Throwback: When It Gets Easy, Go Hard | Ep 581

there's no way to strike out. You just have to wait and wait and wait until you get the perfect pitch, that fat pitch that's in your sweet spot, and then you step up and you knock it out of the park. And if you look at the people who are the wealthiest in the world, invariably the vast majority made their money with one vehicle. The wealthiest people in the world see business as a game. This podcast, The Game, is my attempt at documenting the lessons I've learned on my way to building Acquisition.com into a billion-dollar portfolio. My hope is that you use the lessons to grow your business and maybe someday soon partner with us to get to $100 million and beyond. I hope you share and enjoy. I want to tell you a story that was really impactful for me earlier on in my life and my business career. And it was when Leila and I went to the Pirates Cove Mastermind. Now, if you've ever, you know, listened to my podcast or you've been on this channel, I've talked about this before, but it was one of the most impactful experiences of my life. And it was because I had multiple mentors who made more than me speak belief into me and also made sure that I capitalized on the fat pitch. All right. And so I'll tell you how this went. So I was— Layla and I just got married. This is 2017, May. We had just gone from, you know, me almost losing everything to this business that we had just shifted from a done-for-you, flying out, doing gym turnarounds to a consulting service, teaching other people how to do our model. And we were doing— we were like in our second month and doing $350,000 a month. It was insane. And it was just Layla, me and an assistant selling over the kitchen table. It was absolutely bananas. I didn't even know. We made more money than I knew what to even do with. It was crazy. I mean, we're living on $1,200 a month and taking home $340,000 of $350,000 a month. It was crazy. And so anyways, I got invited to an 8-figure mastermind. And clearly, if you're doing the math there, I'm not making 8 figures. And I felt like really out of place. I was like, "Are you sure you want me to come?" And he was like, "Yeah, dude. You're going to blow past 8 figures." I'm like, really? And so anyways, we get to this event, super nervous to speak because all these guys are like titans and they're all doing $10 million, $20 million, $30 million. And I think Russell at the time, I think they were doing $35 to show you how long ago it was because now I think they're doing $150. And I got up there, it was finally my turn. And I wrote on the board and I told how our whole process worked and how much money our gyms were making on average. Actually, I'll start with what Alex Charfen said. So Alex Charfen was in the room and he's like, you have a $100 million business right now. And you don't even know it. And I remember feeling like the air was sucked out of the room because I felt all of a sudden I was like really proud of what I had accomplished, but all these guys made so much more money than me that they were like, dude, you need to, like, you need to step on the gas. And I was like, what? And they were like, you've got a huge thing in front of you if you, if you like, like you need to take advantage of this. And at the time I was saying how I was like, okay, we're making $350,000 a month and I want to start a supplement company. And they were like, why would you want to start a supplement company? Just double your ad spend because you're not spending anything on ads right now. And I was like, okay, I guess I'll do that. Cuz I listened to these guys cuz they made more money than me. I was like, all right. And so that was end of my end all. So rather than starting another business, I just kept doing the thing that I was doing, which ended up being an amazing piece of advice for them to give me. And I probably would've sabotaged myself if I had not paid for that. So it's like if you ever have the opportunity to spend more than you're probably comfortable with to be surrounded by people who make a lot more money than you, you will almost always disproportionately. And every time in my life I've always disproportionately moved up faster. When I can surround myself and figure out— I want them to speak into me and tell me what I cannot see, right? I'm like, tell me what I'm missing. What am I not seeing that you can see? Right? Because for whatever your business is, right? Or whatever your skill set is, I'm sure that there's— if someone who's, who's doing something that you are very good at, you can immediately see what's going on. It doesn't take you— it takes you 2 seconds, right? You're like, oh, this is what's wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong. When I look at a business now, I could be like, oh, this is the issue, right? It's immediate. But I didn't— when you don't have the context, you just run your head into the wall wondering what's going on, right? So anyways, after the— my little presentation was over, Jason Fladling came up to me and he had done $100 million on webinars. And I was like, man, this guy's super smart. And he was, you know, he was really aggressive and bright. And I was like, man, we got to figure something out, right? I don't want to say anything stupid. And so anyways, he comes up to me and he said, you need to 10x overnight. And I was like, what? He said, if what you're saying is true and you're making gyms this much money, he's like, someone bigger than you who already has all your customer base is going to take everything you have and distribute it. I was like, what? He's like, they're going to take everything you have and just destroy you before you even have a chance. And I just felt even worse after this, right? I felt this pit in my stomach. And then he leaned into me and he said, when it gets easy is when you go hard. And I remember how much I was shaken by that. And Layla was right next to me and I was like, when it gets easy is when I go hard. When it gets easy is when you go hard. Huh. And the biggest gift I got from those guys there was that this was my fat pitch, right? There are only a handful of opportunities that present themselves in the course of, you know, entrepreneur's career where you have the opportunity, you have the skill, and like basically the stars align right now. That being said, you have to develop the skills so that when the opportunity presents itself, you can knock it out of the park and step up to the plate. But when I listen to Warren Buffett and he talks about the investments, right, they, they choose very sparingly what things they're going to invest in. But when they do, they back, they load the truck up, they go all in. You know, you find your sphere of confidence and you just get pitches all day long, right? Just like a baseball analogy, you get pitched over and over, but you have no strikeouts, right? There's no way to strike out. You just have to wait and wait and wait until you get the perfect pitch, that fat pitch that's in your sweet spot. And then you step up and you knock it out of the park. And if you look at the people who are the wealthiest in the world, invariably the vast majority made their money with one vehicle. They made all of their wealth, or the vast majority of their wealth with one vehicle. And then after they made their wealth, then they diversified. Right. And so this is one of the big issues that I feel like I see in the internet culture and the Instagram culture is they're like, you got to like they, Billionaires have 7, you know, revenue streams. Yes, but they didn't have that to get there. Right now I have lots of revenue streams, but I didn't have that building this. Right. And so the idea is it looks much more like an umbrella. You've got one straight path all the way up on one vehicle where you're all in invested, which is your business most of the time or your career. And then it balloons out, then it umbrellas out, and then you sprinkle those investments in other things because you're overly leveraged in one business. But every single one of them, most of the guys that you see, all of them came from one, one thing that made their money and then they sprinkled it out on top of the other vehicles. And so if you listen to Gary Vee, even he talked about one of his biggest regrets was how when Google Ads were really cheap that he should have spent more for Wine Library. And all of these things kind of collided at the same time in my life where I had, you know, like I knew nothing. We're doing $300,000 a month and I was like, holy crap, like what? Is going on? Is this legal? I don't want to mess it up. Like, it's just like, holy. And so, but because of their encouragement, rather than A, distract myself and start another business, right? All we did is we, I followed what they said. I 5x my ad spend and, and then it just took off like a fricking rocket. You know what I mean? We went from, you know, $350,000 to $1.5 million in the next like 5 months as in per month. And so it was just, bonkers. And I just listened to what they had said. And so my, my, my takeaway from this and me sharing this story is that I don't know what pitches you have in front of you. There are only a certain amount of times where we're going to get that fat pitch. And I think we might— the point of this is that if it is easy for you right now, this is the time to step up. I was talking to some entrepreneurs that were younger not that long ago, and they went from you know, next to nothing. I think not next to nothing. I think they were doing that. That sounds horrible. What am I about to say? So they were doing like $1 or $2 million a year. I didn't mean it like that, but their last month they made like $20,000 or $30,000 in their last month of the year. And then the next month they hit this offer out of the fricking park and they did $3 million and they did $5 million the next month in revenue. I mean, that's insanity. I mean, I've never heard of anything growing that fast. Without like a JV, you know, like some sort of joint venture thing. Like never in my life I've heard someone grow that fast. And they were like, yeah, you know, we're trying to like enjoy the fruits of our labor and not spend a ton of time on the business. And I wanted, and I got to have the opportunity to be the older person in the situation because I could see in them what I imagine people saw in me, which was like, you've got a hot one right now. Like you need to ride it hard. Like when— strike when the iron is hot, right? When the fat pitch comes, you step up and you put everything you've got into it. And so like, this is not the time to try and figure out work-life balance because you're going to have this finite window where you're going to make disproportionate amounts of money, where you're going to make your generational wealth in this short gap. And we just have to hope that when that opportunity presents itself, we take full advantage, right? If you're going to California and during the Gold Rush in 1849 and you start panning for gold and you start getting gold, That's not the time to say, you know what, I've made it. I'm going to stay home. I'm only going to pan for gold an hour or two a day. Of course not. Right. Because you'd be like, I got to pan. I got to try to take as much gold out of this river as humanly possible. It seems obvious to us from the outside. But when you're in it, you have all these other things that are going on in your mind. Right. And the thing is, is that opportunity, like many, are finite. Right. There's a defined period of time where you're going to be able to ride that wave and be early on it and crush it. And so Most people who are very wealthy had one big pitch that they swung hard on. And, and then after they've made it, then they sprinkle their other investments. Just don't try and reverse engineer the wrong sequence. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our Scaling Roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all 8 functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, You've got product, you got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, you've got HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. Um, and so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com/roadmap. Road map. Road map.