If I Started A Business in 2026, I'd Do This | Ep 919

In 2016, I had $1,000 to my name, sleeping on a gym floor. 9 years later, I broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling nonfiction book and generated over $106 million in sales in a weekend. I'm going to show you how I'd build a business if I started all over. So first, either sell extremely expensive stuff to a select few or sell something super cheap to everyone. The middle is where people die. So fundamentally, all businesses have the cost of getting customers and what you make from those customers is the core economic arbitrage that makes a business of business. You have a more efficient way of taking resources and allocating them to get superior throughput on the other side. That's literally what a business is. Why did I start with sell really expensive stuff or sell really cheap stuff? Let's dive in. So having worked with thousands of businesses now, I can tell you that it is significantly easier when you're starting to sell extremely expensive to a select few. And the reason for that is that you have to make enough money to be able to serve the masses. So if you look at Tesla as a great case study for this, Tesla started with a $250,000 Roadster, clearly selling to a select few. And it was like a beta test car. So like it definitely wasn't like completely street ready, all this stuff. But from the, the few that they were able to make, they were able to get enough money or enough proof of concept to then eventually get to making the S, right? And then after making the S for a few years, then they were able to work their way down and make the Model 3. And so the idea is that you start high and then you can work your way down. And so despite what most people believe, one of the simplest ways to create an expensive offer is to sell your time one-on-one, even if it's unscalable. Now I'll give you a personal story and then I'm going to sell you on why I think this is actually useful. When I started my personal training business, which was a gym on Huntington Beach, I had a client who wanted personal training. Now my gym wasn't a personal training gym. It was a large group training and semi-private training gym. I did all group. There wasn't any one-on-one. But this one guy got referred to me because he had some like specific mobility things and like whatever. He liked me. And so he, he ended up doing personal training with me. Now this guy would do 5 days a week of 90-minute training sessions, which is huge for a personal trainer, right? So I'm making, I think I was, I think it was charging $125 an hour or something. So I was getting almost like $180 a day for that whole period. So I just remember that I got something in the neighborhood of like $4,000 or $5,000 a month in cash. She paid me in cash. It was amazing. Um, that I would get per month from this one client. And the thing is, is that me having that one-on-one time gave me the cash flow that I needed nothing from the business. So I could just keep reinvesting the business's money to growing it faster. And so a lot of people have this fear around like, oh, it's not scalable. It's like, it doesn't have to be scalable. Like when I speak to business owners, they have a lot of limiting beliefs around charging a lot of money or selling their time. And so I want to drive this point home and give you a lot of reasons to show why it is superior, especially when you're starting out, to sell your time one-on-one, even if it is unscalable. So let me kind of sell you on this. So number 1 is that you will learn more from fewer high-value clients. All right. And if you're around those higher-value clients, you will work with better people and it will shift your belief set about who really is in the market, right? Like if you've ever struggled to sell a $50 membership as someone who has, it's insane when all of a sudden someone's like, here's $15 grand. You're like, what just happened? $15 grand? That's 3,000 $50 sales that I'd have to make in order to get $15 grand. That's how absurd that is. But when that happens again and again, it shifts how you see money and what services you think about creating. The next one that people get hung up on is like, well, I don't want to sell my time because, uh, selling your time is what poor people do. Let me learn you some stuff. All right. Which is every single person on planet Earth earns money per hour. They just don't necessarily denote it per hour, but all you have to do is take what you made last year, divided by 2,000, and guess what? Voilà, you have your hourly rate, which means you worked 40 hours a week, assuming you work 40. And so even if you work project-wise, you spent a certain amount of time on that project. And you were remunerated, little fancy word. You got paid based on that work. And so even something like an investment where people are like, well, you know, investors don't trade their time for money. Of course they do. Because you think, oh, Warren Buffett bought this company. He just wrote a check and then that was it. He was done. But what we're not taking into consideration is the amount of analysis that he does on macro markets, the amount of research that he's doing on a regular basis, the thousand other deals that he did all the due diligence on, then to say no. To only decide to do this one deal. So when you take all of that work in aggregate, for sure he's working. Now, after he makes the investment, assuming he has no effort inside of it, which isn't always true, but assuming he had none, then at that point he would get increasingly larger returns, but still on a fixed amount of time that he put in. So the proof point is you live in time and you earn money in time, which means everyone has an hourly rate. And so the idea here is that as long as the thing that you sell your hourly rate for is more than you currently own, you will make more. Next point, when you are doing one-on-one, especially in the beginning, you have significantly more flexibility in delivery. That means because it's one-on-one, you can change things on the fly. And also when you have fewer clients, you can make these kind of quick iterations. So this kind of relates back to the first point of like, you learn a lot faster when you can just have these tiny little pivots. You don't have to change systems. You don't have to retrain staff. You don't have to look, you don't have to recode. You don't have to have the scalable solution fixed perfectly. It's a great way to beta test ideas. The next one is that because you can still cap the time that you choose to spend with clients, you can still make sure that you're allocating as much time as you need to, to do everything else. And one of the big lessons that I've learned in terms of making more money is that when you have demand, cut supply. And so when you cut supply, what does that do? Why is, why is the acquisition.com logo two concepts? Leverage, which is a fulcrum, and then a supply demand curve. Because those are, in my opinion, the two most powerful concepts in business. And so when you have supply and demand at work, which we do, the reason 1-on-1 is so powerful is because the supply is so, is so contracted, so fixed, it's so small. And so it forces, as long as you don't have limiting beliefs, which is why I'm trying to make this for you, it forces you to raise your price. And so the next one, and this is controversial, you make the money. Nobody else does. If you trade your time for the money, you have 100% margin. It's fantastic. Now, some people are like, well, hey, well, my hourly rate It's not though. You're awake. Your hourly rate is the food that kept you alive. That is your hourly rate. Beyond that, the rest of it goes in your pocket. And so what I think what people lack a consideration of is like every business can have 5 one-on-one clients. Now, when you're like, how would I do this in a, in a lawn care business? Well, it's just who's going to be your account rep. You can say some people get your cell phone and some people get the account rep's phone. Who's going to lead the, you know, like who's going to actually design the whole garden? Is it just one of my guys or is it going to be me? There's always an opportunity to make yourself the super premium version of whatever it is that you have. Now, here's a fun one. This is, I wanna, I wanna break this loop because I know the next one that comes up, which is, it's still just not worth my time. Bro, it is worth your time if I give you a trillion dollars. And so the idea here is not, is it worth my time? It's you have to fix the price so that it is worth your time. Not you would begrudgingly do it or think to yourself, well, no one would ever buy that or no one ever spend that money or I think someone would be crazy. Fine, let them be crazy. Let people live a little bit. Let them be wild. Let them be a little spicy. If they want to pay you more money, you should give them the opportunity to do so. That's the point here. Now, what else happens when you have a super high-ticket, unscalable, premium, one-on-one experience? You lift your entire brand. Because if you charge $10,000 an hour, something absurd, doesn't matter. And the thing that you have is $100. You can then have a very natural narrative of, listen, a lot of people can't afford to work with me one-on-one. That's totally cool. I've taken the lessons I have here and I've put them in a scalable format for everyone. It literally increases the perceived value, not just from the anchor effect, but from the narrative, the association, the branding that occurs as a result. Because even if you charge that and no one ever buys it, they still assume, because that is the narrative and that's what you put in front of them, that that big price tag, the value associated with it, still gets transferred to a degree to the lesser thing that you have that might be scalable. Every business can do this. Like, this is the action step before we get into like tactics on like how we can make something be perceived as more valuable. The action step is this: just have the price listed wherever you sell. And if you don't list it anywhere, say the price when you offer. And here's the thing that people mess up about this. You must confront the high price. You have to confront it. If you just say like, oh yeah, working with Adam Hernandez means like $10,000. But anyway, what most people want to do is No, in order for an anchor to work, you have to allow the prospect to make a full consideration of the decision, which means you have to say, hey, would you like to work with me one-on-one? It's $10,000 an hour. Right. And that's, I think, the highest likelihood thing that I can do to help you to get to where you want to go. Now, the thing is, is at that point, what do we do? We shut up. We let them talk. Why? Because talking might result in them saying yes. And if they say yes, you get money. That's amazing. Right. And so. We're at this point right now. If they then balk, you say, don't worry, I'm gonna pull out a couple of the components of this and give you this thing that has 90% of the elements of this first thing, but it's significantly more scalable. How's that work for you? They'll be like, oh my God, thanks so much. This sounds amazing. This is exactly what I need. And they buy. The thing is, is even if, and let me do the math for you, cuz this is important. Let's say you have a $100 thing and you have a $1,000 thing. And let's say of the 100 people, 10 of the 100 are buying the really expensive thing. So 90% of people, buy the $100 thing. What does that do to your business? Guess what it does? It doubles the revenue of your business. And not only that, all of that incremental revenue, the stuff that came from those top 10 people is 100% margin. So let's say that on your $100 you make 40% margins. You're actually making $40 on those 90 people. So you're making $3,600 in profit off of 90 of your 100 buyers. Now, the other 10, You make 10 times $1,000. So you make $10,000. So you actually make 3 times the profit on your expensive thing and 1 times the profit on your cheaper thing. So 3/4 of what you make comes from this thing. That's why people miss it is they don't get the math behind it. You have the expensive thing because even in tiny, tiny volumes, lots of zeros still add up. And so if you were getting started, I would strongly recommend If even if you have a scalable thing, even if you have your own school, you have a community, you charge $100 a month, whatever it is, have something that's $1,000 a month. Have something that's $10,000 one time. Have it up there. Just make it available. And so I'm gonna give you 3 different frames to working through this. The frame number 1 is what if we charged 10x or 100x more than your current thing? What would you include? Just go crazy with it. Just think if instead of $1,000, if someone gave me $100,000, what would I do? Just write down everything you would do and then look at the cost of doing all those things. What you'd be amazed by is many of the things that you have these ideas for don't actually cost that much. And so cross out the ones that have hard costs and then look at what's left and then say, well, I think I could do that. And then we ask the question, would you be okay doing that for $1,000 or $10,000? You might say like, well, yeah, for 10 grand I would do that. Make it available. The second way to think about this is if I had to make a service or a product that was only grown off of word of mouth alone. And all you have is this one customer in front of you, and the only way that you will be able to get more customers is if you get that customer to tell their friends about your stuff. What would that customer's experience, what would the service, what would the components of the offer look like if that was the requirement? Write down all of that stuff. And if you're willing to do that for a higher price, present it. An amount greater than zero will say yes. And I'll give you a third frame. This is different than the other two, but I think that's still very valuable when you're thinking through how do I make something, um, well, more valuable. If we had to take everything out of it that is unscalable, but we have to make it worth 10 times as much, now how do we do it? So this gives you 3 different intellectual attack vectors to think through the value creation for making your more expensive one-on-one unscalable thing that in many times will make you more money, especially in the beginning, than your less expensive thing. And the other part of this is that it makes for great marketing. One, because you can say, hey, this is one of my clients, one of my private clients, one of my, my individual clients. And what that does is people are like, oh, this guy must be a little bit, you know, has more authority, right? On top of that, when you share the learnings from those quote private clients, it gives you marketing material to actually talk about, right? And where do you think your best case studies are going to come from? There. And so you're going to get amazing case studies. You're going to have amazing marketing materials in terms of the learnings and lessons that you're going to have. And then one of the things that I personally prefer is that these people are way cooler and they will be people that you actually end up being friends with that you like. And they're the ones who actually shift your worldview because you actually will spend more time with these people than all of these people. And that will shift you in the correct direction. Now, let's deconstruct value in a tactical way so that we can take the, the 3 frames that I just gave and do even more with it. Here are the two steps. Very straightforward. Pick the right avatar. Do not try to make your unscalable expensive thing and then think about the person who's currently buying your thing for $100 and think, what would this $100 person, uh, be willing to spend $1,000 for? Do not think that. Likely the person that's going to spend the $1,000 is a different person. So you have to think about that person, not the person underneath. Next, once you have this avatar, they have the money, they feel the pain, they're easy to reach, right? Then we have to think, how can we describe their pain more accurately than they can describe it themselves. And so the big hack, and this is also new with some of the AI stuff that's out there, is go into the books that people are buying in your niche and then extract the reviews and then get the quotes that are specific to their pain. And so one of the really interesting things about copy is that if you can articulate someone's problem better than they can, they will inherently believe that you can solve it. So this is what we're talking about. The dream outcome. It's like, make sure we're talking about the right avatar, about what they really want in the way that resonates with them specifically, because pain and persuasion only exist in the specific, never the vague. And if you do this successfully, their pain and your description of their pain can be a better motivator of persuasion and action than a greater promise. So how do we then reverse engineer what someone actually wants? They don't really want your time. They want to buy an outcome. Now, why is one-on-one a valuable vehicle? Because the perceived likelihood of achievement when you do something one-on-one in an unscalable way actually goes through the roof. So if I had a meal plan that I gave you as a PDF or I said, I will talk to you one-on-one every day, the outcome is still I want to lose weight, but the likelihood that they're going to get there is going to be significantly higher. The likelihood, the ease, how easy it is for them is going to go up. And all of these components play with one another. So That's the outcome side. Underneath of that, we have perceived lack of achievement, which I touched on briefly within the vehicle of one-on-one. But within this case, your reputation over time acts as almost an implied guarantee. And the nature of the delivery also has some level of implication that they're going to get the completeness of you. And so as long as they believe you are competent, number one, and two, have strong intention to help, the likelihood that they believe that giving you money will help them get what they want goes really high. And so that's why I like one-on-one. That's why I like unscalable. And to be clear, just cap it. It doesn't mean you have to do it all the time because that will get in your way long term. But in the short term, it can, it can allow you to live on this and then cash flow all the growth. And so this is me giving you kind of like the, the bootstrap strategies to growing a big business is like, be willing to take 5, 10% of your time, charge 10 times more and make enough income from that, that you can take all the other money and go aggressive, go on the offense with it. So third one is speed. Now, if I had to pick one thing that I could do to maximize persuasion, it is speed or the inverse latency. How do I decrease latency? How do I increase speed so I can make sure the outcome happens as fast as possible? Because latency beats magnitude 7 days a week and twice on Sunday. The reason that this is important is that it will motivate someone's action to buy more than just about anything else. So you're not going to sell someone who's wealthy on how much money you're going to save them. You'll sell someone who's wealthy based on how much time you're going to save them even more. Because money has an implicit value. Their time is the one that over time will become significantly more value than the money. One of the things that anyone can do to sell that expensive thing is just take whatever the delivery time you currently have is and cut it in half, cut it in two-thirds. And if you have a one-on-one service or a higher tier service that should add a zero or more, you can just say you will always have priority. You will always be first in line. When I have a new thing, you'll be the first one to see it. Whenever there's an emergency, you'll be the first to respond. I'll pull someone off a job to come to your house. All of these things are about speed. Those things, like, think about the vectors of value. The higher the number, the more done for you, the more turnkey someone expects something to be. So this is how you reverse engineer ease. You go through the customer experience and you take a note every time you have to do something. Now, you might find out that in order for someone to get the outcome that you want, they might have to take 10,000 actions. And so then what we do is we systematically go and reverse and delete friction point by friction point actions that they need to take. And so this is the process of making an exceptional product. Now, it might cost you more money to make this product, which is why you charge more money for it. So if you have— of course, there's technology that can automate some of this, but for many services that exist in the real world, which 70% of people or 80% of people in the US at least are service-based businesses, then you're going to spend some more money. Now here's the magic of this. Well, some of my business relies on other vendors or other parties. Guess what happens when you charge 10 times as much? You can pay them more to prioritize your customers. And so this allows you to make your own priority ring on top of that, that allows you to consistently outcompete competition because you pay your vendors, you pay your partners better than anyone else does because you have this service tier. And so the TL;DR big picture is that No matter what, no matter how many customers you have, if you simply make a 10 times more expensive offer, you will have a percentage likelihood that is greater than zero that someone will buy. And when that happens, you will be reinforced for doing so. And I think you will actually see how powerful adding one, sometimes two zeros to your price tag really is. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Charge more money.