My 9 Step Blueprint To Making $1M (w/ Simon Squibb) | Ep 785

When we say I want to be successful, success is about sticking with it. And so the only way that you become a failure in business is by stopping. All the games worth playing in life, in my opinion, are all infinite. It's not about getting married, it's about staying married. It's not about getting in shape, it's about staying in shape. It's not about starting a business, it's about staying in business. And the only thing that gets you out of business is you choosing to stop. And I think that's a very powerful frame because it puts it 100% in your control. And so as long as you keep trying, you're still in business. Have you ever heard the saying be, do, have? Have you heard of this? Yep. I hate it because people are like, you have to I need to become this type of person to do this type of stuff to have this thing. But if the doing creates the having, then we don't need to worry about having because doing is the actual thing we control. And if we describe someone only by the behaviors they do, then being also happens as a result of doing, which means it's just do. So Nike's always had it right.

It's true though, yeah. So tell us how people figure out who they are and what's the process people need to go through.

So I think there's a lot of confusion around identity. I think a lot of it is around like, I want to have these traits or like, I wish I were born— I wish I were more charismatic. I wish I were more patient. I don't think people translate them into the behaviors that create the trait. And so, the traits themselves are just bundled terms. So, let's say someone's charismatic. They're like, "I want to be charismatic." All right. Well, if I look at somebody and say, "Cool. Be charismatic," someone would just stare back like, "How?" Right?

All you need to do is smile. It's very easy.

No, but that's— And so, what's interesting is that you've already went to start translating it. But charisma, patience, A lot of these things are what I call bundled terms. And so they're single words that actually have series of behaviors underneath of them that when we see them in the wild, we then describe that person as charismatic. So they nod up and down when you talk. They increase the volume of when they talk and they have different tonalities as in like they go up and then they go down, they speed up, they emphasize words. It's basically looking at all of these microbehaviors. And if you do all of these things, they shake hands firmly, they make eye contact, all of these things, then it's like, oh, So I don't, I don't need to try and be charismatic. I just need to nod when people are talking. I need to repeat back to them what they just said. I need to smile when they walk in the room. I need to be able to enunciate and speak with volume and not just be monotone. I need to go up and down and up and down and speed up and slow down when it's important. I need to shake people's hands with confidence. I need to make eye contact. If I do those things, other people will describe me as charismatic. And so when I look at, you know, the version of who I would like to be, I say, what are the traits that I think of? And then what are the behaviors that associate with those traits? And then that way it makes something that seems feel unattainable, like, man, I wish I were more X. It's like, well, you can be that if you just think what must occur in order for someone to describe someone as this thing. And so that's been honestly one of the big things that like, it really changed my life because a lot of these things feel like out of your control. It's like, I wish, but it's just a lot of times we just break skill sets. Same thing when we're teaching someone, hey, build a company. You can go do that because you have, 'cause that would be like a big bundled thing. Can you just go build a company? Sure, I can. Now, leveled down one, it's like, okay, so do you know how to advertise? Do you know how to sell? Do you know how to create a product or a service? Do you know how to hire people? All of those are bundled skills underneath. And you can basically derive everything all the way down to turn on the computer, turn on Internet Explorer, type in a website. And so at every level, whenever someone gets confused about what to do, it's like, just break it down. And that's fundamentally how we like to train teams. But also it started with me, which is like, what do I need to do?

It's my thing about entrepreneurship that kind of like, anyone can be an entrepreneur.

Sure.

And people get really annoyed at me when I say that. Oh no, it's tough. You know, you gotta worry about cash flow.

Well, if you can't, get a good accountant.

You know, like, you know, I think it's interesting 'cause people always have a reason why it's such bloody hard thing to do. And if you break it down like this, it's not, right? This thing of who you are though, is it a genetics thing though as well? Like maybe some people just can't be charismatic, maybe they can't smile. I mean, you know what I mean? Like, it's my wife is— and she never listens to this stuff, so I can say this— I wouldn't describe her as charismatic. I describe her as beautiful and intelligent.

Sure.

But she doesn't really— she doesn't really bother shaking hands. It's just who she is.

Sure, sure.

So do you think this is a personality thing?

No, I think 100% of people can learn. Yeah. I mean, I have a fundamental belief about the world, which is all things are trainable. It's just that not all things are are worth training.

You've gotta be motivated to be, to turn that.

I think about it from return on resources. So it's like, even if like, I think as a, I believe someone genuinely with Down syndrome could learn to become, or at least rather learn to do brain surgery. Would the amount of resources required in order to teach that person be a good use of resources? Probably not. If intelligence is rate of learning, then it's the rate of behavior change. Like how quickly can we get someone to change behavior? At least for me, that's how I define intelligence. And so if I were to train my team and say, hey, do this thing, and the next time they walk in, they do that new thing under the same conditions. They've learned quickly. They're a more intelligent person. I think it's simply that the rate of learning differs between people, but all people are trainable. That's how we learn everything.

So, so, so concluding this bit, I mean, who you are is who you are, what you want to be. So, so that goes back to modeling yourself on perhaps the people you admire or the people you have the life you want and then go learn what they know. Mm-hmm.

And do what they do. I'll actually give a one that I think is helpful for a lot of people is like it's making sure that we're doing the things that they did at that stage. And so, you know, if you want to become a billionaire, it doesn't mean go fly on private jets because billionaires fly on private jets. If you want to become tall, it doesn't mean you go play basketball. And so it's conflating what, like, what was the cause, what was the effect, right? And so we want to not model where people are today and how they act today, but we want to model the rise. We want to model what they did at the beginning. And so one of the tough parts about that is Usually when you're in the grind, like one of my biggest regrets in the world is that I have zero sales that I had recorded when I was in person and I have over 4,000 one-on-one sales that I had done and all the stuff I learned there, I never had any recordings. And so it's like because I didn't think, oh, I'm going to later someday in the future have a YouTube channel and I'm going to be teaching this stuff. I was like just trying to sell memberships.

Yeah, fair.

You know what I mean? And so I say that because I try and remember to the best of my ability and I do that through teaching, you know, our teams and whatnot, like Hey, do this and do this. And so we do our best to remind everyone who's coming up like, this is what I was doing. Don't look at what I'm doing now. Look at what I was doing then.

I think, yeah, doing things so powerful because that's how also you remember. You can hear someone tell you how to do something. You can listen to this video, but if you don't go out and apply it, you probably won't remember it.

Yeah. Well, nothing will happen. That's the guarantee.

So it's a good place to start. You can be anything. Maybe decide what you want to be. I mean, a lot of people in sales, for example, say, oh, you need to be an extrovert to do sales. I'm like, my biggest salesperson in my last company was my accountant. No one more introverted. And do you know what? 'Cause she was introverted, she was slightly more trusted.

Yeah.

'Cause she would only say things that people, she'd go to a meeting with other CFOs and talk about how brilliant our company was. Yeah. Those CFOs who were also introverted would go back to the office, talk to the CEO and say, you should get Simon's company in. 'Cause I just heard from the CFO what they're doing there. Yeah. You know, best sales technique ever. But she didn't think she was a salesperson. Yeah. If I'd interviewed her and said, welcome to the company, you're gonna be our number one salesperson. She wouldn't have even started. Yeah. But yeah, so it's all about using your personality traits to also be applied, right? What next?

So the second one is like, okay, so you have to acquire enough of these traits, bundled terms, to just take action. So if I had to do that, what's the TL;DR of the last stage, which is do something. That's it. Like if all of this was around doing, it's do something because currently nothing is happening in your life. And so in order for something to change, you have to do something. Now, once you decide, okay, I'm going to take action, then it's like, okay, who am I selling to? This is one that people get really confused about. And I think people want to start with what do I sell? Like 2 and 3, what to sell, are very much interrelated, right? Because who you sell to is going to determine what you're going to sell, right? If I decide that airline pilots are going to be my, the people that I feel like selling, then I can be like, oh, well, I have these, you know, this, this insurance thing that does for houses. It's like, I don't know if that's really the, the right match for that particular thing. Sometimes you come in with some past experience. And so I like to, I know I'm going, I'm going out of order, but hopefully it'll work out in the end. But I think there's 3 Ps around what people figure out. And I tend to talk more about services than products. And I do that because at least in the US, 78% of businesses are services. Great way to start as well.

Service is a very easy business. Right.

At the end of the day, you're just doing something that other people don't want to do for money. Right? And so pain, profession, and then passion. Almost all businesses can get derived from one of these 3 things, which is like you had some painful experience you overcame. And so that's, you know, a mom who helps her kids pack lunches who have food allergies. It's like if you figured out how to overcome that, then you can help other people do it too. If you overcame some sort of depression thing, it's like you can help other people do that. If you didn't know how to advertise your biggest business and then you figured out how to do Google pay-per-click, it's like that's something that's— it's a pain.

Pain is, you know, relative, but time-saving, if you can save people time, is another way of translating it.

Oh, totally. And so then the second one is profession. So a lot of people do have jobs but want to start a business. And so Whatever you do in a company fundamentally is something that other companies probably want. And so you can always fractionalize whatever your professional skill is between multiple companies. And so that's just taking a skill that you already have in the workplace and just selling it to other people. And then passion is like, okay, well, I love, I'm really interested in model cars. Okay, well, can you build a business around model cars? Absolutely. You could build a subscription on building them. You could build the actual products around them. You could make a channel about painting model cars. Like, there's a zillion things that you could do there. But in each of these, it's usually something you overcame, some sort of professional skill that you learned, or some passion. And so that usually goes into what to sell. The most common person to sell to is someone like you. So most, if you look at like Y Combinator and a16z, some of the best venture startup investors, one of the requirements that they often have is what they call living with the problem. And so they want people who've had a lot of surface area, a lot of exposure, many repetitions over years with with many different types of solutions and why they don't work. And so, on one hand, sure, you can be like, "Oh, I'm gonna just, I'm gonna think of this beautiful idea." But most of the times it's like, "What do I hate? What bothers me?" Because you, because then you don't have to do all this market research to figure out like, how do these people talk? Like, what are their innate desires? You just say like, "Well, what do I want?" And it's a much faster path. And I think that's where, this is where a lot of people end up starting in terms of who to sell to. They sell to people like that.

And you don't need much research in the market when you know exactly your own problem. And interestingly, even the top level, like Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook to solve his own awkward problem of being socially awkward. Yeah, he did. He wanted to meet girls, he wanted to be liked, he wanted friends, but he found it socially awkward to go out. Yeah. So he built a platform to solve his own problem. Turns out a lot of people have that problem. I guess passion and purpose, do you differentiate the two?

No, I did not say that. It's not true.

I just, I usually use those 3 Ps because I think people, I believe in sales, it's a, it's a, there's 3 steps, right? Which is like people do it the wrong way around normally. But the first step is, do you like the person? Does the person like you? The relationship stuff. I don't know if people spend enough time doing that. Second is, do people need what you're selling? Sure. A lot of people spend a lot of time selling something they don't need, right? Okay. And then the third step, of course, is like pricing and all that sort of stuff. But I think a lot of the time, like, I took 9 years to get to Apple as a client. 9 years. Yeah. But it's because I had a passion and a purpose to build a company. I wanted to build something that was respected. Apple being a client would, would help my company being be respected. I think that purpose really helps you get through in the end on sales.

Yeah, these are, I mean, this is kind of like the cycle of figuring it out. And then when you, once you're like, okay, well I get it, pain, profession, passion, but underneath of those things, like what really is it? And so typically you're gonna have, you can either sell products. So that's physical stuff, right? Tangible things you can put in someone's hand. There's services, which is you just do stuff for other people, which is, fundamentally services are wrapped to time, and there's two types of time. One is the time to learn the skill, the other is the time to do the skill. So underneath it's some sort of information advantage that you have, and then the actual doing and execution. And so those are fun, like services can be as simple as, I know how to mow my lawn, I just don't want to do it. On the other hand, it could be, hey, I know how to code, and I can code this, you know, site a certain way. It's like, okay, not only do I not want to take the time to do it, to learn it, I also don't want to take the time to do it. And so when you're thinking about products or services, those are, Those are the two kind of buckets as I think about them. And then you have SaaS or software. You've got software as a service. You've got apps, things like that. You have something that I like to go into, which is just access. You've got risk. You've got money. And so these are all things that people can buy and sell. Banks buy and sell money. Insurance buy and sell risk. Access, if you think real estate is physical access, they're digital asset access. SaaS is basically these things just put in a digital format. And so this gives, gives you kind of like a jumpstart of like, well, What do I, how do I take my passion? It's like, okay, well pick one of these ways. It's like you could sell the model cars, you could build the cars for people and then sell them. You could have a SaaS that helps people design their own cars. You could have events where you bring people together and they can show off their cars and race them and whatever. And then you can charge for tick, you know, for access to that or media access. Like if you have, like for me, like this would be like education would still kind of fit inside of here. It's like access to some sort of media. Risk, you could insure people's collections around their cars if they have really valuable car collections. You know, model cars. And then money is, hey, maybe people need lending for this stuff, who knows. Fundamentally, like, that's how I think through what am I going to sell.

I think as well, it's very interesting on the service side because my agency business, for example, I was selling the services, someone else's design ability, their time. Yeah. To someone. I wasn't even doing the service. Yeah. But I helped the person. The designers didn't like to sell. They're shy. They want to sit at the computer creating, right? So I didn't even have the skill to do the design. But I was able to sell the service. I think this list is brilliant. So, okay, so people of who to sell to and what you're going to sell are interlinked. So, you've decided what you're gonna do here.

I'm gonna add one thing to this 'cause I think this will be helpful for people who are starting out. And so, I talk about this a ton in my stuff. In my opinion, one of the things that matters a ton is pricing, right? It's a lot easier to sell 100 people a $10,000 thing than it is to sell 10,000 people a $100 thing. There's just so much more distribution that you need to get. For me, I look at, do the people that I want to sell my thing have the money for my thing? And if everybody's broke in this particular market, then I might consider, well, is there anything else I know how to do or anything else I'm passionate about or anything else that I have a professional skill around? So the first thing is money. The second thing is how easy are these people to find? Like, is it really hard to find this, you know, this particular subset of people, or can I find them pretty easily? Are there directories or associations with them? If so, then it's easy for me to reach out or show up at those conferences or whatever. The next thing is I'd rather have the market be growing. Like if I'm about to pick what business I'm gonna get into, I'd rather go into one where there's more demand than there is supply, right? Like I'd rather just have the tailwind rather than a headwind. One of my friends had a business that sold to newspapers. And brilliant guy. And basically he was trying to transition them from print ads to give them a second ad product that was digital. So he's like, he could convert all of their print ads into digital ads onto their website. And so it makes sense. It's like, you know, it's avant-garde. Hey, you just have another product you can now sell. You don't have to do anything. You just make more money. Like, it was a good offer. The problem is that newspapers, at least in the US, were shrinking by 25% per annum every year, compounding the wrong direction, 25% a year. And so now if he, he had to gain 25% market share every year just to keep his company the same size because people were just going out of business.

Even though it's in the digital space, which is the growing part, right? They didn't have any money to pay for that service.

Yeah. And then the final one is if I had to pick between two things, I'd rather have one where people are in pain. And when I say pain, it doesn't necessarily mean like people are like, oh my God, like, you know, I've got cancer, I'm going to die. But just the annoyances of taking out the trash every day, it's like it's just the problems are things that people would rather not do. Now, when you combine these things together is when you can charge a lot more. Like if it's just like a lot of times when you start out like very, very early days, you probably don't know anything that other people don't know. I'm just being real, right? And so a lot of the earliest businesses you start are are what, you know, we'd probably consider blue-collar businesses. So it's like, it's cleaning, it's lawn care, it's painting. These are not, you know, you can learn how to do it in a weekend, but that's okay because business takes a really long time to learn. And so it's like, okay, well, at least let me— I'll just have something simple that I can do here and then I can learn all the other skills around business by practicing it. These are kind of the 4 characteristics of if I'm going to get into a market, I want to make sure that they've got the money, they're easy to find, it's growing, and they're in pain.

How are you writing this down, folks? Because I wish I'd done this when I was younger. I mean, I built a service business. We were talking about it off camera, and sometimes you're selling so hard to a market that doesn't have enough money. It's so much harder. Anyone's going to fail at sales if you put yourself in a place where people don't have enough pain. They've got too many choices. Yeah, choices. You've got to have that pain to create the closing situation and selling.

And this is actually I think this will be really relevant for your, your history with the creative agency. So there's this story that I really like a lot where a father gives his son an old car. You might have heard this one, but father gives his son an old car and he says, if you want, you can sell it and then you can take the money and, you know, buy yourself something else. And so he says, why don't you go down to the pawn shop and see what they'll give you? And so, you know, kid goes, comes back and he looks a little bit down and he's like, what's up? He's like, oh, they said they'd give me $2,500. He's like, all right, well, go to the dealership, see if you can trade it in there for, you know, for something else. So he goes there, comes back back and said, well, hey, they'll give me $5,000. He's like, okay, that's an improvement. Uh, and he says, hey, why don't you go down to the, uh, the old, the old collectibles auction house, see what they'll do? And so the kid goes there and he comes back and he's, he comes back, he's jumping for joy. He's like, Dad, you won't believe it, you won't believe it. He's like, they say this is an old collectible car and it's worth $100,000. And he's like, the biggest lesson here is that sometimes it's the exact same thing, but who you sell to changes everything. And so Within the services that you have, if Simon had gone back and sold to really small businesses the, like, branding and creative and logo design and things like that, I would bet that the vast majority of those businesses couldn't appreciate what the service was and what the value of even branding is to begin with. 'Cause they'd be like, "Yeah, but how's it gonna get me leads?" And only a more advanced business can appreciate the upside of how much return on advertising, return on throughput you get by having kind of a brand halo effect. But you have to be of a certain size. And so if you had that skill set and then you were like, hey, Alex Simon, I started my business but no one wants to buy it. The first question we'd probably ask is, okay, well, are you good at your thing? And if you check the box, it's like, yeah, I think this guy's good. Well, who are you selling to? It's like, well, I'm just trying to sell to local lawn care services. It's like, well, that's not surprising to me that they wouldn't buy. But in that moment, you might think, oh, I suck at business. But you were just selling to the wrong people. And I think that's why this is so important, is making sure who you sell to is one of the biggest levers that you can have on success. Can I tell another story? Yeah, go ahead, please. So there was a CRO company that came through here that we were looking at to invest in, and it was great. So this guy was a really good coder, really good CRO, you know, conversion optimization for websites. He had a really, really cool business. But what was interesting is he and I had this conversation. He's like, oh yeah, when I work with a million-dollar-a-year e-commerce store and I, you know, raise their throughput by 10%, he's like, it only adds. $100,000 to the business, he said. But when I go to an e-commerce store that does $100 million and I add 10%, it's the same amount of work. He's like, I add $10 million to the business. I can charge so much more money for the exact same work because in a very real way it is more valuable. I did create more value, but it wasn't because of me, it was because of them. And so one of the biggest leverage you can have on success is doing the same work for better people.

Yeah, you know, these stories really resonate with me. And again, I wish I'd heard you speak 20 years ago. I remember when I first started the business, we were selling graphic designs. We go to someone, do you want a logo? Do you want a brand? And they pay a certain amount. And I managed to get quite good fees out of it because we were good. But then one day I gave ideas to someone for free. Yeah. And they said, oh, I would have paid a lot for that. Creative is almost like a commodity. So we started selling the ideas and that's where we were getting millions of dollars from. And then the execution was like, well, lots of people could design it now. You just give them the brief. Yeah.

You know, go to Fiverr and they'll go make it.

Exactly. That got commodified, which by the way is a little bit unfair because the actual creative part is really tough. But people don't value it. And the pain isn't— pain is in the idea. So we go to CNN and give them an idea that, well, that's valuable, but just the execution almost is secondary. So you can always take your existing service and just tweak it a bit and you'll get a lot more out of it if you do that. What's next in this?

So now we've got to get them to buy. So it's like, this is all great. You know, we've got some of these character traits. We decided to start taking action. We figure out who we want to sell to. We figure out what we want to sell. So now, now we've got to get them to buy. I know something, you've got your sales framework. The one that I've been teaching for years is Closer. So there are a million sales frameworks out there. This is just the one that's, it's just consistently worked for me teaching, you know, teams of guys out on the road, whatever. And for years I actually just taught Close. And it was only probably in the last 4 or 5 years that I added the R on there.

I hope you trademark this.

Yeah. I don't know, who knows. Closer. I hope everyone just learns how to sell. So the first thing is like, Basically, okay, now that I'm in front of this who and I've got the what, how do I get them to give me money? And so this is basically a structure for our conversation, which is the first thing that we like to do is clarify why they're there. The person— and the nice thing with any sales conversation is that there's always something that someone has done to indicate interest. Like, you can't— unless someone is still listening to you, they open the door, they clicked on the email, they responded with a comment, they DM'd you, they opted in on your site. Like, someone has to take some initial move towards you in order to— they indicate interest. And so all you have to do then is just ask them why. So you say, hey, why did you— why did you respond to my post? Hey, why did you— why did you DM me? Hey, why did you opt in on my site? And you're just asking them why. You're clarifying the problem, right? The second step— and this is all listening, right? You're just asking questions. So what brought you in today? What was the main reason? What are you struggling with right now? And then— and this is just a very small step, but super important. Which is we label them with a problem. And to say, okay, I got it, John. So it sounds like you're here and you want to get here, and this has been the thing in your way. Does that sound about right? And this is also active listening. So for me, from a rapport-building perspective, if you say back to someone what they just said, they're like, oh, this guy's great. This guy's brilliant. Charismatic. Exactly. And so we label them a problem and we have, you're here, you want to get here, here's this gap. Okay. So then, and this is just out of just experience, we overview the past experiences that they've had. And I call this the pain cycle. I didn't know why this worked. I just knew that it did work. The key point here is you say, "Hey, so what have you done so far to try and solve this? What have you done?" And then they're gonna start listing out, "I did this." And then we just ask, "Okay, well, how'd that work for you?" And then obviously they're talking to you, so it didn't work. So it's a loaded, you know, like you're just pushing on this pain.

Getting them to realize it. Yeah. Basically, yeah.

And so I have this fundamental belief that all salespeople are just motivational speakers. Fundamentally, just on a one-on-one basis. And so all we're trying to do is motivate someone to take action. If you know that, or at least for me, if I think that that's what it is, it just comes down to motivating someone, then what creates motivation? And so I spent a really long time trying to think through this. It's actually the opposite is what creates motivation. Deprivation creates motivation. So if I'm starving, eating, then I'm very motivated to eat. If I'm, if I'm exhausted, I'm very motivated to sleep. With that same concept, what we want to do is basically remind them— we want to deprive them, remind them of how deprived they are of this thing and how much pain they've gone through up to this point. We try and ask them what they did, ask them how that worked, ask them what they liked and what they didn't like about that thing. When they say the things that they liked, you associate that with, oh, I think if you like that, you're going to love this. And if they hated that, it's like, oh, that's great, I understand why you struggle with that, because later we're going to take notes of that and we're going to make sure that we don't talk about that stuff if we have something similar to that in our product. And so after we've gone through this pain cycle, and you just keep asking, anything else you've done? Anything else you've tried? Until eventually they're like, no, that's about it. And they say, awesome, John, I think that you're going to love what we've got for you. Can I tell you about it? So this is where we ask for permission to make the sale. I go sell the vacation. So I have this little moniker about selling that a lot of people sell the plane flight and not Maui or Hawaii or whatever your vacation spot is. And so they then go right into, jargon. They're like, oh, we're gonna do these color tones and we're gonna have this palette for your logo. And they're like, what is going on? But what people want, it's, you know, people don't wanna buy drills, they buy holes. The drill is just the vehicle. And so what we want is to talk about the light breeze in their hair, what it's like at sunset, what they're gonna feel like when they've got their feet in the sand and they're drinking the cold, you know, Mai Tai at the beach and they're with their loved ones and making a memory that they'll have for the rest of their lives.

Sell the sizzle, not steak.

It's like a simple way. Yeah, exactly. But what we don't want to sell is the TSA, the plane check-in, take your shoes off, the guy farting next to you, the terrible food.

I don't know why they ever sell planes flying in the air. That's not the enjoyable bit, is it? Unless you're in business class, maybe. But really, it's not enjoyable. Why do they sell that? Every airline listening should change right now.

And so I do something that I call a 3-pillar pitch. I almost always try and chunk up basically my selling points to 3 points. Why 3? I don't know, but 3's just always worked really well. And so the 3-pillar pitch, I like to have basically one statement and then a metaphor. And so if there's— and I used to teach this for fitness sales all the time. So it's like there's 3 things: fitness, nutrition, accountability. And with that, it's like you want to have a 3-legged stool that if you're missing one of the sides, it's not going to work. It's like if you just work out, then you're good and you're not eating well, then you're going to— it doesn't matter. You're not going to lose weight. If you just eat well, but you're not working out, you're going to lose muscle and you're going to rebound back. Is that right? And because we just knew about their pain cycle, they're like, yeah, I've had that happen before. Like, no, exactly. So you know that. And if I give you the best fitness and the best training in the world, I say the best fitness and the best nutrition plan in the world, but you don't actually do it because no one holds you accountable, it's not going to happen either. And so you got to have all three. And when you have all three, you can't lose. That's the three pillars. And so when I would create scripts for— I was still like a completely opposite script. I made a script for a B2B mortgage sales company. And so I was like, okay, they were selling leads to realtors. And so it's like, okay, so I spent the whole morning, I was like, what are the 3 things? It was like, okay, you want leads that are exclusive to you, you want them to be qualified, and you want them to be timely. You want them to be like, they just opted in, they've got the, they're really interested, and no one else is calling them but me. That's what you want in leads. And so it's like, these are the 3 things. And so then for each of those 3 things, you then just make one analogy or story that relates it. And so if I wanted to do, you know, explain accountability, I would say, okay, have you ever heard of The Amazing Race? It was a show that happened, even if they had, doesn't matter. And they're like, yeah. So there was actually this couple that won so many times they had to change rules. Do you know what they did differently? They're like, what? He's like, so what they did was whenever they land into a new area and they had to find the new location, they would immediately grab a local and say, hey, can you get in the back of the car and just tell us where to go? And by doing that, they always beat everyone else. And so the thing is, is that you want a guide. And so that's exactly what we're going to do with the accountability. And so I have like 6 different accountability stories, but that's one of them, right? And so it's like you just want to have one story for each of the pillars, and then you just say, does that make sense? They say yes, and you just move on to the next pillar. And you'll notice that that like, at least for me, especially in high-volume transactional sales. So I would say like B2C sales, consumer sales where it's, you know, one and done kind of sales. I found that like when I'm like on fire in terms of selling, the person's walking out the door and they're super excited and they're like, "I don't even know what I just signed up for." Because the thing is, is that like the more in the weeds we get, the more questions they're gonna have about it. And as long as you're confident in whatever it is that you sell, just know that you're gonna take care of 'em. Because you explaining the macros and the calories and the rep schemes, like they don't even know what it is anyways. And so they're gonna nod along and try and ask questions that they don't even know why they're asking the question like, what kind of certifications do you have? We just ask, which ones you're looking for? And they're like, yeah, I'm like, right. So you just, they want to seem like they're in, like they're asking informed questions, but they just don't know what to do. We do a 3-pillar pitch and then we say, great. So then we transition to the close. So we ask for the sales. That makes sense. Awesome. You want to get started on Monday? Yes or no? Whatever. And then you start moving through it. Now, if they say anything but yes, you want to explain away their concerns. So most concerns, at least as I, I think through them, is you've got Timing concerns, which is I'm really busy right now. Preference concerns, which is I don't like this particular thing about your solution. You've got money, right? You've got money slash ROI, whatever. You've got stalls, which is sounds similar to timing but completely different, which is can you give me some time to think about it versus I don't have time. They both have the word time in it. First, sales guys off. Finally, you want to just cover past experiences. And so this is where I signed up with a creative agency just like yours and they burned me. And so you want to make sure that you have something to overcome them that particular thing. Once you understand what the core things that people have in, or that they present with that are the reasons why they don't want to do something, you just need to understand the logical arguments for each of these, these bullets. So with timing, this is all about priorities. So everyone's got the same times. You just say, hey, how important is this to you? Okay, then it means that there's something else in your 24 hours a day that we need to trade that's less important than this. As long as you explain that to them, then you're good. Preferences, is they want your result their way. If you change the variables of the way that I do it, if you just want to do fitness and nutrition, not accountability, then you're not going to get the result. So if you change the variables, you change the outcome. And so it's just like always thinking they want my results their way. You can't just— I mean, the amount of times I'd have, you know, ladies trying to lose weight, be like, can I just eat what I'm currently eating and then do your program? And I was like, no, because what you're currently eating is getting you what you're currently getting, right? And so then we have ROI, which we solve with logic, proof, and payment terms. So logic is just understanding, like, if this does this, is it worth it? Okay, so if it is, then the problem is that they don't believe you. And so then it's all around proof, like how many different varieties of testimonials can I demonstrate that are as similar to them as possible to get them to believe me? And, you know, we have our little belief-breaking formula, but I won't even get into that. Uh, and then you've got, uh, payment terms. So it's like, okay, the person logically understands, they believe that could happen, then it just gets into logistics of payment, which is like, okay, can you break this up for me? Can I do half now, half later, whatever. You've got stalls, which is again, I need to think about it. But here what we do is we walk them through a logical decision. So we say, okay, do you think that you'll be more successful if you do this than if you didn't do it? Yes. Okay, do you think that if you do it on your own versus doing it with us, you'll get close to your goal? Yes. Do you have access or know somebody who has access to the money to get started? Yes, yes, yes. Great, then you made a logical decision. And so a lot of people are just afraid of making mistakes. So with stalls, we want to figure out what the fear is. And so the number one triage question that we ask is, if you have less rapport, we just say, "What's your main concern?" If you have a little bit more rapport, I just ask, "What are you afraid of having happen?" And you can lower your voice a little bit. And they're like, "I just don't want my husband to say that I spent money on this thing again." You're like, "I totally understand. What if this is the thing that 5 years from now you look back on and you're like, 'What if I hadn't done that?'" And you're sitting there, completely changed your lifestyle. And you're, you know, your husband and you guys are so much better now. I was like, what if you look back on this one moment? Because I think about this with my wife. I'm swiping on my phone. If I had swiped left on the app and I hadn't met Layla, my life would be completely different than it is right now, 8 or 9 years later. And so it's like, I just don't want that to happen to you. You're like, oh man, okay.

And so then I didn't know you met in an app. Did you? Yeah. Should we give them a plug? Who was it? It was Bumble. Oh really?

There you go. Bumble. Well done. And so this is, so if someone has a past experience, so they, hey, I worked with a creative agency before and it didn't work out. Didn't work, therefore you won't work. I have yet to have an overcome here. There's also decision maker.

I use case studies for this one, by the way. Oh, this one's killer.

So I'll tell you how I do it. So with burn you twice, you just say, listen, you had something bad that happened in the past, and the only thing worse than having a bad investment is letting a bad investment prevent you from making a good one right now. And so then we do a metaphor. So it's like, hey, are you married? A lot of times if you're old, like, they're like, yeah, you're with somebody? Yes. Okay. Did you ever date anybody before that person? Yeah. You were dating like middle school or high school? Yeah. Now imagine after your first middle school boyfriend or girlfriend, you said—

Never date anyone again. Exactly.

So it just means that that person wasn't right for you. It doesn't mean that all people aren't right for you. Yeah. And so there's a big difference. And so they're like, oh, I get it. So you don't want to let that person burn you twice. Once for when it happened and once when it stops you from having the good thing. And then there's decision maker, which is I don't have the authority to make the decision. I don't bring that one up because it's one of the hardest ones to overcome. And people have a lot of harsh beliefs in the comments about how I overcome this stuff because they're like, you should always get permission from the spouse. And it depends if you're buying a house. Yeah, you're going to need permission from the spouse. Koenigl. Yeah. And so obviously you want to bring that person. If you know that whatever you sell requires somebody else, you want to make sure the decision makers are on the call. But there are times when you're in a selling situation where like you've got one shot. For us, I try to overcome decision maker or authority to make the decision. By first saying, okay, well, what if they say no? And so if I have a guy, I'll lean into his ego and I'll be like, what if your wife doesn't give you permission?

Yeah, but after forgiveness, then permission. I use that at the very end.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, so what if she doesn't give you permission? Because then it makes them really— and they're like, no, I could. And it's like, oh great, let's get you going. You know what I mean? As soon as they bounce back, you're good. But if they say no, I wouldn't do it, then you say, well, what do you think they'd be against? So now I'm still not on— I'm now isolating towards variables. Like what are the actual things that they would say no to? Because I can overcome that, not the decision. And so they're like, oh, they'd be over, you know, it'd be this particular thing. But now I'm off decision. Now if they're still like, no, it doesn't matter. And it's like, okay, well just do they know that you're here right now? They know that you're struggling with this thing? Yeah, they know that you're struggling. Are they, are they, are they, do they approve of that? Well, they don't, I mean, no, they don't approve of it. They're not happy that I'm, that I'm struggling with this. It's like, oh, then why would they be against something that they already don't approve of? So they're going relying on past agreements. So it's like you already have the permission. They know that you're struggling. Why wouldn't they want you to solve it? And it's like, well, if your wife's anything like my wife, like we end up making it work in the end anyways, right? And then we'll go into, I think you might be asking for permission instead of support.

Deep psychology again. Starting to be marriage counselor, isn't it? It's time you stood up for yourself, you know?

Well, 'cause then you play it out and you say, listen, because if you don't do this and you don't do it because of your wife or whatever, 'cause let's say you go home and she says no. Okay, fine. Well, play this forward 5 years. Your business isn't in the place you want it to be. You are not at the weight you want to be. You have this back pain, whatever the thing that you sell around is. It's like 5 years from now, who are you going to blame? You can blame her, you can blame you. I don't think it's fair to either of you because at the end of the day, it's your life and you got to be able to make these decisions. Now, again, I just think, and this is where you go into like, I think you're asking for permission when you really just need support.

By the way, Amazon do a brilliant job of ticking most of these off by just saying, we'll give you a refund, you can send it back and it won't cost you anything. So my wife gets a package a day and she's like, don't worry, if you don't like it, I can send it back. So like, I don't object. And it's like, okay, fine. You know, I don't see much going back. But the point is, you can just get rid of it money-back guarantee or giving people some comfort.

Oh, 100%. Yeah. Or delayed. Or you can do a delay pay with the payment term. You say, hey, just say yes now, sign the contract, I'll delay the payment till Friday. And between now and then, if you go home and your husband says, no, sweetie, I want you to live 10, 10 years less long, I want you to be fat, I want you to have generational unhealthy weight loss.

You really want to die young. Yeah, exactly.

If he says that to you, call me up first. I'll talk to him. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I make some jokes about it. And then the final one here is let's assume you explain away their concern. They're like, yeah, I want to do it. And I added this one later, which is you reinforce the decision. And so one of the major things that happens, and I had to add this in because I wanted my sales guys to make sure that they completed the transition of the handoff to customer success and onboarding. And until I had this, it was just like explain away the concerns, close the deal, and then it was like, I'm done. Yeah. And so it's like, no, we have to bridge this. We have to reinforce that they made a great call. So say, hey, right now I'm going to introduce you to Sarah. Sarah is going to get you started. Hey, Sarah, this is John. John's trying to retire his wife. John's trying to get in shape for a wedding, whatever it is. Sarah's going to help you take the next steps. Now then Sarah is going to start the onboarding conversation of how do I relate the actions that this person has to take with their goal and say, hey, we're going to help you retire your wife, we're going to help you get— look good for that wedding, but these are the first 3 steps. So that's how you get people to give you money.

In England there's a new gym that's opened up called Third Space, and one of the things they've done is they've also limited supply. So they basically— I went there, it's beautiful gym, it's like $1,000 a month for it, and they're like We don't have any space right now. Yeah, but put you on the waiting list. Yeah. And then a few days later they ring up, say someone's just left, but do you want it now? Yeah. And that's actually a brilliant— I'm like, yeah, yeah, okay, okay. So limiting supply is another element. Oh yeah, that's great. All right, next, because that was awesome.

So how many times they buy. So now we want to get them to obviously buy again because I think Dan Kennedy said this and I just love this quote. He says, you don't get customers to make sales, you make sales to get customers. And so the idea is that once you have a customer, then you want to get them to buy as many times as humanly possible. At this point, there's so many things that you can do to make a business make more money. So one is that you can increase the price of whatever you have. I'm just talking about 8 different ways that you can make more money to get them just basically make more money from the customer. So one is that you can just charge more. The second is that you decrease the cost of whatever you sell. So if you have a service, you can either pay people less. That's usually not the right idea, but you can improve the service ratio of how many customers to every rep. You can add tech in order to make their jobs easier. You can go offshore, things like that. The next one is you ask them to buy again. So you just do this times 2. You say, hey, you have that thing, do you want to buy more of that thing you just bought? One of my favorite, one of my favorite upsells ever. The next one is that you can get continuity, which is you say buying, which I see this as a quantity, this one as you're, they're buying once and then there's a delay and then a day. So this is a quantity. Then you've got quality, which is do you want to buy a better version of the thing that you have? Then we have downsell. So it's like, hey, and this one is like, wait, how does— how is this going to make me more money? So downsells make you more money in that if you turn a no into a yes. And so, okay, you don't want to buy the normal burger. Do you want to buy a junior burger? Do you want to buy a smaller one? Do you want to just buy the burger, not the other stuff? Okay. Then we've got cross-sells where you sell something different. So I'll go through this whole example real quick, but with, with a burger store, because everyone can understand it. So I can take my burger and make it more expensive. I can lower the cost of each burger for myself. I can get them to buy 2 burgers. I can get them to come back again to buy another burger or put them on a burger subscription. So this would be through like follow-up.

Good idea for a business idea, burger subscription business. In-N-Out should do that. Yeah, what are they?

Did you eat it there today?

It's great. Not today. Okay.

There's no sugar. There's no sugar. Yeah, I'm sure.

Yeah, I don't know what's in it, but it's not sugar. I don't think it's meat either.

But anyway, you could have, you can increase the quality of the meat. You say, oh, this is mystery meat burger. You can have sirloin, you know, burger that's ground up. Mystery meat. Yeah. We can go lower quantity. So, this is making it smaller, you know, quantity. And then you can lower the quality. All right. Now, I don't like saying lower quality, but it's a more economical, you know.

HP, this is the HP strategy for all their printers. They start off as really good printers that never break, don't need an ink cartridge. And they reduce the quality. So, you need ink cartridges and you need the faster one, not the slower one. They make it slower. So you wanna buy the faster one.

And so you get the smaller burger so you have less, or you go from regular meat to just completely questionable, like, what is this thing? Or you say, okay, what are the cross-sells? Well, do you want fries with your burger? Do you want a drink with your burger? And so those are basically the 8 ways that you can get a customer to buy more stuff. The whole process though, especially if you're selling, doing a cross-sell, which is very common in terms of what people are thinking about selling next, is that there's a problem-solution cycle that exists in business, which is that if you actually solve a problem with whatever you do, you also create another problem. So all problems— all solutions create more problems, all problems create solutions. If you do accurately solve it, so let's say, like, let's say someone has the burgers and all that stuff. Well, once someone's full, then I created a, uh, a dessert problem, right? Right. Which I can solve, you know, with, uh, with my milkshake or my ice cream cones or whatever. Right, just to use the very simple example. But if I solve the traffic to someone's site, then the next thing they're going to need help with is sales. The next thing they're going to need help with is delivery. There's always going to be something else that's going to happen. You know, if you, if you help someone lose 20 pounds, the next thing they're going to want is they're going to want to tone up, or they're going to want new clothes. There's, there's a ton of things that happen as a result. But there's another piece that I'll bring up here, which is something that I've learned over and over again, which is that people enter hyper-buying cycles. And so let's say that I sign up for a marathon. If I decide I'm gonna start a marathon and then I go to the shoe store, the running shoe store, and I say, hey, I want some running shoes. If that business owner, it's like, well, they just bought the running shoes. I don't wanna scare 'em away. I don't wanna seem too salesy. Well, what are they gonna do? They're like, well, I still need the iPod thing for my shoulder so that when I'm running, I need new tank tops, I need running shorts. I gotta have, you know, the app that tracks my progress, whatever it is, right? And so, and I've gotta have those gels that, whatever marathon runners, but the thing is, is that if you don't sell it, they're going to buy it, just not from you. And all of it's gonna happen in a very short time cycle. They're gonna make the decision, I'm now a marathon runner, and so I need to get all the stuff associated with that. You buy a pet, there's a zillion things you buy. You go to a wedding, there's a zillion things you buy. Like whenever someone makes a decision to enter it, like basically they have a new identity that then associates with whatever purchases they're going to make, they enter this cycle where they just buy lots of stuff. And you wanna be there right at that moment to make that next offer. Over again and again and again. And offers are only bad if you present it at the wrong time or it's not a need. And so that's why we don't try and sell them. We make the offer, we present it. If they're not into it, no big deal. And so that's at least how I think through upselling and getting more out of it.

Nike stores do this so well, you know, they put the socks on the way out to checkout, right? They put the gel and all that stuff. And brand, brand plays such an important role in this because Once you've got trusted, yeah, and then people want to buy from you because they know, you know, your shoes are good quality. Well, your tops are probably good quality, your socks are probably good quality, your armband's going to be good. Yeah, my iPhone in. And so who helps you? Isn't that next? Yeah.

Yes. Who helps you? That's it.

By the way, um, we have a platform that helps people. It's the hardest thing we've noticed for people to actually ask for help. People love giving help. That's the shocking thing. But people don't ask. Interesting. But, but what's your take So who helps you?

So the way that I think about this is you have, you have 4 ways you can let other people know about stuff, right? So you've got, got one-on-one, uh, and then you got one-to-many, people who know you and people who don't. And so one-on-one to people who know you is warm outreach. So you just text your friends, you DM people, you email, you call, whatever. You've got one-to-many to people who know you, which is posting content. Like you make a post to your Facebook page and you say, hey, this is what's going on in my life, One-to-one to people who don't know you is cold outreach. So that's cold calling, cold emailing, cold whatever. And then you've got one-to-many to people who don't know you, which is paid ads. And so these are the only 4 things that any one person can do to let other people know about their stuff.

You can talk about events here too. The similar things.

Oh yeah, yeah, totally. Once we know this, this is how we advertise to anything to get customers. Then it's like, okay, well, we do the exact same process to get employees. And so you need a team that's going to help you. And so in the beginning, a lot of times you start by reaching out to people you know and saying, hey, friends, family, do you want to help me with my business? And then you probably make a post and say, hey, I'm hiring, you know, anybody who knows anybody, please like make the introduction. And then you start running ads on job boards and saying, hey, I've got this great thing, please apply, it's great. And then when you get more advanced, you start headhunting and you start looking for people who are are really good at that thing. And these are typically, in my experience, these are the highest value, uh, and the hardest. It's just like the sales that you made with Apple. It's like these people, sometimes it takes 2, 3 years to get that one killer on your team, but that person can just build an entire division or a department and just continue to scale. And so it's basically taking the same concept that you have with advertising at customers and applying it to employees. Now I have another framework, if you're good with Yep. So you've got lead gen, how you get, how you get customers, right? And then you've got nurture and you've got sales and you've got onboarding and then you've got retention/ascension. All right. So they— you retain them and you upsell them. Okay, cool. Everyone— a lot of people, at least in business, understand this pipeline, but they don't know that they already have all the skills, just like all the things that you do to currently get customers. You already have the skills to advertise, to get people to help you out. And so then all this is, is just application generation. Which you use the same core 4 that we just went through. Nurture is the same, is that you should be nurturing. So fun fact, so Leila might have shared it yesterday, but like A candidates take on average 8 days to find a job, and B candidates and below take 30 days plus. And so if your process of getting someone from the first engagement to getting hired takes longer than that, then you're by definition getting B players and below. Now I'll say my only exception to that is if you're hiring C-level and up, it just takes a very long time, but you want to make sure that the communication is still rapid between those things.

They're trying to make a decision quite quickly. They might have a notice period that's longer, but they might still make a quick decision.

And so the application nurture here is that like a lot of smaller businesses, like, they should, they should be honored to work for me. They should, they should be calling me. I'm going to put 100 steps of friction. It's like, well, okay, you're just going to get fewer applicants.

Well, like you say, yeah, A won't get A players.

Yeah, a lot of players, they just want to deal with it. And so sales, this is the interview. And so if a lot of people are like, well, tell me why you should work for me, that really only works for low-level individuals. People. At a certain level, you're selling them just as much on why they should work for you as they are on them. And that comes with talent because the higher the level of the talent, the more options they have. They don't, I'm not saying, yeah, I know, you know, but I'm just saying.

No, it's so, this thing, I don't want people to miss it because a lot of people don't understand when they're recruiting, they're selling. And I've worked personally so hard to get good people. Like it's the hardest job. Oh, people don't apply a sales process to it.

I think it's the most valuable.

They sit back and say, well, tell me where you're going to be in 5 years or why you're good for for my company and people just don't give a shit. Good people are like, well, why should I be here?

Yeah, right. Why should I spend my next 5 years here? Totally. And onboarding is the same. You onboard employees the same way. After someone takes the job, they accept the offer, they sign the paperwork. It's like, great, now we have the onboarding. Here's all the passwords. This is what it's gonna look like. And typically people do, I think people do this backwards, which is they basically bring people on and say, good luck. Whereas the, basically the more work you do upfront, the less work is required over time in order to get someone to be proficient at whatever their work is. Do you do a big onboarding? Onboarding? Yeah, we're super big on onboarding.

Anything particularly on onboarding you think's really useful?

Honestly, it's just a lot of touch bases. I mean, the first 2 weeks, they're probably like, managers usually meet twice a day, you know, with new hires just to say like, okay, what are you gonna do today? At the end of the day, it's like, how'd it go? Tell me about the conversations you had. And usually, especially it depends on what level of, you know, person's coming in. Anybody who's maybe director level and up, they're gonna talk to all the directors across the departments or kind of shadow a lot of people 'cause we want them to get a very good idea of a holistic understanding of the business so they can understand where, where and why their work makes a big impact. And then finally, you have the exact same thing, which is retention and ascension, which is how do I keep good talent? And then what's my career path for them? So they can see their vision of what it's gonna look like in 5 years. It's like, listen, we're bringing you in a director, but long-term we'd love to have you as a CRO or a VP of this whole division or something like that. And this is, these are the requirements. This is what you would have to do in order to move up there. And again, we try We try and define things by behaviors. So if you're doing all of these activities, then you will by definition be this role. And so our way of promoting, at least at acquisition.com, is we want people to just start doing the role and then the title feels obvious rather than, hey, I want that title. Okay, here's the plan. I'd rather you just go do the next role. And then everyone's like, well, yeah, he deserves the title. Like, so everybody else has already bought in 'cause you're already doing the job anyways. And I think it's one of the biggest hacks, at least for those of you who are employees at a company some of the best ways to move up.

Nayla said yesterday, which I absolutely love, was growth. Yeah. Give people a chance to grow because that will keep them. Everybody I've ever lost in past companies has been because I didn't have a thing they could do next. Yeah. So this is brilliant framework.

If we think about the brand as a virtuous cycle, right? We can make whatever, you know, we can, we have those brilliant advertising campaign of all time, the best associations, the best celebrity endorsements. But as soon as people try the food or they try the product, they wear the shoes, if it's not good, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how good all of that stuff is, is that you have to keep the edge. And I think that's where the connection between the brand. So it's like the brand makes a promise that remains the same, more or less. The way to keep the promise changes. And so it's like, we wanna be the, so if Apple says we're going to have elegant, you know, products that are well-designed, blah, blah, blah. Okay, that promise has remained the same for many years, but the way they execute on that promise has to change, right? Because technology changes. There's new advancements in foam, so the shoes become lighter, they become better fitting. From an R&D perspective, what we did was that we actually had an R&D department at Gym Launch, the company that we sold. And what we did was I said, okay, here's, here's your budget and I want you to spend this money no matter what every month. And I just want you to spend it on solving our customers' biggest problems. So every month you're going to give me a list of all the problems that they, that they're saying they have. And I want you to try and weigh them as how big is the problem and how many of them are suffering. Suffering from the problem. And so we use a little format which is basically with the product is like how many people are suffering from this thing? How much are they suffering? How likely is this solution going to solve the problem? And then how much does it cost us to do it? And so with that we can basically create a power ranking of okay, this thing is impacting a lot of these people. So this is a high priority issue. But we don't have any solutions that we're actually really confident about. Well, we've got a solution that we're really confident about, but it's really expensive, right? And so this is where you basically factor all 4 of these things in into your innovation cycle. So you say, okay, this is how we strategically prioritize our resources to get the best returns. If we think about what strategy is, okay, so a lot of people use this word and no one really defines what it means. And so I'm gonna define 2 words for the audience that I think will make a lot of sense. So strategy is just prioritization of resources. So when people are like, man, And I really need a strategy. It's like, dude, it just means what are my priorities? That's all it is. And so if we think about the universe as having unlimited things that we could do, but we have limited resources, time, money, energy, effort, then the people who get the furthest in life are the ones who are the best at allocating those resources to get the most bang for the buck. And fundamentally, that's what the best strategists are. It's just this big amorphous word that people define in all sorts of ways, but that's all it is. Then it's like, okay, well, if I'm gonna prioritize my resources, I wanna prioritize my resources in a way that provides the most value. And so for customers, I see value as this value equation, which I taught in the $100 Million Offers book, which is I see there's 4 variables to value. You've got the dream outcome, like is the thing the thing they want, the need thing that you were referencing earlier. We've got perceived likelihood of achievement, which is if I buy this thing, how likely is it that I'm actually gonna get what I want? And this is actually the last one that I added to this because I was like, there was another thing that felt like it was missing. You've got time delay. Which is how long is it going to take between when I buy and when I get? And then I've got sacrifice and effort. So, uh, they're two sides of the same coin. Effort is what are the things that I have to start doing as a result of this purchase that I don't want to do? And what are the sacrifices? What are the things I'm gonna have to stop doing that I wish I could keep doing? And so fundamentally, the goal here is you want to increase the dream outcome as much as humanly possible and increase their perceived likelihood. And you want to decrease the time delay and decrease the effort and sacrifice. And so in a perfect world, you'd have something that they click a button, they get their dream outcome absolutely guaranteed immediately by doing nothing. And if you had that, you'd have an infinitely valuable product. If you think about like, hey, uh, buy a six-pack. If someone could just simply click a button and then all of a sudden they could pull their shirt up and they would have a six-pack.

They'd press that button right now.

Of course. So many people would. And so think, and then because of that, we'd be able to charge a tremendous amount of money. And so by thinking through this, these, these things in my opinion will never change. People will always want things to be faster. People always want to do less for they will always want to have less risk or higher perceived likelihood of achievement, and they want to make sure the thing is actually what they want. I obviously, you know, I use fitness examples a lot because a lot of people understand it, but it's like, okay, let's say that someone wants to lose weight. Okay, that's the dream outcome. Then why is it that a PDF is $5 about how to lose weight and liposuction is $50 grand? Well, the other 3 variables. So if I think about the PDF, if I, if I buy a $5 PDF, when I make the purchase, do I really believe that I'm immediately going to lose weight? Probably not. And so there's a huge discount that I'm going to put on the value of the PDF because I don't think I'm really going to do anything with it. Whereas liposuction, if I pay it, I— they're gonna put me to sleep, they're gonna rip this fat out, right? Like, so the perceived likelihood of achievement significantly higher on the liposuction. For time delay, it's like, okay, this one I might have to work out for a year in order to see the results. The liposuction, I go to sleep, I wake up, I'm thin. Much faster. And then effort and sacrifice, well, I'm gonna have to sacrifice you know, Taco Tuesdays, nights out with the girls. I'm gonna have to sacrifice sleeping in. I can't do that anymore. Sacrifice my weekends. And the effort is I now have to wake up early. I have to eat food that I don't like. I'm gonna have to be sore. I'm gonna have to feel stupid because I don't know how to exercise. It's like there's a lot of cost with that compared to you just wake up and you didn't do anything. And so for that reason, one thing's $5, the other thing's $50 grand. And so if we think through that, like there's many different things that Saul losing weight, making more money, you know, getting more leads. There's a ton of different things. But if you want to make sure that your thing's more valuable, you want to decrease the risk, which is increase perceived likelihood. You want to make it faster, decrease the timeline, and you want to make it easier.

This framework works so well. Case study like Blockbusters, you know, they didn't keep their advantage. Yeah. Because people wanted it quicker. They could just go on to Netflix. Originally it was getting posted to them. Blockbusters didn't think people wanted it posted. They thought it was more convenient for people to go to a store and buy it. And so with a less time delay, there's less sacrifice. Just press a button at home. People don't keep their advantage. They die like Blockbusters do. So you've got to keep thinking about how you can make this. This is a brilliant equation. I'm glad you went a bit deeper on it because I think a lot of people just talk about this top line. As you say, they don't think about the time delay and they don't think about the sacrifice element.

It's so funny you say that because the first, the first half of my career, all I thought about was, was this. So all I did was I had bigger promises, more proof, bigger promises, more proof. But if I look at the biggest companies in the world, all they focus on is this. Amazon's like, how do I make it easier? How do I make it faster? How do I make it less effort for the person? And this part is usually where all of the operational effort goes in. This is all the marketing and sales. Totally.

Plus this promise, if you make it too big, you damage your brand. Oh, totally. This is why this all links together. Yeah. 'Cause if you're not careful, you want to get that big sale and you sell something you haven't actually got. Yeah. And then you're in real trouble, right? Stick with it, right?

The difference between number 2 in the world and number 1, practically, for running is a tenth of a second. But the difference between number 1 in the world and number 2 is everything. And so all of the best gains come at the very end of the compounding. It comes from the very deep knowledge that only comes from repeating many failures in a very narrow field. And so it's actually one of my favorite definitions for an expert— somebody who's, who's made more mistakes than anyone else in a very narrow field. How do people stick with it though?

Because I mean, social media is a great example. First 3 years I did social media, I made no money and it probably cost me £1 million. So it's only in the last year and a half I've actually started to be able to make money and be able to pay the team and all the rest of it. So I look at it as a purpose thing, right? I'm trying to fix the education system. It's broken. It should be teaching the skills that you and I are trying to give people for free. What do you think is the formula there?

So I'm going to go back to something that I said at the very beginning. So if motivation motivation is equal to deprivation. You need to feel deprived of something. In the examples I gave, you know, if you're starving, you're hungry. If you're sleepy, you're— if you're exhausted, you're motivated to sleep. But money doesn't work the same way. Because if you take that logical extreme, you'd say, okay, well then all poor people should be more motivated to make money than anything. And the reality is they're not. So why is that? So because all the ones that I first said are all physiological needs. The other one is completely made up. Money is only a new— I mean, I mean, in terms of humanity, it's a very new thing, right? And so it's a psychological construct. The idea is that the deprivation actually is completely made in our own minds. You know, Harvard at least did this study, which is they talk about your reference group, which is the biggest predictor of people's long-term financial well-being is their reference group, which is, and this is important, is that it's the 5 people you compare yourself to, not the 5 people you spend the most time with. And I think that's a huge difference. You want to take advice not from the people who are closest to you, but the people who are closest to your goals. Take advice from them. And people are like, oh yeah, I'll take advice from them. But when you're about to make a big life-changing decision, who do you talk to? If you're talking to the people closest to you, none of them have relevant experience. And if you don't want their lives, then definitely don't listen to what they say. Right. And it's very hard because that's what makes it feel so lonely, I think, in the beginning, because you have no one to talk to. And so that's why I'm such a big believer in heroes. Heroes and mentors. So mentors are people who actually interact with you, but heroes are just like, what would Warren Buffett do? You know, some people are religious, what would Jesus do? Whatever your thing is, right? Like, who's that, who's that ideal? And sometimes, you know, one of my phrases is like, what does the ideal version of me do? What's the person I want to become do? And all this again around doing, because if I do those things, like, I might not be a patient person, but if I pretend to be patient for 5 years, people start calling me patient. I might actually be patient because all I did was patient things, even though I don't feel patient, right? And so it's like, we can change change— basically how we feel and what we do don't need to be connected at all. So you can feel horrible and still do things and be kind. And people like— you can feel like a very nasty person because of the things that you think and the things that you want to do, but as long as you don't do them, then the only thing the world will ever judge you on— at least the only thing that I would ever judge you on— is what you do. And so it's like, okay, motivation deprivation. So back to this. In my opinion, I've always struggled with this question the most because it's never been an issue for me. And I think, and that's, and that's why it's one of the hardest things that I have to translate to somebody else. So everything that I have is more around how do I translate how I see it more than this was the series of steps I followed to become motivated. I was so afraid of failing. I was so deprived of respect, or at least how I perceived it. Not continuing was just never a choice. And I always used to think when I was like, the earliest days of the gym was really tough for me. I was sleeping on the floor, you know, all the, the whole, the whole, the whole story, right? And it sounds, it sounds cool in retrospect, but when it's like you're sleeping on the floor of a gym because you can't afford two places and, you know, you've got kids the same age as you who are partying on the rooftop of your gym because it was below a parking garage where my gym was. So there's a parking garage, like these cars would drive over the tops like, doo doo doo doo doo. And it was, it was concrete and metal. So it just, it sounded like a gunshot and it would happen all night long. So I couldn't sleep, but I'd have to wake up at 4 to teach the 4:30 class. And I taught all the classes. So I'd take 8 classes a day. But then I also ran the whole business. I had zero employees. So I did all the billing, I cleaned it, I fixed the equipment. I marketed and got leads. I did everything. I didn't know that employees were a thing. That's why I have it as one of the steps. I had no idea. Whenever it would be really hard for me, I would always think to myself, as long as I don't quit, I win. If I just keep going, I just have to survive. Just kind of approaching it from that perspective because the more painful thing was the idea of going home a failure. And I just couldn't do it. I was like, I would rather die. And I think thinking through like past human experiences, which is, okay, across all the globe, slavery has happened everywhere. Mm-hmm. And slaves for their entire lives, for thousands of years, had to work all day every day, and they had no opportunity. They had to work all day every day, but there was no upside. They just had to work all day every day, or they die or get killed or whatever. Mm-hmm. And so I was like, if they can do it with no upside, I can absolutely do it with the chance, uh, that I can win. Mm-hmm. And I think seeing business as an infinite game is what was a huge perspective shift for me, which was the— there is no number one in business. And this was something that was like really like— it's for anybody who's listening to this, I think it's powerful to understand is that if I were to say, hey, who was number— who's the richest man in the world 30 years ago? There's a couple Japanese guys because the Japanese economy was booming at that time. Now no one even knows who they are. And that was just 30 years, forget 500 years. And so the thing is, is the number one guy in the world at business, if you want to measure it by net worth, which whatever. But even if you did, it's like that guy just touches the top for a decade and then someone else touches the top. And so when we say I want to, I want to be successful, success is about sticking with it. And so the only way that you become a failure in business is by stopping. And so all the infinite games, like all the games worth playing in life in my opinion, are all infinite. So it's not about, it's not about getting married, it's about staying married. It's not about getting in shape, it's about staying in shape. It's not about starting a business, it's about staying in business. And the only thing that gets you out of business is you choosing to stop. And I think that's a very powerful frame because it puts it 100% in your control. And so as long as you keep trying, you're still in business. And I think a lot of people give up so much. They give up just on the idea of a negative comment or some snide remark from a friend of theirs, or, you know, their dad or their brothers, you know, makes them try to feel stupid for taking a risk that they were unwilling to take. And I think that's bullshit. A lot of times there's a lot of social media stuff. I don't think there's anything wrong with it that talks about like like find your passion, find your purpose, find the thing that you love. And I think that's great. But when I started, you know, my first business, I wasn't doing it because it was something I was passionate about. It was not, it was not this like sunshine and rainbows. It was miserable. I had a lot of shame and a lot of anger. And so I didn't feel any of the butterflies, but that's what I had. And so it's like, I think you just use what you got. And if you need shame to get you going, if you need, if you need anger to get you going, then you can— that fuel can change over time. But wishing you had a different fuel, I think, is what gets people in trouble. I think that's what, that's what stops a lot of people. Like, I should feel— it's like, you should nothing. Like, should just, just shouldn't exist. It's just, what do you have, then what are you going to do? I'll say the last piece is they're trade-offs. And I think being able to name the price of the things that you want is super valuable. Yeah. Which is like, you know, the, the cost of, of fame for example, is privacy. You don't get that anymore. And the cost of you starting a business is for, you know, for me it was like I stopped being able to follow the football team that I used to follow. I stopped being in fantasy leagues with my friends. I stopped being able to go out to, you know, the bar and drink and things like that. So there was a cost. And so the thing was just like, am I willing to pay that or trade that for this thing that I want most? And I think for some people, maybe you don't want that. And I think the thing is, is like, and that's okay. But I think the problem is where you want to have your cake and eat it too. I want to have the six-pack, but I also want to have cake. I want to, you know, I want to—

Well, you have dessert and you got a six-pack. Yeah, right. Well, you gotta learn how to play the game.

But it's that people aren't willing to make the trade. And I think that just comes down to the very bottom of everything. Like when I wanted to, you know, there was a period where I wanted to get into Harvard's business school when I had done 2 years of consulting and that was what I thought was gonna be my path. Path. But I'm always very grateful for them because on one of the application questions they had was, how will a Harvard MBA help your short and long-term goals? And I thought about it for like 3 days, and I realized that, well, I wanted to start a business. And so me start doing another 2 years of school, I could just start a business. Like, that was— this is the goal. And so I'm grateful that they asked me that question. But before I ended up getting to the application, I spent 4 months taking, um, I basically did 10 phone books of problems because I read this research study on on standardized testing, which said basically it was just a direct correlation between the number of problems that you did before taking the test was directly correlated with your score. And as soon as I saw that, I was like, oh, I'll just do all of the problems. And so I did 60. Like, it was, it was, it was huge. It was like I was sitting on the floor, books of problems, like the really thin Bible paper, like really thin paper. And so I did 4 hours a day of problems for 4 months. That's all I did. I just did problems. And so I got above Harvard's mid score. For me, it was like, this is the only thing that I have to do and this is what I care about most. They were like, how do you stay motivated? It was like, I don't know, I just didn't have any other choice because the alternative is just something I wasn't willing to do. And I think a lot of people aren't willing to cut things. Like, I've been, I'd say one of the things that's been, you know, blessed with, if you want to say that, is I'm very willing to cut people and things out of my life very quickly.

I think it's healthy to do that. First of all, I feel a little bit emotional hearing you talk about that. I don't know why that is. Triggering something in me. Do you know what it is? Because I have the same problem trying to help people have a better life. They kind of got to help themselves. What do you think of this? Like, you know, I think it's Pablo's cave where people get brought fish in the cave every day and it's easier, right? They don't ever leave the cave because that's what a salary kind of is. The food comes to you every day and people have forgotten how fucking amazing it is to go out in the rain with your mates and hunt or go together and make the food. And men and women made food. Men and women went out hunting in the old days. But like, you know, like there was no fridge. Yeah, there was no get up and eat shit.

Yeah.

Just get up and go out and make shit happen. And you know what it is? I think that, and it's absolutely fine if people don't want to do it, but I don't want people to say they can't be an entrepreneur or they can't sell. I want to be honest. They can't be bothered. Yeah. Because, and I think the key is, and you describe your story, I have a similar story. I love the hunger I have from the deprivation that I had. The Vikings used to land places and burn the boats that got them there. Then they got no fucking choice. Yeah. And I think that's what people need to do if they really want to do it. They need to burn the boats they've got. They can't go back to the cushy job, that middle-class life. That's it. You're in or you're out. Yeah. And then like you say, you got to like figure out what you're going to cut out. It's going to give you the goal you want.

So especially in the beginning, you have limited resources, right? You have limited time because you have no leverage. You have no one helping you and you probably don't have that much money. And so time is the only thing that you have that you really have to be really careful with. And so that's— it's what are the— what are the activities? Does this activity be, you know, like drinking, for example, is this like, does this increase the likelihood that I hit my goals? That's it. Does it increase the likelihood of my goal? Does having these friends in my life increase the likelihood to hit my goals? And the answer is usually pretty obvious. It doesn't. And then the thing is, is that most people are again just cowards. Yeah. Is that they're not willing to just make the cut.

I'm pretty sure you live the same framework that you did when you were younger. Like, I act like I've got no money. The motivation thing really gets to me because sticking with it, which theme around this is all to down to perhaps limiting your choices, not increasing them. Some people have too many choices. Yeah. You know, like die on the hill, you know, like go for it. Yeah. And people don't do it. So, okay. Getting better. This is the one step before we get a million dollars. So I'm looking forward to the million dollars in cash. Yeah. All right. Getting better. Cause I've done all these things. So I, hopefully a big suitcase of money's coming my way. Get better.

So I'll, I'll describe a process that, that I do, and it's all based on action. So I define work, right, as volume times leverage, which is how much you do and how much you get for each time you do it, because that equals output, which if you're looking at this transitive property, work equals output. So it's not about how hard you try, it's about what you get done. And if you have more leverage, you get more done. Now, if you do a lot of work— so I'll give you a simple example. So if you're— if you— if we're learning sales, right? So if I start cold calling and I do 100 calls a day and I have low skill, then I will have low leverage. I'm going to get fewer appointments than somebody who makes the same amount of calls as me and has high skill. They'll book 5 times the appointments as I will. So did they work more? In my world, yes, they had higher output. And so a lot of times it's like you have to learn how to work. But the thing is, is that how did that guy who is good get good? He did volume. He did a lot. And so then it's like, okay, if this is our equation for output in terms of getting better, The getting better part is going to be leverage. This, this is a constant. You have to do work, you have to do volume. Okay, so we start with the doing, which is the volume. Cool. So we have that first. And so whatever it is, so let's say it's I want to start making, you know, Instagram Reels. Fine. I want to get good at Instagram Reels. So it's like, great. So I'm going to make 100 Instagram Reels. And this is the part that people— well, people, people don't even do this, but let's assume that you did this. Okay, so you do the 100 Instagram Reels. People then say, well, I did 100 and nothing happened. It's like, okay, So then what we do is we look at our 100. Let's say this is, you know, the 100 reels that we did. We say, what's different about these, about these top ones?

And what's different about these? Singers do this all the time, don't they? They put music out all the time. 60% of Adele's songs never went in the top 10 or something. Oh, really? You know, so yeah, this is that, that they also do it.

And so then once we figure out, and this is where you have to, this is where you have to be as detailed as possible. And a lot of times you'll start having almost superstitions. It's like, okay, I caught it. Well, I coughed at the beginning of this call. Well, that was different. Well, did all of your top 10 calls, did you cough? Well, no. Okay, then disregard that. So you run something called a common factors analysis, which is just saying, what do all these ones have in common? What do these ones all have in common with each other, but that's different than all of these ones? And so once we do that, we say, okay, so my next 100 that I do, I want 'em to look like this. And then all of a sudden it's like, huh, I got 30% better on my total views by just doing more of the stuff that worked. And so this process you just do for like 10 years and you just keep doing it over and over again. I mean, like the first, the first YouTube video that I did, I think probably has like, you know, 100 views or whatever it was. And for anybody who's listening to this, like Simon had a, had a big business. But I'm assuming that when you started, you had zero subscribers when you started your account, right? And so did I across all platforms. And so people have this idea that like Everyone starts at zero. And I'll also give you this other kind of word of encouragement, which is there's this, there's a huge media narrative around the idea that like millionaires and billionaires are evil. I don't know why, but there is. What's interesting about that, if you look, at least in the US, statistics are that it's over the overwhelming majority of millionaires and billionaires are self-made, not inherited. And so it's like, okay, wait, if the majority of them are self-made, then that means they all started at zero. And so they had the same thing. So let's say they didn't have a lot of money.

I actually think having zero, starting at zero is competitive advantage.

Oh yeah. We have nothing to lose. Yeah, exactly.

Anyone with zero, you think you don't realize that you've got an advantage.

You have no money and all you have is time. And that means that you're in the exact same position as every self-made millionaire and billionaire when they started. And the only difference is that right now you're a self-made poor person. It's just that no one likes to claim it.

By the way, self-made doesn't exist because everyone had help.

Oh, for sure. No, no. But your concept in terms of starting here.

Yeah, we've no, no, you can have nothing. And still make it. Yeah. Do you know what's really interesting about this for people listening as well? Like, I've invested in 78 companies. I know you've invested in a lot of businesses as well. Sometimes too much money can destroy a business. I've seen people like WeWork, for example. Their biggest problem was they never thought about actually making money. Their business was raising money. Yeah, right. So I think that that's another thing people don't really quite grasp. But getting better, I mean, do you think there's a mental framework to help people get better? 'Cause I mean, even myself, right? I'm pretty good at business. I've had to get better to compete. But is there a framework for getting better as a human? Like, do you think?

As a human being, not as a business person?

You're right, I think they're linked, but what would you?

Well, I mean, I really 100% live on that common factors analysis thing. So if I look at, so I'll tell you how I lived my whole life. So like, the thing that started this was I was 21, 21 or 22. And this is my first job outta college. And I remember I had a really good weekend. I was just like in a good mood, came in on Monday, and my boss was like, "Hey, what's going on?" I was like, "Ah, just, you know, just had a good weekend." She said to me this line that I just, it kind of like hit me. She said, "I'm pretty sure stringing as many days in a row like that as you can is the secret to living." And what it did though was it took this whole, this amorphous idea of like joy, contentment, purpose, and just made it really tactical. I was like, okay, how do I live as many days in a row as I can of days that I like? So I looked back at like last year and I said, okay, what were the days that I liked the most? What were my top 10% days? Well, the things that I had in common is I worked out. Okay, cool, I did that. I ate with people I like, ate with friends, and then I worked until I had nothing left. If I do that on all my days, then more of my days will look like that. And so the majority of my days now feel like what used to be top 10% days. So, obviously these are different for other people. It might be play music, it might be whatever, you know, whatever your thing is. But that common factors analysis and it's like, okay, what are the top 10, you know, we've, you know, Leila and I've gone on 100 dates. Okay, the top 10 dates, what do they have in common?

Okay, well, Alex got flowers. I think about all that.

Yeah. How do I make sex better?

It's brilliant. Alex got flowers, right?

He got flowers. He had a gift.

Is this coming from her side?

She tells you? He had a free plant. No, he had a free plant. He had pre-planned something.

Right. She's told you her list. List.

I wrote some sort of note, right? Um, and so, and we dress up. And so those are the things. They're like, this is my, this is my recipe for making good dates. And so it's like, a lot of, a lot of times it's like no one just takes the, the look back and says, okay, what— but it's because they don't start with the I did stuff. That's the first step. Like, you got to do the 100 reps, you got to do make the 100 posts, you got to make the 100, you got to make the 100 cold calls, you got to make the 100 sales, and you got to record them. And that's the other piece, like, you have be able to record it. Whatever, whatever, to the greatest degree possible, you have to recall what were the details. And so then you look, you see the common factors, like, all right, well, I'm going to only do those 5 next time. And by, by randomness, because life happens in— there's variables that are out of our control— again, there's going to be another top 10% in the next 100 dates. And we're like, okay, so in those days, not only did I do these 5 things, but I, uh, we had a driver, uh, was a, was a big difference. And there was a surprise element for some of these. And at a certain point, the thing is, is the improvement is going to go like this, right? Just like that. Just like that sales thing. You know, the first time you do this, your dates are going to get way better, right? And then after that, though, the dates are going to get incrementally better. But all that happens is like, man, people are like, how do you have such a healthy relationship? You're like, you know, all I did was I just looked at the stuff that worked and I just stopped doing the stuff that didn't. And I just did it over and over and over again.

Amazing, Alex. Honestly, you're an amazing human being. I love this. I hope you guys enjoyed it. We're off to have some chicken now. We'll see you later.