the same I was trying to teach the same concept, but I was teaching it to realtors, then I would probably use a house analogy. If I was teaching to baseball people, I would probably use a baseball analogy, right? If you have a narrowed down audience, you will increase comprehension by using analogies that they all understand. If you're talking to a broader audience, then you need to have a broader slice of the market, probably a more human experience that all of them have. So if I'm talking to everyone, I might talk about food, I might talk about sleep, I might talk about driving, right? Because most people do that, assuming I'm not talking to children. You have to match the analogy to the history of learning from the people that you're trying to communicate to. And this is what takes your marketing and your advertising and puts it on steroids. And to put this to the test, this is something you can do right now. Look at whatever emails you send, run them through a reading, a reading grading level up, keep working on it until it's below 5th grade minimum, 3rd grade if you're awesome, and then send it. I did this to our email follow-ups and had a 50% increase in conversion. I didn't say change anything about what I said, but I saw that as I got 50% more people to understand. Because the goal here is to decrease the friction of comprehension. So if we think about the elements of value: speed, ease, ease, time delay, these elements are all impacted by complexity. And so something complex takes longer to understand, it takes more effort, right? And it's harder, right? And so instead what we wanna do is say, okay, how do I make it easy and faster? Okay, well then I'll just speak in a way that everyone understands. The next massive growth lever is proof over promise, all right? And so what this means is that in my earlier days, I would spend so much time on my promise. Right? I wrote a whole book on promises, which is basically offers, right? And I would obsess about the offer, but then the offer is super important, but the only thing that's more important is proof. All right, so let me give you two hypothetical examples. Let's say that you've got Business One that's selling Thing One and Business Two that's selling Thing Two. Well, let's say they still compete for more or less the same audience, and Business Two says, we'll do X, we'll do Y, we'll do Z, we'll do W, and we'll guarantee X, Y, and Z. Right, and you look at their reviews and they've got a 5-star rating and they've got 1 review. The other company says, "Will do X," and they've got 11,382 5-stars and they've got a 4.7. Who do you buy from? This guy, obviously. But why? This guy has a better promise because you believe this guy. And so you wanna have proof up to your eyeballs. Proof is your single highest priority as a business owner or marketer or advertiser or promoter for your business. It is the one thing that you prioritize. Before I enter any new space, launch a new product, the first thing that I do is try and get beta users. I get people to do, uh, I work for free in exchange for testimonials, reviews, and feedback, and sometimes referrals if I'm lucky. But in the beginning, that is the highest most valuable thing that you can do. People will say things like, "Never work for free," and you only hear that from people who don't make that much money. If you make a lot of money, you will know that you spend so much time in the free phase because getting the product right is so important, is such high leverage. The proof process both makes you convicted because you get the opportunity of many feedback loops to make your product better so that You then can collect the positive feedback that you can then advertise to get more people like those customers. The most compelling way to advertise anything is show, don't sell. If I just stand here and said nothing, and I said, and I just stated the facts and told the truth, and I said, I have 11,382 reviews and our average review is 4.7, and I make pasta Really good. And then, or I have one review from my mama and I make super fragicalilisticexpialidocious pasta guaranteed. Which one do you like better? Obviously this one. You don't need to say much more. The proof is the pudding. So the most important part of a message is the messenger themselves. They're inextricably linked from the thing that's being communicated. And this is what people seem to miss when they're making content, which is why I'm a big advocate of do epic stuff first, then talk about what you did. And if the stuff that you didn't do is epic, focus more on the doing epic stuff, not on the talking about it. I started this channel with a commitment to a vendor saying, "I'll make 3 YouTube videos a week." And I was busy and I was like, "I'm just gonna hit a webcam and I'm gonna talk to the camera." And that is how this channel was started. The only reason, in my opinion, that people decided to listen was because I just so happened to have sold a company for just under $50 million. And so because of that, there was proof that I was able to deliver on the promise. Whereas somebody else might have a totally beautiful studio and have all these things, but they just forgot the one most important thing, which is why should I listen to you? Either it's gonna have to be proof that you generated for yourself or proof from other people saying that you helped them achieve that thing. So the next big thing is the hook. Now you're like, okay, I've heard about hooks before. Not the way that I'm gonna talk about it, alright? So the hook is greater than everything. Now you're like, wait a second, I thought proof was greater than everything. Well, the proof is gonna be contained in the thing, but no one's gonna see the proof unless you have a good hook. The one thing that I think has consistently been reinforced, and it's just like a greater and greater percentage of my time is allocated towards this one part of my advertising that grows my company the most, is I search for the best hooks, and then I don't convince myself that I'm more creative than I think I am, and I just keep using the ones that work. So think about it like this, these are the only 4 things that you can do to advertise any business. You can warm outreach, so reaching out one-on-one to people you know, cold outreach, reaching one-on-one to people you don't know, you can run paid ads, which is going one-to-many to people you don't know, or you can post content, which is one-to-many to people you do know. And in each of these 4 situations, you can double, triple, 5x the amount of people who open and respond, who click and watch your ad. Who watch your content all the way to the end. And if you do something like that and you do increase the click-through rate by, go from 1% to 5% or 2% to 10%, which absolutely can happen. When you do that, you in a very real way can 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x your business with just that one thing. Remember I talked about earlier that advertising is a boom, it's an order of magnitude change? Well, what other one thing can you just tweak that then opens up the flow to the entire business based on how good the first 5 seconds are, or the first 1 second. In thinking about hooks, I think about both the visual hook, as in what's happening, what that people can see, and then there's the auditory or verbal hook, which is what are the actual words that are being communicated. Right now we've reviewed our top YouTube videos of all time, and I made a video about 6 months ago saying what we found, which is our hook formula is proof, promise, plan. And this is a force multiplier on any kind of advertising you do. And so when I think about like all the different things, all the effort that goes into advertising a business, if I can just do one thing— and the crazy part about hooks is they're the shortest part. They're the shortest part of the whole darn thing. This is where David Ogilvy says, if you have written your headline, you've spent $0.80 of your advertising dollar. The more advanced the advertiser is that I meet, whether it's a content creator, somebody who's on outbound, somebody who makes paid ads, the more obsessive they are on the first frame, the first impression that someone gets because they know, one, it increases the likelihood that the person's gonna watch the rest of it and then potentially buy, and then two, it changes their entire perception of what follows. We actually looked at this for speakers at an event, which was if we changed the intro, the 1 to 2 minute intro that we had for a 60 minute talk, the person's net promoter score, so what people rated them in terms of how good they were, changed massively even though the actual presentation was the same. So simply how we framed the presenter, the person hadn't even gotten up on stage yet, changed how everything they did afterwards was perceived. If there's 2 minutes that can influence the score that you get, the customer satisfaction, the amount of prospects, the one thing to focus on is nail the hook. Let me show you the force multiplication of this. We just started reviewing short-form content on the content team and just doing a more regular activity of saying like, what are the things that make content do well? And there was a video that we're like, we think this thing is good. All we did is we took the same video that got like 40,000 views and then we just chopped out the first 3 seconds that was kind of like getting into the, into the video before the actual real hook was delivered. And by snipping those 3 seconds and then just starting where the hook really was, It went from a 40,000-view video to a 780,000-view video. So you're talking about a 19x improvement. So I'm talking about, you know, 1%, 2%, talking 19x. That is why obsessing over the hook is so important. So the next big growth lever that gave us the super fast growth was more. So I talk about more, better, new in the Leads Book as one of the, you know, the 3 strategies that you can use to grow any business. So I talk about more, more, better, and new as the 3 primary strategies of growth. You either do more of what's already working, you do what you're doing to make it work better, or you do something entirely new. Now most entrepreneurs love doing new stuff, and that's why it's called shiny object syndrome, and it's a cancer and you should get that looked at. The very boring answer is the mundane more. You have to master more, and it's going, instead of zero to one, which is what most people love doing, oh my God, I finally got it to work. But actually doing 1 to N, which is how do I do this thing as many times as humanly possible without wanting to kill myself? Here's the actual math explanation of this, is that more is typically the highest risk-adjusted return strategy. All right. And so what that means is if you can do something and you already know it works, the likelihood that the next thing you do works is much smaller. And so this is why once you have a control, meaning you have a specific landing page or ad or copy or email that, you know, converts. Whenever you deviate from a high-converting advertisement, the likelihood that the variant is going to beat it is typically low. And so you have to try a bunch of variations because all you're doing is messing something, messing something up that actually already works. And so let me give you an example. If you had one sales guy and he's closing at 30%, Well, you could try and obsess to get them to 35 or 40%, and that would be material. You know, you get a 25% lift overall, 30 to 40% to 25% improvement. But you know what would be even cooler? Just hire 3 more guys and then you have a 4x or a 300% improvement. It's like I could get a 25% improvement or I could get a 300% improvement. And me trying to change up the sales script also has a significant shot of me taking it from 30 down to 20 because it's a change. And so here's the thing is that when you change anything, you guarantee you incur the cost of change, but you do not guarantee that you get the benefit of change. And so in each of the core 4 methods, you do more outreach, which is cold or warm. You go from 100 reachouts a day to 200 reachouts a day. Paid ads, you go from $100 a day to $200 a day. You go from posting content, you go from posting once a day to twice a day, right? Those are how you do more. Again, when I talk to the most experienced advertisers that I know, the most experienced business people that I know, the most common thing we talk about is we kind of laugh in the back room of like, if people just— people just don't know how much more they can do. That's the real is that when I, when I, when I have conversations with small business owners, they're like, hey, I don't think I can do any more ads. You know, I'm running— I'm already running $1,000 a day. I'm like, I mean, dude, there's businesses that run like $2 million a day. You usually have so much more runway than you think you do. Sometimes you just need someone ahead of you to be like, dude, you can like 10x this and nothing's gonna change. But they think because of whatever mental limitation they have, or like, you've never spent that much money on an ad before, you've never made that amount, is it gonna hurt my account? No, they want you to make good content. Is it gonna hurt my ads? No, they want you to spend money. Is it gonna hurt my outreach? You're going to people who've never met you before, so why would they know that you've sent it to another 100 people, right? Is that there's these perceived fears But most of the times, it's just between your ears. Yeah, I'll tell you guys a quick story about this. So when I had my first, I would say, real business, which was my first location of my first gym, I had a mentor, and he was a really good local marketer. He had a strategy for his tanning salons where he would bring in, I mean, thousands of customers every single quarter. And what he did was he would put out flyers. He'd just put flyers on cars and then had like a free VIP gift card, and people would come in, redeem them, and he'd flip them into memberships. And so I figured, okay, I'll just run the same play. I did the flyers and I put 300 flyers out and I waited by the phone being like, oh my God, I'm going to get 300 people in here. It's going to be sick. What happened? Well, my phone only rang once from the flyers. And when I picked up the phone, the guy was like, hey, did you put the flyer on my car? And I was like, yeah, I did. Like, what time do you want? But he cut me off and he was like, you damaged my Mercedes. And I was like, oh, click. And I didn't know what to do. So, as soon as I, and thankfully he never called me back 'cause I definitely didn't have the money to fix any Mercedes at that time. I called my mentor back up a week or two later once it was clear that no one else was gonna call. He said, hey, how'd the flyers work out? And I was like, well, they didn't work out at all actually. I was like taking some attitude with him. He was like, oh, well what was your test size? And he didn't take the bait. He was like, oh, what was your test size? I said, well what do you mean? He was like, well like, what'd you test with before you did the real campaign? I was like, "Oh, why? I mean, I put 300 out." And he was like, "300? You can't know anything with 300." I was like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "I test with 5,000." He's like, "And then we put out 5,000 a day for 30 days." I was looking at his results from 150,000 flyers over 30 days and comparing them to my results of 300 in a day. And once I saw that juxtaposition, I was like, got it. I will never make this mistake again. It was very embarrassing for me because I was on the right path. I just didn't do enough. And so one of the big meta lessons of this is that what presents as volatility is typically a symptom of low volume. So if you're like, man, I only get like, you know, a sale every week or every other week, it's kind of like, you know, it's It, you know, most days I don't get a sale and then every once in a while I get one. It only appears volatile because you're doing so little per day. But if I looked at your year and saw that you closed about, let's say, 12 customers in that year, you closed one a month, for example, every, every 3 or 4 weeks you get a customer. Well, all I would do is look at your entire advertising activity for the year and say, okay, if we wanted to get 12 customers a day, we would have to do 365 times more advertising than we currently do. And if we did that on a daily basis, we would get 12 customers a day. And so you just take your calendar horizontally and then you flip it vertically for a day, and that is how much volume is required. And so most people just think that it's like, oh, they're— they can't be doing more than like twice as much as me. But in my experience, the people who are crushing it literally are doing 1,000 times more than you. And that's the part that like, until you sometimes you hear it or you have someone ahead of you say it, it doesn't become real for you, and it's why I make these videos, is to try and like push as much out of my brain and history so that you can just get the story without the scar. And that's the whole point. So once you're like, okay, I have something that's working, I should just do way more of that, awesome. Well, the next thing, the next power lever here is word of mouth, and it's not the way that you think. So word of mouth, people are familiar with referrals, you know, customers, tell other customers or tell other prospects that your stuff is good. What a lot of people don't understand is that negative word of mouth is significantly stronger and faster than positive. Disney did this big study where they found that it takes 37 tragic moments to make up for one magic moment, versus there's basically like a 5x versus 37x on— if someone has a good experience, they tell 5 people. If someone has a bad experience, they tell like everybody. A new business owner often will get customers pretty cheaply and then all of a sudden costs are going up. And part of the reason that costs go up faster, because you can actually put math to this, which is understanding the difference between CPM, which is cost per impression, and it's like, why is it M? It's mille, which is French for thousand. So cost for 1,000 impressions versus CPL, which is cost per lead. All right. And so if your CPMs more or less stay the same, but your cost per lead has 2x, or 3x or 4x. Well, if it's not costing you more to reach those people, then it means that fewer of them are responding. And if that's the case and you're just going to still relatively warm markets, the issue is that instead of having positive word of mouth working for you, which should be actively lowering the amount of cost that it takes to get a new customer, you have word of mouth working against you. And so people who would otherwise purchase from you heard something negative and then choose not to. And so now all of a sudden you have to reach 3 times the amount of people because 2 out of the 3 people who would have gone and bought your thing heard it was bad. And then now you only have 1 person who's just heard nothing. Over time, the percentage of the audience that's neutral or hasn't heard of you gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And so it's way harder to grow off word of mouth that's positive, but it's really easy to get crushed on negative word of mouth. And for whatever reason, No business owner ever claims that they have negative word of mouth, but I can tell you half of you are below average. That's a fact. And this is why I emphasize the proof over promise earlier on so much, because if I'm going to get negative word of mouth, which I know I am, if I'm starting out, I want to keep that as concentrated and quiet as possible. I don't want anybody to know, right? And so of course I'm not going to charge them money because the last thing I want to do is also have their money when they're upset. So it's like, "Hey, I'm making this trade, you're gonna get stuff, it's probably gonna not be that good, my only ask is you give me feedback, right? Tell me how I can make this right. Tell me how I can make it better." Right, and when you ask those types of questions, you get the types of answers that can ultimately create more value for the customer. And then once you get positive feedback, positive feedback, positive feedback, now you have something that people actually want. Then you can introduce strangers to it. And of course you're gonna roll into the next issue, which is, "Okay, how do I keep that consistent because now it's not me doing everything?" about a team and we'll get into that. So the next big growth lever is steal from yourself. And so everyone's like, oh, he's gonna steal from his competitors. No, so think about it like this. All of your competitors are copying your stuff and taking what's working. When you find something that works, keep doing it. Deviation from what works is more likely not to work. Think about it like this. If you demolish a building, so let's say we build a building and it takes us 2 years to build a building. Demolishing it might take 5 minutes, just put a bomb, boom, because the place of the bricks and the steel in that building, every other potentiality that those bricks could go to create not a building. But there's only one placement of that brick and steel that creates a building. And so you have unlimited options for destruction and only one for solution. And so when you do find something that works, the likelihood that when you change it and you move the brick and you move the you move the scaffolding, that you destroy the building is very high. Something can literally go anywhere except for the right place. And so you can have more options and all of them be wrong. So one of our portfolio companies, which is very large, hired a new advertising director. And that advertising director had came in with lots of new ideas. And so the founder, because he wanted to teach an important lesson to the advertising director, said, "Sure, let's do all of your ideas." And so he sat there, he said the scripts, he recorded all these ads, he took multiple days to do it. And what ended up happening is that they ran all the ads and they didn't work. And so he said, "Hey, crazy idea, what if we use the same hook that's been working for 3 years?" And they used the same hook and the ads worked. Think about it like this, Nike on its second year after "Just Do It" wasn't like, "Hey, 'Just Do It's' kind of old, let's switch it up." It's like when you find a message that converts, you keep hammering the message. When you find the ad hooks and you find the, the processes that work well for you, most times you'd be better served just continuing to reuse it because you will get bored of it far before your customers ever do. So believe it or not, there's actually math to support this. So Sergey Brin and Larry Page, I can't remember which one of them, is like a brilliant mathematician and actually was able to prove this ratio out. So when you're stealing from yourself, You want 70% of all of your effort to go into basically carbon copying the thing that works. And this works across all functions. This works for a sales script, this works for product, this works for reinvestment activities. Like this rule works. The second is adjacent. So something that's just like one degree removed, right? So it's, it's, it's close to the core of what you normally do. Okay. So instead of saying starting a school community is the fastest way to start an online business, right? I could say that would be a hook and it's a hook that worked. I could say one of the fastest ways to start an online business is to start a school community, right? That would be a variation of something that we knew that those words worked, but it would be adjacent to it, not the exact carbon copy, but similar. Now 10 is— that means that 1 out of 10 of the things that you're putting your effort towards would be something that's brand spanking new, completely, you know, out of left field. And when you look at your effort in your business, I can almost guarantee you that you have this flipped. And I only say this because I speak from experience. Is that this is what I would do. I would spend 70% of my time on new crazy things, new ideas, all the stuff that excited me. And then 20%, I'd be like, oh yeah, I'll do something kind of different from what I was doing before. And then 10%, I'll be like, fine, I'll, I'll maybe— and this is, this is a maybe. Most times like, oh, I already used that, used that hook once. I don't want to use it again. I don't want to use the same hook that worked before in another ad. It's silly. Also, a different version of this from an advertising perspective of the 20% is use the exact same hook. We have a different background. So it's just like a different variation. So it's like I could wear a different shirt, I could have a different setting, and I could still deliver the same hook. And to me, that would still be kind of a 20% variation. So once you're done stealing from yourself, then let's talk about emotional versus logical buyers. This is a huge, monstrous increase in business for me. Have you ever heard from, from the marketing world, there's logical and there's emotional buyers? I had heard it growing up and I kind of repeated it over and over again because I hadn't really thought about it. I don't actually think that's true, and so let me explain. I actually think that there's a continuum of buyers that people sit on, and you've got people who require more information, so they're high info buyers, and then you've got people who require less information. There's two elements to this. One is their information requirement, and secondarily, how much info they have received. And so you could have a high information buyer that's further closer to this little this dollar sign here that only needs a little bit more information in order to buy. And then you have some people that just generically buy lots of stuff. Everybody loves those people, of course, but guess what? Everybody fights over those people. The thing is, is that the amount of low information buyers is like this. The amount of high information buyers is an order of magnitude or multiple orders of magnitude greater. Only crazy people buy immediately. It's very normal for people to want to have more information before making a decision. When we think about our advertising, the reason that the direct response community typically can't grow very large businesses most of the time is because they only advertise to these people and this pool of buyers is significantly smaller. But the reason building a brand, for example, and investing in an audience is because you're trying to move them down this line. Now, when I heard this in the earlier days of my career, I was like, I don't have time for that, I need to make money. I get it, sure, in the beginning you just advertise the 6-inch putts, but when you wanna scale, you have to educate a higher percentage of the audience because they will require more to buy. The way to move people through this is something that Eugene Schwartz pioneered in his book Breakthrough Advertising, and he talks about the 5 levels of awareness. So he has unaware people, so people have just no idea about anything, The next is problem aware, so they have some sort of pain. You have solution aware, you have product aware, and then you have most aware. So those are the 5 stages. Now, a customer will basically move in this direction, going from unaware to most aware. If you want to go to broader and broader audiences to get their attention, the unaware audience, you typically have to go off of broad curiosity. And so if you've ever seen those crazy like ads that are like weird articles, like, you know, Arizona State, blah, blah, blah, has this new blah, like they're trying to go after a massive audience of people who have no idea what's going on. That new, you know, scientific breakthrough could lead you to buying a supplement. It could lead you to buying a weight loss thing. It could lead you to buying some sort of equipment. It could lead you to buying insurance. Like it could go in any direction, but it's the curiosity that gets them in. Problem aware. Would be something to the extent of like, do you wake up to pee 3 times a night? Does it hurt when you bend over to tie your shoes? Do you get out of breath when you play with your kids? Those are going to be problem aware. Now they— again, that could lead you to a supplement, that could lead you to insurance, that could lead you to whatever. But it's a slightly more aware person. At least they're problem aware. Solution aware is that somebody knows of the potential things that they could buy and you're helping them select between them. Product aware is at an even more micro level, and most aware is typically your existing customers. So here is where you just make offers, right? This is why the book Offers is where I started, because the people who are here is the tiny audience here, and so you just make an offer to get them to buy. But that only works for this tiny audience. So you will make money quickly doing that, but you will also cap yourself quickly. In an effort to figure out, okay, well, how much should I allocate between these most aware, less info people, and the maybe problem, unaware, high information people who require more education in order to make a purchasing decision. Well, I had one of the most enlightening conversations I've had in a really long time with Ben Francis, who's the CEO of Gymshark, and then he introduced me to Chris Davis, who's the CMO of New Balance. And so we had an awesome conversation talking about what Chris had done at New Balance and helped them just skyrocket their sales. What they did is that when he took over, 30% of their advertising budget was going to here, was going to the broad awareness level storytelling emotional stuff. And then 70% was basically geared towards buying shoes, saying, hey, go buy these shoes. What he did when he took over was that he flipped them. He ended up with 70% going to big high-level pairings, endorsements, specific athletes that they wanted to recruit that they felt represented their brand, and only 30% of their advertising budget went towards actually telling people that they had shoes and that they were for sale. After he made that flip, here's the crazy part. It took 18 months for them to see the return on that budget. And so if you're in a rush, this isn't going to work. But if you're in a rush, you're never going to get big anyways. Keeping this ratio made this concept tactical for me. And so when I think about my marketing effort, my marketing dollars, and most importantly, how I measure it, my marketing impressions, I wanna make sure that 70% or more of the advertising impressions that someone's going to get are gonna be around the pairings that I want of me giving something rather than asking. So when we look at this ratio, this is actually super well studied between 70 and 30% here. Because right now, it's actually 3.5 to 1 is the ratio that has been studied to basically not lose audience. And so if you look at television, for example, and they've already studied how many commercials can we jam into the show before people stop watching. And so they figured it out that it was every 3.5 minutes of content, they could basically put 1 minute of advertising in. If you look at your Facebook newsfeed, for every 3 posts you get when you scroll, you'll get 1 ad. And the platforms that grow the fastest have a larger percentage of this give and a smaller percentage of ask. TikTok for years had zero ads on the platform and just wanted to grow as virally as possible, and they acquired more users because they had a give first, give all the time strategy. The fact that they settled on this ratio and it has been corroborated— fancy word for it's worked in multiple other places— made me think, wow, there's something to this. And so this makes this concept of how do I balance high information buyers people that need more brand, people that need more education prior to purchase, with me making money, is that you basically start with that ratio, add patience and time, and then it becomes a snowball that compounds unto itself. And then you will get to a point in the future where you're still— you're doing so much more than you could ever possibly do if you only focused on the direct response, on the less information. But you're actually still digging the well for what you're going to do next year. Basically, you can see when a founder stops running a business and then the corporate execs come in because what they do is they flip the ratio. They basically pull forward demand from the future. The founder dug the well and then they just suck all the water out of the well, but then they didn't dig the next well. You always want to be ahead of demand. B2B businesses and B2C businesses do this differently. This was something that took me a really long time to figure out. B2C businesses, so like business-to-consumer businesses, will typically do these types of pairings in terms of high information buyers by telling emotional stories, making associations, getting endorsements from athletes and influencers or organizations that represent the values that they think resonate positively with their ideal audience. Once they do that, they then can place the product next to those associations so that they can then pair them, and then the person wants to buy the product as a consequence. That is what it looks like in a B2C business. But it took me a really long time to think through, well, what does this look like for a B2B business? And so I break this down into several tactical things. So number one is aspirational outcomes that you have achieved, or the business has helped facilitate. Secondarily, people like this person, like your avatar, that you have helped facilitate. So just to be clear, stuff that you did, stuff that you help other people do. The third is stuff that you help them do, the prospect themselves, which you can only facilitate, at least in my opinion, in two major ways. One is that you give them free content and education, which is why I make this stuff, and the second is that you give them free products and services, which is why the books are free, they're on my site, you can read them, you consume them, there's a Scaling Roadmap there, personalized, all that stuff is free because fundamentally it's two degrees of separation if some person does it. Alex had a big exit, now he has a big portfolio, cool. That's 2 degrees of separation. There's other companies in the portfolio or other businesses who look just like mine that he helped scale, 1 degree separation. I used his stuff and made more money, 0 degrees of separation. And so we wanna, and this is always gonna be stronger than anything else, but it'll take longer. And so in understanding the difference between B2C and B2B in terms of what do I do top of funnel here, how do I allocate my resources, it means that I'm spending time Putting together the course in my spare time so that you guys can go consume it on how to make offers, how to get leads, how to scale a company from $0 to $100 million. Like, that's time, that's effort, that's my team who's behind the camera right now, that's budget that goes towards that because I'm not looking for demand today. I'm looking for those of you who are gonna scale your companies and in 5 years hit me up. Here's the thing, if a new, let's say acquisition.com went public tomorrow and I got ousted for being rude, which I probably would, and then they put in a new CEO, and that new CEO says, "I need to hit quarterly earnings." So what would he probably do? He'd probably switch to lots of direct response, and he'd probably cut down all the budget on the gives and the books, and all of a sudden be like, "Well, there's no ROI in a book. Books don't make any money." It's like, "Yeah, not today, but they bring people into our world, and when they do have the next billion-dollar company, they will hit us up first." And that's the goal. But that guy will just say, well, you know what, screw all that, I'm gonna recapture all this marketing spend and effort, we're gonna focus it all on these direct response ads, tell people to buy, buy, buy, and you know what, for a quarter it'll work, maybe two quarters it'll work, but all of a sudden it'll start slowly going down, slowly going down, slowly going down, then what happens? They call the founder back up and they're like, hey, help us fix this, and then the founder's gonna say, I can't do it in a quarter. It's gonna take me a year, year and a half to basically right-size the ship because you sucked all the wells dry and I'm gonna have to start digging again. In. So the next one is some of my marketing laws. So I'm gonna give you a few of them, and I'll start with the first one that you— if you've heard my channel, then you should know this one. It should be ingrained in your brain, which is state the facts and tell the truth. And the reason this is so important to me is that it forces me as an advertiser businessperson to change reality. And so rather than try and exaggerate, it makes more sense to to put all of the effort into doing epic stuff and then telling a truthful story rather than telling an epic story about something that was underwhelming. And I think the vast majority of marketers and marketing do the second thing. They have something normal and then they try and tell an exaggerated story of it rather than having something absolutely insane and just stating the facts and telling the truth. And I can tell you that the second, this one, stating the facts and telling the truth is the best long-term strategy. How do I actualize this? All right. So number one is that we make the truth more compelling. We actually change reality. The second is that we show only what we can show. I remember I was talking to a martial arts guy and he's like, "There's all these other martial arts studios, you know, in my area. How do I stand out?" And I said, "Well, what's your specialty or whatever?" And he said, "I'm a double secret black belt of something." And I said, "Okay, well, how many double secret black belts?" He's like, "Well, there's only 6 in the nation." And I was like, "Okay, well, do any of them live in your area?" And he said, "No." Well, why don't you say that, right? Why don't you say that? So every business, if you get narrow enough, has something that's unique about it. You might have the best parking. You might have the fastest introduction to getting somebody to sit down. You might have the most gyms, you know, whatever it is, the most customers, the most customers at a certain price point, the most, you just need to slice the data of the business to figure out what is unique about your business. And I remember this moment in Mad Men, which is an advertising show. It's like an old '50s show. Well, it's a new show about the '50s. Don Draper, who's the lead character, who's an advertising guy, is pitching a client who's a cigarette company. They're like the third or fourth in the category. They're highly commoditized. They're competing on price, and they're losing. He asks them to explain how cigarettes are made, and they roll their eyes. They're like, "Why is this important?" He's like, "Okay, well, first we have the plants, then we take—" He keeps going through it. And he's like, "And then we let it sit out in the sun." He's like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "To draw out the leaves." He's like, "So you toast them?" He's like, "Yeah, we toast them." He's like, "It's toasted." And so that was a unique part. He just sliced down and got really narrow about one particular part of the process and was able to pull that out and emphasize it so that people were like, "Oh, this is different than other things." And the really important part about this is that Maybe some of the other cigarette companies also toast it, but they don't say that they toast it. And so the perception is still that it's different, even if it is the same. The best version of this is finding something that's truly unique. The second best version is to just say something that's unique about something that everyone else already does, but that your customers don't know. The, the corollary to that is say what only you can say. So you show it only you can show, and you say what only you can say. So the showing part is going to be like, okay, with the toasting thing, how do we display that visually? With the super secret black belt, then how do we display that? You could show the black belt, you could show you shaking your hands, getting the certification, you could show you winning some tournament, right? If you're, if you're toasting, you could show the bed of all the tobacco that's getting toasted and the smells and the wafting through the air, whatever, right? And then you describe it in a way that only you can say. To do this, it's more important that you are the best than what you are the best of. I would rather be, from a marketing perspective, not absolutely, I'd rather have the 10th biggest company in the world, right, than the first biggest company in Indiana. But from an advertising perspective, it is more compelling to be the best. And I'll tell you a story that I haven't told. John Rockefeller, when he was early on in his oil empire, bid to buy the biggest oil refinery in Cincinnati. And he was the second biggest. He ended up overpaying for the business. And the business owner of the oil refinery laughed at him, kind of laughed his way to the bank. He's like, "You completely overpaid for this thing." And so then what John D. Rockefeller did after he bought the second— the first biggest and he already had the second biggest, is that he then was able to say he was the biggest. And then in the next 30 days, he had over 20 M&A deals. In the next 30 days to consolidate the entire rest of the market because he became the gorilla. He was willing to overpay for the asset to get the story. The difference in value between what he should have paid for those 20 deals and what he was able to pay by strong-arming those smaller competitors because he was now the gorilla more than made up for what he minorly overpaid or maybe even majorly overpaid for the one company that he bought. And when he recants the story, when he tells the story again, he talks about how that competitor didn't see the bigger picture. I remember reading it in the letters that he wrote to his son and thinking to myself, that is powerful. He was willing to overpay for the story. He saw it as an investment in his brand, in his reputation. And so the guy who sold it just saw it as him overpaying for a product, but he wasn't appropriately valuing how much true brand value that would give Rockefeller as a result. The next big growth lever is all about the list, right? So when I talk about the list, people immediately think that I'm talking about email list, direct mail list, and sometimes that's true, but I'll give you a hypothetical example. So let's say I am selling winter coats and I advertise an amazing offer on some killer coats that people love. They look amazing. And nothing comes back. Well, what could have happened? Well, if I showed my advertisement to people who live in South Florida, the likelihood that they buy my very expensive, really heavy and hot winter coats is very low. It has nothing to do with my offer, nothing to do with the ad creative, nothing to do with my pricing, nothing to do with anything. It's just the wrong people are seeing it. Many smaller businesses think that marketing doesn't work when in reality they were showing it to the wrong people. And so the first thing that you have to get right in marketing is targeting the correct audience. This is different by method of advertising. If we pull up our core 4 here, you wanna reach out to people that you know are suffering from the problem that you solve or have a high likelihood of suffering from the problem that you solve. And the narrower the problem, the smaller the list. From a paid ads perspective, this is where the targeting by platform gets more important. And this is why some ad platforms tend to be more profitable than others, because what makes an advertising platform successful is how well-targeted it is. In fact, Facebook was so good that they had to roll it back because of privacy laws, but it was so effective at targeting people that people complained 'cause it was so good, it felt creepy. Posting content, this is where the algorithm itself, based on what you look like and how you talk and what you say, will impact what the AI serves your content to. The same works with paid ads. And so if I wanna get more women to buy a product, guess who I'm not gonna have in the ad? Me, because this is not what attracts lots of ladies, right? This is just usually a bunch of entrepreneurs who tend to have beards and like fitness or whatever else, right? But like my audience is like 89% male. And sure, for my 11% females, keep rocking, I appreciate you. But by and large, I have a male-driven audience. Now maybe it's because I talk about money, but there's tons of female entrepreneurs who talk about money and don't have predominantly male audiences. And so it's just that my way of saying things and/or the algorithm just tends to display it to dudes. One of the easiest ways to make sure that you're displaying your ads to the right avatar is make sure that the person in the ad looks like the avatar. And I'll tell you a funny story. So when I was running the Gym Launch 1.0 version, which is where we used to fly out to gyms and do the turnarounds, I found out that when I put the thank you page, this is before automated schedulers even existed. So it's kind of wild. I remember when I had my first automated scheduler put on the thank you page, I thought I had like, I'd cured cancer. I was like, this is the coolest thing where people can automatically book. Like I don't have to call them and work the lead. The thank you page that I set up was just like, hey, text this number. And then the second version of the thank you page was, hey, my name's Alex, I'm gonna be the one calling you. So I put a picture of me and I said, I'm gonna be calling you from this number. So I tried to put some visual to it. Then when I put Leila's picture on the thank you page and said, Leila's gonna be the one contacting you, what do you know? Our response rates went through the roof. People were immediately responsive. They were showing up to appointments. They were, oh yeah, sure, I can make 5 o'clock. For me, they're like, oh no, I don't give a shit, right? And so if you want to attract a certain avatar, try to make sure that what is in your content, how you talk, matches the way they talk. Because fundamentally all marketing works as long as you get the targeting right. Think about it this way. If you walked into a room, this is how I like to visualize marketing because people, people overcomplicate it. If I walked into a room and I got on stage and there was 1,000 people in the room, if those 1,000 people were my ideal customers, then even if I had just like a really mediocre offer and something that they like kind of wanted, I would get some response. Now it might not be efficient, it might not get me the return I want, so I might lose money, but I might— I would probably make something, right? I would get some clicks, I would get some leads, right? And so it would allow me to start the feedback loop so I could improve. But if nothing is coming through, it's simply because the wrong people are seeing it. And so one of the highest leverage ways of getting more from advertising is just making sure that the right people are seeing it, which is a perfect transition into the next one, which is how do you know that you've mastered something? Which is that masters have more ways to win. Now, what does that actually mean? They understand the many different ways that you can measure progress. So if you were to talk to an HR professional, okay, you ask them, what do you do? A lot of times they're gonna give you a couple vague answers like, you know, payroll and I'll make sure that people get their benefits and whatever. But when you talk to someone who's a master at this, and I remember the first time I had somebody who who completely improved my understanding of talent and acquisition and recruiting. In the interview, the candidate said, "Oh, well, what's your time to fill?" And I was like, "What do you mean?" She was like, "Well, the average time to fill a role." I was like, "I don't know." She was like, "Oh, well, what's your two-sided fit?" I was like, "I don't know what you mean." She was like, "Okay, what's your cost to acquire talent?" I was like, "I don't know." She had all of these different metrics that she was using to measure, which completely made sense to me. Like, I have cost to acquire a customer, I should have cost to acquire talent. What's my cash conversion cycle? How quickly do I get my first sale? How quickly do I fill a role? And then in terms of customer satisfaction, it's basically employee satisfaction of how likely is it that the manager and the employee both say at day 90 that this is a 10 out of 10 fit. And so when I started looking at that, I was like, oh wow, there's a whole nother level of understanding this that I had no idea about because masters have a higher quality and quantity of metrics that they use to measure progress. If I am trying to fix this function, I have nothing to know how well I'm doing. And so a beginner will try to advertise or will try to sell and they will have binary outcomes. They'll just say, I didn't sell or I did sell, or I got leads or I didn't get leads. But there are so many nuance steps between that. When you have the milestones, the progress markers, it allows you to fix things so you can keep moving the buck along until you get the outcome. And so I'll tell you a story about this. When I was starting outbound way back in the day, it was a new channel for us and I'd never done it. And about 90 days or 4 months in, my executive team kind of did like an intervention. So they came together, it was like I was getting like a drug rehab, right? They were like, we think this is a problem, we think this is shiny object, we think you're, you're distracted and we should double down on what works. I was like, how dare you use my words against me, right? And the thing is, is that strategically I knew we needed to have a second acquisition channel for us to sell the business. I was like, no, it's because they could only see that we'd only done one sale in 4 months and 100% of my time was going towards this, but what they didn't see was all the progress that we were making. And so I had hired degrees of mastery in this. Now to be fair, it was just because I had learned it along the way, but when it started it was like, okay, well, we have to get a list, so where do we get the list? So we looked at, you know, we bought a bunch of different lists, a lot of the lists didn't work, one of them did, we're like, okay, this is a good provider, and then we start, you know, we're like, oh, we gotta enrich the data, so we start learning how to enrich the data. Then we started calling them, but then no one was picking up, and then we had to learn how call wrapping works, so we get local numbers, and then all of a sudden people start picking up, but then they start hanging up on us, so then we had to fix the hook in the script, and then we fixed the hook in the script, people would make it a minute, but then they'd hang up on us, so then we fixed the hook, and then we fixed the offer, and then people would then go to the second call, but then they weren't showing up for the second call. And so it's like, we have to just keep moving the buck along the way. But if you looked at it, 2 months in, it's like, you know, heart surgery looks like murder to somebody from the outside who doesn't understand the milestones. As you master something, if you don't know why something's not working, look closer. Look for the smaller attributes that you can actually zoom in on and say, okay, well, we'll get a sale eventually if we just keep moving in this direction. And so look for directional correctness rather than binary. And so this is a perfect example of masters have more leading indicators to success than beginners do. Beginners typically look at purely the lagging indicator. They just say churn is up, sales are down, revenue's down, cash collection's down. Those are all lagging indicators. You can't, if I looked at you and said increase revenue, you can't do anything. If I said decrease churn, you can't do anything with that. You would then have to do something else and then the result would be a decrease in churn. The result would be more revenue. The result would be more sales. You have to identify what all those steps are. Are that are high correlates or increase the likelihood that, that ultimate outcome occurs.