The NO BS Way To Build $1,000,000 Business (on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu Pt 2) | Ep 833

Hey guys, welcome back to the game. This is part 2 of the Impact Theory guest spot with Tom Bilyeu. We go deep on a ton of topics. Um, it's me, so it's going to be business related. Uh, Tom talks about a lot of stuff, but, uh, for in terms of this podcast, it's, it's mostly business. Um, and so I think, uh, you'll enjoy the exchange. I don't get to go this deep on stuff often. And so it was, uh, enjoyable. If you liked the first one, you'll like the second one. Enjoy.

Yeah, no, the willingness to try things I think is incredibly important. You said earlier about courage. I want to go back to that. So what is, what is the most courageous thing you've done?

I actually think it's quitting my job. I think that's the hardest thing.

Back in the early days.

Yeah, I, because I actually weirdly, I think about this a lot. Um, like what are the hardest things that I've done? Uh, hard thing number one was quitting my job. It's the decision of quitting my job. And then leaving Baltimore because I— to give everybody an idea, like, you see me now, but I was so afraid of my father's judgment and the few people that I knew from back home that I was going to, like, quit my white-collar job to go, to go start a gym and be a personal trainer that I actually drove across the country and called them when I was already there. Because I basically left in the dark of night. Like, no one knew. I basically was a stowaway to my own fear. And so I had to just— I just had to— I just drove there. And I called my dad, I think, when I was going through Texas. And Texas is like forever when you're driving across it.

Yes, it is.

And I called him. I was like, hey, I'm going to— I'm going to do the gym thing. And he was like, yeah, no worries. He's like, just, you know, come over, we'll talk about it at lunch. Because he would always talk me off the ledge. He'd be like, hey, You've got the— you did Vanderbilt, you did in 3 years, you got the good consulting job. He's like, you aced the GMAT. He's like, you're going to go to Harvard. You're going to get your MBA there or Stanford. You'll pick one of them. He's like, and you're set. Like, you're good. Just, just follow the plan. And I was like, I don't— I don't want to do that. And when I was like, I'm already gone, then like the flip, you know, then the thing that I was most afraid of was that he would freak out, which is exactly what he did. And the thing is, is that a lot of people would expect the story to be like, oh, my dad understood. And he was super supportive, but he wasn't. We didn't talk for a few years after that because I was the prodigal son and I did everything to his plan and I was living the most successful version of his life, not mine. And it was one of those realizations. You're like, I'm winning at a game that I didn't design.

Yeah.

And so I'm actually by default a loser. And so me quitting my job to then pursue fitness was the hardest thing I've done. The second hardest thing I've done was actually getting my gym to work because I didn't— I had so little understanding of how anything worked. I had $50,000 saved up when I was 23 from the consulting job. I lived on basically nothing and almost banked all my pay and I basically bet it all on the gym. I had $5,000 left after paying for all the equipment and everything else, and I had $5,000 a month in rent and I had never sold anything to anyone. And so the idea of making $5,000, having never really sold anything to anyone in a local business, which I'd never had in a, in California, which I was from Baltimore, I knew no one. So it wasn't like I could just get on my immediate friend group to come and at least pay the rent. I had no one. And so I think when I was like sleeping on the actual floor of the gym, cause I couldn't afford two rents, um, was when it like really hit me that no one was coming to save me. And like, if I failed, I would have to go back and tell my dad he was right. And that felt like worse than death for me. And so that was incredibly hard. Um, I remember that I was, I have, I have a pretty decent work ethic. Um, but at that time I was, my first session would start at 4:30, so I'd wake up at 4:00 and then my, my last morning session ended at 10:00. And then I would do the marketing sales meetings. I would clean the gym. I would set up the next thing. I would do the, I'd get the workouts, I would get the music prepped. And then my 4:00 would start showing up, and then 4 until 7:30 or so, people were at the gym. And then after that, I would run the billing and make sure the contracts are right, and then reset up for the morning and do it all over again. But I had zero employees, and so I didn't know— I didn't know you could hire employees. It was only when a member of mine who was an entrepreneur came up to me, and I'd been short with the class that morning, um, and she was like, you can't treat people like that. And I was like, what do you— but I knew that if she was saying it, like, I was really off, off base. And I think I was sleeping right around 4-ish hours a night, and people say that But I did it for, I want to say, I want to say like close to 6 months.

Oh God.

I was like delirious. I'd fall asleep on the like leaning on things. Oh, for sure. Yeah, I was very, very tired. And I used to tell people that it was the kind of, kind of tired that a good night's sleep couldn't fix.

Yeah.

Like I needed a lot of time, but that was probably the second hardest thing that I did. And a lot of it was just because I made up for a tremendous lack of knowledge. With just, I just have to make rent and then everything else is mine. So I didn't have any understanding of like, I just, I spent money on nothing. My first gym had sandbags that I wrapped in duct tape as the equipment that I started with. Oh yeah, it was crazy. Um, and when I opened the gym, I was selling people into a gym that had no equipment because I thought that you should open as fast as possible to start making money. Now, if I know now, I would have said I would have 3 months of pre-sales, only collect money and have no, have no classes. That's what I would have done. But I didn't know any better. And so I was trying to get open as fast as I could, then meant that 8 hours a day at baseline is me with a microphone in front of customers training, doing all of that before I could work on the business. And so like it was very real 16, 18 hours a day. And I think setting that standard for people who are new is useful because when you start, you don't have enough money to pay other people. And so you either have to raise money, which you can do, I wouldn't recommend, especially if it's your first shot. Or you have to work 3 jobs and, and basically throw out all of the opinions of everyone who has no idea how business works, because the only people you probably know when you're starting out don't have businesses. And so they will tell you all these things you should be doing and you should take more time off and you should have more balance and this isn't healthy. And they will tell you all these things, but they are not where you want to be. So don't listen to what they say. Completely ignore them. And instead, like, I like this little ism, but it's listen to the opinions of people. Don't listen to the opinions of people who are closest to you. Listen to the opinions of the people who are closest to your goals. And a great approximation of that is, if I had known that when I was doing the decision to quit, then I would have known that this is where I want to go eventually. I want to start a business. And if it's hard for me now, it's never going to get easier. As I have more responsibilities, kids, wife, whatever, that's only gonna get harder. And the people that I looked up to the most were the most aspiring entrepreneurs, and they would've said, go for it. But everybody I knew was saying, don't go for it. Don't throw away what you have. But I think sometimes you have to trade good for great. And there's always gonna be a J-curve. There's gonna be a dip where instead of being immediately rewarded for the decision, you're immediately punished, and you think that you're making the wrong move because of what immediately happens after, which is how humans learn, which is why it's so tough. Um, but it's like the first week of the gym. Just because you haven't seen results doesn't mean you're doing the wrong stuff. You're probably measuring on the wrong time horizon. And so, um, quitting the job, starting the gym was the second hardest thing that I've, that I've done. Um, I would say that the, the third hardest that I've worked has been now, the season that I'm in right now. This is probably close to the hardest I've worked. Um, but it's different. There is nothing urgent, everything's important. And I am taking fewer days off than I ever have and basically working at all hours that I can physically. And so the times that I'm not working is active rest so that I can increase my total output over a longer period of time. And it was a long-winded answer, but those are the two things that I feel like those were hard, hard calls for me to make. And those were real struggles for me. But those, those were the times when I feel like it, it was— I'm very proud of who I was then to do it.

Now, I heard you talk recently about you can feel a shift in culture, people moving away from the soft stuff, getting a little bit harder.

Yeah.

What do you think is going on in culture?

Oh, I think the pendulum has swung back and I'm so excited. I do think that it's going to swing back too hard, that people are going to go way too hard into like other direction and all that stuff. Oh, hustle porn. Oh, that— I, I don't mind about hustle porn.

So what do you mean?

No, I meant societally, like from the political realm and stuff. I think that the pendulum definitely reached its pinnacle on the other side and then is gonna swing back. And there's gonna be— and the thing is, is that when the way pendulums work is that we have— we start swinging back and everyone agrees it's— or not everyone, but more people than not agree that the— it's better coming back to the middle. And then it's better, and then it's better, and then all of a sudden— but hey, more of that was good. But then at some point it stops being better, right? And so— and this is— I think cycles is why humanity lives in cycles. And so I think it's likely that we will overcorrect, but it might take 10 years for that to happen. So I think right now we're going in the right direction, um, which is, uh, basically pushing away from the political correctness and leaning more into reality, uh, which I am— I am a hard staunch proponent of reality.

You and I both. Now you've said that you want to normalize guys, young men, working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.

Yeah. Why? Because I think that's what's required. To get where you want to go on the timeline that they want.

Why men? Why not men and women?

I have an 88% male audience or something like that. And so I feel like it's my place to speak to them. There are obviously women who follow my stuff, and if that's you, then you can assume that when I say men, I mean men and women. But I think that if a message is going to hit people, if I say men, I will have a stronger reaction and a higher likelihood that it changes someone's behavior than if I said people or men and women. And so if I, if I look at my effect size of my message, if 88% of the people who hear my message are men, then I'd rather make it as potent as possible. That's why I do it that way.

Makes sense. Uh, so what should young men be doing? Like, what they're— if they're working their ass off 12 hours a day, how do they make use of that 12 hours?

I think being really clear on trade-offs. So I, and I think you, I think I'm speaking for you here, um, I gave up my 20s.

Uh, I would say I sold my—

yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, I, yeah, I sold my 20s. I'll say that. Well, I actually ended up losing everything, um, and so I did have to start over at zero again.

But hey, with way more knowledge.

Yes, all day long. So I traded my 20s. How about that? So, and that, and that perfectly mixes with the trade-offs, is that You can have the nights out, the fantasy football league, the rec dodgeball team that you want to go to, beers on Tuesdays. You can do that. You just can't also build your dream unless that is your dream. And I think that's the big part is like entrepreneurship isn't for everyone. And I, as much as I, I talk about entrepreneurship a lot, I think there are plenty of people who don't want that, in which case, great. Like, you've already won, congratulations, right? It's simply the complaining about reality that's my problem. And so, uh, I think that most young men could accomplish all of their goals if they extended how long they would be willing to give themselves to accomplish it. Now, not to anti-Peter Thiel here, because I'm a huge Thiel fan as well, but I think that when you are a novice, you have no approximation of reality. And so one of the difficult parts with how we observe success. A lot of it's social media driven. And this is the easy— this is the best analogy I have. If you were to look at an Olympic marathon, look at where the people in the stands are situated. They're situated at the beginning of the race and they're situated at the end of the race. But watching someone start a race and watching someone finish a race has almost nothing to do with running a marathon. And so that is the closest approximation that people think. That's why everyone's really excited to start a business and they're really excited to sell a business. But everything in between, the mundane middle, as I like to call it, they're just, okay, if I, if I'm 4 miles in, it's this times 6. Okay, I'm 5 miles in, it's this times 5 plus 1. Like, you just keep playing these mental games with yourself to learn to endure. And I think that, that endurance is— if I had to pick one trait for a young man to have, it would be resilience. And I define resilience as the amount of time after an aversive experience that you return to baseline function. And so if you have a series of behaviors that you do under certain conditions and then something bad happens, how quickly you return back to the original behavior set. And so in doing that, like, if someone can not give up and learn, then on a long enough time horizon, you guarantee victory. Like, if you only had those things, you don't stop and you get better. That's it. And I think that if those are the two hypothetical extremes, that's what I would want young men to have. And if you know that, then I know for me, because I've been asked before, like, did you always know you're going to be successful? And I don't really like the question because I only knew, and I, and I, I, to my core, believe this. I knew I would never stop, and that was the only thing I could commit to. I just knew I would never stop, and I knew that I wouldn't go home to Baltimore if the gym failed for whatever reason. And so my plan B, and this is, this is super tactical for anybody, is that I think you should look at your plan B in excruciating detail. Now Arnold has this whole thing of don't have a plan B, make plan A work, and I understand both both sides of this. But me knowing my Plan B allowed me to pursue Plan A. It allowed me to take the jump. But I think the day that I decided to live for me was the day that I, I allowed my father's dream to die. And so I think that you either live out your own dream or you live someone else's, and one of them has to die for the other to live. Wow.

Yeah, that's heavy. It's interesting. I never, uh, love my parents, but I never felt in any way, shape, or form beholden to what they wanted for me. Now, I will say, though, sort of a bizarre similarity. I was trying to write. I wanted to break into the film industry and I thought, okay, I need a screenplay. That's going to be my calling card because this is all before YouTube. And my mom once calls me in the middle of the day and I'm sleeping and she's like, why are you asleep in the middle of the day? And I'm like, I got a new job. Doing what? Driving. Driving what? "Driving models." Driving models, that's escorts. And I was like, "Oh God." And so my mom was like, "You have to call them right now and like turn this down. There's no way." And so that is the one time where I let my mother's superior judgment, I think in this case, but yeah, so that I could write, I took a job driving lingerie models to their appointments.

Someone has to.

Someone has to. And the funny thing is in the interview, they're like, First of all, the guy, he's sitting there playing guitar while interviewing me and he goes, I have to ask, why are you interviewing for this job? And I was like, I need something that'll let me write during the day.

Yeah.

He's like, okay, well here's how it's gonna work. The girl's gonna have a pager. You're gonna have a pager. If they page you, you know, whatever, 7, they're like, you go in there with a gun, you kick the door down. And you, and I was like, oh God, oh God. But I actually took the job. I can't believe I did.

Yeah.

Very stupid. I'm very grateful to my mom for ensuring that that did not happen. But I was actually going to go on a job where they're like, you kick that fucking door down, you get in if she sends you a 7 or whatever the number was. And I was like, okay, cool. If that's what it takes to write, man, then we'll go for it. But thankfully not.

I think it's worth, um, for those of you who are young men or young women, there you go, who are listening, um, I think planning out what B looks like and not being ashamed of it. Because the thing is, is people will judge you based on the career path that you're making. But you're not making that as your career path. You're making that as the launchpad for what you really want to do. And I think that if you can, if you can reconcile that reality, which is that you will have like for me it was super tough because everybody at Vanderbilt was that all the guys I knew were pretty successful. And so a lot of people were like, oh, back home now, high school friends sure are different. But like my college friends, I went to a good school. Like almost all of them are investment bankers, management consultants, private equity. Like they all make good money, you know, they're like heading some software thing. Like they all are successful. And so when I went to do this personal training gym thing, it was like, oh, Hermoso gave up. Like, he's out of the race, you know, he's not, he's not playing the game anymore. And I would have these almost like these fan— these shame fantasies of what they were saying about me while I was sleeping on the gym floor, not being successful, having literally kids above my roof because it was— I was in a garage. So kids would like party at night while I was trying to sleep. Really tough. But like literally in front of me demonstrating the life that I could be having while I actively was on the floor. But they weren't thinking about me to begin with, and nor do they really care. And they're going to all die eventually. And so if, if they were to die before me, then their opinions wouldn't matter. And if I'm going to eventually die, then what happened to me won't matter either. And so then it's like, wow, I'm going to change my entire present existence to satisfy the fictitious idea of what other people are saying behind my back when they aren't thinking about me. That seems silly, but it's hard, but people don't do it. And so I'm saying don't be ashamed of the, the lingerie job or the Uber or whatever it is that you're doing as long as you're using it to build towards the thing. Now, if you're, if you're, you know, you're, you're driving Uber all day long and you're making $70,000 a year and then you spend 100% of it, then what are you doing? You're using all your time up and using all your money. Like you have to be banking something. Either be banking time so you can work or be banking money so that you can invest in something. When I say invest, I mean invest in skills, invest in opportunity, not trying to, you know, play the crypto market or become a day trader because you will lose.

Yes, you will. Speaking of things that people may lose at and that might be giving them existential dread, what do you think about AI for entrepreneurs?

Oh, it's a great question. I, I'm not worried about it at all from a what will it change about what I do. So I have seen, I basically see the history of humanity as humans, then humans plus tools, and then tools beat all humans. And so AI for now is a tool just like the internet, just like computers, and we will use the tools. So I as an entrepreneur will use all the tools available to win. And so AI will come online and we'll do that stuff until AI can do everything better than everyone. And at that point, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. And so again, me dreading that changes nothing about what I do today. And so what I will do today is what I've always done, which is do the best I can with the resources at my fingertips, what's available to me. And so I absolutely, across our portfolio companies, are pushing how do we incorporate AI into this? How do we put it into a streamlined process? How can we incorporate in sales and marketing, whatever? And we will continue to do that until and AI is starting and running businesses without us. And at that point we'll try and do that. And if, if AIs are— AIs own AI businesses and they're just outcompeting humans at everything, then the world is different and I have no ability to predict that. And so I'll just keep playing the game until I can't play anymore.

What's the most jaw-dropping use of AI that you guys are doing in a portfolio company?

Uh, we're getting really close to being able to have, uh, it take calls. Whoa.

Yeah, specifically inbound, I assume.

Uh, no, outbound works too. Whoa. Yeah.

Sales?

Uh, setting. I think it will get sales.

Wow.

Yeah, I think end of next year it'll be able to do sales.

Whoa.

But like setting, I think we're, we're basically like 3 months off. Um, so main thing, the only issue right now is lag. So the actual responses are, are perfect. They're on script. They all reasoned. All that stuff works. The only issue is the lag time between someone saying something in the response, or if someone says something, the person starts, the AI starts responding and then they say something else, it can kind of like jumpstart it. And so the next big iteration that's going to happen is voice to voice. So right now what happens is, you know, prospect says something, it goes to a satellite, which then goes down to a database, which then transcribes it. AI takes that as a text prompt, responds in a text prompt, beams it up, translates it to voice, and then beams it up to the satellite to then say to the other side. That takes like a second and a half. As soon as it's voice to voice, it eliminates like 3 steps. And so it'll probably be like a half second. And at that point, that's just human latency. And so, um, that's close. Like, that's— I think that's 3, 3 months off, 4 months off. Like, that's, that's, that'll be end of Q1 next year.

Wow. Now, are you guys doing any of the training, or are these companies that are building these models?

These are tools that we— I'm not an AI company. And so it's like we were talking earlier about the platform of like, are we a, you know, are we a dev company? Um, acquisition.com as a holding company is not. Is not an AI company. We want to utilize the tools that are available to us. And most of the AI companies that we've, like, you know, started vendor relationships with, etc., there's usually a training period that you want to train your specific, you know, model, agent, whatever. And so we've begun that process.

Yeah, that's where I want to get my hands in the mix. I want to do the reinforcement learning so that it will do the things we want to do. But yeah, I don't want to have to build the AI out itself. AI is the one that, man, this really gets me excited when I think about how much it's already sped us up. And we're, you know, what are we, just under 2 years from when it launched? It's absolute insanity how far it's already come. If you could push a button and get it to work in one area of your company, that would just have a huge impact. Where would you want it?

It's tough. I'll give you 3.

I'll take them.

Um, so I mean, marketing, sales. So, uh, marketing is like, how can we get the content stuff to be like truly top 1%. The thing that's tough is that whatever, whatever— the thing that I hate and like about it is that whatever skill AI can do for you, it can do for everyone.

Yep.

And so it has a massive equalization. So like the ability to execute is going to be not nearly as much of a competitive advantage, which I'll just say transparently, I'm bummed about because I'm pretty good at it. I get it. But I'd say marketing and sales, both of those. And then the one that, that people might not expect is, is decision-making. Like if, if it can get better at prediction than me for outsized returns, then of the three, that would be the highest return thing that we could do. And so I think that again, but if it can do that for me, it can do it for everyone. And so that's where that's again, this is where I struggle with it. So I just think of like, what can I do today? And then I, I don't spend any time on what might happen in the future with it because when it changes, I'll be there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, that's, I think, the right way to think about it with that kind of stuff. The nice thing now is AI doesn't have taste. And so what I have found is that because the output of the prompt matters so much in terms of what I give it, that that still feels like it matters a lot. To your point about you have infinite or limited resources against infinite possibilities, the same is true with AI. So you can have it go 1,000 different directions, 10,000, million, whatever. And that matters. So understanding the end target person that you're creating this piece for, but it taking all of the manual work off of my plate so that now I can iterate faster. So I just have to think about, okay, I need to understand my customer. I need to understand what it is that I'm trying to communicate, the angle that I want to do it, knowing which piece to say yes to, which to say no to, where to push it, and then to be able to edit it. It, it is— it's taken so much time off of so many of my different workflows.

That's cool.

It's really incredible. And for us, because game development is such a big part of what we do, if it can do 3D characters— yeah, oh my God, that all of the cost is in the creation and the, um, rigging of the 3D characters.

How far is that away now?

I'm gonna guess— so I just saw very compelling 2D to 3D stuff. It's static, so you can't rig it yet. So I'm gonna guess 2D to 3D over the next year is going to be extraordinarily compelling. Give it another 18 months, so 18 months to 24 months, and I think that the financial structure of a gaming company changes overnight.

Yeah, yeah, it's pretty crazy.

So you were saying that you're bummed about it, uh, replacing certain aspects of marketing because you're really good at it. What is the thing Because we can all look at you and go, yeah, you're— there's something here that you were unusually good at. What is that thing?

I think it's rhetoric.

Say more.

Um, how you structure statements to make them more interesting or compelling, uh, for an audience.

So you're doing it intuitively, or do you have a method?

Um, the single greatest training grounds for this is Twitter, or X. I, I started tweeting, uh, I can't remember. You could probably look at my profile, probably 3-ish years ago. Um, and I think Twitter is one of the best writing tools that exists because it gives you real-time feedback immediately for how good the quality of your writing and thinking is. And so there are basically sentence structures that resonate better with people. And so that would be like having 3 things in a row where you have, uh, they all start with the same letter. If you have basically like a reverse sentence, like it's not about listening to people who are closest to you, it's about listening to people who are closest to your goals. And so it's like there's repetition there and you change one variable. You know, if you can't do it in a decade or if you wouldn't do it for a decade, don't do it for a day. So there's alliteration. And so there's, and I would say some of this has been probably subconsciously intuitive because I've tweeted probably 6,000 times over the last, you know, 3 years. And so I've had a lot reinforcement loops. And it's— and this is where like AI will do better than I will eventually. But like right now I can look at— I want to record this because there was this time where Layla and I were driving and she wanted to like tweet while I was driving. And so she would read me what she wanted to say and then I would tweet it back to her. And they ended up like, they just banged it. And you kind of get in the flow. I was like driving on the road. I could just like kind of like zone out and think about it. And like that, that's something that I'm— I've gotten significantly better at over the years and making more content. So it's like I have verbal practice and feedback loops which are more delayed, so I don't think it's as strong as the Twitter feedback loop. And that's probably been— I think that's, that's the— from, from a, from a copy and content perspective, that's where I think, um, I've put more emphasis.

I love it.

Because this is really interesting for persuasion, is that if you make the statement more memorable people have a higher likelihood of remembering it. If people have a higher likelihood of remembering it, then they will think it was their idea. If they think it was their idea, they're more likely to do it. And so the best persuasion is one where someone doesn't feel persuaded, they just think it's their own idea, and then they do it. And so if you make things memorable in a very real way, you will influence and change more people's behavior. And so if you look at the best orators of our, of our time, the last 100 years, they were very skilled, uh, rhetoric— rhetoricians or whatever, whatever. Yeah. Um, and, and, and they use specific sentence structures that people tend to like. And same, it's like probably chords in music. I think it's the same thing happens, uh, with words.

That's interesting. All right, what's some of the worst business advice you see people give out all the time?

Do a bunch of things and see which one works.

Why is that terrible?

God, so many reasons. Um, well, first off, trying to do many things at once, you already have such limited resources. The easiest analogy I can think of is imagine you've got, you know, 1 cup of water and you need to, uh, overflow, uh, another cup to get it to be an effective dose, right? Enough volume for you to see an outcome. The visual I can give is, okay, let's line up 7 shot glasses because millionaires have 7 streams of income, apparently. And so now we're gonna pour that, that water into all of those glasses and then hope that it somehow overflows. Mm-hmm. But it's not going to. And so what ends up happening is you just have insufficient volume of action on 7 things and then you accomplish none. And the fallacy is thinking that you'll see which one will work, which assumes that the environment, the circumstance is going to be the thing that makes it work rather than you. And so better stated is that you can make any of them work, but none None of them will work unless you focus on one of them. That's all rhetoric, right? That's the idea. And so I think that is a very insidious piece of advice. I think that you can try many things if you want. If you are gonna do that, do it in sequence, do one at a time. But I say that knowing that if you actually try hard at the first one, you'll probably make that work. So try the first one that you think is the best one first, in which case, why do you even have 6 through, you know, 6 through 2 or 7 through 2? And so that— and I think there's this big idea. This is one that I remember talking to a portfolio company about. He was like, I'm not really sure if I'm passionate about this anymore, like about like this, this, this product or the company, whatever. And so he was like, I think I want to consider starting something else. And I said, what do you think the natural extreme of this looks like at the top? Because in my opinion, all businesses at the top look the same. Which is you're going to have a head of marketing, you're going to have a head of IT, you're going to have a sales head, a head of product, head of customer success, whatever. And so if you win and you win all the way, it looks the same. And so where, where your entrance point to the maze is doesn't really matter if that's what the hypothetical extreme is. And so I have this story about a friend of mine who started a cookie store actually here in California. So he started this cookie and he was in fitness, right? So it was kind of hilarious. Like, he's a really fit guy. Starts a cookie store. And I remember I asked him, I was like, are you passionate about cookies? And he was like, no. And I was like, huh, weird. He's like, well, I looked at the market, there's, there's a lot of people. And this is before Cookie— before Crumble. So he had a, he had a good inclination that like high-end cookies were going to be a thing. So he, he did his, he did his homework. But what he was passionate about was being excellent, and he did amazingly well. And so I think that you can be passionate about ideals and translate that to anything. And so I had a conversation with Ben Francis from Gymshark this year, probably the most— the best— the best day that I had from a business owner perspective was hanging out with him. Just had a really good conversation. And there's not a ton of people that you can talk to about like revenue levels and problems that come at that. And we had a great discussion. And what was interesting is like, I can't believe that you're doing all these different things. Because he saw each of the portfolio companies as a different thing. He's like, I can't imagine doing anything besides Gymshark. This is all I want to do. And I thought about it for a second. I was like, acquisition.com is the only thing that I'm doing, right? These are just like fundamentally like you have different types of clothing. How— I can't believe you have all these different types of clothing, all these different types of apparel. So it's really chunking up and chunking down. And so if anyone hears that and thinks, well, wait a second, I thought you told me that I should focus on one thing. How are you doing all of these different things? Is there's a very big misconception when you are starting out that CEO and owner are the same thing, and they are not. And that's because in the beginning they are the same because you're the only guy. But if you look at, you know, Berkshire Hathaway, for example, uh, Warren Buffett is not CEO of Coca-Cola, he's not CEO of GEICO. He has operators who are in charge of each of those companies. Now, those guys couldn't run 3 companies. They can only run the one they're and he can only run Berkshire Hathaway. And so it's really chunking up or chunking down a level to understand how do you do— how do you have multiple things? Because you can always go down and say, okay, well, if you have an agency, then you have 10 clients. How can you have 10 clients? You should only have one. Well, it doesn't— the logic doesn't carry. But it's really just that one person has limited resources. And so by limiting the scope of the problems that we have to solve, we get more leverage, as in we get more for what we put in, in my opinion. And so So that was how I reconcile those two kind of styles of doing business is that I'm not CEO of any of them and I'm not even really CEO of Acquisition.com, if at all. And so that's been, that was how I made sense of that because that's the only one thing that I think about.

All right, so what is the difference between what life is like when you're running a million-dollar company versus a $100 million company?

I was gonna give the obvious answer, which was scale. Um, that's like the first—

what's the knock-on?

Yeah. Um, so we have only one theory of how we grow everything, and so that's kind of been our unifying principle, which is the theory of constraints. So a system will grow until it is constrained, and it will grow no further. And until you relieve the constraint, whatever the bottleneck is, it will stay there. And so the difference between, uh, a million-dollar business and a $100 million business is typically, if you're a million-dollar business, you're still you're doing a lot of everything still. At $100 million, you're predominantly making decisions and SWAT teaming in on high-leverage problems that need to get solved. So kind of like the Elon, like we jump in and Laila and I both kind of champion this methodology of close CEOing, which is rather than having somebody who's kind of like running the basically driving, so driving objectives on a regular basis, we see as like traditional operations and management versus kind of like CEO as saying, okay, the single most important thing that we need to solve right now is this product ascension piece, or we need to solve this sales constraint, or we need to solve this CS issue, whatever it is. And then basically CEO goes in, is now on every huddle for, for that, because the operators who are running each of the divisions or functions are continuing to drive the ball forward. And so The TL;DR is in the very beginning you're doing everything. At the end, you're doing one thing very well, and your understanding of talent will dramatically shift over that time period. And so right now you can't imagine having anyone else do anything because everyone who works for you probably isn't that good. Um, and that's because you don't know how to recognize talent and/or you can't compensate them well enough. And unless you're giving away big chunks of equity to people, which is a strategy, there's nothing wrong with that, but either you're building a dream team or you're, or you're bootstrapping it. If you're bootstrapping it, you're going to be doing a hell of a lot of work. If you build the dream team, then you're going to have to give slices of the pie away. Again, cool either way. Expecting a different outcome from a different decision is where the problem comes in. And so that's kind of obviously like at a very high level, you're doing a lot of stuff with no help to you're doing a few things with tons of help so that all of the normal day-to-day activities continue and you're just thinking, what's the highest leverage move we can make?

How do you recognize talent?

Um, so this is probably— so if I had to say like the 3 things that have changed in terms of me as an entrepreneur for the year, um, or like last 2 years, like big, big moves, one is my understanding of brand. So probably 4. So understanding a brand has deepened, my understanding of focus has deepened, my understanding of talent has deepened. So it's not like, oh, I learned about talent, it's just my understanding of it has grown more nuanced and the arbitrage that exists between B and A+. And so I still think that one of the greatest returns that you can make as an entrepreneur is paying someone who's exceptional exceptionally well. And Steve Jobs gives this— I'm not going to claim credit for it— but he says if you look at the best cab driver in New York compared to the worst cab driver, it's probably a 3x difference between— and that's the best and the worst. But the best marketer and the worst marketer, it's not a 3x, it's probably 100x difference. Same thing for the best engineer. And now that's the best and worst. What about good and best or good and top 0.1%? Well, the difference between those guys is probably still like 25x. It's huge, huge, highly leveraged. And so the arbitrage is that you don't typically have to pay the best guy 25 times more than the good guy. You can just pay him 3 times more. More. And then the— all the increase in throughput goes to the company. And that has been my shift and moving away from— so basically headhunting happens in levels, right? In the beginning, you start running ads to get— first you talk to friends and family, right? And then you start running like Indeed ads and Craigslist ads to get people. And maybe you post in communities you own, or you make public posts, whatever. That's how you get your next level of talent. And then from there, you start networking. Maybe you hire headhunters and recruiters to help you out. Maybe you get an internal resource who starts doing outbound, looking for specific types of candidates. And this also follows with the functions of the organization. If you're finding a low-level role, you can still do the lower-leverage ways. The higher the role, the more individualized the approach, just like a whale would be if you're trying to go after a big client, a high-value client. Like, okay, I wanna sign Amazon for my warehouse services. Like, okay, we're gonna have a really tailored approach. You're not gonna run an ad to get Amazon. You're going to have to know somebody, you're going to have to work your way in. It's going to take a while. And so I would say that now my thinking has rather been like, let's go find a unicorn to I need John from this company to work for me. And I don't know John, but I know he's really good and I need him. How do I— what would it take for me to get him to be here? And so I'd say that that has been the shift and I am more okay with getting— I'm basically being involved in some of the highest level recruiting and those roles take 6, 12, 18 months, uh, to actually come to fruition because it's, it's like a courting process. It's more like a marriage. Like, they don't need your company, and like, they have a career. You're not giving them an opportunity. Like, they're giving you a company because they can drive an entire division of growth. They can take you international because that's what they're, you know, that's their Rolodex is. Or, or they can take you public if that's where they're, you know, what they're especially— whatever the thing is. And so So that's kind of how I see it as a very high leverage use of my time despite the fact that it's a very slow process that has very delayed reinforcement. Yeah, talent is a whole beast.

How do you go in when you've got a role that you don't necessarily know? How do you make sure that you can't be bamboozled?

So Layla, so I'm stealing this from Layla. Her frame is talk to as many really smart. Basically reach out to people who you would want to hire, ask them if they know anybody, uh, hop on calls with them. And she uses the interview process as her learning process. And so from there, you know, if you only talk to one customer success person, you have no idea if they're good or bad. If you talk to 20, you have a really good idea. And so, because then by the, by the 17th, you're like, but what about this? And what about this other thing? And the The way that I think through this is a couple of razors. So razor number one is the quality and quantity of metrics they track and how they influence those metrics. So if I talk to, let's say I wanted to find a sales manager, I might say something like, okay, so, you know, how do you, how do you think about running sales and improving sales performance? Now, if the guy says, you know, got to get in there, get the team riled up, you know, make sure, make sure the culture is good, you know, drive, drive outcomes. I'd be like, okay, how do you measure that? Now, if the guy's like, you know, make sure the close rates are good and, and yeah, and I'd be like, okay, how do you make that go up? Now, the best guys would say, well, they would have every metric all the way down. So it's like, what's our contact rate? What's our, what's our, what's our offer percentage? What's our close rate? What's our cash collected? What's our back out rate by rep? What's LTV to rep? So because some reps have higher LTV because they'll have lower churn because how they're sold, what expectations were set. And so if these are the metrics that I'm doing, they would then say, well, which metrics do you want me to improve? I'd be like, okay, let's say that offer rate's low. What do you do? Like, okay, well then that's probably going to be a lead nurture issue, which is we're not qualifying people on the front end. We probably need to fix the headlines that we have in the ads and maybe the offer that we're doing for whatever giveaway we have that's generating these leads. And then I would probably add in some sort of disqualification process earlier. So if the guys can look at the stats I could remove them from the calendar so they can open up a slot and then increase throughput. Now, if someone said that, then I'd be like, okay, that's clear. I zoomed in on a metric because he had many and he had quality metrics and he knows how he can influence them. And so if you have a very good idea, because I remember the first really good HR person that we, that we brought on, um, they introduced all these new metrics to me that I had no idea about. And I was like, this is great. She was like, well, what's the cost to acquire talent here? And I was like, I I haven't thought about it. She's like, oh yeah, well, we need to know we can spend this much to acquire talent and this is our average cost to acquire a role at each level. And then what's our, what's our two-way fit percentage? I was like, what do you mean? I was like, well, at 90 days, what percentage of people are saying it's a 10 out of 10 from the manager to the person and the person to the manager? So it's a two-way fit. Both people say that this is a good, a good thing. And then what's our average time to fill? And I was like, I don't know. Right. And so all of a sudden she had all these different metrics. I was like, this makes complete sense to me and I've never measured this. And then all of a sudden from that point going forward, for every single head of people or director of whatever it is we're doing, if they're in charge of some sort of recruiting function, then if they're not bringing up those metrics, then I know that they're already not at that caliber. And so again, it's like the— and this is where I think like entrepreneurial pattern recognition is so valuable is like every entrepreneur that I know who has had something successful and then started something else with the assumption that the first thing wasn't because of luck. Because we have probably both seen some guys that got richer than they should have. I'll just put it that way because I remember I had a dinner with somebody once who was like, and I'll loop back, but he said, isn't it crazy that like Gym Launch could be the biggest thing you ever build? And I was just like, that is not true. I just like, I wholeheartedly reject your premise. It's like, I know exactly what we did to build Gym Launch. I know all the reasons that it was not as big as I want it to be. And I know what I'm going to do next. I know how to win. And that guy never ended up building something bigger than the exit that he had. And it might have been because of his view of the world or because he got lucky or whatever. Right. But that pattern recognition for most entrepreneurs that truly are self-made, that forced their will into existence, their ability to get it again after losing it all, or just when they— when they take their second or their third or their fourth swing, they almost start like— for me, every company I've built has gotten to each revenue level faster than the company before. And it's because it's like, I already beat the boss at this level. I know what has to happen here. Oh, I know what has to happen here. And then you finally get into virgin territory. You're like, I don't know what's going on. And then your rate of progress slows again. And so it's like you want to crystallize the artifacts of the knowledge of beating the game at every level so that when you, when you get to that level again, you're like, oh, this is another one of those. I know good sales managers look like this. They know these metrics. They say these things. They interview this way. This is the best source for them. And then all of a sudden when it takes someone 18 months to find a sales manager because they hire wrong the first time, and then it takes them a year to figure that out, and then they go back into the process, and then they have to do sales management themselves, and then they finally on their third try— and that was the constraint, they can't fix it— and so they stay stagnant that whole time. Whereas if you think about how much faster it goes when you're like, all the roles are right, and then it's like boom, you just go to the next level, that's order of magnitude. I think that's the— that is the— those are the scars and the lessons that we collect as entrepreneurs so that we have our cheat codes for when we get to that level next time.

Mm-hmm. All right. As you scale up and you are just really entering a whole new echelon, how do you think about or do you think about political environment? Does the government matter to you at all? Do you think about tax or anything like that?

So I'll start with tax. I don't think much about it. I have always been of the belief I should just make more money and that's more under my control. And I will be, you know, we'll be sensible. If we buy a building, we'll depreciate it, you know, you know, we'll donate a certain amount to charity because we can, you know, write off 30% of adjusted gross income. It's like, okay, well, that takes me from 37 to 29, you know, you know, we work our way down, but we still pay taxes. Right. And I'm still waiting for this. This— I'm like, what is— what is this? No taxes that billionaires are paying. I'm still trying to find this, this loophole that all these politicians are talking about. But the big realization that I had around taxes was realizing— and this is when Elon still lived in California— that all the richest people in America lived in California, or many of them did, and, and New York. And I was like, if they're the richest people and they're in the highest tax state, what do they understand that I don't understand about making money? And so the big misnomer, misconception that I had is that my understanding of making $1 billion, which was a goal that I had for a very long time, was— and to be clear, for anybody who has that goal, like, it wasn't always a billion. It was first a million, and then it kind of moved its way up. But the first way I thought of making a billion dollars is that I had to make $2 billion in net income, and then after taxes, I would have, I would have a billion. And then the second version was, oh, I just need to make enough, and then I'll invest that money. And then if I, if I make maybe, you know, $400 million over 10 years with appreciation of the stock market and things like that, I could get to I could get to a billion. Okay, that was my like 2.0 version. And then the 3.0 version was, oh, you— the thing, the asset itself has inherent value. And so I only need to get to like $100 million in EBITDA with a conservative 10x multiple to have a billion-dollar asset, which I can then take loans against, or I could sell portions of it or whatever I want to do there. And so that's kind of like how my evolution of getting to a billion kind of changed over time. I know, you know, this is obvious, but like for me, I didn't— I didn't even understand how it worked. So that's the tax component and some of the enterprise value component. What was the other part of the— you had two questions.

Well, so do you care about who's in government?

Oh, yeah. No, that's my simple answer. I— who is in government the regulations that they put in place, I will only be affected by those regulations or changes in tax code. Like, you know, like we just said, if it was something that affected me disproportionately, maybe like Elon, then it might make sense for me to change my behavior in a way to try and influence the outcome of the election, because then it's like I have high— you know, we— I think we all try to have high agency. Like, what can I do about it? But as a rule, I try not to think at all about things that I cannot control. And so, so we're like, sure, you can vote, okay. But, you know, the one vote I have in the one state of the county that's already whatever color you're in, whatever. But if I really wanted to get into it, it's not your vote that matters. It's how many votes can you influence? Like, that's the game for sure. And so the, the easiest litmus test I had for this, I remember this was like a formative experience for me, is that when we went through COVID, COVID, I was in the gym space, which is— woof, right? 100% of my customers were not allowed to do business legally in 24 hours. And so that year we went from $37 million in revenue to $31 million in revenue. Okay, so we did $31 million in sales in an industry that was not legally allowed to do business. Whoa. And I think is one of the biggest entrepreneurial successes I've had despite the fact that we shrunk that year. And I remember managing the team during 2020 saying, if we cannot control it, we do not talk about it, period. Only talk about the things that we can control. And whenever there's a disadvantage, it means all of our competitors are screwed. And so that means there'll be more for us. Because we'll work harder while they get disheartened. And so they're going to be talking about all the things that it's not fair and blah blah blah, but we are going to advertise our asses off, we're going to sell our asses off, we're going to deliver like crazy, and we're going to find a way to make it through this. Because everyone— I was like, gyms will not stop existing. So if we believe that to be true, then we need to find a bridge for them to get from here to there. And so we can build that bridge. And the nice thing is we have more resources than our competitors, which means we can build a better bridge than anyone else can. What was the bridge? So we we came up with something in 7 days called the Hybrid Gym. And so basically what we would do is you could meet with people one-on-one in person. That was allowed. You couldn't do workouts. And so what we did was I got all the gyms together to teach different classes and different variations, the whole Gym Launch community, so that we had 12 hours a day of sessions that were being streamed by different gym owners. And so everyone was able to maintain their membership and have way more classes than they did before and do them at home. And so we pooled the resources. Yeah, very smart. And so we, we cobbled together the streaming thing so that because we, you know, we paid for all of the baseline tech that was required to do that. They supplied the talent to lead, to lead those sessions. And then from a marketing and sales perspective, they either sold over the phone, which we had more ramped up sales scripts, which was more reasonable at the time because people understood it, or you'd meet in person one-on-one to do it. And some people were able to meet one-on-one, just do one-on-one training, things like that. Um, and we leaned really heavily on supplement sales because we sell Prestige Labs. And so Prestige Labs, uh, a lot of gym owners were able to get more people to take supplements during COVID because they're shipped straight to their door and not have to come to the gym. And so the combination of those two things allowed the majority of gym owners to get through. Now what was really interesting— now I think you'll dig this So about— I want to— I can't remember the exact number. I want to say between 8 and 10% of all gyms went out of business in 30 days. Oh my God. Yeah. And my theory around this— whoa. Yeah, my theory around this was that they were waiting for a good enough reason to give up.

Interesting.

And so they were waiting for a reason that they could look at their friends that they're like, 'Covid, you know, what are you gonna do?' They were looking for a socially acceptable reason. People would own a gym for 8 years, 10 years, And then when the second wave of shutdowns happened, like 9 months later, whatever it is, when they were like, maybe we'll open it and shut it down, that was when the guys who really wanted to but couldn't, who literally couldn't pay the bills anymore, went out of business. So it happened in two waves. The first ones gave up. The second ones had no— of course you always have a choice, but like those guys ran out of resources. And so, but yeah, we were able to make it through.

Wow. What an awesome example of No Bullshit. What Would It Take? What are you like off camera? Like, are you— do you have a super hard edge? Like you have a really playful vibe, but you've said a couple things here that, if we can't control it, we don't talk about it. Like things like that, I can see. I think people are always surprised when they come to work for me, if they've seen me on camera. Now I have the world's most angry face, so that helps at least a little bit. But I'm very, look, this is me on camera, but I am very intense for sure. Um, yeah, what's your— what's the off-camera like?

Not for play, I don't fuck around, or, um, I think the number one thing that I get from the people who work with slash for me is that I, uh, I have a much, uh, a lighter, uh, sense of humor when, uh, when they see me kind of day to day. I do like to poke fun and make, uh, illicit jokes and things like that that people are like, is that HR compliant? I'm like, definitely not for sure. You should talk to them, but they work for me, so I guess it doesn't really matter. Um, so, uh, that side. But I think it depends on the stakes and how far in a deficit people are. So like, high performers, I think, like me in general. Like, I'm super encouraging, I'm very rewarding, telling great job, etc. I want to create an environment where people can win. And if you win, you will love me. And if you don't win, you will be very uncomfortable. And so I see the job of the manager is to create the best possible environment for the best performers and a terrible environment for low performers. And a lot of people don't like the second half of that. Are you flirting with me? That is— and so for that, I want— and, and I think a problem that has happened in a lot of management, I think some of this is in the wokeism stuff, is like the idea that we should accommodate everyone. And I heard this from someone, I can't remember where I heard it, but it was like, this company is a dangerous place to work. And I just love that saying. Now, I don't think like Layla would probably be like, you know, shiver, you know, would be not happy with me saying this, but, um, I want a place where winners want to win. And I want to build a company where ambitious people can build world-class products. And whether your product is consistently delivering a sales script, or it's making amazing content, or it's just the actual companies themselves. If you're an entrepreneur, like, I want to create an environment where ambitious people can build world-class companies. And if I believe that, which I do, then my actions need to be aligned with that. Which means that if, if you don't like metrics, if you don't like being held accountable to your performance, if you would rather have a political environment where people jockey and backstab and gossip, this is not the place for you because I will root that out quickly and ruthlessly. I prefer, in my opinion, the perfect organization has zero managers. Hypothetical ideal. Of course you need to align people's— I mean, in that hypothetical ideal, everyone works, period. That's all they do all day is they produce. And so if that's the hypothetical ideal, then every layer of management fundamentally acts as waste. Now we have to orient that behavior so that it's aligned within whatever the objectives of the department or the company are, but that should be the only real role. And rewarding people who do well and providing feedback for people to improve. And so I see fundamentally that is the role of the manager. And that means that the manager most of the times also should probably work on stuff besides like, I do all this stuff. And if we see a good manager, then they should increase the overall output of the team. Now, if I add a manager and, and performance stays flat, then I don't need you. I could not have a manager and performance stay flat, right? Like, and if performance goes down, even worse. And what I hate is the outside cause, you know, pointing outside to external circumstances. And I tell the story of COVID to my company as well, which is, hey, if we have a company that relies on financing, let's say you're in home remodeling, whatever. So financing is a big part of our car sales. Hey, credit, you know, you know, interest rates are higher. It's harder for us to do sales. Can we control that? No. Why are you talking about it? It's just a very easy razor to drive. Like, what can we control? Well, good. More for us because other guys are all like, they all have all these disadvantages. We don't live with it. They do because they'll talk about it. We won't. And I am— I, I think the world needs a little hardcore and I'm okay being that. I love that.

As always, my friend, it is wonderful to have you. Where can people follow along for the hardcore?

Um, if you listen to a podcast, then, uh, I have a podcast called The Game. Uh, you can check that out. I have— I think it's like 580-something. You'll probably find it. I have, uh, two books, uh, that I give away for free on my podcast: $100 Million Offers, $100 Million Leads. So it's $100M Offers, $100M Leads. Those are the book titles. Um, they're on Amazon too if you like, like physical copies, but they're free if you, if you like consuming them. And if you still can't find it, just Google it and you'll find it on my podcast. Um, that's probably the, the best thing you can do. And if you're on YouTube, then you can, you can check out the, the videos on YouTube. I love it.

I highly encourage people to do so. And speaking of things I encourage you to do, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.