Win Slow | Ep 758

Hey guys, welcome back to the fourth mini audio first series podcast that I have going on here. Today I wanna talk about win slow. That has been the background on my phone. It's how many of the growth lessons that I've had as an entrepreneur have been counterintuitive to my human nature. And I wanna go through a few of those kind of counterintuitive lessons that I have learned that have made me more money despite being things that aren't what I would guess would have worked. And if you are stuck or not growing as fast as you want, then maybe you might need to try one of these instead. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about growth. Growth as a human being, but also growth obviously as an entrepreneur, which I translate into making more money. One of the things that I have been thinking about is how that is very similar, or growth has been very similar to me, as marketing. And you'll be like, how does that even make sense? Don't worry, we're gonna Quentin Tarantino this. Rory Sutherland has this great little ism, and I made a pithy aphorism inside of The Offers book about psychological versus logical solutions. Which is that the logical solution, if you've tried the logical solution and it doesn't work, you might wanna consider psychological solutions, which are solutions that are completely illogical but bank on the fact that humans are irrational. And I'll give you a simple example. So people may complain, complain about the elevators being too slow. So you can either spend millions of dollars to try and fix the elevator, or you could put mirrors in the elevators and people stare at themselves and they don't notice the time go by. That would be a psychological versus a logical solution. In the UK, they had a lot of complaints about the trains being slow. And so again, they could spend a billion dollars or probably more, you know, making faster trains. But the solution they had was they just added a dot map that just showed how long people had to wait for trains. And so what's interesting is that an unlimited wait that you have no idea, you know that it's gonna be some period between 1 and 10 minutes, the unknown is more unbearable than knowing that you will wait 9, because then you can make plans. And so it also shows how crazy humans are when it comes to expectation management, which is that an unknown expectation, this is the devil you know and the devil you don't, right? People are so much more afraid of the unknown than of what they know and don't like. Which I find hilarious. And so in a lot of ways, entrepreneurship is a lot like this in that what makes it so painful is that you don't know how long the painful period is going to last. And so if you knew for a fact that it would be 3 years and then it would get good, then you could just lock in on 3 years and say, "Great, I will grit my teeth, I'll get through it." But if you have no idea if it's gonna end tomorrow or never, it becomes way harder. And so there's a little story about this, a research study that was done with mice. And you may have heard the story, but I'll tell you anyways, which is they had a mouse and they dropped it in and a mouse drowns in, let's call it 30 minutes. I don't remember the time. I think it was 30 minutes. In the second scenario, they drop a mouse in and then before the 30-minute mark, they pull the mouse out, they let it rest, and then they drop it back in. But the next time they don't take it out. Until it gives up. The second time, it goes for 16 hours. So it gets 30 times the output because it thinks that help is right around the corner. And so the fact that you save the mouse, and again, this is me adding narrative, so I'm sure they can try and prove this or not, but at least this was the takeaway that I had from that little story is that a lot of times we are the mouse and the hand that comes to save us is just that the thing works out. Is that the, you get the deal, you get the breakthrough on the new acquisition channel, the product starts retaining customers, churn lowers, you hire that key role, whatever it is, is that I like to remember that nothing hard ever lasts because only one of three scenarios happen. You quit, which means you never see it through. So it doesn't, so in that instance, it stops. The second scenario is that it just gets easier because whatever the pressure was goes away. Or the third scenario is that you learn a skill that allows you to no longer see the thing as a threat or painful to begin with. In other words, you get harder instead of it getting easier. Just simply knowing that, that this hard will absolutely pass has helped me a ton in my business. But I started this with the fact that growth is a lot like marketing in that it's counterintuitive. And so let me explain now the meaty part of what I want to get to, which is that growth is counterintuitive. Most of the things that you want to do are work immediately or are wrong. And that might sound counter to the whole like, wait, I thought I had to take a long period of time. Let me, let me bridge the gap. You need to keep doing more until the point that you can't do more anymore and you need to do something better. Typically we max out volume before doing anything else. And usually there's a lot more volume than you would think. But sometimes in order to grow, and this is especially true if you're at like a stagnation point, right? Like you're like, I don't know what to do. One of the things that's counterintuitive that has led to growth in more companies than I can name is deletion. How would it make sense that if you cut branches off a tree, it grows more? But it does. You prune trees and then they grow up vertical further. And so what feels illogical actually ends up working in most businesses. And so you want to do more things. You want to, quote, "overdeliver" to your customers. But you see overdelivering as providing more stuff. Rather than doing fewer things better. And so we reach these points where we don't know what to do, and so then we just try to do something new, and we keep doing these cycles and end up just diluting down the stuff that we ultimately sell. And so a lot of times I've just found that my breakthroughs come from counterintuitive solutions. So right now, believe it or not, I'm in a period of slowdown. Which sounds crazy for maybe you to hear because we're growing like crazy. Basically, everything in me right now has 17 more amazing huge things that I want to do with Acquisition.com. And it has taken me more than a decade of doing business to learn that I can basically do one big thing a year, about. That's about it. And that's like maxes out my team with crazy growth with an exceptional operator in Layla and the directors that we have and the executives that we have. That's about it. That maxes it out. And so then it's like, well, what do you do with the rest of the time? And so if we define patience as figuring out what to do in the meantime, then it means I get to practice being patient. In a real way, acquisition.com continues to grow faster and faster the less I try and break it. And again, it's counterintuitive. You would think that you should push harder. You should keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing. And to an element, you wanna push from a holding the standards perspective, but not necessarily from trying to have a baby in one month by sleeping with 9 women. It doesn't work. Like, some things just take 9 months. There's a story that I have around this, which was when I started building out the outbound team for Gym Launch, I read a book and it said it will take 12 months for outbound to be a material percentage of your business. And so I said, well, I'm smarter than this guy and I work really hard. And so I'll be able to do it in 12 weeks. And it took 12 months. And this guy had built a zillion outbound teams and was very reputable. And it was a really good lesson in humility in that like, as much as we wanna always believe that we're special snowflakes, sometimes it just takes 9 months to have a baby. Not sometimes, most of the times. That's what it is. And so you probably have a lot of pregnancies that are going on in your business. And if we just say that as an analogy for the things that you're giving birth to, new products, new processes, projects that you have going on, new people that you're bringing on. You want to treat them like one-night stands and that they'll somehow be fully grown children when they come out in 7 days, but sometimes it just takes 9 months. I have been going back and forth in this little saying that I've been repeating to myself, and it's the background of my phone, is win slow. So for a while, the background of my phone was just win. I recently changed it to win slow, even though that's a It should be slowly because it's an adverb, slow down. But I like win slow. And it's a different way for me of triggering the thought of win for sure. So it's a different way of saying just win that's appropriate for my current chapter. You may be actually wanting to go faster, but the desire to go faster is making you go slower. That lesson has been so hard for me to learn. It's been painful because I also compulsively want to work. I want to feel like I'm doing something. But sometimes it takes 9 months. You can't sleep with your wife again to make it go faster. It just takes 9 months. I have just figured out things to do in the meantime, which is how do I lay the train tracks for after the baby is born? How do I set up the baby's room? How do I get the books that we wanna read? How do I go to the parenting sessions? And by the way, we're not having a kid. That's not my, that's not, everyone get, you know, calm down. How do I think about preschools for this kid so that we don't have to do that work? I try and do as much of the other work for the, for after the child is born ahead of time so that when we hit that curve, then when I'm back to being able to push again, it zooms. And so it's a lot of, like, a lot of my day-to-day right now is digging the well before we're thirsty. It's banking pre-work so that I can lay tracks so that Layla can continue to build the track that she's on. She's continuing to build the continuation so that when that track hits the track that I have already laid out, it just connects and then zooms. But that track doesn't get to get used until these things occur. They are contingencies. This has also been helpful for Layla and I in trying to figure out our growth and the roles within growth, which is that I'm very much the zero-to-one guy. I'm the breathe life into this thing. I will do the Herculean amount of work to make something happen. Once it happens, Layla is the 1 to infinity person. And you know, as much as I get all the credit because I'm awesome, I'm kidding. No, 'cause I'm the guy. But as much as I get all the credit for our success or disproportionate amount of the credit, Layla's the one who makes us all the money. Because you make all the money when you do the boring shit. Like news, fun. Doing more is boring. But when you do more is where you make all the money. All the money is in more. It's in going from 1 sales guy to 20 sales guys. It's going from 1 support rep to 20 support reps. It's from buying, you know, your first round of inventory to buying, you know, 6 months of inventory. It's scaling ad spend from $1,000 a day to $100,000 a day. Like, those are the things that make you more money, but they are also known. And so in a lot of ways, The best risk-adjusted return way to grow is to do more because you already know that the strategy worked. And so you have very little risk in doing more of that thing. It's just that most entrepreneurs like doing new stuff, myself included. Because more takes less of my time to do, I spend a tremendous amount of time on what the big new thing is going to be and doing as much pre-work as I possibly can to do that work ahead of time so that when the time comes to go zero to one, it goes zero to ten. Really fast. But once it gets to 10, then the new train track has to get laid, and that will take time. And I have to accept that. And so it's been a long process for me of being able to hold back. Because I'll tell you the story of Henry Ford with his marketing director, 'cause I think it's a good analogy for kind of what it's like to be an entrepreneur. But Henry Ford had a marketing campaign. So his CMO, his marketer, was right next to him in his office, 'cause he thought it was really important. And so he'd walk by his office every day and he saw this car ad that was sitting, you know, it was old school days, so they had like paint the ads and stuff. And after like 3 months of seeing this ad every day, he goes in the guy's office, he's like, hey man, when are we gonna stop running this ad? I'm just getting sick of seeing it. And the CMO looked up at him and he's like, we haven't run it yet. And so we have this assumption that because we've thought about something a lot, that the market already knows, the market's already tired of it, when in reality the market doesn't even know you exist yet. They don't even know your name yet, and you're worried about, you know, making your content boring or repeating the same thing. But it's— it couldn't be further from the truth. And so the things that have changed about what my day-to-day looks like is that I spend a tremendous amount of time trying to figure out what is the true input that I can put into the system that makes the whole thing move the fastest. And fast doesn't necessarily mean that we have tremendous amounts of activity, but what type of lever can I pull that one move on that lever makes a thousand steps irrelevant? You know, 4 or 5 years ago when I started— I guess it's 2019, 5 years ago— when I started making YouTube videos, the thought for me was, if I only had a brand that was massive and had tremendous trust within the business community, then I wouldn't need to be be the best investor. I wouldn't need to have the most cash. If I just had proprietary deal flow and people who wanted to do deals with me specifically, then all of these other concerns would be irrelevant. And so then, if I know what that one thing is, then I can just make all of my priorities just making that one thing come true. And so that is what I spend a lot of my time thinking about. It's like, is there a way— is there a cheat code? Is there an override on the system that can make all of this busywork disappear, not because I don't have to do it, but because it has shrunken into irrelevance, because there's another thing that's 10 times or 100 times more potent that I could do as a move. And so I think that deletion is counter to human nature. I think slowing down is counter to human nature. Pursuing fewer opportunities is counter to human nature. And so a lot of the things that I'm in the season right now that I'm working on are things that are counter to my personal nature, but I think that they are also exactly what is required for us to grow right now in this season. And it may be the season that you're in right now, is that you may need to confront the work and just say, we need to do more of what we're doing and do nothing new. We need to actually do less stuff. We need to take some of the stuff we're doing and delete it. 'Cause I'll give you a good litmus test for this. If right now, think about all the stuff you've got going on. Of all those things, think in your mind, which one of those things makes you the most money? Because you have it in your mind, right? Like you've got, you know, a handful of things going on. What's the one thing that you're like, that for sure is the thing that makes us the most money? If I were to wave a magic wand and make all of the other things disappear except for that one thing, how much easier would it be for you to grow? You'd probably be like, a hell of a lot easier. And if that's the answer, then why don't you do that right now? Because there's no other move that you could make that could grow your business as much as choosing not to do everything else that's not making you money. And so in a very real way, you doing less doesn't really mean doing less. It means doing fewer so that you can do more on the one thing that gets you the most for what you put in. For me, that is why growth has been counterintuitive, and this has been top of mind. And if you like this more narrative style of audio-first podcasts, again, let me know. That's why I made this little mini-series. So that you guys could tell me, and this is like a little mini test, and if you like it, I'll do more of it, and if you don't, I will go back to doing what I was doing. So share it, tag it, and otherwise, keep being awesome.