The Question That Actually Fixes Your Business | Ep 930

You have this small amount of time to get a very high leverage answer. And so I wanted to make sure that every single person who asks their question asks the right question. And I'll tell you a story that might illustrate the point. I think like probably 6 months back, there was a guy who came here. He was one of the gentlemen in the back, got up and said, hey, can you talk to me more about the closure framework? And I said, well, before I do, you know, what's your close rate? And he said, 40%. I was like, okay, so you got excited, you bought these tickets, you reserved the date, you waited for it to happen, got on a plane, flew out here, got in a hotel, got everything ready, left your business behind, went through the first day, and then you had this opportunity to ask your question. I was like, and the answer to this question will do nothing to change your business. There's nothing to change the business. Um, he just likes sales stuff, and so what are we here playing Alex talking about sales stuff? And what's interesting is that the vast majority of the time The things that we enjoy the most are rarely the thing that's holding the business back. And so that's why I like so much entrepreneurship, it's just like eating glass, it's just so painful because as soon as you get good enough at something, then it's no longer the constraint. It's like, great, I just feel like I've started to get a hold of this and now I have to get kicked in the genitals, there you go, it's both sides, over here in this thing that I don't know anything about. And so, uh, that's why we organize it that way, so that hopefully, um, because you probably— who here has a lot of notes from today so far? Today and yesterday? Yes? Okay, cool. Well, good. Um, and notes are very valuable, but they're only valuable insofar as they translate into whatever you're going to do when you get home. And so all of you guys at some point are going to get into a plane or in a car and open up a blank tablet page, or if you're old school, actually write things down, um, and you're gonna have a blank page and you're looking at your 8 pages of notes, whatever it is, and say like, okay, what the hell am I actually going to do? And you're going to write like 3 or 4 things on that next page. And my entire objective, objective of this little portion, is to make sure that the 3 or 4 things that you write on the page are the correct ones. Because you can— I'll say this, I've grown and worked with a lot of businesses. You can get a lot of stuff wrong. If you just get like the 1 or 2 things that you're really going to dedicate your resources to, You really can get one or two things right and get just about everything else wrong if you get the right things right. And so I— and when you're talking about constraints, who here was at the implementation workshop, the online one? Okay, so this will be largely new for a lot of you. So I have now the distinct pleasure of doing lots of Q&As for businesses, and when I thought through What is the actual decision tree that I walk through when I'm talking to somebody about trying to figure out where their business is stuck? And so I call this the 6M framework, the Mozi 6, whatever you want to call it. And they just happen to all have Ms, which is convenient for me and for anyone else to remember things. So the first and obvious question that I always ask everyone— and I'll light a point as we're going through this so you can see this is a real framework— but the first question is, why can't we do more than what we're currently doing? If you can do more than what we're currently doing, Then great, you now have permission. Go do more of what you're currently doing and great, we have now scale. Now when I asked that question, it was like, I can't. And it's like, okay, why not? So the first one is metrics. I can't do more of what we're currently doing because I don't even know what I'm doing right now because I have no numbers to have a predictable anything process because we don't know what we're doing. Okay, fine. So you don't have enough metrics. So each of these become off-ribs. The idea is as soon as you find it, great, that's what you attack so that you can eventually go do more. So the route of all of this is always back to— as soon as you, you knock out this other stuff underneath, you go back to we keep doing more. The next issue that comes up is model, which is I don't want to do more because I'm not sure if I'm in the right boat. I'm not sure if Live2News is the right vehicle. I'm not sure if this is even worth it or it's going to be accomplished my goals. And that becomes kind of a larger question like Am I getting out of this what I want? And I would say my, my one tidbit on model is that a lot of times when someone's stuck on a model issue, I would say like 75% of the time when I talk to them, it's just that they need to be reminded that it's going to be difficult and that they have this big goal. And then the reason that you get paid $10 or $100 million for an exit is because it's fucking hard and that most people don't have the intestinal fortitude to go through it and A lot of it comes down to being able to manage uncertainty. Like, fundamentally, a lot of the pain of entrepreneurship is walking into a dark room. You can't see anything and racing for how you're going to get there. And then just continuing to walk in every once in a while, you're like, oh, ice cream. And you're like, oh, dog shit again. Yeah. And that's a lot of what the entrepreneurial process is for just many years at a time. And then you're like, I think there's light at the end. And then it's actually a flashlight. Somebody's going to beat you over the head with it. And so. You have these moments, these glimmers of hope that only get crushed. Back to this. So, but I want to ask the question, why can't we do more? We don't know our metrics, right? Get our metrics, then we can do more. I don't know if this opportunity is right for me. And this is the feature, not bug. Like, this might just be a feature of your business rather than something— this is not a problem to solve. This is a dichotomy to be managed. This is just going to be part of the shit that you deal with in the business that you're in. I'll give you two polar examples. If you're in the cleaning business, finding business is really not that hard. Many people want you to clean their— it's just not a hard business to get demand in. Finding people who want to clean other people's stuff, much harder. That is the feature of that business. On the fitness and weight loss side, warning people to come and train at your facility and talk about fitness stuff, tons of super fitness geeks who do it for free all the time. Really hard to find people who are overweight who want to lose weight, who want to sign up for a gym. Really difficult. It's always going to be a demand-driven business because people in and of themselves lose motivation. And so these are two completely different industries, um, and they have dynamics that are embedded within human psychology, human behavior, that are inherent to those businesses. And so if you were like, hey, You know, the cleaning business is tough, it's just really hard to find good people. No shit, that's the problem that you get to solve in exchange for money, right? And then on this side, it's like, hey, you know, I've got this beautiful gym, I've got all these people that want to train, but like, no one actually wants to like stick with the diet and work out. It's like, no shit, welcome to the gym business, right? And so it's just like, these are inherent to a lot of the businesses that we're in, and sometimes you just need to hear like, yeah, that sucks too. You want to start over? No? Well, at least you have 5 years of experience, and now you have 5 years ahead of something you're starting out today. Right. Okay. So we've got more metrics model. The next issue that comes up is money. Okay. Which is I can't do more because I can't afford to. Okay. So underneath of this, we're like, all right, can we not afford to because leads cost too much? Can we not afford to because we close too few of our sales? We're closing too few as a conversion rate issue. Is the problem that we have our lifetime gross profit is too low? We make too little on them, right? Are these the, these are the kind of like sub-offshoots of money. So maybe we have to, like, you have to isolate each of these because all of these can sometimes seem similar. So we can't afford to because it's too expensive. Well, are our leads too much or do we not make enough money? Or a lead's the right price, but we don't know how to close. And so this is where having industry averages, which is the only time in my life where I'm okay with looking at industry averages— every other time just toss it out because why would you want to be average? But it is decent to at least understand, like, okay, uh, if I'm closing off of a webinar and we're closing 0.5% of leads, we're off right now. What's our lead cost for this personal development thing? Well, if we're at $20, that's too high because that's just not the CPMs that industry dictated. That's where a lot of pattern recognition, that's where a lot of R2 can help a lot on the diagnosis of this stuff. The last step here is manpower. So simply put, so these are sub, right? So this is like A, B, C, sorry. So you got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and there are 6 and I'm forgetting one of them. I wrote it, so I should know what they are, but maybe one of my guys can tell me. The last one is manpower, which is like, I would do more, but I just don't have more salespeople. I don't have enough agents. Right. I have metrics. I'm fine with the model that I did. We can afford to do it. I just don't have enough people. Which, here's the cool part about this model. It goes back to the top. What do we do to get manpower? Why can't we do more? We can't do more because I don't have metrics around how I attract talent. "Okay, let's get our metrics and then we can do more of the attraction account." So it's a cycle, it always repeats itself. And so this actually took me like, you know, only 10,000 fucking calls to figure out. But yeah, that's how it works. And so maybe, what's my 6th one? Anybody? I would say like free lunch. Anybody figures it out, go ahead and throw it in. So, all right, with that being said, was that helpful? Market. Market, thank you. Thank you. I forget it because it's such a bullshit one. All right. My market is too small. Okay, sure it is. Tom. All right. So my market is too small. There's only like, it's so rare that your market is actually too small. Like if you are in Bumfuck, Kentucky, you might actually have a market that's too small. That's fair. And that actually works all the way through. I can't find a super AI technologist in bumfuck Kentucky. Um, so I can't do more reach-outs because I've texted everyone in my market because I know them all, uh, and they're in my cell phone, and none of them are AI whatevers. Okay, that's fair. It's just that the vast majority of businesses are not in that situation. Even if you're a local, if you're in a market that's, you know, 50,000 and up, you can pretty much— you're pretty much good. Um, and then obviously the follow-up question is like, is it a remote? So we do hybrid or semi-remote. Like, you get into some of those conversations. Um, but yeah, so these are the, these are the reasons that people get stuck. Um, and that is the model. Like, this is the deconstructing model. Like, this is what we run through. And then obviously for each of these levels, it's like, okay, well, what do I do instead? Thank you guys so much.