How To Stop Solving Problems That Do Not Exist | Ep 959

I've been in business for 14 years. I've scaled 6 brick-and-mortar gyms. I did 30+ gym turnarounds across the country and built service companies to over $30 million a year. Today, our portfolio at Acquisition.com is over $250 million annually. And so in this video, I'm answering your questions about how to scale your service business. And for all these questions, I try to make, you know, my answers as tactical as humanly possible so that you watching from home can immediately use them. Enjoy. I am a chiropractor. We do right around $2.4 million. Been stuck there for 5 years. I'd like to get to 3.6, get out of the swamp. Stock or growing over 5 years? We've been at 2.4 for 5 years. Yep. And so I don't know what's stopping us. I'd like to get out of the swamp. Heard. And then profit margins, you're at 30%, right? Yes, sir. Yeah. Okay. I remember seeing $600,000 as a profit number. I don't know if that's still accurate. Okay. So you got $600,000 in profit and you have— you and a partner, you're 100%? 100%. Okay, well, what do you want to have happen? Do you want to, like, what do you want to do? Do you want to go to many locations? No, I want to grow a main big location and create a space for family to eventually, I mean, grow in there. If they don't want to do that, then I would probably change my goal to be an exit standpoint. What's your square footage? Right now we have 7,700. Okay, so decently large. Yeah, we occupy about 4,700 of it. Okay, got it. And so are you at capacity within the space right now? No, we used to have a supply issue till about 2 weeks ago. Oh, great. And then we hired another doctor, so now it's become a demand issue and that's where we're at now. So how do you get customers now? We, our highest is referral. Then we get about, the next size would be paid ads. Through Facebook. What percentage are ads? Probably about 20% from ads. About half is from referrals. Another 20% is from Google. Okay, so you separate Meta ads from Google ads when you talk about ads? Yep. Okay, got it. We don't actually currently do Google ads, but that's where they said they came from. Heard. Got it. Which I would probably see as word of mouth. Like, I Googled you or Googled somebody here. It's probably SEO, something like that. But okay. Okay, so $2.5 million. Like, what stops you from just spending more money on Meta ads? Trust that we're doing it right. I mean, I just— are you making more money than you put in? Yeah. Well, so you might have one of these guys, which is that we need, we need attribution tracking so that you can know if you're putting a dollar in and getting $5 or $10 or $20 back out. We have no clue. But as soon as we have the attribution tracking, because fundamentally what you lack right now is an input-output equation for the business to grow. And so every business needs to know what are the core actions that I do that increase how much money I make. And if you can't define that for the business, then for sure as shit, your employees don't know what it is if you don't know what it is, right? And so for you, if you are not supply constrained and you're demand constrained, that means lead generation is the issue. If lead generation's the issue, what's the activity? The activity's gonna either be, I'm gonna be making content, I'm gonna be getting affiliates that are gonna be promoting my shit for me, I'm gonna be running paid ads, right? Those are gonna be kind of like the bigger buckets that you're gonna be going into. And then you got people who do those things on your behalf. And so, right? Right now, do you make content? Yes, sir. Okay. What percentage comes from that? We just started it about 2 months ago. How much do you do? We do— I'm not going to tell you to do more. I'm just curious. We do 4 videos that gets created into short and long. Per week? 4 videos for the month. And that gets created. Yeah. Don't— chopped up. Yeah. Okay. Got it. Okay. So you've got 4 longs and you chop those into little shorts and things like that. Okay. Got it. All right, so short term, long term. Short term, we gotta get the data tracking in place. Second step is gonna be putting the ad, the ads funnel in place and kind of like what the sales motion is behind that. For local, the good news is that it's easy to do because there's already so much trust locally that you don't need to have nearly the complexity of kind of like the funnels and indoctrination and education prior to someone making a purchasing decision. You can pretty much just like, one call close to two conversation close anybody, even at very high ticket numbers, which is one of the benefits of local. The downside of local is that you've got a market that's this big. Correct. That's the downside, right? So if you don't want to expand markets, then you need to dominate the market you're in. And so it's going to be a multi-pronged approach. And it's kind of like I was saying earlier, like we're going to start with ads because that'll just get you more in. Because I'm guessing right now if you have a good reputation, a good brand, then the ads will actually help you more than they would help somebody who doesn't have that footprint. But then we're going to start probably layering in the, the content as the second kind of the well that needs to continue to get dug. Again, this is gonna be long-term, and so you're gonna wanna be a thought leader. And then what happens is that if you can succeed at building the brand long-term, and it sounds like you're more long-term guy, so I'll speak in these terms, what happens is your radius actually continues to expand. And so if you take into the natural extreme, you can go to the Amen Clinic in New York because they have a national reputation, but people would fly there. And so that's what it looks like as you continue to expand the brand because people will just be more willing to travel to you and pay premium prices, which I'm sure if we looked under the hood, the prices probably get tweaked too. But like those are some things. And if you're in the swamp, cash flow is actually the biggest thing that you need. And so again, the pricing and packaging is probably like, again, if I was to do order of operations, pricing and packaging would probably be number one. So we could free up cash flow. The freed up cash flow, we'd then funnel into the ads so that we could get data attribution. Then we'd put the ads in place, start flowing, putting flow through there. And then the baseline that happens after that is we're just gonna increase the cadence on the content that demonstrates thought leadership. That's the path. That makes sense. Thank you. How do you, we're having trouble also hiring good high quality doctors. Mm-hmm. In Wyoming. It's actually ladders up to the first problem, cash flow. Okay. We need to fix the pricing so that we can generate more cash flow so that we can pay doctors so that we can actually get the business to not rely on you as much. Boom. Real quick, if you are a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. My team and I put together The $100 million scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it into these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at. No matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstrain the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can just book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.

I sell basically complete digital marketing services to service-based businesses in Australia. I move—

SMBs?

Like cleaning companies, stuff like that. Cleaning and yard work.

Average revenue for that?

Average revenue per company is anywhere between half a million to $2.5 million.

Tough.

They're the ones I sell. I pivoted. The company's gone from zero to 500K in the last 4 months. I pivoted from fitness. It just happened. So it worked out well. So they've all been wound down, getting other people to operate. I'd like to ideally get to 8 figures. In terms of what's stopping me, I spent the whole 28 hours here going through every framework I could to figure out what was wrong. I just want to figure out—

Can I tell you what it is?

Good. I also want to figure out where would be Besides like getting operations and moving out to other people and making sure I'm not involved in delivery, where would be the best use of time?

You'll get to 3, 10 will suck. Yep. Yeah, that's what's going to happen. Yeah. So you're 4 months in, so you're— it's brand new. It's very new. And you haven't seen all the shit that's about to happen. So what's going to happen is because you're servicing SMBs, their volatility will translate over to your volatility and independent of how well you do, they will start churning. And you have probably mastered the sales function, which is why you're growing quickly. Yeah, but you also will have like CAC will never be cheaper than it is today.

Yeah.

So CAC will always go up and churn is going to start eating into the business because SMBs suck. And so what's going to happen is that your margins will continue to compress and compress and compress and you have to spend more and more. CAC will go up. You have to hire more people because of churn. That's what you're going to think you have to do in order to fix the churn. But it's not. But whatever, let's go to it. And so you're going to keep going, keep going, keep going. And so revenue keep going up, but the margin gets smaller and smaller. So eventually you're just like, I feel like I'm And I have to just keep selling stuff and I don't even feel confident about it because I got all these people complaining. But it's really because they're the business owners who suck. And then you think, maybe I should take more responsibility for the business owners. I'm going to start maybe doing some sort of sales motion, some sort of nurture motion, because they suck at sales. They don't know how to run their business, and that's why they can't market with me. But I'm going to do this because I want to take responsibility of this. And all of that is just wrong. Yeah. And so if you want to get to $3 million a year, you can just do what you're currently doing. Yeah. You'll just sell more. And LTV will probably be— what's your price point?

$450 a week.

A week. Okay. So you're $2K a month-ish. Yeah. So you're right in the sweet spot of churn. Like that is like if you like $1,500 to $3K a month for an SMB, average stick is going to be 4 to 6 months. And so you can back of napkin— how many you sell in a month right now?

I'm selling about 10 a month at the moment.

Cool. So if you're selling 10 per month, right? And you said $2K was your price point, right? So let's say that we have 5 turns on that on average. $10K, right? And 10 per month.

Yeah.

So you're going to get to $100K-ish per month and then you will stall. And so at that point you'll either have to increase units sold or increase LTV and then you'll keep thinking, man, if I could just get this to go up It would be amazing, but you won't be able to. Yeah. And so the only way to really make SMB work is to go the opposite end, is to go super, super cheap. Yeah. And then build something that costs you nothing.

So nothing to deliver.

Yeah. So it's like $400 a month or less for an SMB if it's a nuisance style. So I'll give you some examples. If you were like, I can get you ranked on first 3 of Maps in your local area and I charge $400, $500 a month. They'll do it because they can see it. Yeah. And they'll pay for that review management and SEO stuff. They will pay $300 to $400 a month and they will stick on that. You'll get like 30 to 40 month stick rates on that, but you'll close way more sales velocity. So LTV is actually similar to this, but CAC stays super low as a result. But I know you got out of fitness, which you probably got out because it was terrible and hard. You might need to just go and get to there and then you'll feel good about things. Like you might need to walk this path rather than believe me, but that's probably, that's what's going to happen. So what do you want to have happen?

Not walk, uh, to not have to walk the path in the first place.

Okay.

Um, get less amounts.

So this is like the, this is me just being real, like marketing. There's so, I mean, obviously a lot of marketers follow my stuff and so I get a disproportionate amount of marketing agencies and I've seen every model under the sun. SMBs, suck as customers. And so you have, you have to do this one or the other. You have to go upmarket, you have to go downmarket, and you guys are really cheap and it's something that's super automated or you do truly do more of these high-touch services, but you do with a business that actually knows their metrics, actually has a sales process, already has a proven model rather than all of them just like wanting to change their stuff all the time, not knowing what they're doing to begin with because like they're expecting you to figure out something that they haven't figured out themselves. So like your price either goes up and you serve a higher level avatar or it goes down and you serve the one you are now, but you make sure that your delivery is almost nothing. Yeah. And then it becomes a CAC issue because you have to offset CAC. And so then become big headlong tail, one-time setup into very small recurring monthly high gross margin. Those are the two models that work for what you want to do. So drop low, go high, and in the middle is just a dead zone where everyone dies. Cool. Makes sense. Thank you.

We do— we're a WaaS, so website as a service, based company. So we build websites, do digital marketing services, that kind of stuff. We cater to small, medium businesses, small businesses. Average revenue per customer is $450 a month. OK. Subscription-based company.

Yeah.

And yeah, we're at $20 million in revenue.

And notice, example, right price. Really small. You price it super low, and it works. Go ahead.

And we want to get to $80 million of revenue in about 3 years.

OK.

So the question we're asking ourselves is, we're in an industry where AI is very disruptive. Every day that goes by, it's constantly degrading and decaying our product. And at the same time, we have this one-channel risk that we're living with. All of our sales, 100% of our growth, has been done through outbound cold calling.

Love it.

Yeah, it's great. But again, cold calling is becoming harder and harder, and the industry is decaying. So we're constantly— we're trying to figure out—

industry is decaying?

Yeah.

What do you mean by that? Churn is going up?

Churn is slightly ticking up, but at the end of the day, AI is making it easier and easier for our customers to be able to build their own websites. Well, yeah, I know. With the type of customer we deal with, they're not usually super sophisticated. So we do have time.

I just found out about ChatGPT.

So yeah, exactly. So we have time, but—

Some of you guys still fax, so I think you got time.

Yeah, but this is the question, right? So do we double down on marketing and create an inbound channel and really invest hard into that? Or do we try to innovate on the product and figure out what else they need and build a revenue engine? Right now, we're trying to do both, but it's obviously limiting.

So this is really, really good. I love that you asked this. So I went on this long rant the other day about— this particular topic, which is solving problems that don't exist. Okay. So, 'cause like, you have a narrative, you have a story around AI is decaying the business, but all I hear is that you have customers and your job just got way easier.

Explain.

So, you know what I mean? Like, if you were like, our churn is escalating by 10% per month, I'd be like, we have a problem, we need to change something. But if it's not really showing up in any meaningful way in terms of the business itself, I think there's plenty of people who will just be super laggards on this and are not gonna be replet vibe coding. They never bought your shit to begin with. Yeah. Like the person who is super into AI right now wasn't hiring Waz anyways. They built their own website before AI made it quote easy, right? Like, 'cause I mean, to be fair, website building software, not that complicated. No. Right? So you said there's two paths. So one is, you know, change the product around. My opinion, I wouldn't— that probably wouldn't be where I'm focused unless I had some business metric that was way off that I'm not seeing. I would be doubling down on the acquisition side. What's your number of months average stick?

So it's 29 months.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's the game. It's usually 30 to 40. The highest I've seen was 38 for this type of business. So you're right. You're right in the sweet spot there. You're a little higher priced. I think they were $299. It all works out in the same thing. So yeah, I think you just double down on inbound, so paid ads.

Paid ads, yeah.

Yeah, and I would just see if you get them to prepay for the quarter so you can offset CAC.

Mm-hmm, OK. On that subject, if you don't mind, in terms of prepaying for the quarter, again, our customers are pretty price sensitive. There's people that are cheaper than us, obviously, if you've seen before. My fear is the amount of churn that will generate some— we bill 90% of our customers on credit cards, and we hold on to 10% that pay us through like pad, and through checks, and that kind of shit.

It's awful.

But we're going to experience churn if we're like, hey, you need to prepay us up front. You'd still—

Well, you wouldn't churn, you'd just close fewer, right?

Close fewer, absolutely. And I think customers that are with us would leave us.

Why would the people who are with you leave you for how you treat new customers? Sorry?

People that are with us would leave us?

I don't think you change your billing process for existing customers. Gotcha. I'm saying if you're doubling down on inbound, what will go up is CAC, because you'll have media spend in addition to the sales commission. And so to offset that from a cash flow— or how cash flow positive are you right now?

So we did $3.6 million in EBITDA last year, generated about—

Interesting. That's lowish. Slowish. Yeah, I'm curious.

We're heavy on people. We're heavy on people, dude.

AI.

I know, I know, big thing.

I know, it's like you're worried about them doing it, you're not even doing it. Correct, right? Right. Yeah. So like, okay, so this is what I would actually do. I would probably spend the next 6 months reorganizing the workflow, probably reduce headcount by 50%, using AI workflows in order to actually do the same thing. Increase the margin from 3.6 to like 7 or more with the added cash flow. You wouldn't have to change the price on the front end. You'd be willing to go negative for a quarter in the acquisition knowing you're going to get 29 on the back. That's how I'd actually fix it. Okay. Makes sense. Chill, right? Cool.

Yeah.

I sell CFO advisory. We will do probably about $2.9 million this year.

Amazing.

I would love to be at like $20 million. Okay, but what's stopping me? I have— we've made all this stuff. I have two books. I have Fire My CPA, I have Tax-Free Millionaire. I've made all these courses. I don't know what to do with them. I don't know how to market. I don't know how to advertise. I've never done any of this.

We're doing $3 million a year, all organic. Yeah. I mean, you're obviously not marketing shitty. So you've got all this stuff, right? You got these books, you got these courses, you make content.

Yes.

Okay, so you are marketing.

Well, I've never put them out there. Like, I don't know what to do with it.

Wait, huh? Okay, hold on. So you've got all this stuff in your back pocket. So you've got Tax-Free Millionaire book and/or course. You've got FIRE CPA book and/or course, and you make content about tax accounting shit.

Yep.

And so people come in and buy your tax accounting shit, right? And you're trying to get to 20?

Yeah.

Do people churn out?

Well, I've never tried to sell anybody on the stuff that I've made.

Well, but we don't need, but like, forget, let's erase those for a moment. Those are not real things for the purpose of our conversation. If you didn't have those things, what would you do to grow the business?

People call our office and they come in and I sell them for monthly service and I get referrals for coaching.

In person?

In person or virtual.

Yeah. Okay. But you're local?

I'm local. We have a bricks and mortar. I have a billboard.

Uh-huh.

But most— I do. Yeah. But most of our clients are not in Texas.

Okay. Hurt.

Yeah.

Okay. So they're coming from the content. They call up, you guys tell them.

Referrals. Yeah.

Okay. Got it. And what are you growing at annually?

What am I what?

Growing at annually.

Last year I was 2.2%. Okay.

That's great. Yeah. Super good. So whatever, 30%, 35% annual growth. That's awesome. Okay, so you want to get to 20, and I'm guessing you just don't want to wait like 7 years to get to 20 at that compound rate.

Yeah.

Right? So as long as you're keeping customers, when I said, do they churn? That's what I meant. Like, are they stay, do people stay with you?

The people that are on monthly stay a lot more than the people that come in just for a one-time tax plan.

What's the, this will be fun for you.

Okay.

So what's the, I'll give you like some business accounting. What's sales velocity right now?

I don't know what—

How many units a month do you sell?

On the monthly recurring?

Yeah.

There's probably about 190 clients.

No, how many do you sell every month?

Oh, new ones? We've closed down for new sales 'cause I'm trying to figure everything out. So nothing right now, nothing.

Well, that will not grow the business, that's for sure. Yeah. There's my— Yeah, I'll be here all day, guys. Okay, so you have a goose egg there, okay. But okay, you have this other stuff, why do we care?

Well, that's what I wanna do, like I like the products, I like to educate, I like to be in front of the camera, like I wanna do all that.

Okay, well what's wrong with the business that you decided to stop selling stuff for?

It's fucking hard, that's why. What do you mean? No, like to fulfill on it.

You could always just start a business where you sell everybody else's stuff.

Well, you didn't even get my joke.

You missed it.

Okay.

And what I'm trying to get to now, like AI, which you were saying is going to completely obliterate our industry, which I'm really excited about because I want to dive into it. I want to leverage AI tools and even overseas partners doing low-level stuff.

Okay.

Because people in our industry are really slow and outdated.

Okay.

Yeah.

But all of these are not things that you would solve with marketing. You're supply constrained. And so you're like, how do I market more? I'm like, you can't even take people.

Well, I want to market like for courses and to buy my books and things like that.

You have a valuable business right now.

No, I do. Yeah.

No. Why are we, why would we start another business?

That's not what Ed told me, but I want to do that too.

Yeah. I mean, like, like I make the content, I continue to repeat and I get, I get my memes made of me of like, Alex just going to say, Shit's hard and hard things are hard and hard, hard, hard. And it's because it just never stops being hard. It just always sucks. Like the course thing will suck too. You just don't know it yet. Ask the course people, they'll tell you it sucks.

That's great advice.

Right? They're like, it sucks. Yeah. The customers aren't sticky. They'll expect you to do everything. They're like, I'm not a tax-free millionaire already. And I bought your $17 course. Like, fuck you. You know, like, like that's, you know, that's what's gonna happen. But you have a service that people aren't churning out of, I'm guessing.

No, they're not.

Yeah.

I mean, some, but they're pretty sticky.

Yeah, no one who has bad churn stops selling, I'll say that. So like the fact that you're comfortable enough that you're like, oh, we don't need to take customers for a while, like I'm sure your stuff is better than you think. But I think that we have to think, basically, you're a supply constraint. And so we just need to fix the supply constraint of your business. Because if I said, hey, we found a way, what are your margins right now?

About 20, 25%.

Okay, so if we said, okay, let's see if we can find offshore talent that can give your existing team 2 or 3x leverage, so you don't have to increase internal headcount, you can increase external headcount, and then when AI comes in, you can basically wipe those guys off the map and then fine, right?

Yeah.

So it's like, yeah, they don't have jobs or families. So they're overseas, they're not real. I'm kidding. So I know half you guys are overseas, that was a joke. But yeah, so I think that we need to create operating leverage. We have to look at basically how the services are being delivered so that we can figure out how to get each person 2 or 3 more, you know, X in terms of their ability to deal with customers. Probably there's a little bit of tech that's missing because this is for everybody. Everybody, every entrepreneur I talk to is like, I wanna be AI first, right? And then you're like using ChatGPT for emails. Like that's not how you're AI first. The first thing that you have to do in order to have an AI-first company is you have to be a data-first company because AI works with data. If you don't have data, then there's no fucking AI. So you have to have complete data-first from your approach and have an architecture in place so that you know all the elements of the business from data. And then we can put the AI layer on top to put reinforcement training in place in order to actually train it to do stuff. So if that's where you wanna go, which does have tremendous operating leverage, And like, just for everybody, this is the once in a generation move right now. So 25 years ago, cloud computing came out and then, you know, software went from CDs to cloud and that, and then all of the software companies and all that boom was the last 25 years and all the billionaires were made. The next boom is this, right? And so we're early. And so the hard of this is like, well, the pieces don't all fit together perfectly yet. And it's like, well, that's the figure out that we make lots of money from, right? So I don't think the solution is you selling a course because you just happen to have recorded it. I think that we need to fix the supply constraint first, and you'll use all those things as marketing assets to increase demand when the time comes. So save those in your back pocket. There's nothing wrong with them, but I want to look at the model, increase operating leverage. That'll probably also increase margin, start making this number more than zero.

Okay.

Which I promise you can take this to the bank. If you make that not zero, you will grow faster. You will make more money if you sell people. And then I think from there, so it's like increase operating leverage through offshoring, add in data layer. Once the data layer's there, Then we can add in the AI component that further increases operating leverage. Once you put the remote team in, you'll then be able to sell again.

Turn it on.

If you get to the point where you're like, I've now reached my new 2 or 3x capacity without even marketing, then great. If you do need to market more, then use the assets that are in your back pocket to go do more lead gen. It was like 4 or 5 steps, but that's how I think through it.

Thank you.

Real quick, I'm gonna show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to $100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by 8 different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it? And then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, uh, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this. And it works and it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap, just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you all free.

I sell roofing and exterior remodeling.

Sweet.

We do close to $6 million this year.

Amazing.

I would like to be at $100 million.

Okay.

So what's stopping me? And I'll be a little bit vulnerable. I would say it's comfort, distractions, and fear.

And food? Fear. Oh, sorry, I was like, all right, good to know.

Not food, no.

Sometimes I feel that way too.

So the comfort is I have built the business, I've replaced myself in every aspect. I can work 2 to 3 hours a week and it run fine.

Okay.

Fear, I would say the fear of losing family time, the work-life balance.

Sure.

And the distractions are my other, I've got another business, drunk removal business. I've got real estate. I've got just all kinds of little things.

What do you think you should do that you're not doing that you want me to tell you to do?

So I know I need to go all in again.

Okay.

And I did that the first 5 years that I—

And that worked out.

And it worked out great. Went through COVID. I got, you know, kept the business going really well. And I worked myself out of a job, got comfortable.

Okay.

So I don't know what I'm looking for you to tell me to do.

Well, I'll say this differently. I think regrets come when we imagine the upside that we don't have without taking into account the cost that we didn't suffer. And so— Sure. I think we regret when we imagine the upside that we didn't get without also considering the downside that we didn't suffer to get it. And so I think that's where a lot of regret comes from because it's not real. So it's like maybe there's some girl that got away or some business opportunity that got away and we just imagine this amazing thing, but not the trade-off that we would have to do in order to get it. We just imagine the upside without downside. And so I would say a couple things. So one is I think that there are trade-offs that we always have to make, and I don't think they're right or wrong. I think they're just, they're preference. There's no right answer to how much work-life balance you wanna have. It's right for you. And so said differently, if I like cookies and I'm good with that, and I also want a six-pack, I just prefer cookies to a six-pack. It's just that's the trade. And I think the dissatisfaction comes from wanting both, right? Right. And so either want less or trade more. Okay. And I think that's really what it comes down to in terms of like, is there a path where I can work no more than I currently am to go from 6 to 100? There probably is. It depends on how much you're willing to pay other people. And so you might have to take a short-term hit in terms of profitability to bring in the level of talent that you want to expand the business on your behalf to where you want it to go. And so as long as you were the type of person character-wise that they would want to follow and believe in your vision, and you can make your vision big enough that they think that their aspirations can fit within it, you can get that type of person. But like, it's 100% like you're graduating right now into the who game. Yeah. But there's levels of who's, you know, like I remember the first time I hired a $50,000 a year employee and I was like, This is the shit. This is what I'm talking about.

You know what I mean?

Like I went from minimum wage, you know, labor to $50,000. I was like, this, they can read, they can write. Like, let's go. You know what I mean? And then I hired my first 6-figure employee and I was like, oh, what was I talking about? Like, this is what's going on. And then I have my first $250,000, first $500,000, first million, first multimillion dollar per year employee. And it's just levels. And so Sharon, who's our president, said this to me years ago, but I always remembered. He said, the best talent's always in the future. So whatever we have today, the best people are always ahead of you, not behind you. And so I think for you, if we— if you really do want to accomplish it without making the trade, you will make a trade, because if you change nothing, nothing will change, right? So we have to change some, some component of your life. And so the question is, which thing do you value the least? Do you value having more profit or more time with your family in the short term? In the long term, you can make it up. You won't make up family time in the long term. You can't make the profit up in the long term, right? So if you're willing to give up short-term profit, you can bring in high-level talent and then they can lead the growth. Okay. In terms of the, uh, the fear stuff, I mean, I would just say like, just hold the line. If you don't— you're like, I'm afraid of losing time with the family, it's like, just don't. Like, I, you know— and then in terms of the real estate thing, I see real estate because I know a bunch of entrepreneurs. I have a ton of real estate. I don't— like, as long as you're not like actively running it Like, that's why I'm a big fan of like REITs and funds because you have, if you have, you know, good partners in that stuff, they can just run it. You can make better than the market. And then, but it's not, it doesn't change anything about what I do. Like me putting in the S&P or me buying another big building changes nothing about my life. And so it's not a distraction unless you're like, you know, if we could add a gazebo and what if we added a different roof? 'Cause I'm a roofer. And what if I combined what I'm really, and you're like, dude, stop. Just like, Let the real estate be the real estate. Let the business be the business and just keep them apart as long as you're good there. Cause I think he's a distraction. Actually, let me double check on that real quick, which is when you said you're the distraction thing that you're afraid of, why are you afraid of that?

I'm not afraid of it.

Okay.

I'm just, I've got ADHD and I collect gold and silver. I buy houses, I buy buildings. I mean, it's just a little bit of the red dress.

Well, as long as it doesn't change anything about what you do, I don't care. But if it's like, now I check this stuff all the time and it like eats up my days, then yeah, I would say that it's a problem. And it's only a problem if you decide it's a problem. Like you might just like that stuff. It's just like, I sacrifice my goals 'cause I enjoy this ADD. You know what I mean? Like the cost of the big thing is the new stuff that you have to give up to keep it going. Yeah. Thank you. I feel like there's some amens. This is great. This is like a good meal, right? Yeah. I appreciate it. But yeah, that's like the cost of the big thing is all the new stuff you have to give up that you don't get to pursue. All the exciting things that you will no longer participate in because you wanna do one thing big. Okay. And I think for me personally, I had this moment, I think a while ago, but like I had this realization of how long it takes to get good at anything. And then I thought about, oh, I only have like 30 or 40 more productive years at most. And so I'm like, I've got like 4 or 5 big seasons in me left. Yeah. And so that's it. And so I don't have like unlimited shots on goal. I've got 4 or 5 big runs in me. And so I think like realizing that it's kind of like Warren Buffett talks about, if every person just had a punch card with 20 punches on it and that's the only thing you could invest in, you could never sell it, you'd make way better investments. I see entrepreneurs the same way in terms of what business opportunities we pursue, because if we take the hypothetical extreme that if we want to build something really big, it's going to take a long time. Then it means we can't do that many things. So hopefully that helps.

I appreciate that answer because I thought you were gonna say sell everything.

And I mean, they're investments. I mean, I'm not gonna tell you sell your investments. I would say keep passive stuff passive. Don't make it active. That's like incurring cost. Because if you're gonna make it active, then make active money. Yeah. If you're like, I want to take my passive money and then make it cost me more time to get 5% better returns, it's like you're going to get way better returns in your active income than your passive. And just, I would just keep active, active, keep passive, passive.

Thank you.

Appreciate you.