The Brutally Honest Cost of Success | Ep 904
24 Oct 2025 · 43 min
In this episode the host (the founder of Acquisition.com) argues that true elite success demands an exceptional, unbalanced lifestyle and that the single most powerful lever for growth is sheer volume. He debunks the myth that high‑achievers can keep their old friends, hobbies, or sleep patterns, emphasizing that the pursuit of the top 0.01% forces you to become an outlier and reject the expectations of average people. The core strategic principle presented is the "more" framework: doing dramatically more of the same activity (content, ads, outreach, sales calls) yields the highest risk‑adjusted return, far surpassing incremental optimization. He illustrates this with multiple anecdotes – a real‑estate executive who grew a $200 M company to $1.2 B by speaking at 260 events in a year, his own gym‑lifting experiment that broke plateaus through 45‑minute interval sets, and the $105 M book launch that required 2,000+ ads and a 15‑editor team. He also introduces operational concepts such as the 20 % rule (the typical performance dip when changing a system), the ICE prioritization matrix, and the distinction between maximizers (absolute output) and optimizers (relative efficiency). Throughout, he stresses consistency, the pain of volume, and the need to make a conscious decision to live an “exceptional” life, accepting that the work itself rarely receives credit.
Chapters
Do you think that you can keep the same friends? Do you think that you can keep the same hobbies? Do you think you can stay up late and sleep in on weekends? Do you think that you don't have to sacrifice what average people care about? Do you think that they will support you when you start to pass them? Do you think anyone will think this is healthy, balanced, or logical? No. And they're right. Yeah, I went white shirt today. I was feeling a little, little wild. So as you guys are hopping on, I told you that my two kind of themes for this year are live and interactive for my media. And so I'm telling you guys right now, you guys make content, I'll tell you my cards. Like we just started. And so we're going to be doing this more. I'll tell you why, a couple of reasons, and then I'll get into the stuff I want to talk about today. I think that fundamentally we have to do stuff we like, which sounds kind of obvious. And so if you want to do a tremendous amount of volume of anything, like it's very hard to do it if you don't enjoy it. And so I have, I've kind of taken the perspective yet again. And this, I think this is like a calibration thing. Like you do stuff you like, you find a portion of it that works really well. You do a ton of that and then you kind of go off over here and then you're like, okay, I don't like this anymore. And so you kind of come back to center. And so I enjoy talking to you guys more than anything else, which is why that's kind of the center pillar of what I'm gonna be doing from media strategy going forward. As a result though, I think we'll be able to put out like a huge amount more volume because me trying to think of like, hey, you know, what's a really interesting topic that I can bring on today or riff on today is different than just like helping you guys solve your problems specifically. And so the way that today's gonna be structured is same as last week. I'm gonna do a quick kind of top of mind thing that I've been thinking a lot about, and then I'm gonna be answering questions from y'all. All right. So to do the job you love thing, Sammy, by the way, hilarious. And like everybody knows what she's saying, but there is some hilarious meme accounts on that that are just like S tier. All right. With that being said, I'm gonna do a quick YouTube intro so you guys can actually see this in like real time, how we do it. And then I'm gonna get into my little mini topic of today. All right, I have used one strategy to win repeatedly across 13 years in business and also outside of business. And it's one of the biggest reasons that we had a $105 million launch for $100 Million Money Models in 72 hours for my latest book. And I'm going to explain why it's the highest risk-adjusted return move that you can make to win more in business or just win more in life. And so if you're not sure what to do right now within your specific business, no matter what industry or size business you're in or whatever goal you're pursuing, this will help. I talk about more, better, new a lot, but I want to dive into the one that is near and dear to my heart, the one that is— that has made me the man that I am, which is more. And I want to talk about that because the fundamental question every single business owner needs to answer, and even every person pursuing any skill or endeavor needs to answer, is why can't I do more? And for most people, doing more is the answer. And it's, it's far more common than it is more. What's very sneaky about more is that you get to a point and then you say, there's no way I can do more. And at that point is where the big unlocks in volume really occur, right? And so Napoleon had this really great quote back in the day, and maybe it's misattributed to him, but he said, I'm sorry, quantity has a quality unto itself. Meaning like if you do so much volume, you do so much work, and in the military sense, if you just have so many people, at some point it almost has its, it takes on its own quality. Of the amount of work, the amount of people, the amount of volume that you're putting into something, whatever it is that you want to break through. I wanted to give you a couple cool little anecdotes to reinforce this. So some of you guys know about Charron. He was on the live with me. He's our president at ACQ. I'll tell you two stories about Charron that really drove this home. And I can tell you so many of them in my life. But one of them about Charron that really, like, I'll tell you the moment where we went from being friends to me being like, man, I really want him to be president of acquisition.com. So he was talking about how he was growing Real. And so Real is a $200 million, or was a $200 million per year business after a $200 million market cap. So they're publicly traded. And he was talking to me about the business and, and he, he had grown it from $200 million to $1.2 billion in less than 3 years. So like 30 months. All right. And I wanna put that there as a, as a moment for you guys to think about that. How, how insane that is. $200 million to $1.2 billion, less than 3 years. How does he do it? We're having dinner and he says, I just did 260 events in the last 365 days. And I was like, what do you mean? And he was like, I flew around and I did every single real estate event. I spoke on every single stage. And that's how I generated, you know, more demand for our, uh, our platform for realtors. And, and when he said that to me at dinner, I was like, this guy, he gets it. Now we've been friends for years, but seeing him so tactically involved in the business and being like, that was the thing that took a $200 million business $1.2 million, just sheer volume. Now, most people might hear that and think, well, yeah, I speak on stages one time a month. And, you know, I mean, I'm on stages all the time. It's like, no, no, you're not on stages all the time. You have no idea what being on stages all the time actually means. And so most business owners wildly underestimate the amount of volume, one, that is required, and two, that they are capable of. All right. And the thing that is required is almost always higher— or sorry, your capability is always higher than what is required. But the thing is, is that you might not know it yet. And so I've had so many times in my life that it's become my de facto operating principle. Like, I got stuck in trying to grow muscle for a really long time, and this is before I took testosterone. All right, so to be very clear, I've taken testosterone exogenously injected inside of me and gotten all the man juice. But this is before that, and I was able to put on like another 20 or 30 pounds like 7 years into lifting. And the main thing was I ended up saying, well, I wonder what would happen if I made it my job to lift all day? And I was like, well, what does that mean? So I lived at a gym obviously, 'cause I was in my, I had my own gym and I set a timer to work out every 45 minutes. So I had set up 3 exercises and every 45 minutes I'd go in the gym and I'd hit 1 set on all of them and I'd go back to work. And I was doing 9 or 10 sets every day, right? Which is a lot of sets. And I did it every day. And so what ended up happening is that like in a matter of 4 weeks, I put like 15, 16 pounds on and I was like, holy— I, and I, and it broke me through all these plateaus of size and strength that I had been stuck at for years. And so then later I was like, let me see if I can do it for 6 weeks and do it even more volume. And that's what ended up happening. Now to be clear, some people have different genetics, some people have, you know, their joints can't take it, whatever. But the point is, is that the solution set we have to think about is like, how can I do more? And the answer to that question, the thing that's stopping you is the constraint of the business. All right? And so many of you guys have heard the story of the pottery class where you have a teacher, he signs two classes. You guys, you will get graded on making the best pot. So the quality of your pot is what I'm gonna grade you on. And the other class, he said, I'm gonna grade you on the number of pots that you make. And at the end of the semester, quality team had made one pot and it was decent. And then the team that had just done sheer volume of pots, not only did they make way more pots, their pots were better. And so the thing is, is that kind of like the Napoleon quote, quality— quantity takes on a quality unto itself. Like, you get better by doing more. And so that is why there's this, this tied relationship between the two that's massively linked that people underestimate. And so I want to read you this. This is from my internal sales handbook that I have for my sales team because I want to set— like, this is the culture of acquisition.com. Like, we ask, how can we do more, right? How can we do more? Now leverage is a part of doing more inputs and outputs. Like if we can get more output with leverage, let's do it, right? So let me read this to you because I think it'll frame how we think about this. Many people say they want to be in the top 1% or 0.1% or even 0.01%, but saying that has zero bearing on whether it happens. Achievement comes from actions, not aspirations. So let's get real. To be the top 1%, you need to enter a room of 100 people and leave number 1. To be the top 0.1%, you need to enter a room of 1,000 people like a local high school and leave number one. To be the top 0.01%, you need to enter an arena of 10,000 people and leave number one. Think about it, a stadium. And in a battle to the death in that stadium, you have to come out on top. You beat everyone, not almost everyone, everyone. And so if you have the goal to be in the top 0.01%, do you think that you can live a normal life? Do you think that you can keep the same friends? Do you think that you can keep the same hobbies? Do you think you can stay up late and sleep in on weekends? Do you think that you don't have to sacrifice what average people care about? Do you think that they will support you when you start to pass them? Do you think anyone will think this is healthy, balanced, or logical? No. And they're right. But it doesn't matter. When you want to be the 0.01%, there's no greater waste of time than explaining yourself to people who actively don't support you. It's normal for people to not understand why you do what you do. I say this because you cannot make yourself exceptional and live a normal life. To make yourself exceptional, you must live an exceptional life. And an exceptional life does not always mean better. It just means that it's so different that most people will reject it and you. And when that happens, you must reject them as well. Oil and water do not mix. That is what it really means to be exceptional. You must become the exception. So I routinely get asked the secret to success, and it just comes down to this. Number 1, get better. Number 2, never stop. If you do only those 2 things, you will win on a long enough time horizon. The problem is people convince themselves they no longer want something once they see the experience of how hard it really is. So I wanna set this expectation for you as you head off to practice scripts, mark your calendar, and set your alarms. The work begins when your motivation ends. Just win. That's from our internal handbook that we have at ACQ for our sales guys, and it's one of the ways that we welcome guys on. And I wanna read that to you because I wanna frame what I'm talking about today. It seems like a very simple thing, just saying, just do more. But like, it's almost become an art form and something that I have like a deep passion about, which is very odd to say. But more actually has the highest risk-adjusted return move that you can possibly make within the business. The reason more has the highest risk-adjusted return for a business or for you is that one, it's so hard to, to get something to work, right? Many of you guys have tried anything. You have a new marketing channel, a new sales script, a new offer. You try a bunch of things and then finally something works. The likelihood that you changing that thing and that next thing working is actually statistically very low. Think about how many different things you had to try before something actually worked. And so the idea is, OK, I have these limited resources. I can allocate them to take a risk and roll the dice. Or I have this thing that I know works, and I need to jam more into that machine, which is why it's the risk— the highest risk-adjusted return move. Now, one of the other misconceptions that I think is that there's a huge preponderance of people who talk about optimization. Getting as much as you can for as little as you can. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. The difference is that there are optimizers and there are maximizers. Maximizers try to ask the question, how do I get as much as I possibly can? Optimizers ask, how much— how do I get as much as I can out of as little as I can? But when you're looking at returns, maximizers win. So what's the difference between first place, you know, gold in the Olympics, and second in the Olympics, silver, right? A tenth of a second in a race. But what is the realistic difference, the real world or pragmatic difference between being the best in the world and second best? Everything. And so when you're talking to an Olympian, you're talking to somebody who wants to be the top 1%, 0.01%, 0.0001%. Diminishing returns are still returns. It's you need to do more because you're trying to win, not be cute about saying that you had great return. And I say this as somebody who was a converted optimizer. So in the earlier part of my life, I really prided myself on doing school with as little work as possible. I was like, you nerds. I was like, you guys needed to study. I can walk in and hit a 91 with no studying. And I'll tell you the story that really, really changed my life. So there's a guy named Kemp Knott. I gave Kemp a hard time. I did when I was in high school. And he was a kid who didn't catch on to stuff as fast. And you know what? Kemp's a successful guy now. He's done great. But this thing happened. So all of high school, I kind of gave this guy a hard time. And when we went to go apply to colleges, I wanted to go to Duke. So Duke's a top 5 school in the US, and I didn't get into Duke. I ended up going to Vanderbilt, which is also obviously a great school, but I wanted to go to Duke. And guess who got into Duke? Kemp Knott. And so what was really interesting is that this whole time, like, Kemp would go to study hall, he'd be like, "Teacher, you forgot to assign his homework." Like, He was that guy, right? And I honestly just really disliked him, but mostly because it probably just reminded me of my own inadequacies, of like, I was just unwilling to do the amount of work that he was. And I shamed him for doing the amount of work that he did. I was like, you have to work so hard just to try and come close to me, right? But in the end, he got into the better college. And so it was this really humbling lesson for me that it was like, none of the colleges cared. That I worked less than him. They just cared about who had the best applications and who had the best grades. And it was this really like very eye-opening experience. And so when I went to college, I had a different frame that I was like, well, I'm not gonna lose. I wanna go here and I wanna maximize. I wanna study all the hours of the day that I'm, that I'm not in class at the gym or at the cafeteria. I'm in the library. And you can ask anyone that I ever went to school with if you ever meet them, like that's where I was. I was in the library 12 hours a day. Cause I was like, well, if I just study more than everyone, I'll get good grades. And that worked out pretty good, right? And so that's just kind of a, just a little bit of framing around why I have such a, such a strong affinity for Moore. Now I'll give you a second kind of a little bit more heady reason. So I talked about how Moore is the highest risk-adjusted return. I talked about how diminishing returns are still returns. They're still at the end of the, you're still output, right? The next piece though is that change has a fixed cost. All right. And a variable reward. All right. So let me explain what that means. So if we have this thing that's working, right? So I want you to imagine that this line right here, ooh, nice and wet. Oh, I like it. My markers, calm down guys. Okay. So I've got this line. This represents your revenue or whatever your current level of activity or output is. Okay. This is output, whatever your thing is. Okay. Now what happens is most entrepreneurs, they say, you know what? I'm gonna change something. All right. And guess what happened? Because they think they're going to change something and things are going to get better, right? You tweak something, you mess around, you change your page, change your script, change your onboarding process, whatever. Right? So then what happens? Well, if there's people involved, typically output will go down. You have to retrain the team. They have to practice. You know, this variable affected two other variables you didn't know about. And so you get— and this is completely based on my observation— you typically get about a 20% decrement or decrease in performance. Okay. And so what this has created for me is my minimum rule of 20%, which is that if something is going to give me a guaranteed 20% decrease in output by me changing it— now this is initial. What ends up happening after that is it might not work and then you stay here, or it might be worse and this goes here, or it might get better and it comes back up eventually, right? And then maybe you have a 5% higher output here, and now this is now your new baseline. It's a little bit higher than it was before. Now here's the thing. If you have a 20% guaranteed decrease and you have the potential for a 5% increase, do you take that bet? No. But I see entrepreneurs every day, myself included, for many years taking that bet over and over again. 'Cause I was like, I just have to get it better. I just have to get it better. But it was a fallacy. It's not true. Sometime, like your business will never be perfect and you have to accept that fact. It will not be perfect. You will always see things that you could And the thing is, is you don't even know if it's gonna get better. You just aren't sure if it's quote good enough. And so you just wanna change it. You wanna mess with it, right? But the magic is the compounding returns you get when you do the same thing over and over again. You get this, this depth of understanding, this depth of skill that happens with repetition, right? If, if necessity is the mother of invention, repetition is the father of skill. All right. So coming back to our 20% here, right? This is, this is cute, right? But let's look at what entrepreneurs will normally do. Maybe they'll start seeing some increase here, but what do they do next? They say, you know what, I've got this other idea I have. And so then they get another 20% decrease. And so they're constantly living significantly below their output means, or your revenue, or whatever your thing is, below what your potential is because you're constantly changing stuff. And I wanna be real with you for a second. If you're a small business owner, you've got, you know, maybe 10, maybe 20 employees, or if you're anything less than that, then like hear me right now. The amount of resources that you have to implement change are so limited. Like, they're so limited. I pick like one big thing a year that I do, like one. And what happens is when you realize how limited your resources are in order to deploy successfully a new change or a new experiment, what happens is it forces prioritization. It forces you to focus on what things, if I only had one thing that I could do this year, What one thing would I be like, this is the bet I'm going to take? Well, it certainly wouldn't be a 5% thing, right? Well, maybe if we write handwritten cards, we'll get a 5% increase in referrals. Maybe, right? But given those resources, what else could you do, right? And so when you look at the whole thing, the whole spectrum, and this is how I want to frame strategy for you around this. So most people think about business strategy. I got this from Shiran. I love this. I'm using it all the time. It's so good. Most people think about business strategy like they think about making dinner. So they go to their kitchen, they open up the fridge, they look what's inside, say, what, what, what am I gonna whip up? Right? That's how they think about business strategy. But the question that we should be asking isn't, what am I gonna whip up from what's inside the fridge? We should ask the question, what the fuck do I want to eat? And then go get the ingredients and go make it happen. And so when you, when you have, when you're saying, I'm only gonna take one bet or two bets this year, they're gonna be material. Then it forces you to be like, it's gotta be worth it. Because here's the part that no one else knows is, assume let's, this is still the same output, right? You've got your output. What happens is that if you change nothing, believe it or not, people get better at their jobs. People just keep getting better. They get more skilled. And so you'll typically have 1, 2, 3% increases that happen kind of month over month from you just not changing anything from just leaving it alone. And so this has taken me so much time because I'm a natural— I'm a yes hinge, right? I'm like, let's do it. Let's shake it up. Let's change things. Like, because the thing is, is I have this need from my business. I like earlier days, the business satisfied multiple needs and I didn't satisfy the business's needs, meaning I had cravings for novelty. I wanted to do new things. I would get bored of doing the same thing over again. And so because of that boredom, I would say, let's shake it up. But why? Because the times I've made the most money in my life have not been when I've been changing the most. It's actually when the business has been really boring and we're just blocking and tackling and doing it over and over again. And so this is something that some people never learn. Honestly, a lot of entrepreneurs never learn this. And the hard question, the hard problem to solve is not the new idea that you want to try. It's how can I do more once I've already exhausted my existing way of doing more? I'll tell you a story to illustrate this. So I went and spoke at this personal training thing. God, I don't know, 8 years ago, long time, right? So I was still successful gym launch at this time. So I was like considered an authority just within the fitness space. And so I go there and I give my whole, you know, I give my whole presentation, whatever. And so then I, you know, a girl raised her hand and asked a question. She said, hey, I currently do outbound, you know, DMing from my Instagram to get customers, but I want a more scalable method of acquisition. And I, and I kind of like looked at her. I was like, what do you mean? She's like, well, you know, outbound doesn't really scale. And I was like, In what world do you think that outbound doesn't scale? Of course it scales. Some of the biggest companies in the world do exclusively outbound. The problem that she had and encountered was how do I hire, onboard, and train another SDR or another outbound rep or another DM setter, right? And so some people get to like 5 and they're like, there's no way I can have more than that. But that becomes the complex problems that we then get to solve rather than saying I'm going to do something new. Right. And so I, I bring this up because, and I'll circle back to this 20% real quick. So for me, the minimum rule is that it's gotta be over 20% if I'm gonna get a 20% loss guaranteed, right? Of course. But I don't even know if I'm gonna get this 20% cuz we have to analyze this through, this is an investor frame, by the way. It's called, uh, it's called ICE, right? Which is impact, which is like how big, right? Confidence is how likely. And then ease is what are the resources required for us to make this thing happen right now? The perfect world is something that's gigantic impact, gigantic competence, and super easy, right? That'd be the best type of thing. And so when we have a risk-adjusted return move, we think, okay, I think this is, I think this could double the business. I have super high confidence and I think it could be easy. Then those are the types of bets we want to take. Because said differently, if you know that something could double your business, with one move, why would you do three, right? Just because you have this compulsion to be busy, to mess with your team, doesn't mean it's what the business requires. Real. And so a lot of people use the business to satisfy their own ADD, to satisfy their own need for novelty, when the business thrives on same. It's very rare that you're Kodak and you need to adjust to the digital world. It's very rare. We love to tell these stories, but what we don't tell is the guy who just said, you know what, uh, I've got 3 levels of my membership and we're doing $1 million a year. How do I 10x my traffic and get to $10 million a year? And then once I'm there, what do I need to do to get to another 10x of traffic to get to $100 million a year? We don't ask those questions, right? Because one of the fallacies or the pains of small business owners is that, uh, we— and myself included, right— we consistently think small. We don't think big enough. And so let me, let me give you an example on this, right? So let's say, and this is where people get obsessed around optimization. They get obsessed around relative returns rather than absolute returns. So let me tell you, lemme give you two examples of this. So let's say that you've got a marketing campaign where you put $100 in and you get, call it, let's say you get, you know, 10, uh, you know, $1,000 out. Okay. So this is 10 to 1. Amazing, right? Cool. But as soon as you scale to $200, let's say that you now are getting, uh, 6 to 1. So you get $1,200, which is pretty bad. You know, you, you had spent twice as much money and you only made $200 more, right? Most people would say, oh, I, I should stop doing this. The maximizer says we made more money. Net-net, we made $900 here. 1,000 minus 100. Here we made 1,000. This is still more, and this is what people miss out on. And so people think— and what happens is when you're a small business owner, you get obsessed with these relative returns. And there's a point where you do want really high relative returns. You want big, high LTV to CAC, and we can get into some of that stuff. But I want to just put a pin in this from a, from a larger thinking perspective, because I will see people stay in these optimization loops for years, right? They're like, I got to— I, you know, my opt-in page converts at 30%, right? This is my opt-in. And they'll just keep testing it, trying to get it to 35% or 40% or 45%. But the thing is, is like, you will never 10x your business by getting— this 30% will never go. It will never go to 300%. It's never going to happen. But you can 10x your inputs. You can do more. You can do more and you can send more in, and then that will for sure increase your output, even if your relative return goes down. And so if I had the choice between spending $10,000 and making $100 back, 10 to 1, or spending $1 million and getting $2 million back, 2 to 1, I would take $1 million in to get 2 back every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Why? Because it's more, it's still more, it's absolute returns, absolute output, right? And so when you're thinking about yours, and I'll bring this to business now, right? I mean, I've been talking about business, but like more to business, more tactical. We have our core 4, right? We have our 4 ways of getting customers. We've got our warm outreach, we've got our cold outreach, we've got content, and then we've got paid, right? We have paid ads. These are the only 4 things that you can do. And so the magic is answering the question of how can I go from 1 piece of content to 100 a week, right? And I'll tell you this, this, you know, I'll tell you a quote from Elon and then I'll tell you a story that I just had. So Elon, uh, he talks often about like, you know, figure out your 10-year goal and then ask yourself, what would it take to get this accomplished in 6 months? You might not accomplish it in 6 months, but you'll get there way faster than the guy who accepted it was gonna take 10 years. Right? And so I do love the frame of like, they're gonna capture your kids, they're gonna capture your wife, they're gonna capture the thing that, that you care the most about. What would you do if you actually had to get this many people to start working for you for Apprendi or get the sales team, uh, trained up or actually make 100 pieces of content when you're currently making 1 a day? What would you actually do? Like, what would you actually do? And then, and I, and it's worth answering the question, not saying I couldn't, you answer the question And you say, this is what I would do. And then this is the trick. Then you say, what kind of resources would be required to make that happen? So what would it take in terms of what would the actions be? And then secondarily, what are the resources required to make that happen? And you'll often find that it's far fewer than you expect. So I'll tell you a story. This happened literally yesterday. So guys here at one of our workshops, uh, he's doing, I think he was doing 10, $6, $6, I can't remember. I think it was $10 million a year. He was doing $10 million a year and he's got a healthcare-related business. So he's got workers that do health-related stuff, whatever. And so he's got 38 of them. He's got unlimited demand. His phone's ringing off the hook. He can't deliver. So he's supply constrained. And so I say, all right, so if you could get twice as many people on your staff, your business would double. I said, is that correct? He said, yes, that, that's correct. I said, okay, And I said, you know, what are your current channels? And he's like, I get, you know, I've got these two recruiters. They send me, you know, one good candidate a month that I end up hiring. And then I've got this like, you know, education program that I work with the colleges and I get another one person every quarter from them. So he's got 12 plus 3 that are coming in a year, roughly, or 12 plus 4. So 14-ish people. He currently had 38 to 40, right? So that's a 30% growth rate. And there's nothing wrong with that, but that growth rate's gonna diminish as the base gets bigger, right? Unless you find a new way. And so I said, "All right, how much do you make in gross profit off of a new provider?" He said, "About $100,000 a year." That's what he makes. I said, "Okay, that's what you make." I said, "What are you currently paying a recruiter to go get this?" "$5,000." I said, "Okay, could you imagine a world where you'd pay $25,000 and you'd spin up 10 recruiters and you'd say, 'I want you to give me 5 people and you have to give me a guarantee for 6 months that you replace them as many times as possible. Cause that was the big risk that he had. What if I hire somebody, they're not good, right? And I want you to also add in a guarantee that if in 6 months, uh, I don't keep 'em, you replace them at cost, right? And so I'm willing to pay you more, but I want this guarantee and I want it over this period of time. If you did that, right? And this business I think was doing around $2 million in profit a year. All right. On this $10 million. And so I said, okay, for $1 million, half of your current profit, right? $1 million, $25K. What does that get us? It gets us 40 new providers, which is the exact size of his current business. And so for $1 million, that investment, you double the business. Now partially there's incremental margin that's there, so it'd actually probably be larger than doubling the profit of the business. But here's where this gets really interesting. Let's say this business— I'll give you the math here. So $10 million top line, $2 million in profit. All right, this business probably trades at around 8x, which means right now it's a $16 million business. Okay, now when he has his $2 million of profit, he's got two options. Option one, he just pays taxes on it, and he lives in California, and so he's only going to have $1 million after taxes. Or more realistically, if you live in California, nothing. Um, I'm kidding. You'll have $17 after taxes. You will have a lawsuit and a high five. The alternative here is that he can invest it. Now let me explain how that works. So if he invests it here and he gets his 40 guys, number one, he takes his tax bill down and he cuts it in half. So now he only pays $500,000 in taxes, right? And he has $500K left off of the million that's there. But here's where it gets interesting. If he doubles the amount of providers, Next year, what does that mean to his enterprise value? He's going to be at $4 million in profit, right? And that $4 million in profit then turns into $32 million in enterprise value. And so he made an extra $16 million, 6 to 1, 16 to 1, excuse me, on the $1 million that he invested. And he did it tax-free. That's how you get super rich. That's how it works. Okay. Not a promise. Of course, your results will vary because most people do nothing. And this is not meant as an earnings claim. Of course, you are watching a YouTube livestream, so I have no idea what you're gonna do, which will probably be nothing cuz most people do nothing. Now, that being said, for each of the different ways of the core 4, the ways of the warrior, the ways of the marketer, right? We have our— I'll redraw this for everybody. We have our outbound, We've got outbound, we've got, we got paid, paid ads, and then we've got, you know, organic or content, right? We've got organic. Okay. Now, how do we do more, right? So from an ads perspective, we'll start here. More can simply mean more money. It could also mean more creative. It could mean more platforms. All of these things are versions of more. And so I will typically do this in reverse order of risk. right? And so that means that I think that if I'm gonna, if I'm gonna put this in order for paid, it'd be like, okay, well the first thing I'm gonna do is make more creative. If I have more creative, I have a higher chance of getting more winners. If I have more winners, then I'm gonna get better ROAS and I'll be able to scale to more markets, more avatars, more segments. Great. So that's the first more I'm gonna do. The second more I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say I'm gonna spend more money on ads. How can I take my $100 a day and spend it for $1,000 a day? What stops me from doing that? right? And then third, if I do step 1 and step 2 and I make way more creative and I spend more money, then at that point I say, okay, what now that I've built this machine that can create 10 times the creative volume, how do I do this within the context of Instagram? Or how do I do this in the context of TikTok? Or how do I do this in the context of X, right? Each of these platforms. So some of you guys don't know this, but for the launch, for the Money Models launch, this puppy, right? So for this guy, the reason we were able to do 105 point whatever million at the launch is because we didn't just like, we advertised so much, right? So we did, I think, 2,000+ ads before the 6 weeks out began. We had banked those 2,000 ads, 2,000, like count to 100 and then do that 20 times. And if you counted, it'd be like, wow, this is really boring. That's how long it takes to count to 2,000. We made 2,000 ads, which takes significantly longer than counting to 2,000. And so this is what people dramatically misunderstand, is the amount of work it takes to do more. Because then I could say, well, my editor— I only have 5 editors and I can't do— they can only do, you know, they can only do 5 ads a day each, and that's 25 ads a day is all we can put out. Well, if I got to 2,000 ads Do I think that I would have a higher likelihood of hitting this big goal? Yes. What would it take? So it turned out, we did the math, it took 15 editors. And so that means that we had to contract 10 more to do the editing. What does that cost? A lot less than $105 million. So we did it, right? So we figure out what would it take to get this big goal in terms of volume? And then what are the resources required to do that? And then is it worth it? And most times the answer is a resounding yes. Not a small yes, a big-ass yes. And so then we say, then what's stopping us? And the answer is almost always nothing. Just do more. Now that's how I would attack paid from a more perspective, right? From a content perspective, it's the same thing in terms of scaling editors. Now, one of the interesting things about doing more is that doing more is so painful, right? It's so much work. It's a lot of work to do more, but that pain forces another forcing function, which you don't need to try to do. It will occur on its own. Which is you will try and minimize how much work you're doing, or at least you will try and get more. If you have a fixed work, like I'm gonna do 100 calls no matter what, I'm gonna do 100 minutes of content no matter what, what do you think happens? You think, man, it'd be really nice if I got higher pickup rates. So then you start looking at your time and saying, you know, people pick up more in the afternoons for my market, or they, they pick up really hot between 5 and 7:00 AM in this particular market, whatever, assuming you, you know, follow the law, whatever. You start getting better. You start looking at the data. You start saying, like, if I'm going to do all this work, I might as well make it worth it, right? But you have to put yourself in that pain, that pain of the lack of leverage, the pain of it being inefficient. So you have this massive inefficiency that happens, but you have to keep it there because what happens otherwise is like the weak-minded, the weak of will, will do 100 for one day or two days in a row and they'll say, I didn't get the result I wanted. So it's like, duh, Of course you didn't. You didn't do nearly enough. And so the reason that your businesses may feel volatile or erratic, you're like, I don't know why sometimes we have high sales. Sometimes we have low sales. It looks like this, right? Let's walk through an example. Let's say that you do one sale on Monday of this week, and then you do one sale on Thursday of next week. And you do one sale. I'm gonna make, I'm not gonna draw on the whole thing. So let's say one sale on Friday, uh, of the, the following week. And then one sale on, you know, Tuesday, of the week after that. So you're doing 1 sale a week and they're kind of happening all over the place. So your sales look like this, right? That's what they look like. Let me give you the realest take I possibly can. There is a level of advertising that is occurring that is generating 4 sales per month for you. There's a level of letting people know about your stuff that is happening. If you wanna get to 1 sale a day, you would have to 7x that level of advertising, period. And you might even have some inefficiencies because you might not get the same out of you doing 7x, so you might have to 14x, assuming your efficiency drops. And so what? How much would it take for me to do this 14x? And is the amount that it takes me to do the 14x less than a 7x for my business? If the answer is no, then what's stopping you? Right? And so this thinking pattern is why I think people stay small. They get obsessed with the margin. They get obsessed with, with the relative returns. They get obsessed with the optimization. But sometimes you just have to do a violent, unreasonable amount of work for an extended period of time because part of volume is the consistency associated with it. We couldn't make 2,000 ads in a day. We had to make 25 or 50 ads and we had to do it every single day for hundreds of days in a row to get to the point where we could make $2,000, right? And that was before we started. We ended up what, with $3,000? $2,800. We made 2,800 ads. But we're like, man, I can't scale my ads past a certain one. You don't have enough. We spent $500,000 a day, per day, at the end of the launch, last few days. And you can only get to that level of scale with an equal amount of scale in terms of the inputs. And so this is probably my favorite volume story that I have because it was so real for me, but I'll tell you two. So one was I paid somebody who was way bigger than me at the time in terms of content and all that stuff early on in my career. And I was like, hey, what should I do to grow? And I got basically no tactics from this, but it was incredibly valuable for me, which is why I'm trying to do this for you. I can't sit down with every single person because it'd be— physically impossible, right? And so I try to do these instead as my, my best, my second best, you know, attempt to do this. And he was like, dude, he's like, you just need, he said, pull up your, pull up your LinkedIn. And I was like, okay. He said, pull up my LinkedIn. And he had made 10 posts that day and I had made one. He was like, okay, pull up Instagram, pull up your Instagram. He had made 3. I hadn't even made one that day. And then he said, pull up your YouTube, pull up my YouTube. And once we did this 2 or 3 times, I was like, I get it. I get it. I just need to do way more. He's like, yeah, dude, like way more. And so we as humans so often think I need to do twice as much, I need to do 3 times as much. We can't fathom what it would mean to do 100 times as much or 1,000 times as much. But if you want to beat every fucking human being in the arena to the battle of the death, right, wouldn't you want to leave no doubt? Wouldn't you want to make fucking sure that you were going to win? Because here's the thing, if you see someone ahead of you, a lot of people get triggered by this. They see someone ahead of them, they throw rocks at them. They're like, because it makes them feel bad at themselves. I strongly encourage you not to do that. If someone is doing better than you, they are better than you in some way. And in that you can learn of them. Real. So when someone's doing better, if you're like, I gotta beat them, you look at their volume, right? And let's say that someone's doing 3 times as volume that you can see. Right? What do you do? Do you do 3 times the volume? No, because now you're just matching them. You need to do 10 or 20 or 30 times the volume, because not only that, they're doing volume that you can't see. You're just, you're just judging on the volume you can see. And so if you want to leave no doubt, it's like, not only if I did the same amount of work as that guy, I'm always behind, so I got to do more work to catch up. But that's just based on what I can see. I might have to do more, more to make sure that I accommodate for the things that I can't see. I said, I would, I would, I would tell you my, I'll tell you another Sharon story. This is 2 years ago, I think maybe 3 years ago. Geez. It might've been 3 years ago. He's, at the time he was, he was making content and he was like, it's not really popping. Like, can you help me out with it? And I actually had a repeated story, the same. I literally had the flip reverse conversation with him where I was like, well, how many times you post in a day on Instagram? And he was like, one. I was like, how many times are you posting a day on TikTok? How many times you post in a day? And by the time I got to this, literally just the, the third one, He was like, I get it. I get it. He just stopped me. He was like, I get it. I need to do more. And remember, this is the guy who got on 200+ stages. This guy understands volume. And so to, to, to land the plane here, we were having dinner. He told me about the 200, you know, the 200+ stages, 260 stages or whatever that he was on that year. Right. And after he said that, he just looked at me. He was like, no one gets it. He's like, no one gets it. Everyone thinks that I've got some magic trick, that I've got the most, the highest converting presentation, that I'm some amazing guy on stage. And it has nothing to do with that. He's like, no one understands the volume. No one gets it because it's not doubles, it's not triples, it's not 5X, it's not 10X, it's 100X the volume. And so that is my word du jour. I'll close on, I'll give you a second close. We're closing twice. All right. Consistency is the rarest of traits. And I think the reason it is so rare is because you cannot observe it without at least having some level of consistency. Think about that for a second. How can you observe consistency? You, it's very hard to do, right? You can't see somebody coming, like you have to be at the gym every day to see someone at the gym every day, which is why like when people come to acquisition.com, all of a sudden they get this gigantic boost in their skill set, their productivity, their output, because they're around everyone. Like, when you show up at acquisition.com at 5:30 in the morning, the parking lot's full. Like, we're here to win, not play. We want to win. And so I think I would ask yourself the question: if there— if I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I could do 100 times more than I'm currently doing, I would hit the goals that I have, then I would then ask the question, great, what resources are required And then following up to that, is it worth it? And if the answer is yes, what's stopping you? I'm just so passionate about more. And you can't even do like more for one day is not enough. Like we had to be consistent with the amount of ads we were making for a very long time to get the volume. So you can make 5 posts on all the platforms in one day, but you gotta wake up tomorrow and you're at zero again. right? One of the things that I think is so magical and so amazing about like sales teams is you have a week and everyone's trying to, to, to up the tally and win the week. But what happens on Sunday morning? Back at zero, baby. Back at zero. You have to be consistent. You wanna win the quarter, you gotta bring it every day, right? I don't pretend to know what, what it is that separates people, you know, from the people who can and for the people who can't. But I would say that one of the biggest ones is like, it's a decision. It's a decision. You decide that you wanna go pro, you decide you wanna make this, you wanna, you wanna be legit. And the thing is, is that you have to do it for you because no one will see the amount of work. No. Like if you want credit for the work, you've already lost. You can get credit for the outcome, but you will never get credit for the work. Like you have to accept that real. You have to accept that you will never get credit for the work. If anything, you will get, you will get criticized for the work. The people around you say you work too much. They'll try and pull you away from the work. But the work needs doing.