My Business Isn’t Growing. What Do I Fix? | Ep 891

The other piece that I will tell you that is worth writing down is that we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught, and that goes double for your audience. Maybe some of you guys watch some of my content. You've probably heard me say work more before, and yet when you see the 7th video of that in a slightly different context, it's like, well, I kind of wanted the reminder.

Please help me welcome author of The $100 Million Offers, Leads, and Soon-to-Be Money Models, Alex Hormozi.

How are you guys doing today? Good. Good morning so far. Yes. Very tactical. Awesome. I appreciate that. So I normally do a little bit of a preamble, just kind of top of mind stuff. I feel like it's more common that we will keep our goal the same, but then be unwilling to change ourselves to accomplish it. And so then we just stay on the same path. When we know we should probably be doing something different than we currently are. It's just something I'm thinking about. Like I heard the last bit of, you know, you've got a bunch of stuff that's in your way. It's like, well, if you had to accomplish the goal, you'd probably do something a little bit different than you are. And I think rather than saying, you know what, the path I'm currently on will never accomplish my goal, we kind of mentally masturbate to the idea that we have this goal, but our actions don't align to it just because it's very easy to say and much harder to do to change you. So you don't change your goal. You also don't change you. And so you just stay there basically doing nothing. It's just something that I've observed on a continuous basis. And in having a lot of these discussions, I've had kind of the unique benefit of seeing the common mistakes that are made as business owners, kind of at all levels. And they're thematic, meaning they're very strategic in nature, less tactical, because a lot of times, like for sure, tactics, we can help you with all that stuff. But the big things that move the business are going to be the decisions that sometimes are just left unmade. And typically that is what slows the decision down more than anything else. And so right now you probably have some decisions you need to make, and the amount of time you choose to deliberate can take weeks, months, years, and sometimes you just never make the decision. So you stay the same. And so I see a lot of businesses stuck in those places because there's typically rock and hard place scenarios where you either choose short-term pain today or long-term pain persistently. That's just slightly less painful than the short-term pain, which is why I think people get stuck in these ruts. And so just by show of hands, who here is in around the same revenue they were last year? Okay. Keep your heads up. Would you guys like to change that? Yeah. Okay. So these are kind of the 7 rock and hard place scenarios that I see with founders in general. The first is focus. I talk about it a lot. I have, you know, a laundromat, a real estate business, an e-commerce company, like whatever, right? Like, and they all somehow work together, but like, Let's be real. No, they don't. I mean, just in that they have customers and the customers have money and money, you know, combines all the businesses sort of, but for the most part, it's like you need to pick one thing and go all in on it. The difficulty is that when you have quote two businesses or more than one business, that's kind of live at one time. The short-term pain is that you're going to see a dip in revenue because you're going to lose the revenue from the one that you choose to give up. So you either have that or you have the long-term persistent not achieving of goals. The next one is overexpansion. So this is the classic, like, I had one location, it was doing well. And so then I opened up a second location and I took the best person from my first location, put it over there. My first location dropped to here. My second location didn't get up to my first one, and that pretty much destroyed two-thirds of my margin. But now I have two times one-third of the margin. I'm making about a little bit less than I was before with two times the liability. And so I think the solution is I should open up a third location. Right. Which whenever, like, to be clear, every business needs to expand. So how are you quote over-expanded? It's easy to say that, but the reality is that you're just under-talented, meaning that it's the team that you have is just not sufficient. If you had two rock stars or somebody who's better than you at the first location, then it'd be fine for you to open up the second one. But it might be a model issue or a cash flow issue that prevents you from getting the talent that you need, which ultimately is what's keeping you stuck. So in this situation, again, what do you do? Do you kill the second location? It's like, well, that kind of hurts. On the flip side, it's like, or do you just give up all of your profit for a year or two in order to get somebody else in? Also a risk. So what do you do? You just stay the same because it's easier. The next is compensation, which can be over or under. So I'll give you an example. Physical therapy clinic came here doing really well. Fully all the beds were full, you know, all the therapists were staffed up, just wasn't making any money. And so, you know, after a couple of questions, it was like, oh, well, You know, I do a rev share with my therapist. I was like, oh, okay, well, how much? And she was like, well, 50%. I was like, okay, well, are they like kind of like a hair salon? Like they just rent it, you know, rent a chair or room and then they handle everything else. She's like, no, I, I spend the money to get customers. I close them. I outfit the facilities. I'm the one who cleans everything. They just show up and do work. And I was like, well, yeah, you're running the entire business on half your margin and there's just nothing left. Right. You know, that's an example of a compensation issue. Another one. Very common is underpriced. I bet over half of you guys are underpriced. And I think the reason there is, again, it's the same rock and a hard place scenario. Well, undercompensation, underpriced, equal side of the same coin. One's for employees, one's for customers. But if I tell my staff that I have to change their compensation, I'm going to lose my team. But if I don't, then I'm never going to make money. Underpriced, same, same. If I raise my prices, then I'm going to lose my customers. But if I don't, I'm not going to make money. Let's see, what is my S here? Ah, thank you. Single product, which is like you have a business where you have one thing, that's it. And you do that thing relatively profitably, but over time your margins continue to shrink. And so then you're like, well, I guess I should just start another business when maybe you just need to sell those people something else. Having a backend. The next one is avatar. This is again, classic hard rock and hard place. Well, I have to accept everybody who has a pulse and a credit card. Really, the pulse is optional, but I have to accept these people. And if I don't, I won't be able to make payroll next month. But I do need to get more narrow and more focused on my services and who I'm servicing and the messaging around it and the pricing that goes with it and my actual delivery. But if I do that, I'll lose money in the short term. Right. And so then we stay again in this rock and hard place scenario. And this last one was the last one I added to this list, which is data. There's not really a rock and hard place scenario here. More so that I guess the rock and hard place is you need data, but the resources and time it takes you to get data, you're unable to do because you don't have data. And so you're like, well, how do I expend the resources to collect the data and forego my short-term goals of putting out fires and growing? It's like, well, you can't grow because you don't have the information to make the bets you need to make. So these are just kind of 7 recurring themes I've seen. I saw a bunch of you guys nodding your heads as we go through the Q&As. I will do one of these so that, uh, you know, we can kind of be in on it together. With that being said, let's rock and roll. I'm guessing you're a yoga clinic instructor. The doctor. Yes, I should have gone with doctor. That would have been better. Yeah.

So my name's Colton. We sell tattoos to tattoo clients doing about $4 million in revenue. I'd love to be at $35 million in revenue. And what's stopping us is focus. So we've got multiple parts of the business. Stop me if you've heard this before. We do the tattoos. We also have continuing education for other tattoo artists. And what I was alluding to earlier, I've started to get into coaching studio owners and things like that. And so Ed was talking about maybe doing something like Gym Launch for the tattoo industry.

Yeah. So yeah. So normally I wouldn't recommend doing something like Gym Launch because Gym Launch was a unique situation. It's actually similar to tattoos in that probably tattoos actually been more in that direction because it's so dependent on the skill of the operator or the artists that are in each shop unless you are absolutely like mechanized it. So it doesn't matter if anyone's good, like there's 100 tattoos that everyone gets. I don't know. Is that true? No, not at Okay. Yeah. Just like, yeah, I don't know about that part. So what's the goal?

Goal is to have a company that I can exit.

Okay. So you wanna exit, so this, these are conflicting, very, very tough to exit a business that's like that. It was unique for us and very difficult to do that mostly cuz it's very face-driven. And so people don't typically like, unless it just over time becomes, you know, Gym Launch became its own brand. Yeah. That it was like I stepped out the back door for almost 2 years leading into the sale where I wasn't involved in delivery or even, you know, last 18 months for the, for the, the ad side. So you can do it. It's just significantly significantly harder than you might expect and profitability will take a hit. But let's outline the decision paths. So you have number one, go into the kind of information, et cetera, space, very difficult to sell. You will make more money in the short term. The second option is that you just continue to grow corporate and build a large brand, and then that will for sure be easier to sell when you come to sell, but it will take longer to get there. I don't really think there's an option three. So which of these sounds more tasty to you?

It all sounds good to me. The only, when I'm thinking about scaling the studio side of things, I would need a lot of studios, which is a lot of personnel. It's like 20 people per studio, you know?

So I mean, Panda Express has 2,600 locations. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

I mean, I'd really be happy with any of them, I think.

Well, well then which one are you going to do?

So should I not do Gym Launch for tattoos?

I don't think you can. It's like, that's what the thing is, is that either way you're going to have to shoot a kid in the head. Yeah. Or I know, aggressive, maybe multiple. Well, it feels that way. I imagine, you know what I mean? It's like this spawn that you created. And you're like, you made it in your own image, you know? Yeah. And it hurts. It hurts a lot. Has anyone here ever shut a business down before? Painful as shit. Like so much harder than starting one.

Because I'm assuming to pursue one of the other options, I'd have to shut the studio down.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now there's the narrative that you're saying, well, isn't it good that I have these studios that I can prove that I'm legit? Nope. Nope. Doesn't matter. I owned exactly zero gyms when I had Gymwatch. I had six prior, but zero when I did it so that I could focus on Gymwatch.

Yeah.

Makes sense.

So which direction are you going in?

I think, I think the educational or the, the tattoo studio owner facing thing.

So here's the thing, you will make more money over, like, let's paint it out over 10 years, right? Like over 10 years, you'll make more money every year. You just won't make as much the last year. And so there's a lot of romanticism around selling a company. And as somebody who has done it, I can appreciate it. But the thing is, is like, I don't see one way as right or wrong. If you offered somebody, hey, would you like to make a million? Like when you're 85 years old and you look back, would you be happier that you made, I'm just making up numbers, $3 million a year in personal income for 10 years, or basically made $100,000 a year for 10 years and then made 50 on the last year in your 30s or 40s, whatever, pick your, pick your number. I don't know. When you look back on it, like, I mean, it's 10 years of living. So I'm not as polar on the decision. It's totally personal. But if you do want an exit, then the corporate path is the way. If you want to make more money, then the Gym Launch version is probably a better path, which I don't normally say, but just because of how difficult it is to attract star artists and that being kind of the core of the delivery, I could imagine wrapping their model in something that you have. And then ultimately what you'll have to weave in is the things that make it sticky. And that's why Jim Launch was able to win because basically everything in education, what makes it so difficult to sell and also honestly to run is that once someone has gotten your secret or your bag of tricks, then what? You have to have consumables. And so that's one of the things that, you know, we can help you with, but like putting the consumables in there so that it does stick and that's what's going to drive LTV long-term, putting the sales motion in place, all that kind of stuff. It's different, but ultimately the that's gonna make it work. Cool. Awesome.

Thank you.

Yeah. Rock and roll. Thank you. Doctor of the year.

My name's Tony Cooper and I sell plumbing and air conditioning to residential customers. And I would like to, we're currently doing around, we'll pace it for $15 million this year and I'd like to be at $40 million. And what is stopping me is the chaos. We, I recently hired 2 new leaders from outside the industry and we went from $4 million to $8 million to $11 million. We're pacing for 15 now. Awesome. The chaos, I'm worried about the overexpansion or just, just to, because we're making a lot of errors. Our profits are staying level and I expected them to go up, but we're not, we're growing top line and we're just flat. We're just chewing up a lot of mistakes.

Yeah.

Why the aggressive growth pace?

It's actually, I'm kind of bent more towards perfection and going slower. The guys that I hired are from outside the industry, they're, They're just top line revenue driven and it's almost like they would just keep driving it and it's working and I'm making more absolute dollars than I could have imagined when I first hired them. So it's a good thing.

But I'm wondering if they'll be that or I mean, because you're netting too, right? You're in the 13%. No.

Yeah, we're netting about 14% right now. We landed last year 15.7% and we're like 16-something whenever I at the $4 million mark. So we're staying flat net, but the gross dollar is coming to me. I'm the single owner. Everything's paid off. We're not acquiring debt to grow. So, you know, I'm stacking up money, but I'm just wondering if we're going to make a mistake that rams it backwards.

What are those guys compensated on?

Net.

And they're driving top line?

It's just how they're built, I guess. They, they're driving top line. And I, one, the guy that's the biggest driver, he really, uh, I just, just in love with big numbers. He's come from the corporate world where they did hundreds of millions of dollars and And that's what he's, uh, about.

Yeah. So your issue one is data, I'll bet, unless you have real-time gross operating margins on each of your product lines. Because by doing that, you'll be able to drive EBITDA through the roof. And in your business, being tax efficient is actually super achievable. Do you have a good, um, CFO?

I don't, no, I don't think we do.

Okay.

I would want more of that function. My background's kind of accounting as well, so. I'm kind of a little bit lent that way.

Okay. Are you, do you want to exit it or what do you want to do?

I just want to grow it.

I want a good running business that's just a cash cow and kind of a lifestyle business. That's what I want.

Okay. Well, what if you said our goal this year is to not increase top line at all and to triple bottom line?

Yeah, I like that.

I feel like, yeah, that's chill. Yeah. No, I like that. That would, I would be perfectly happy with $15 million and run 30% net. Yeah. Yeah. 'Cause I mean, if you're at 13, 14%, or whichever one it is, if you're around there, I would for sure, like you for sure, I'd be targeting +30 minimum. I don't pay much attention to industry averages, mostly because like American averages is like fat, overweight, and divorced. So like, why would I care about industry averages? I kind of take the same position with most service businesses. I'm going to bet right now that you probably have some sales motion that can be improved and probably some pricing. That can get optimized that would improve cash flow. Basically the sequence goes like this. It's like, okay, we have to look at the sales motion so that we can fix the pricing and packaging of each of the services so that we can generate sufficient cash flow so that we can get the talent that we need so we can shore up the infrastructure. And so that would probably be the sequence that I would do it in. And then I would set the year's goal, like here's our 4-part plan. This is what we're doing for next year, and this is how we're going to go from you know, whatever, 2 and change or 3 and change, whatever it is to, you know, 6 in EBITDA.

Fair enough.

Congratulations on the business though. Rocking and rolling. Cool. My name's Ricky. I, uh, I sell coaching to real estate agents. Mm-hmm. I do $2.5 million in revenue. I say I, well, it's really I, because hey, I'm a solopreneur. I have no employees. I, um, everything's 100% organic. I'd like to double it. What's stopping me? That's a good question. Your boy Ed, he seems to think, he's real passionate too. He, you see, he seems to think I could be just super famous. Uh-huh. Brand, he's like, you need a brand manager. Yeah. And so, you know, he's like, you need somebody that has already kind of achieved that with someone else. Right.

Yeah.

So I guess my question is, how do I find that person? 'Cause 99% of the stuff out there is scams. Yeah. Basically it was totally that kind of thing. And I would even define them as scams. I just, people with that are not that competent. I think it comes down to deception, whether they intended to deceive or just aren't that good. But back, back to your point, I agree. So fundamentally, if you want to just make more money and you are a brand that promotes itself, then you need to advertise more. Are you, constrained on your delivery? Delivery as far as the fulfillment? Yeah. No, it's group coaching. It's easy. So you could double the amount of customers you have right now at a wish rate of 2. Quadruple. Yeah. Okay. Well then, yeah, I mean, this is a pure advertising play. Yeah. You probably, I mean, I'm, I'm interviewing sales guys and I'm looking at paid ads, like hiring people. Yeah. That, so like I'm getting into that. Yeah. The paid side is gonna give you, call it like a one-time 3 to 5x off of a baseline. Not a promise or guarantee, just saying like, that's, that's what I would say is kind of typical if you've gotten to this point off of just organic. Obviously we can help you with that stuff, but like the long-term kind of like well that you need to keep digging is you want to, so think about like this. So you have, just imagine this is your audience. Right now you're monetizing these people, right? The people who are just like super hot, they love you forever and you continue to promote and you know, this gets filled up with new eyeballs and then they come up because they see your stuff and then they give you money. Yay. Right? When you start doing, if you do more organic and do it across more platforms, do it more consistently, do it with higher volume, do it with higher quality, then what you're going to do is you're going to grow this, this base. This percentage will stay about the same, but now it's going to go to here. Right? So then that dollar sign goes up. That's a great long-term play and you just want to keep growing the pyramid. What ads will do is that ads will keep this the same and then it'll move this line down. And so you want to do both. So like in the short term, if I was like, how do I like double your business? It's like, That wouldn't be that difficult. I would just be like, cool, just pull the ad lever. It's done. But if we're looking at a 10-year horizon, then I would say, well, we need to do both of these in parallel. We need to continue to plant the seeds and then the ads kind of reach off the top and skim. That makes sense. Yeah, for sure. So how do you find an ad manager? I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, a brand manager. So that's good. Yeah. The best thing, I mean, I just, we just poach. We just, I mean, just outreach. Hey, you've crushed it with so-and-so. Can I pay you more to do it here? Right. And since, do I get you, I guess, how do you realize who those people are to poach?

Like who?

Look at the brands that you admire and then reach out to them and offer them more money to do it for you. But you see the brand, but you don't really know who's behind the brand. LinkedIn, like Frank and Hut, like, yeah, solvable.

Gotcha.

For sure. Solvable. Yeah. I mean, and most of the people who are really good at media stuff do have some presence anyways on their own, so they don't make themselves invisible. Like you could probably ChatGPT search who are the people who are involved with that. Here's my question. Like, like, is that something that could be outsourced? You mean recruiting? No, no, no, no, no. Not the recruiting part. Like the, like the brand manager part. No, I wouldn't recommend it. Yeah. Bring somebody in-house. It's the thing is, what are the, so what are the core things for the business? So for every business you have attraction, you've got conversion, you've got delivery, right? Those are the things that are core to every business. IT, recruiting, finance. I see all of these functions as ancillary. That aren't core to value creation for the customer. There are things that must occur for the business to continue to be a business, but not things that are core for the value to be created. And so for you, your brand is arguably the most important asset that you have, and for sure would not be something that I would outsource. So bring somebody in-house, work in direct with me. Yeah, I would poach somebody. Obviously we've done, we've hired a lot of media people. We can help you with that. But beyond that, I would probably, if I'm doing order of ops, it'd probably be, because the thing is, is right now, are you selling? You're selling, who's doing the sales? Well, so I do it in a challenge. Okay. That's the only time I offer it, you know, you do one to many, one buy a day thing, something like that. Yeah. Okay. And so I'm gonna switch to book a call. I'm a single sale guy. And do it on a recurring kind of evergreen basis or still do it in this long form? I'll do it both. I'll do both. Yeah. But, okay. But you're selling straight to checkout. Mm-hmm. Got it. Yeah. That motion, um, as soon as you turn on ads is going to break in all likelihood because it's totally different selling to cold than it is to, to warm. And so the motion break, you will not convert the same percentage. I don't really do. Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. No doubt. By a lot. And so the whole, the whole, the economics of the entire funnel will change. And so that'll take some adjustment in motion. So just more like preparing you for that. Cause that's what comes next. Yeah. So HighLevel recruiting for brand manager, that's going to start building the base and then ads plus sales motion are going to have to come in tandem because they both have to be good. The ads have to be good and the sales motion has to be good. If the ads are great and the sales motion sucks, it won't work. If the sales motion is great and the ads suck, it won't work. Cool. That makes sense for next steps. Yeah. Yeah. Go to LinkedIn and poach somebody. Got it. I highly recommend outbound for high-level roles, by the way. Like your stars, one, already have a job, and two, are not looking on Craigslist. That answers one of my questions. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all 8 functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, you got HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, R-O-A-D map, roadmap. Bingo. My name's Austin. I am a chiropractor. We do Right around 2.4. Been stuck there for 5 years. Like to get to 3.6. Been stuck in the swamp. Stuck or growing over 5 years? We've been at 2.4 for 5 years. Yep. And so I don't know what's stopping us. I'd like to get out of the swamp. Heard. And then profit margins, you're at 30%, right? Yes, sir. Yeah. Okay. I remember seeing $600,000 as a profit number. I don't know if that's still accurate.

Okay.

Okay. So you have $600,000 in profit and you and a partner, you're 100%? 100%. Okay, well, what do you want to— you just want to like, what do you want to have happen? Do you want to like, what do you want to do? Do you want to go to many locations? No, I want to— I want to grow a main big location and, you know, create a space for family to eventually— I mean, grow in there. If they don't want to do that, then I would probably change my goal to be an exit. Okay. Standpoint. What's your square footage right now? We have 7,700. Okay. So decently large. Yeah, we occupy about 4,700 of it. Okay. Got it. And so are you at capacity within the space right now? No, we used to have a supply issue till about 2 weeks ago. Oh, right. And then we hired another doctor, so now it's become a demand issue. Mm-hmm. And that's where we're at now. So how do you get customers now? We, our highest is referral. Then we get about, the next highest would be paid ads through Facebook. What percentage are ads? We do probably about 20%. From ads. About half is from referrals. Another 20% is from Google. Okay. So you separate Meta ads from Google ads when you talk about ads? Yep. Okay. Got it. We don't actually currently do Google ads, but that's where they said they came from. Herb. Got it. Which I would probably see as word of mouth. Like I Googled you or Googled somebody here. It's probably SEO, something like that. But, okay. Okay. So $2.5 million, like what stops you from just spending more money on Meta ads? Trust that we're doing it right. I mean, I just don't feel like— Are you making more money than you put in? Yeah. Well, so you might have one of the— which is that we need, we need attribution tracking so that you can know if you're putting a dollar in and getting $5 or $10 or $20 back out. We have no clue. But as soon as we have the attribution tracking, because fundamentally what, what you lack right now is an input-output equation for the business to grow. And so every business needs to know what are the, what are the core actions that I do that increase how much money I make? And if you can't define that for the business, then for sure as shit, your employees don't know what it is if you don't know what it is. Right. And so for you, if you are not supply constrained and you're demand constrained, that means lead generation is the issue. If lead generation is the issue, what's the activity? The activity is going to either be, I'm going to be making content. I'm going to be getting affiliates that are going to be promoting my shit for me. I'm going to be running paid ads. Right. Those are going to be kind of like the bigger buckets that you're going to be going into. And then you got people who do those things on your behalf. And so right now, do you make content? Yes, sir. Okay. What percentage comes from that? We just started it about 2 months ago. How much do you do?

Uh, we—

I'm not going to tell you to do more. I'm just curious. We do 4 videos that gets created into short and long per week. 4 videos for the month. And— Heard.

Okay.

Got it. Cool. Yeah. Don't— Yeah. Chop it up. Okay. Got it. Okay. So you've got 4 longs and you chop this into little shorts and things like that. Okay. Got it. All right. So short-term, long-term. Short-term, we got to get the data tracking in place. Second step is going to be the ads funnel in place and kind of like what the sales motion is behind that. For local, the good news is that it's easy to do because there's already so much trust locally that you don't need to have nearly the complexity of kind of like the funnels and indoctrination and education prior to someone making a purchasing decision. You can pretty much just like one call close, two, two conversation close anybody, even at very high ticket numbers, which is one of the benefits of local. The downside of local is that you've got a market that's this big. Correct. That's the downside, right? So if you don't want to expand markets, then you need to dominate the market you're in. And so it's going to be a multi-prong approach. And it's kind of like I was saying earlier, like we're going to start with ads because that'll just get you more in. Because I'm guessing right now, if you have a good reputation, a good brand, then the ads will actually help you more than they would help somebody who doesn't have that footprint. But then we're going to start probably layering in the content as the second kind of the well that needs to continue to get dug. Again, this is going to be long-term. And so you're going to want to be a thought leader. And then what happens is that if you can, if you can succeed at building the brand long-term, and it sounds like you're more long-term guy. So I will, I'll speak in these terms. What happens is your radius actually continues to expand. And so if you take it to the natural extreme, you can go to the Amen Clinic in New York or whatever. I think it's in New York because they have a national reputation, but people fly there. And so that's how, that's what it looks like as you continue to expand the brand because people will just be more willing to travel to you and pay premium prices, which I'm sure if we looked under the hood, the prices probably get tweaked too. But like those, those are some things. And if you're in the swamp, cash flow is actually the biggest thing that you need. And so again, the pricing and packaging is probably like, Again, if I was to do order of operations, pricing and packaging would probably be number one. So we could free up cash flow. The freed up cash flow, we'd then funnel into the ads so that we could get data attribution. Then we'd put the ads in place, putting flow through there. And then the baseline that happens after that is we're just going to increase the cadence on the, on the content that demonstrates thought leadership. That's the path. That makes sense. Thank you. We're having trouble also hiring good, high-quality doctors in Wyoming. It's actually ladders up to the first problem, cash flow.

Okay.

We need to fix the pricing so that we can generate more cash flow so that we can pay doctors so that we can actually get the business to not rely on you as much. Oh, appreciate you. Thank you. Yeah. Happy to help.

Hi Alex. I'm Rob Jenkins.

Hello, sir.

Hey, uh, I'm a 25-year recovering attorney. I have a very specialized practice.

I'm so sorry. My condolences.

We serve as an officer of the court for judges throughout Texas.

Uh-huh.

About 1,400 judges, 250 counties. The, uh, our revenue currently is standing at $15 million.

Okay.

74% profit margin.

Okay.

Uh, based on a proprietary piece of software we developed. I'd like the revenue to get to $20 million. It's a nice round number.

Me too.

It's, and it's, it is progressing that way.

For both of us.

Yeah.

You know, it's progressing that way. Uh, so what's stopping me is we have conquered the market in Texas. We are number one by a large magnitude. Uh, Number 2, 3, and 4 combined still don't do what we do. And so we're about half of the entire industry in the state of Texas.

Love it.

So where we are now is this crossroads of we have solid relationships with 5 of the 7 whales that could possibly exist in Texas, and the whales being the law firms that ask the judge to appoint a receiver.

Mm-hmm.

We have relation— like I said, locked down relationships with 5 out of the 7. There's 2 that we will choose not to serve.

Yeah, dicks.

So we just don't align.

Yeah, our values. Yeah, I get it.

So we're kind of at this crossroads of, do we go to another state? Or, as kind of came from yesterday's discussions, perhaps I go out and do some whale hunting and bring some new whales into Texas. And so, meaning find other national big high-volume law firms that choose not to do business in Texas because Texas is a tough state to practice in. And so it's really that fork in the road of what makes more sense. We're a single business building operation outside of Dallas. We cover the entire state with our, our ability, so we have massive efficiencies. Yeah, we are tight. I have a rockstar team, 3 of them there up front on the front row, versus going into uncharted waters.

Yeah.

And saying, all right, well, we did it in Texas, we can do it in Oklahoma.

What prevents you from doing Oklahoma?

It's never been done there. There would have to be a tweak to the law. The legislation might need to pass. So there's a 2-year journey to pass a law to make it more available.

Okay.

But the good news is the, you know, one of the particular wells we have in Texas is saying, hey, come to Oklahoma, we're already here, we need this remedy here. Yeah, but my natural inclination based on efficiencies and processes and systems that are in place is, well, figure out how to do what you're doing here bigger. And so I'm kind of in that fork.

Yeah.

Which mountain is worth climbing?

Well, it's a great— I was— you even used the analogy I was gonna, I was gonna use. So the good news is that both ways will get you up the mountain. And I think one of the things that I used to get— I'd lose too much sleep over was obsessing over which path when both of them lead you up. So then I would end up deliberating for way longer than I should have because I wanted to find the perfect path rather than just knowing both of them will take me up. And so that's allowed me to take, make big decisions faster just as an overarching frame. The second thing with regards to the actual decision. So when I think about something like this, I think, okay, how do I maximize the risk-adjusted return on this move? Right? And so if I call a whale up, so you have 5 whales that you like, are there any other whales that you like that are not those 5 that you have relationships with?

Not in Texas, but the idea is there are, you know, there, there's firms out there that do 8 states. They just don't do Texas. And so not a lot of cost into pursuing, hey, let me encourage you, let me tell you what Texas can hold for you and try to get them to come to us.

Is there, and you would know this, are there laws that prevent you from kind of doing a joint venture or something like that with a whale firm so that they use an exclusive?

It, it is critically important that I am independent.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Heard.

Yeah, because otherwise I would've been like, you could put a very big, you know, check on the table for them to get there, which I guess you could still do, but you'd have to have no agreement. Like they could just take the money obviously, and then not send it to you.

Right.

They probably still would. But as a risk consideration, the thing I don't like about that one, my big hangup, which might be yours, is I just don't want the growth of my business relying on somebody else opening their business and doing a good job. Whereas I'd rather go where the fish already are. So if Oklahoma has a 2-year delay, I mean, that is a pain in the ass. But are there other states that don't have a 2-year delay?

That's just the most logical first step because of the one whale.

Geographic.

I mean, it's literally—

sure. Our north. Yeah.

And we already have a relationship with the Texas whale that is in Oklahoma saying, please come here also.

How much business does that represent though? That's the big question is it's unknown because you're doing Texas and you're at 15, right? Oklahoma is way smaller by, you know, headcount than Texas. And this is 1 of 5. So it's like if we had 1/5 current revenue, you know, you're at 3 and that's of Texas slice of pie. Now, whatever the Oklahoma slice of pie goes from 3 to less than 3. Exactly. And like, to me, I'm like, I don't know if I care.

You nailed it.

Yeah.

That's really a big piece of it is. You know, the growth piece of, great, we can take on another state. And of course Texas could lead to Colorado and Colorado could lead. But you're talking about, all right, you just added 10 more percent revenue.

Yeah. Incremental for sure.

But now you have something else dragging and, and on your brain at night, at 3 in the morning, you know?

Yeah. I'm with you. So then what stops you from going to New York? Hypothetically, like if you, if you operate remotely, fundamentally within the business, like what? Why does— if it's another state, is another state, is another state, do you need to be local in order to do it?

Some of it has to do with the laws that are in place. Yeah. You know, this remedy that is a Texas law-based remedy makes sense in Texas because Texas protects wages and you can't do wage garnishment. It protects your homestead. We can't force you to sell your house. It has a lot, you know, it's considered the second toughest state in the nation to recover unpaid debt in or judgments in. So we come in as a tool. That works. And so we— there would be just a handful. I would estimate 3 to 4 states where this would make sense.

Okay.

It's a matter of, is the view worth the climb? Is adding 10, 15% more top line revenue worth taking my brain, my overthinking brain?

Yeah.

To Oklahoma.

I would say this will actually be fun. I'm going to do this because it'll apply to probably half the room because this is a really cool fundamental decision. So bear with me, this will be a little bit longer, but you'll hopefully like it. If you don't, don't tell me. So let's say that this line represents normal revenue of the business. In my experience, I've, I've noticed that I get a 20% decrement or decrease in performance whenever I change anything about the business before any kind of gains can then get accrued from whatever that change was supposed to bring. And so I see this as my guaranteed cost of change, no matter what that I have to pay. And so what's ended up happening after observing this over and over and over again is that number one, if I'm going to take a guaranteed 20% cost, then I'm not going to take a potential for a 20% gain on a guaranteed 20% cost. And so for me to take a 20% dip, it's like I need to see 50, maybe a double in the business for me to be like, okay, this is worth it. And so what ends up happening is that I think this can, I'm speaking to everybody now, but you get out of this constant desire to tweak everything in your business and drive your employees insane because you always have a new idea every week and they're like, well, just did this other one. Because what ends up happening is you're like, well, this thing's gonna net, well, you're like, okay, well what if this does net me 20? I should still do it, right? Okay, sure. Let's play that out. But the thing is, is that this week you're gonna think of something else. You're gonna have another 20%. And so people actually have like persistently far below potential businesses that are operating way below what they should be because we just constantly are changing shit. And so to ladder back to what we were talking about, my question would be, What state can generate the same amount of revenue as Texas? None. None. Okay. You have to grow the pie of Texas. So you have two, two growth paths, right? You go from 40 or 50% where you're at now to 70, 80%. So it's like, what monopolistic levers can we employ so that no, like we can starve everyone else out, which then just increases the value of the business a ton, which is awesome. And so there's, share of pie and growing pie of Texas. And if none of the other states really make this feasible, then I think that probably answers that, at least in the short term. So I don't love the, I have to get other people here as my growth path. And so it's like, number one, the thing that requires the least amount is increase percentage of pie. Number two would be increase pie percentage, or sorry, yeah, pie percentage. And then number three, if I've done both of these things, well enough, then that might already be, I mean, for sure getting your 20, but then it's like, okay, I'm going to look at New York. I'm going to look at some of these other, other states that might have opportunity that's still not as good as Texas, but I have truly tapped this. And that's probably the order of operations I would do it on. So then solving for the constraint of, okay, why do these other 50%, why are they allowed to breathe? And then how do I take the oxygen out of the room would probably be my approach if I were swapping places.

Love it.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Appreciate you. No, thank you. Congrats on the business. Very cool. Yes, sir. My name is Chris.

I sell welding accessories to welders. We do $1.7 million revenue. I'd like to be at $10 million revenue. What's stopping me is I feel like, uh, demand has plateaued and we have about 300,000 followers on TikTok. And I was wondering if you—

that's amazing. So you're doing this on from TikTok?

TikTok is our main channel. I kind of got things going and then we had a Shopify store.

Yeah, but I'm just still amazed. Thank you. Yeah. TikTok has just the worst monetization of, of audience. So kudos.

I was wondering if you think it'd be worth trying to double that audience from 300,000 to 600,000 or jump into another channel. Like Amazon is what I was really considering.

You were seeing Amazon as a channel?

Like as a, as a means to sell more things.

Well, so, okay, hold on. So are you saying I have such limited resources that my decision is I can either list my stuff on Amazon or I can make more content. Is that what you're saying? You said go from 300 to 600 on TikTok, right?

Yes.

Make more content, uh, with TikTok. The thing, uh, I made videos for about a year, just every day I was trying to make like good original content. And over the past few months I've been experiencing a lot of burnout.

Sure.

And I think that's what's kind of, yeah, made me interested in looking in other avenues of selling my shirts.

So this is, this is like awesome. I'm really glad you asked this question. You have to reverse engineer you. So what are the things that you actually like doing?

Making content.

Well, sometimes. But you're burned out though. Yes.

Yeah.

So is there a type of content you enjoy and other types you hate?

More educational content. I like, uh, I like educator, uh, educational content because I feel like, uh, yeah, when I post it, people can come back to it anytime and it just kind of creates an omnipresence.

So what stops you from making that?

Ideas, like coming up with good original ideas, I feel like it's hard. And like, I know they say just like post the video, like no matter what, but, uh-huh. Sometimes then I look at it, I'm like, man, like that could be better maybe.

Yeah. So I, I don't think you should just do this other random thing for no reason. Um, so if that, if that, if you want that initial answer, I can give you that one right away. I think that the long-term Play for you is figuring out how to make the content that you enjoy so that you can keep making it. And so it's either you like the stuff you make or you capture yourself doing things you already like. Those are kind of your options. And then the rest of it is just pain tolerance. That's fair. Being real. And to be fair, going from season to season of content creation, like you'll probably notice many people, myself included, like the nature of my content shifts over time and it's for the same reason, which is that like I have to give myself permission to do whatever I want because there are no rules and no one's— there's no content police that's gonna come arrest me if I don't make a video today. And they're not gonna arrest me if it's not algorithm optimized. I'm just gonna make what I wanna make. And that changes cuz I change and I focus on different stuff. The other piece that I will tell you that is worth writing down is that we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. And that goes double for your audience. Maybe some of you guys watch some of my content. You've probably heard me say work more before, and yet When you see the 7th video of that in a slightly different context, it's like, well, I kind of wanted the reminder. And so it's not like you're disserving the audience by reminding them of something they want to be reminded of in a context that is slightly novel. And so I think one of the big burdens that creators or people make content put on themselves that they believe that the content has to be as novel for them as it is for the audience. And it is just not true. Dave Ramsey has been answering I'm broke questions for 35 years. Stop spending the money you make. That's it. That's it. That's, that's what you got to do. Right. And then everything else goes up. That's how it works. World's shortest content piece. But the thing is, is that it's the nuance of this unique situation. Well, there was a girl who won a lot. I mean, I've seen multiple lottery winner call-ins to Dave Ramsey. Have you seen those? Like little clips of them? I've seen multiple. So you'd think, oh, well, we can't make another lottery clip. We've already covered what to do with lotteries. It's like, well, that was a $22 million lottery. This is a $2 million lottery winner. What's different now? Well, this guy has a wife who hates him and this guy doesn't. Now what? Well, the answer is stop spending so much money. You get where I'm going with this, right? Yes. So if you weld stuff and you like making cool projects, the nice thing about your business is super visual. So it's so made for making content around, which is a huge advantage. Whereas if you like teach stuff and you have a big box of intangibles, it's like for me to demonstrate client finest acquisition. Not nearly as fun or cool as you welding some shit. Never.

That's fair.

Right. I also follow a handful of gym equipment accounts. Like, that's probably one of my hardcore side hobbies. I will look at reels of the same piece of equipment 30, 40 times until another one comes up. It'll be 31 or 41 times. Right. And so I think you underestimate how much your audience might just like your shit and then you just be okay with posting Today's version of that thing. So just keep Dave Ramsey top of mind. And part of the reason that he's been able to make the content for 35 years is that he enjoys doing it. And so it's just find a format that you like and then figure out all the algorithm bullshit around it to make it, you know, all nice and clickable and all that, all that kind of jazz. But I'd say start with you and kind of reverse backwards and then long-term, that's what's going to build it. But was that really the core problem? Uh, I just, I wanted to answer that 'cause I know that probably affects a third of the room. So yeah.

Now the, uh, other big problems that I've kind of realized being here, data, like I don't know my numbers like I should. That's a big thing that I've realized. Focus.

You run ads? That's a big thing.

And that's what like you were saying, like we need to be, yeah, minded more. That's, uh, I think coming here and just having that laid out has helped a lot.

Do you run ads?

Yes, we do. Uh, Google and Meta ads.

Okay. What percentage comes from that versus organic from TikTok?

It's probably 50/50, I'd say.

Okay. Interesting. Got it. And so what stops you from just running more ads?

I've talked to my marketing guys about it and they say—

We've saturated the market.

Uh, like, not like that. They say, uh, we just wanna like trickle up slower. So we're planning on spending more leading into the holiday season.

Okay, cool. I agree. Spend more. I appreciate it. I know he is not the only person who's dealing with that content issue as a side note. Yeah, shoot.

My name is Derek. I sell real estate advisory services to C-suite execs and business owners. I do about 1.2 right now, and I'd like to be at 10.

You're running like 60% margins, right? Like 700 or 800 profit.

As an example, the guy who repped you to buy this building, that's like what I do. So my, my hypothesis in Seattle, I'm in Seattle, suburban market in Seattle doing 1.2. Hypothesis is I'm moving to Phoenix next year, so I'll be, I'll open the office in Phoenix. Much larger TAM. I want to hear your framework about how do you think about customer acquisition strategy for C-suite execs in a brand new market where you don't know anyone.

Yeah. So how many people do you have working under you in Seattle?

I have one guy.

It's like, are you concerned?

He's adding meetings for me.

What for? Okay. Are you concerned that your revenue in Seattle's gonna drop?

I'm starting over.

So you're cool. Just, you're like, this is going to zero.

It's more like lifestyle too.

Okay. Heard. Okay.

Yeah.

So, well then what'd you do to get the first 1 point?

Brute force calling and emailing 1 to 1. Yeah.

Well, that will do.

So like, yeah, for sure. But 0 to 1, but how do you think about from 0 to 10 in a brand new market? Would you change that strategy up?

Yeah. If you're going for high-level people, then it's gonna, it's gonna be more outreach driven because most high-level people are gonna get everything from referrals or for meeting people in specific, you know, arenas. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just being real. I'm not responding to a Meta ad for buying this building. Right. For sure. Yeah. And so, and you don't pay that, you don't pay out of pocket.

I mean, the landlord or the seller pays my fees. So like the customer itself isn't paying for my services.

Or you do, you do renters. Is that what it is?

Tenants. So like, yeah.

Okay. So renters. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That is actually kind of interesting. I remember. Yeah. Now, now it's coming back to me. Yeah. Unique model. Only focusing on tenants, tenants and buyers. Yeah. Oh, but and buyers. Yeah. Okay. And buyers. Okay. Got it. What percentage is tenants? Not just landlords. Yeah. What percentage is tenants versus buyers?

Oh, in this market with interest rates, it's like 80 or 90% tenants to 10 buyers.

Interesting. Huh.

And I do industrial and office buildings, so.

Yeah. Like, yeah, I'll, I'll say this, if like that specialization is kind of unique, at least I haven't, and I feel like I get solicited constantly.

And so You're not getting beat on by bro— by a commercial real estate broker's problem. I mean, not really.

Zooming all the way out, you go into a new market, right? It's like you got to either be face-to-face networking, et cetera, like conferences, meetups, like pounding the pavement. V1. V2 is outreach just digitally, right? Which if you have some organic following that can help, or you have to go true cold outreach on LinkedIn, things like that, that can work for sure. Again, volume. The ad strategy, I think because of the unique angle that you have, I actually am more okay with it given it's like, if you just lean in on the tenant side, I actually think you might have a better shot because it just feels unique rather than like, I have to buy these buildings. You know?

Yeah.

So that, because if you're like, I am a specialist at negotiating leases for commercial buildings under these conditions, then it's like you're niching down and that messaging could pull someone who otherwise would like, I have multiple brokers that I use.

That's, yeah, redaction.

But I currently don't have a, I own all my shit, but like if I didn't, then I would, you know, I would probably be responsive to a message like that. So I think I would probably just from a speed perspective, 'cause I'm guessing you have cash from, right? I mean, your margins are good. So I would probably start with ads first. No. And I would do the rest as though ads don't exist, but the ad strategy would be probably one of the primary things that I would want to crack in the new market because otherwise it's going to take you However long it took you to do it the other time.

How would you 80/20? I mean, from, from cold outreach to ads, what's that disparity look like?

Yeah, I don't normally recommend doing more than one thing. Yeah. My only exception is for local. Yeah. Because local, there's just, it has smaller, you just have to just hammer a market. The thing is, is that ads don't take a tremendous amount of time. Yeah. I basically would want you to spend, call it $100 to $200 a day. In local ads and your primary priority is to work the shit out of those leads and get the sales motion in place. Yes. And in the meantime, you do the normal playbook. Okay. So it's like, this is my guaranteed path. This is my fast path that I'm willing, I'm spending this money.

Right, right.

To learn to get it, to, to, to crack it. That would be my approach. Now the good news is that there's plenty of realtors who are super successful running ads in local markets.

Platforms, LinkedIn, obviously.

I'm, um, no, I mean, I think. Like, again, I like the super niched messaging, so I would actually be more willing to, I mean, I LinkedIn for sure, but I wouldn't be as opposed to a meta strategy given that unique angle. Just being generic realtor number 6.

No, no chance.

Yeah. Right.

Okay. Real quick. And then decommoditizing my service, I guess I already have that kind of specialty, so that probably helps.

I would be showing before and afters. You know, this is what the tenant was originally offered. This is what we're able to negotiate. This was the difference.

Right.

Just, I would be—

I thought about a guarantee, you know, landlord offers this.

Mm-hmm.

If our, if where we end up is 20% less than that or not, I'll rebate my fee kind of deal.

Yeah.

The landlord paid fee back to you.

Yeah.

But it's like, yeah, tough to guarantee that when sometimes it's 8% savings, 10% savings. I mean, mm-hmm.

I would probably go with dollar amounts if you can. Okay. And then only take projects over X. Right. That way you could probably, it'll, it'll, because you want to anchor to the, the biggest number you can. And that would probably be how I'd approach it. Because percentages get eaten up real fast and going from like, if it's less than 5, it's like, that's not impressive. But if it's like, I'll save you 50, but it's like over a 6-year term, it's like, okay, that I did save the money. It's just backloaded in the right form. So I'd rather anchor to the big number. Okay.

Appreciate it. Thank you.

100%. Congrats, by the way. Ballsy.

Hi Alex.

My name is Dylan Larsen. I sell beef protein chips to athletes and outdoor enthusiasts. We do about a million revenue. We want to be at 12, want to be doing about a million a month. Up to this point, up until this point, we've been severely, what I've identified as supply constrained. We've been in the supply chain purgatory for a while. And I say a while, period of like 6 to 9 months trying to find a manufacturer that's gonna make our stuff. Or because we decommoditized away from jerky, didn't want a price race to the bottom. Changing their lineup a little bit dissuaded so many of them. So we finally found one and we're working through that right now.

Okay. So what else is distracting you?

The approach. Now that we've unlocked the volume, this new manufacturer can do about 20,000 units a month.

Okay.

Which will get us to about 280,000 a month in revenue.

Okay.

At that point, he has a proprietary machine that can spit out a tray of our product every 12 seconds.

Okay.

Um, but that machine is too large for his facility, so we would need to kind of come together and find a solution and a location to employ that. Or the alternative option, which I think is the ultimate end state anyways, would be to stand up our own facility.

Yeah.

Understanding the timeline.

Mm-hmm.

The red tape.

How much does the, uh, machine cost?

I didn't think about buying it from him.

Yeah. And you could buy it used. Okay. So basically how big are your dreams for this business? Large. Well, you want to get to 12, but do you want to do beyond that? Do you want this to be a big brand?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Well, if you want it to be a big brand, then owning the manufacturing for something that is novel or different is probably a good idea. The issue is obviously cash flow is that you're super constrained right now. I'm guessing. A couple things. If I were to like, one, there's probably a renegotiation of terms if I absolutely could to just increase my payment. So like, can I be net 30? Can I be net 60, et cetera? That'd be the first thing I would look at. We had a company I was looking at investing in, just taking term, like we just really hardcore negotiated, went from net zero to net 90, and then the company went from $2 million a year to $5 million a month in 18 months. Not a promise or guarantee, just saying. The second thing, okay, so one is cash flow from a terms basis. The next one is what's your influencer game?

Oh, well, right now we're heavy in the CrossFit space, very heavy. And we were able to secure his name, Austin Hatfield. He's He has a, a high, high likelihood of, uh, podium at the CrossFit Games and, uh, you know, a shot at winning. And so we contracted his head and so he's, he's our primary influencer right now. So we're kind of pumping everything into him and we got a couple more athletes like that. And then we do everything else through podcasts and, uh, on the unscripted live reads.

Got it. You don't run any ads then? It's all organic? Nope.

Yeah. We just kept hitting the inventory ceiling trying to solve for that.

And okay, so right now you have a double sitting in front of you that you think you can hit with the guy's existing capacity. Capacity.

Yeah.

How many months of that do you need in order to save up enough to buy the machine with terms and lending? Ooh.

I mean, not that, not that many. Not that many.

Yeah.

Okay. So I mean, I think that you're spelling out kind of the plan. So meet existing volume, uh, requirements. I also, it might be worth leaning into selling out because then you can just kind of pent up some demand, um, in the, in the meantime. So that's number one. You can also do pre-orders to do that.

Uh, we did before, but we just, we ended up letting go of another manufacturer just a couple weeks ago because they, there's the whole nightmare, QA dropped, everything wasn't on time. So we were technically sold out, you know, for this last month and we got the team together, rented, we just kind of flew by the seat of our pants and solved the problem. So we did the sold out play and I'm sorry, I forget if that addressed your question there, but you're good.

I was just trying to pull cash forward. Okay. So we have, we have our terms. I think you can use pre-orders as a mechanism. You have your existing volume that you think you can hit. These new volume caps that are twice as big. Cool. So that, so the 3 of those things bring you cash flow forward. Then it's where are you based out of?

San Diego and the manufacturer's in LA.

Interesting. Okay. Well, yeah, ideally you'd be central, so then you could get, you'd actually hang out. Yeah.

Our 3 PLs in Georgia, so it doesn't.

Okay. Okay. So yeah, then you can, I mean, I still just hate California stuff, but yeah, you can, then you could basically open up the facility there. I'd still hate that, but you, But you do live there, right?

Originally from Montana. So that's probably a more appetizing location. But if we—

much more appetizing.

It sounds like if we, you know, scale into this, this guy's volume, um, we're able to acquire the machine from him then, or just from whoever makes the machine, right? It, it was a proprietary, he assembled a bunch of things together, at least he said so.

Yeah.

And then grab the own fa— the, the new facility that we would own and then inject that machine to a—

yeah, it'd be interesting, like The machine is a big question mark for me. Like I would call up a couple of really good machine guys and say that this is my partner of marketing and roll in and check the machine out and be like, all right, how proprietary is this? Because we might find out it's like, you know, a $75,000 machine that has, you know, a $25,000 add-on that they're pretending is $400,000. A good friend of mine was in the machine business, murdered it. They were doing, you know, they're doing $70 million a year selling machines. The average cost they'd sell machines for was like $400 grand, cost them $17. Yeah. Wow. So like printed, destroyed. So I say this because like, again, I mean, a smart machine builder prices off of value, which is if I, you know, I replace your entire workforce that cost you $2 million for $400 grand, it's a steal. And if it just happens to cost me $20 grand to build, mm-hmm. Right. More for everybody. Right. So I would, I would really lean on that cuz there's, there's probably a big delta there because the core of your business, if it really is this proprietary thing, that machine right now is the core defensibility that you have. So knowing everything about how that thing works is everything. Because if you're, again, like we, we have to take this to the natural extreme. Let's say we hit that. Okay, then we have this machine and then we build it out. It's like, well, we're gonna need more machines. And that's the only thing differentiates us from everybody else. Then it's like, that actually is a huge point of leverage for the business. And so getting as much intel as you possibly can on that, so that you can ultimately grow. Got it.

Thank you.

Yeah, you bet. Rock and roll. I should have prefaced this earlier, but I, I try to answer the questions in a way that it, you know, obviously affects more than one person in the room, whether it's, you know, should I do this business or this business? Should I, you know, go to a different state? Should I buy the machine, you know, for, for meats? Do I need to expand the brand? How do I go, you know, how do I go about doing that? If I'm at $15 million and my margin isn't what it is and we've been going like crazy, should this be a year to prune the tree and get it really lean So that we can then set up for our next year of expansion. Like these are all everyday business problems that affect more than just the people in the back of the room. And part of the selection that we do is we try and have different questions that are representative of more people's problems than just one, rather than like 7 people in a row that are like, I think I need to grow my brand. With that being said, so we gave a talk on basically maximally converting an audience to our sales team. So this is something, uh, Vincent and I put together. One of the big reasons that I stayed at between $30 and $40 million a year for like 3 or 4 years of my career was because I didn't understand how to convert the widest percentage of an audience. And so Benson's going to go through a talk that kind of explains our thinking around this. So you can actually convert as many people as you want within your given target market. Business owners, quick question. Can I get your email address? Because I want to send you a gazillion dollars of free value in my next book, $100 Million Money Models. Okay. Who here read one of my other books? Yes. All right. Was it worth reading? Yes. Okay. So August 16th, this book comes out. It is the crowning achievement. I've been working for years on it. And on top of that, every single person who shows up live will get a product I've been working on for not one, but two years that is better than an NFT, less than a Bitcoin, and every single person who shows up will get one. All right. And it will be for sale afterwards. So this is not, this is legit. All right. So click register. The event's absolutely free. I've got five, five mystery headliners. And out of 10, what would you rate the last two books? Can I get some fingers? Hell yeah.

All right.

So you're not going to miss it. Click, register, and I'll see you there. All right, thank you guys so much. I appreciate it. Back to Benson.