TRAPPED! The ONE Word to Change Your Business Trajectory (and It’s Not What You Think)

Well, there's one word, just one word that will take you out of the business rat race forever if you understand the word. Okay, before I even tell you what the word is, thank you for being here. Each week we're talking about scaling, getting to your apex, whatever that is. And the first week we covered about setting your mission, your wants and your whys, getting a reality check. And as I mentioned last time, I was going to give you a sneak preview of the pinnacle up here at the top of what, what it's like to actually get your business to a place where it runs itself and that you are no longer a slave to it. So again, if you have comments throughout this, feel free to type them in there. I'll do my best to answer them. And, and again, make sure you share this with other people because this will be on, on all these platforms for several days. Make sure you check it out and lots of good questions. As a matter of fact, I'm going to tell you this is that I wished I would have had some of this information a long time ago. Would have saved me a lot of time and a lot of aggravation. And again, there are a lot of people that decide they want to build a business, but they get trapped and they figure that, well, I'm just going to build what I've got and, and hope for a break and then I'm going to be a big business, branded business and passive income. It just doesn't work. That it does work, but it's not a very good business plan. So I'm very honored today that today's session, our broadcast is going to be in conjunction with a good friend of mine, somebody that I've been working with for a while. His name is Joe, Joe DeMaria. I'm going to bring him up here right now. I can add to the stream. There's Joe.

Hey, Joe. Hey, Blair, how you doing? Good, good, good, good.

Good to have you here. And Joe and I have been working together for better part of this year, working on our business. And as you can see, the one word is the word of scale is how do you scale the business? And you know, so Joe, maybe you could tell them a little bit about your background in this broadcast. We're going to keep it brief, kind of high level, but if you've got questions, you can ask Joe or myself and we can do our best to answer your questions. Hi Kanika, good to see you. Welcome to the, welcome to the broadcast. So a little bit about your background, Joe.

Well, first of all, thanks for having Me. And it's been a lot of fun to work with you on this sort of thing. But my background really started in Internet marketing about a decade ago. And like most people's, I kind of floundered in the first few years of my business. And it took a lot of boom bust cycles, make a lot of money, lose a lot of money, make a lot of money, lose a lot of money to start really figuring out what the process is. And the good news is there is a process, there's a definite scalable system that you can put in place in your business. The issue is most people wander the desert for 40 years before they get there. So once I figured out, by the.

Way, literally 40 years, literally 40 years.

Well, there's a time for everything, right? I mean, for me it took a lot of different shapes and it brought me into now over, I think over 200 different industries, over a thousand different niches in the past decade. But one of the big things that we did was we were one of the first venture backed education startup, well, edutech startups doing group coaching and courses and things like that a few years ago. And that company using this sort of system, and it's kind of when I cracked the code on, it went from a 1 million valuation to a 50 million valuation, from 66,000 in annual revenue to, you know, 15 million in annual revenue very, very quickly. And as Blair said, the word of power here is scale. And, and people tend to confuse scale with size. And size isn't necessarily the same thing. You can scale vision, you can scale models, you can scale offers, you can scale all of these different components and collectively that's what brings you to that next level as a business. But all of it starts with singular intention. And that's where most people fail. As you said, Blair, you can be very successful and wake up one day and realize you are in a business that you had no intention of running and it is not piloting you to where your personal goals really, you know, align and you can build yourself a very beautiful golden cage. And this is why most businesses break a million dollars and they stall between 1 million and 1.5 million. So it's something like 80% of businesses that break a million never break 1.5, and they can be there for decades.

You know, and that's, and when you realize how small the number that is, understanding that, you know, less than 80% of the businesses even make it to that, to that, to the million to begin with. Right. So the, the whole idea is, is this is a, it's a rare opportunity right now for you guys to learn something. Joe's been partnering with me in this process right here. This is our apex process. Eight steps to get you to this, to get you to the summit of whatever that is, whatever is your dream is. Because, you know, the thing upsets me is that everybody goes into business with these starry eyes and great goals. And I'm gonna kick, I'm gonna kick butt, and it's gonna be amazing. And like you said, sooner or later, you find out that you've worked yourself into a corner and there's really no way out. I'm just, I'm going to lever. I'm going to do what I do. I'm going to leverage myself. And, you know, and that becomes. That's kind of putting the horse before the cart before the horse, you know what I'm saying? Because you didn't design it that way. And to try to con, to change all that, the hardest part is changing your own mind, right?

Absolutely. I mean, the reality is that good businesses, you don't just stumble into, you architect them. So in the early doors, when we're entrepreneurs, we're all about action. We're all about just moving the needle, just continuing to do things right. Our success or failure in our first few years is usually just activity based. But at a certain point, you over leverage time, you over leverage sweat equity and activity. And that's why people can hit a million and struggle to go beyond it. Because, heck, at a million, you might just be totally over leveraged for time. Right.

You just can't. You don't have any more life force particles to put out to the world. You've extended them all. Extend them all. So that's awesome. So before you, I know you've got some really good stuff to share here. You mentioned something to me. I. And in my mind, when it came to the training business, which is the business we're in, is I had a very myopic view of what scaling meant. And you said something to me. You said it was really good. Hey, Mike o'.

Dell.

How you doing? Our weatherman from Kilimanjaro down there. Warriors. All right, listen closely, my friend. This could change you and your brother's business. This could change you guys forever here. But you said something to me. You said there are many ways to scale. There are many ways to scale. So would you expand on that for a second?

Well, the, the reality is, you know, everybody's trying to solve for the. Like, business is an equation, right? So scale is a Nebulous thing. When you're trying to find the solution to this equation, scale could take the shape of so many different things that you end up sort of splitting your attention across team, across products, across partnerships, across financial capability and stability. You might go out and overextend yourself in 50 different areas looking for this elusive thing that we call scale. This, this nebulous concept. Right. The reality is there's, there's a million ways to do that. Right. You can scale by acquiring companies, you can scale by acquiring better team, by hiring the right people, you can scale by introducing new products or product lines. Those are all methodologies for scale. But what matters more than anything is, is that you zoom out and you see what are you hiring the business to do. Because businesses are just machines. And if you know where it's trying to like where you're really needing this to go, you might look at your 25 year vision, your 10 year target, your 3 year target, and you might see that the plan that you're on, it's impossible for you to get to where you're going. So true scale comes from you re architecting the company at that point to make sure that you can easily hit those targets from three years to 10 years to 25 years. Because 90% of folks I talk to are way out of alignment. Scale only comes from clarity.

Interesting, interesting. So, so again, it's by design. You got to architect it. And so if there's different ways to scale, just can you make, give, give us like a short bullet point list of ways to scale?

Absolutely. I mean the easiest ways to scale are to actually select models that empower you. The funniest thing about scaling is the easiest way to move forward is to identify the assumptions you've already made. So I have a definite step by step process that I follow all the time. And the first thing we look at is what's the vision? Where are we trying to go? And then it's, does this business model that we're currently using empower us to get there? What are the assumptions we're making about our current situation, our market, our product, where we're going in this next phase of the business, and are there ways that we can fill that gap? So that's where research comes in and these different components and you and I have done this together. Right, right, right, right, right.

So yes. Well, hi, Gabriella, where are you from? Gabriella? Let me know. I'm not sure where you're from, but thanks for being on the call today. And John Marino, another good partner of ours. Good to see you, John. So again. Yeah. Now, so what I just heard you say is that scale is not necessarily the same as replication. Is that correct?

Sure. Yeah. There's definitely a difference between growth and scale. They were just conflated. Very often scale comes from. Yeah, so growth can happen across a million different data sets, right? You can grow followers, you can grow top line revenue, you can reduce costs, you can grow team, you can grow. Growth is different. Scale comes when you've empowered the company in and of itself to have a strong enough framework, a strong enough skeleton that you can tack all these different things on without drowning it. So for example, like there's this big thing called the hug of death, right? Let's say hypothetically, Blair, this video goes viral tomorrow. It gets 40 million views and you get flooded with so much business that you can't handle it. If you are not set up for scale, the company will fail because of how much success it has. So that growth will have killed you. Growth is not always a good thing. Growth without a plan can crater the whole business. Scale is what allows you to have a stable architecture to tag all those different things onto.

Got it. I recall when you said that it reminded me years ago in the trucking business is that when we hit the market really well, we timed it really well, not by any of our brilliance, but just by chance. And we got flooded with so much traffic we couldn't handle it. We had tractor trailers backed up all up and down the streets and we just couldn't deliver on time. And so it was great, I mean, for like a month or two. And then people go, well, these guys are a bunch of bozos because they can't deliver it. That's what you're talking about, right?

Absolutely. This, you step into Tim Ferriss's sponsors all the time. He would recommend a product and they would completely sell out of everything and their supply chain would be ruined. They wouldn't be able to furnish the orders they'd actually like converted on. And they would get tremendous amounts of chargebacks, lose their, their like payment processing partners, and like, they could completely go out of business practically overnight. Because while they had these great experiences of growth, right, they were not set up from a scalable standpoint to be able to hold that weight. Good.

So what now, what I'm understanding you to say that the reason scale is so important is it may be that replication, more staff, another company, more trucks, affiliates, is one way to scale. But the real issue is that if you were to take a look at A bigger picture. Say, okay, if I want to take this from a, like you say, a million dollar business to a $50 million business or even a $10 million business, what's that going to look like? Okay, as opposed to I just need more trainers or I just need more affiliates. Is that what you're saying?

Right, right. I mean, the very nature of going from a $1 million company to a $10 million company, for example, is the entire architecture is going to change. And when it happens, a lot of the time people do it slowly and they can still get there. They'll experience growing pains and yada, yada, yada. But the reality is there is a, a fundamental core level difference, like a physiological difference between a company healthy at 1 million and that same company at 10 million, there'll be a lot of things that have changed. And if you skip the actual planning and you skip the alignment on that stuff, you can scale to 10 million in a direction that completely does not suit you or your company. And it can invite a lot of threats and risk. Like, your business can be working a heck of a lot harder at 10 million with a lot more risk, a lot more threat, a lot less sellability even than at 1 million just because you let yourself go down the long, winding, exciting path of, of growth, growth, growth. But there was no real consistent plan for architecture. It's like if. If every year, Blair, you added a floor to your house, but you never changed the foundation. Right. Or you didn't plan for that. You never, you never strengthened what it is that, that the original thing was built on. Eventually it's going to collapse.

Makes sense. Makes sense. By the way, those of you guys just tuned in, we got folks from Vietnam. Tiffany Greeley, good to see you. Gabriella says she's from Belgium. We got Mike o' Dell from Texas. John Marino, he's from, I believe. Where's John? You're in San Diego, aren't you, dude?

No, John's a couple blocks from you.

Oh, that's right. He's here in Phoenix.

That's right.

So again, if you've got some questions for Joe or myself along this, or anything along this apex line here that we're talking about, we're talking about the top of the mountain here. We're talking about scaling, which is that to understand scaling is to be able to get yourself, is to design your way out of the business. Rat race is what I'm getting, is to design it out of there. And because if you don't, you'll fall prey to what Happens at least in the training business, which I'm in, A lot of you are in. It's a trap. It's a, it's a big time trap and you can make a bunch of money and be working your butt off, but not making the money you really wanted to make and not having the lifestyle you really want to have because you didn't design it properly. Didn't design it properly. And just so you know, Joe has been working with those of you tuned in late. Joe's been working with me. Joe and John been working with me for the last several months on scaling our business, our training business and his, what he's done prior to me meeting him is he took his, his training business group coaching business to how many million?

15 million annual revenue, 50 million valuation.

And then, and then they sold it. Now he's helping, helping me and helping a lot of other organizations do replicate his process. So. Oh, Tiffany Fishers, Indiana. I know where Indiana is. I have no idea where Fishers is. So thank you for being on the call. Tiffany, if you got some questions, ask. Because you know what, no matter how big or small you are, if you've got a burning desire to get something done and make a difference, here's the other side of that coin. If you can't scale, you're not going to make much of a difference. You might be the best trainer, the best business that nobody ever heard of or if they heard of you, they heard of you. And they say, well, they couldn't fulfill or they couldn't, they, they didn't nice people but their company wasn't the size that would help us. And so that's, that's what we're doing. So again, you have a little graphic here you wanted to share.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah. If you want, you can bring that screen up. And I'll say this just to clarify, I exited the company but that company still exists, so they didn't completely sell off. I just am not doing it anymore and haven't been for a few years. I've been focused more on creating these kinds of transformations with folks like you. So what I'm showing you here is this is kind of my, if you had to put it on a napkin, how do you scale anything? Now you'll notice there's two areas. Entrepreneurs can start on the top line, corporations start on the bottom line. And the reason is a lot of my corporate clients are focused more on the intrapreneurship aspect. They've already got a lot of the top line stuff done. But for entrepreneurs the first thing we start with is that vision. That's what I mentioned earlier with Blair. Then we check, can you make it a little bigger? Absolutely. So the first thing we do as entrepreneurs is we start here in vision casting. And that's where we make sure that our business model and everything else that we do going forward is in alignment with our 25 year vision. And we break that down backwards into where do we have to be in 10 years to be on track for 25 years? Where do we have to be in the next three years to hit our 10 year target? And we work backwards to make sure that those little benchmarks that we create, you could use players pert charts for this when we're starting to use it because they're just smarter than the way I've always done it. But we go back and we say, okay, well fundamentally, if we're going to be there in 25 years and we look at these markers, the business is going to have to look very different in just three years. Are we on track? Is our current model going to allow us to do that? There's a fundamental misunderstanding that most people have about the business models they've hired. And every single one has pros and cons. There's higher costs associated or there's little things that they have to do operationally. Some make more sense if you're funded, some make more sense if you're bootstrapping. Yeah.

Or at the opposite end of that spectrum too. It's like, well, I'm really good, I'm a really good coach. So I'm just going to coach a lot of people and I'm going to make a lot of money. And that's my model. And someday I'll sell my. You know, I got a friend in Southern California, he's a doctor, right. Gastroenterologist and great doctor. Spent all the years studying and build a practice. But his model was never set up to sell and it was never really set up to I even sell it in an environment. Had no vision of the environment that so changed in healthcare now that even if he had that what the traditional models of selling a medical practice wouldn't work at all anymore anyway. And so he has no more flexibility. He has to walk away from, has to walk away from a practice that he spent all this money on doing. So models are really, really important. Really important.

Absolutely. And that's where intention comes from. Right. There's only three ways to exit a business. You sell it, you pass it down to someone you care about or you trust and Then you close the doors and pretend it didn't happen. Only one way is not acceptable to me. So I'm happy if you want to hand it down to your, your kids. But there's got to be a road map forward. And the problem with selling a business is what the day you decide you want to sell, you're starting a three year journey to sell that company most often. And if you're already tired of the business, it's very difficult to maintain your enthusiasm for three years, maintain a good valuation, get out like the most money you can out of the business because it just wasn't architected properly to empower you to get the most out of the deal. So once you know your model is in alignment with where you need to go and you have your milestones laid out, basically then it's about how do we empower the business from a cash flow point of view. And that's where we start applying things like high end offer structures. We call ours the halo profit model. Players, you know, we're using that for you right now, but the idea is how do we make sure that the cash flow engine of the company is healthy enough that we can hit every single target along the way? And a lot of that comes from the careful curation and the careful alignment of higher end offers. And you're seeing that in the training space. There's this general trend where everybody's charging less and less and less and it's kind of a race to the bottom. And that creates massive cash flow crunches. It doesn't matter if you're a $150 million company or $150,000 company, no cash flow is going to crater both of you. So architecting that creatively is very, very important for our entrepreneurs here. The next is your monetization arm. This is something Blair is very, very good at, right? This is your sales process. This is the actual marketing of what you're doing. It's the messaging. It's where all of these things come to play. The reason most people fail to scale their business is they try to scale just this piece. More marketing money, more sales dollars, more whatever. And they don't realize that they haven't empowered the business to be successful because they haven't done the work that I just took you through before we got here. This is actually, in my mind, the smallest piece of the puzzle of everything else we're doing. This is the smallest, easiest thing to do. Any company can make more money, but it needs to be empowered before it can. Now, if you get to this final stage here. You've now validated your new model. You can go from being an S to being a B. Now the problems of a B are different and you start playing a bigger game.

Hold on just one second. Hold that thought for a second. I was just a shout out here. We got Eileen Zhang from Sydney, Australia. Thanks for tuning in. I have no idea what time it is there, but you have my kudos for being on here. And who else we got? Drougie. See John, you've responded to him, Floyd Marks, bunch of other people again. Listen you guys, if you've got some questions for Joe, you know he's particularly those of you in the training business, although you've worked with, I know you work with attorneys, you work with manufacturers, you work with tech companies, you work with all these guys, help helping them design. Hear the word design the model in advance. You go to the future, design your model. What's that going to look like? Part of the perk process that we'll talk about next time is you work your way backwards from that. Okay, so if that's where we're going, then how do we structure something to get there? Because again just like climb and Killy, if you just figure that I'm good at the gym and I can lift weights and I can jump rope and that's good enough for me. And you get to Killy and you start going up and trying to go up in altitude, that training alone is not going to help you. You need other skills, other techniques, other guides, other support to get there. That's again, without this kind of advice. As you said Joe, most people fail not for lack of enthusiasm, for lack of creating a model and a structure.

Correct? Yes. And that is the biggest thing when companies fail. It's almost never because they got out competed. Right. It's you. I think it was actually you who gave me that statistic.

Yeah, yeah. It was like 20%. Yeah. Small business administration said of all the failures in businesses, only 20% is due to competition. The rest is self inflicted.

I mean think about that. The vast majority of you guys spend all your time studying your competitors, only deciding your price points based on what your competitors do, deciding how you market based on what your competitors do, how you sell based on what your competitors do. And only one in five of your peers that does shut down does so because they were out competed. You do not have a competition problem, you have a strategy problem. Almost always. So now when we graduate and we have that validated idea, right, that's usually for the business that you do just what I showed you earlier and you can get to that 1 million, that 1.5 million. And then you kind of hit that ceiling. Because what gets you out of Egypt doesn't get you to the promised land. Right. So at that point, the business has to mature. This is the idea of going from S to B. And because of that, we go from these higher level concepts and we start actually seeing the business as a machine. Every great company you have ever seen, race runs innovation this way. And the way that we look at it is our idea is proven. If we start as entrepreneurs, we come straight in and we form a new hypothesis. If we make these changes to the business. Right. We already looked at our 25, our 10 year, our three year. We know what we have to like, where we have to be in three years. What's our hypothesis on how we get there? What are some assumptions? Right. And it's important that these are testable. Just like a science experiment. Right?

Right.

We set our list, our hypothesis. Here's what our intention is for the next phase of this business. This is what we believe. These are assumptions we might have around this that we need to go and check before we go and launch ourselves into this next phase. Again, market research. From there, you sit down and you evaluate the opportunity cost of scaling to that next level. Again, people love the idea of just scaling. Monetization, marketing and sales dollars. The reality is every time your company makes a leap, your opportunity costs increase. Because if you're chasing a new product line and you don't have a big team, you're taking them away from what worked to chase an aspiration. Do you have. Go ahead.

So I don't think there's anybody that's listening to this right now that doesn't have the experience of chasing shiny objects. Okay. Which incorporates two things that Joe and I both just been talking about. Number one is the reason you're chasing a shiny object is because you have a friend or a competitor that's doing it. So you're comparing yourself to them, but which is a big mistake. And the second thing is because it takes you off the main focus of the model you're trying to create and you get everybody else in your team distracted too. Like, okay, what's, what's the flavor this month?

Absolutely. And it causes chaos. It becomes more paralytic than anything else. So your opportunity cost. I mean, I know you guys know what that means, but for those of you who may be a little confused, I'm, I'm considering every single factor of Testing this new idea. If that's marketing dollars, salespeople, if it's new folks to come in and run operations for my company, if it's video production, if it's partnerships that need to be made, I'm trying to establish a minimum viable product. And I'm trying to understand, given my, my limited scope hypothesis for what this thing needs to prove out. What would it cost me? What's my guess? What would it have to cost me? Is it worthwhile to pursue it? Because a lot. And Blair, you've got great stories about this. A lot of the time we take on amazing projects and then we only realize halfway through that they're too expensive.

Too expensive, too time consuming, too arduous, too distracting from the main core. I could go right down the list. Absolutely. The classic line, it's like, seemed like a good idea at the time. But the difference between creating a model and then what you're saying is trying to proof out the model in advance as best you can. Okay, so, so for example, if I'm gonna, if I'm gonna hire other coaches, okay, how much those coaches are gonna cost, how much, how much business might I have to give them? How many marketing dollars is gonna take me to get enough leads for them to close, etc, Etc. Etc. You gotta lay all that out because just the idea of getting a bunch of other coaches to sell and coach for you, it's a tip of the iceberg that'll trap you.

Absolutely. Because then who's going to train them? Is it you? If so what are you not doing now because you're training them or if it's other, other coaches, what are they not getting to do because they're spending time training. All of these things are crippling.

Yeah, exactly. And so I don't want anybody listening to this to think, well, I'm too small, I'm just starting. No, it's never, it's never too early to design your future.

Absolutely.

Bucky Fuller said we are meant to be architects of our future, not its victims. And the problem is, for most s are self employed solo entrepreneurs, is they become a victim of their very dream and the dream just becomes a drudgery. And the drudgery overtake, overwhelms them. Okay. And it shouldn't be that way. I mean, you should be able to maintain the joy of what you're doing and help a lot of people and create market share. And it doesn't take, like I said, it doesn't take rocket science. It just takes a plan.

Right. And that's it. This is not high science. This is not ingenious thinking or the product of business school and all these different things. I dropped out of College at 18 years old and started my company. This is not because I have every advantage in the world. This is just experience. My family were originally farmers and truck drivers. Like there's, this is not. I didn't go to Harvard, I didn't go to Yale. This is, this is just the system that works in practice if you put it in place. So if you develop your opportunity costs there and you have that in front of you and you say that is worthwhile, that is something that I can pursue. It's within my budget. It's within the realm of reason. Also, if you, if it fails, I'm not going to completely go under. Please. Some of you take on way too big of an expansion all at once. Once you know what that is, the next thing is you need to set KPIs. What is your minimum viable KPI threshold? So if you're, you're measuring here success or failure, you're trying to get a good picture, right, a dashboard almost of the health of this new idea. Okay, so you might say we're going to launch this new product line that's going to expand the business. And our hypothesis is that we will be able to spend less time as coaches, trainers, whatever, but we'll be three, four times more profitable than any of the things we used to do. Great. What are the additional costs? Well, it has to be developed, it has to be completely produced. I have team costs that are going to go into it. I'm going to have to pay a sales team. I might have to market it. I have my list. Then I go, okay, how do we measure success? Well, measuring success could look like a few different things. It could be just pure dollars. It could be number of phone calls that get booked. It could be the number of total sales made. It could be lifetime customer value changes at the company. But you want to pre establish what you are measuring because if not, you will lie to yourself about how well something went. You will find a statistic that you will use to justify whatever the heck you really wanted to do in the first place, right? And once you have that, you just start, you go and run your test, you collect your data. It's important that during this time you set a predetermined length of a test, okay? Because most things work out infinitely. At some point it'll work out, but you need to realize that your money does not run as long as time can run. So you need a definite length of test. Okay. Once you get to the end of it, you evaluate it and you stick or twist. If it worked, you form a new hypothesis and run the same loop again. Right? You just change your aspiration. Now it's we made 400,000, prove the idea. The next time it's how do we make 2 million? And you just keep running the loop. Okay, awesome.

Simple. So let's just hold it. Right, let's hold that right there.

Hold that.

So again, hopefully you guys have some questions and Mark Johnson, good to see you, my friend. Welcome to, welcome to the broadcast again, for those of you that tuned in the middle, what's this all about? This is about scaling. This is about scaling your business at the top of the, at the apex of your, of your business journey from going from solo to fully scalable, or as Robert Kiyosaki would call a B bigger quadrant business, B quadrant branded business. If that's gonna happen, you're gonna have to scale it because you only have so many life force particles. And this is Joe DeMaria. He's been working with me for the better part of this year to help us scale our business to the next level. And he's taken his training company a few years back and scaled it to, and sold it for millions of dollars. Went from, what'd you say? I keep Forgetting the number $66,000 to $15 million in sales, I believe, and then sold it. And that business is still carrying on.

That's right. My principal partners there are still running that company.

Yeah, yeah. And by the way, if you want some help with this and you want to know what, what kind of a plan, you know, what kind of plan that we can help you with. If you see scrolling on the bottom on the ticker is blairsinger.com forward/plan. You know, just go to, go to the website, make an appointment with one of our guides and sit down. We'll create a, create a plan with you. Create a plan, see whether there's a match there. We can help you get to that scalable business. Because like I said, it's my passion after all these 25, 35 years of working with entrepreneurs is that a person's dreams should live. You should be able to see the fruits of your labor. Unfortunately, the stuff that Joe is talking about is not taught in school. It's not taught at universities, just like so many of the things that we all want to learn about financial literacy and health and wealth and all that stuff. So that's why we can help you on this journey. Go to blairsinger.com forward/plan. And we'd be happy to sit down with you and work it out, see what your plan looks like. So if you've got any questions, any questions here, Silio. Okay, we get, we get a shotgun from Sileo. That's a good thing. Let me ask you another question, Joe, is when you see people that are startups, I mean real startups, no financing, just starting on their own, they're refugees from a company, you know, I've had enough of my boss, I'm starting my own business, I want to get going. And some people make it, make it all the way up here. Some people do make it, but most people don't. And, and what? And so my question to you is, you've been in the trenches. What is the biggest piece of advice or the biggest pitfall people need to over overcome?

Well, the biggest thing that happens, the thing where, where most folks get stuck is they have no clear destination when they start the company, right? They just, they start the company as a service provider or a product and that is it. They just go out and try to make sales. And it's very, the existence in and of itself is very hollow. It's just whether or not the company makes money is what dictates if it's alive next month. But the reality is, if you have a very clear picture of where you want to go with it from day one, and I'm saying, even if you've never run a company before, to treat it as if, what, like what should my life look like in 25 years? What do I want my relationship with this company to be? Do I want to have sold it? Do I want to be in a different business? Do I want to still run this? Those are things that affect our decision making, right? And like entrepreneurs and even corporations to an extent, we are all the result of a series of decisions we make. Our company is a result of a series of decisions we make. And if we let those decisions be made for us or from a reactive place, it is very hard to control your results. And like Blair said, you can wake up with a company that's a very, very pretty golden cage where you are not living the life you want. You don't have a good relationship with your family or your spouse or your kids. You don't ever get to leave the house or travel or anything, which is why you wanted it, maybe freedom. But you're always stuck behind a desk and you're always managing people. And these might have never been in your vision in the first place, but unfortunately it's now the reality of your life and you can't.

So let me ask you something. I mean, that, that all that strikes home, and it should strike home for everybody. So if I'm gonna scale, so if I'm gonna start and begin, okay, so I'm gonna do vision, what I want for my business, what's the first thing to focus on? Like, how many people do I want to touch, how much money I want to make? Just my lifestyle, you know, speak to, just for a minute about mission or, or something like, because, because somebody said, well, I, I don't want to, you know, my 19 year old, I want a Lamborghini. I go, you need to go work a little bit more.

Yeah, of course.

But, but, you know, where, where do you, where do you. When it comes to scaling, do I start thinking about people? Do I start thinking about reach? Do I start thinking about impact? I think about money. What's your thought?

Yes, My, my thought is that when, when you look at your 25 year vision, you're almost never in the same company you started in 25 years later. Like, you're an exception to the rule of. Right. So 25 years down the road, I don't, I'm not having you look at what you want this company to be. I'm having you look at what you want your life to be. Because again, the company is a machine. The company is not its own, like life force. It's hired to do a specific job. The issue is that you haven't given it a specific enough brief to build the machine that can actually solve the problem. Right. If it's an equation, you've got a thousand variables, and that makes it a heck of a lot harder to solve. So for you, I say, okay, well, what do you want life to look like in 25 years, Blair? Do you want to be retired? Do you want to be spending time, like more time with family? Do you want it like, what do you want it to look like so you can paint that whole picture like, okay, well, where do we have to be in 10 years to be on track? Well, maybe you still want to be retired or maybe you want to still be running the company, but in a different capacity. Well, what it starts to show us, and we go back to three years and then to present day, what it starts to show us is there's different decisions that have to be made at the company. If everything happens at the, if all money is made because Blair is on stage right. And Blair, in three years, wants to be off stage. That's not a thing that, you know, a thousand days from now, we just decide tomorrow's the day Blair gets off stage. Right. There has to be a plan. And if that's the case, if Blair's stepping down, who's going to step up? That's where internal leadership comes from. It's where systems, processes, operations starts to matter. It's where the messaging and the marketing of the business subtly needs to shift. All of that stuff has to happen today to empower Blair three years down the road to do what he wants to do. Right, Right.

Well said. Well said. You know, and, and I think that it's, it's, it's the soul searching and it's, it's the prognostication that most people don't do. And, you know, and I, you're right. I mean, I, I'm an exception because I've been in the, I've been in this thing for a long time. But if I were to tell you that I sat down and I, I properly set out a model for this thing in the beginning, I'd say you're wrong, because I didn't. And so the reason I'm so passionate about this journey is that, is that we've done, we, we. We've made great strides in doing all this. But it never ceases to amaze me that what you said is the business is a machine. And without the proper brief, that machine doesn't know what to do. It doesn't know where it's supposed to go. It can't read your mind. So, so you gotta design this thing as. Not an extension of you, but as, As a, as a tool or an ally or a partner that's gonna work with you to get you where you wanna go. Because it's not gonna happen. It's not gonna happen automatically, is what you're saying.

Of course, I, I like the big reminder I always give folks in my audience, right? Or my clients, my students, is you're not in the training business, you're not in the marketing business, you're not in the service provider like you are in the leverage business. And every decision you make gives you more leverage or less leverage. And not having a plan gives you less leverage. Not knowing how you want to exit gives you less leverage. Not knowing where you want this company to be in 3 years, 10 years, 25 years to give you the life that you want gives you less leverage. So the idea, like everyone that's ever gone into being an entrepreneur You've done it with a dream. It's been because you hated working for a boss or you wanted. You had something to prove, a chip on your shoulder, and you wanted to show the world. And that's all great. And I totally believe in that. And I think to an extent, I did the same thing. Right. I think I started mine out of a little arrogance, thinking that I could do anything, that I was always the exception. But you're not empowering yourself to be successful. You're not creating real leverage until you make those kinds of decisions.

Yeah, you know what, you said it really well. I just highlighted this in my own notes. Hopefully you guys taking a lot of notes, because I've been taking notes. So hopefully you're taking notes. But you said you're in the leverage business. And I think that if there's a summary to what we've been talking about, Tiffany says this is amazing info. That I agree. Tiffany, thank you. Is that we are in the. As a business owner, the minute you decide that you are going to be in control of your future, you're now in the leverage business. And to look at every decision is how do I leverage, create more leverage for myself. More, more. And again, whether that's money, whether that's furthering a mission, whether that's getting out to more people or getting yourself to an ideal lifestyle or passive income, whatever that is, if you look at it from the fact that I am in the leverage business, in your mind, everything's going to look a little different. You're going to have a different filter across your glasses. You can see things different, you're going to make different decisions. And you know what I think? I think that your business, if it has a personality, will be happier with you because your business doesn't like getting beat up by you. Your business doesn't like being scolded by you. Your business doesn't want you to be thinking, well, I don't want to do this anymore and it's not worth it. It doesn't want to feel unwanted. So that's a really good piece. And we have one question here. The question is, how do you know when it's the right time to scale?

So timing is an interesting thing with, with scale, right. Which is if you have a plan, it's already happening. You know, it is a de facto result of having a good plan of knowing where you're going because your decisions are incrementally moving you towards that goal all the time. So if you've never put a plan in place and you're wondering if you're ready to scale. The first thing I would ask you is where do you want to go? What is this business supposed to do? Because if you know Blair, like you said, your son, he wants the Lamborghini. Okay, well, if for some people that is the answer, it's I want this company to be a billion dollar organization. I want a Lamborghini. I want my kids to be in Lamborghinis. I want for 10 generations my family to be wealthy. I want this, this, this, this and this. I go, okay, that's fine. And for some others that are on this call, maybe it's, I want to, I want to reach 10 million people. I want to change their lives. I want to be a transformative force in the world. That's valuable too, because the business isn't judging you. The business is a machine. The business is non judgmental. It doesn't care what you want or don't want. It just needs to know what it's making. It's a machine. You dictate what it does. And the decisions you make running it every day are what is going to produce that result. So when you say, how do I know I'm ready? The first thing I would say is, well, where do you want to go? Are you close? Are you far? If you're far away, you start looking at what does incremental change really look at. Like is the model I'm using today, for example. I'll give you an easy one. Let's say you want to be a billionaire and today you're running a training business that's making $100,000 a year. That's a big gap, right? So the easiest thing that we can do is we can look at it and we could say, is the model we've chosen conducive to us being a billionaire in 25 years? Probably not. So you might look instead at other business models that are out there that could empower you to do that. Maybe you decide to pivot out of pure training and into training and software. Maybe you partner into a web application company. Maybe you start seeking active partnership over just building a bigger training business. Because not a lot of people run a training business for 25 years and hit a billion dollars. You just might choose to be in that business over and over every day and architect yourself into a corner where you never get to reach that goal. And you might build a wonderful, beautiful life making millions of dollars. But if it is not anywhere near the real deep seated, heartfelt gold that you had, you can make $20 million. But if you wanted to be a billionaire, it means nothing. Awesome, right?

Tiffany Greeley just said I just had the biggest aha Ever. Wow. I'd love to know what that is.

Yeah, I'd love to hear it.

So if you're still there, Tiffany, type it in there. I'd love to hear what it is. So, so thank you, Joe. This is, this has been more than bargain, more than bargained for. So thank you. You know, I think that it's a conversation that most entrepreneurs never even know about, never let alone have it or when they do have it. Like I said, it's step two of our step one and two of the ape, our apex model is like, what do you want? What's the mission? And then what's the reality? And I think that, that this all falls into that category. Even though scaling is up here, even though scaling is up here, it's got to be considered over here. Well, you know, I got it all backwards, but down there at the beginning, right? And it's a conversation. It's like some of those conversations that you just know you should have but you don't have. And I think that again, if you, those, if you want to have that conversation and, and begin to plot a course to get there, you know, just go to blairsinger.com forward/plan. Let us sit down. And Joe's on our team and John's on our team who's also in this, in, in, in the chat here and, and some other great, great coaches that we can let us help you at least design a plan, you know, to take a look at where you want to go and ask the right questions. Because be my goal for everybody that's got a consistent dream of what they want to do and how they want to help to be able to get it and to get it in a way that's elegant, that matches your lifestyle and gives you all the goodies that you want. Because it can, it can be done. It can absolutely can be done. And Joe, you, you've demonstrated that in your own businesses, in your own life.

I appreciate that. Can I make an observation about that too for you?

Sure.

What Blair is showing you behind him right now is it looks like a series of steps. Okay. And I think a lot of the time when we're in the first few years of our business or Even if we're 10 years in and we're looking at that next level, that next level, that next level, we're telling ourselves this, this story that this is all event based, that you're waiting for something to happen to trigger the next thing. And fundamentally, that is just not true. Right. Fundamentally, what you're seeing behind Blair is a journey. It's not steps. It's not singular events. It's not a daisy chain. It's an ebb and flow. And that journey can take you eight steps. It could be five years, it could be one year, it could be 40 years. You might get stuck seven steps in. It's a journey. You don't get to just appear at step five. And if you don't feel like you are far enough down the road to take this seriously, I guarantee you that's exactly when you should be having that conversation. Because it is the stuff that you do today, when you're at base camp, when you're at the bottom of the mountain, that is going to dictate just how far you go. It's going to dictate just how much you. You grow or scale, just how close you get to your apex, your goals, your summit. Those things are not to be ignored. Right. You don't get to just break them. In case of an emergency, break glass. You know, it is something that has to be intentional. And if you want to make a difference in the world or if you want to make a billion dollars, it makes no difference. It starts with intention. It goes to commitment. And it's a journey you take on. And if you want to do it fast, you definitely want a guide. If you want to do it even faster, you want somebody that's willing to sit down with you directly and give you the plan. So what Blair is offering you with this Blairsinger.com plan, there's an opportunity that most people don't get. I never had it. Blair never had it. But he's gifting that to you. And I. For me, if I could go back in time and take that call, I would take that call. Thank you.

Well said, Joe. And again, thank you. Thank you for today. Thank you for the amazing wisdom and for giving people an insight into the part of the journey that is to going kind of behind the curtain that people don't talk about, because so many people, so many people don't. Don't even know about it to even talk to you about it. So. So thank you for that. And all of you that showed up today, thank you for. I got from Majid from Iran. Well, it's good to hear from you, too. Okay, so we have people from all over. Make sure you share this with some of, with other people. It's on. It's on YouTube, this is on Facebook, this is on on Twitter, on LinkedIn and, and share it with other people. Most importantly, if as, as Joe said, if we, if I would have had the opportunity to sit down with somebody who knew what they were talking about to help me design my future, I could truly be the architect. Now am I, do I regret my journey? Not at all. But if I could do that journey in half the time, why would I not do that? And why would you not do it? So check it out. Go to blairsinger.com forward/plan and take up the offer. Okay. We'd love to work with you. So Joe, thank you. Thank all of you guys. Next week we're going to talk a little bit more about the next step on the journey. Tiffany said that her biggest haha was the plan. The plan. How simple is that? That's awesome. All right, thanks you guys. We'll see you next week. Be amazing.

Thanks guys.