The Secrets To Becoming A Category King: Advice I Got From Tony Robbins

It's a flawed strategy. You should not try to get a sliver of a market cap. You should try to be the category king of a market that's much smaller. That's how you play business big. Now, if you're new to the show, my name is Bridger Pennington. I currently run 2 8-figure funds, a blockchain investment fund and also a GP stakes fund where we're actually investing into our students that come through Fund Launch. We've done over $35 million in revenue through Fund Launch. We have 1,000 fund managers we are incubating in our Black Card Incubator. Now, Back to this event. So, I show up. Now, this event was not cheap. It's a quarter million dollars to go to this thing. It's for the year. There's a number of events throughout the year and it's invite only. You have to be invited and interviewed to come. I was interested about coming to this. So, I show up. I was kind of like, ah, is it going to work? Is it going to not be? And I walk in the room and it's phenomenal. Over the couple of days I was there, I realized every person in this room was selected because they are some of the top, if not the top person in the world at their thing. We had Dean Graziosi who runs the event. His last 10 events he's done on a virtual Zoom, him and Tony, they've had over a million people in live attendance on 10 events in a row. They did the Matthew McConaughey last year. I think that had like 2.5 million people live on Zoom. They are, I think, by far the largest record holder of Zoom streaming like ever by far. And then he sat— he sits down and like, let me show you how I did this. Let's talk through how I How we got people to show up, what we did, like how do we, you know, sell people on those webinars? What do we do there? We had Pace Morby, who is redoing real estate to a great degree. Pace has been a friend for a long time and absolutely impressed with what he has built in his Sub2 community and how he's structured stuff there. And we actually have a lot of people that join Sub2 and then join Fund Launch because they're wanting— they do the creative finance and they want to go build a fund around it. We help them build the fund. We had Jim Kwik, who wrote the book Limitless. He's the guy that, you know, the mentality coach makes your brain unlock, which is very cool. You had, you know, other people like Andy Elliott. If you've seen Andy Elliott online, and I've never met Andy Elliott, so I met him for the first time. And, you know, guy like him online is very— and it's funny, most of these guys you see online, Garrett White, Sean Whalen, Andy Elliott, that are very extreme on the internet. They're yelling, they're loud. You meet them in person, they're like the nicest people on earth. Always, always. The more extreme they are online, I feel like in person, they're always like way nicer than you'd ever anticipate. But it was fun to hear from him. So I'm gonna give you a few takeaways from this. Number 1, Big takeaway I had from this day. Now, those are the kind of the notable people social media-wise. We had other guys that run huge tech businesses. We had one of the guys, he has like one of the biggest exporters out of Alberta, Canada. Another guy that runs a huge manufacturing business. There's very, very cool people in this room. What I found was all of these people had mastered, mastered one of the 4 pieces of leverage. And the 4 keys of leverage for any business. Number 1 is capital finance. Like, allows a lot of leverage in your business. You can lever up when you have capital. Number 2 is technology. Code. A number of people in there were writing, you know, code, had tech platforms or softwares. Obviously, code is a huge leverage piece. You write a piece of code once and it serves you forever, theoretically. The 3rd one is labor or people. Pace Morby has used this better than anybody else. I was sitting down. We went through all of Pace's funnels. I went to his office. He actually, their team broke down our funnels with Funnel Launch. And I'm like, man, you know, what can we do to get to their level or what they're doing every month? And I was like, their stuff kind of looks like our stuff. It's all kind of the same. I mean, the way we structured our ads, they're like, it's nothing special. Besides, Pace has an army of people, labor in his community. It's truly a community where they really help one another. They do meetups. Pace, he's like, I know the first name. I went to my event. I know the first name of 300 people in the audience. While he was speaking, he called out 300 100 people by their first name. I mean, the dude is phenomenal at remembering names, remembering people, building a community. I was like, man, he has used labor to an incredible degree. Andy Elliott, you could argue in that same camp. But the final one is media. So again, finance, tech, labor, and then media. Those are the 4 pillars of leverage that any business can use over the last century, century and a half. OK? This is the— there's no more. There's no less. There's 4 pieces of leverage. They all fall into those buckets. The last one is media. People who use media to a huge degree. Think of the Kardashians. So we had Tony Robbins there. We had Dean. We had guys with huge social medias. We had Jordan Peterson come on live. He has used social media to be one of the most influential people on planet Earth. And so one of my big takeaways is like they just doubled, tripled down on one core competency. Furthermore, I looked at, you know, a lot of these guys and they're OK at the other categories. But when you really talk to them, like, what business are you in? Oh yeah, we help people with this. Well, what do you do? What business are you in as the founder? Well, oh, all I spend my time on is media. That's all I do. It's just media. I wake up every day, I just do media. Or the other guy's like, oh, all I spend my time on is labor. I teach, I coach, I train good people. I know I'm in the labor business. The other guy in tech, what do you do? Oh, we work on the code. Man, the code, the technology, that's my leverage piece as the owner of the business. I'm like, Man, that's amazing. Last one is finance. What do you— I know I spend all my time raising capital. I spend all my time getting more leverage through capital. And I've known this before, but meeting some of the best people on the earth, I'm like, huh, they built these companies. They get spread thin. And I love Ryan Holiday. So, he came and spoke to us. Again, it's about 25 people. So, small group. Ryan Holiday, he's the author of The Ego Is the Enemy, The Obstacle Is the Way, if you've heard of these books. He's one of the— he has The Daily Stoic. Online. Very incredible author. I've heard him speak a few times. He wrote an incredible book that you guys should all pick up is Trust Me, I'm Lying. Trust Me, I'm Lying talks about media manipulation. He wrote this book 10 years ago and it has proven— I actually asked him a question. I was like, hey, give me the update on Trust Me, I'm Lying. He goes, honestly, the update is everything I wrote in the book came true plus 10 times worse. And it is the manip— and he walks through— he was on American Apparel's like I think he was their chief marketing officer. He walks through how they manipulated media to get outcomes for their business. How— anyways, very interesting book. It changed the way I thought about the world. That's how impactful it is. Like, it really changed me. Trust Me, I'm Lying. Very interesting book. So, Ryan's there. He gave this quote though. I love this. And he's talking about himself in this, but he shared a quote from somebody else as well. He said, the funny thing about getting successful at one thing, you then have people come and have you do other things you're not so successful at. He goes, for example, I'm a writer. I've gotten really good at writing. I'm a bestselling author. I've written millions of copies sold. And guess what? Most of my time last year was not spent writing. It was spent on TV shows. It was spent on speaking on stages, on podcasts, on anything but writing. And he goes, it's funny, like, you're a really good chef. You're really good at cooking and you're really good at your thing. And what happens? You grow a business and what do you end up doing? Pretty much everything else besides cooking. You're managing employees, you're training teams, you're building a restaurant, you're trying to get on TV, you're trying to get sponsors. You're doing everything else besides, number one, what you love, and number two, what you're really good at, which is just cooking. And I thought about this with me. I've seen this drastically in my business. I've been pulled in 100 different ways. And I came home on Monday and I talked to my team and I said, I need to go back to what I'm really good at for this business, what I actually provide to this organization. And I have a number of things I laid out, like these are the things that I think have made us successful, the things that will continue to make us successful, and that I can't spend time focusing on the finance team or the client success or the customer service team, which I've I can help out. I'm happy to help on whatever. But where is the highest leverage point in my business? And for me, I'm like, I'm going to double down on content. When I do webinars for Funnel Launch, at least when I do webinars, when I do calls, when I do podcasts and stuff, we make more money. We just do. When I make content, when I work with my clients on Zoom, we make more money, bar none. Like the 4 levers, media is huge. I now have booked out my calendar to spend significant portions of time producing content. And funny, talking to Alex Hormozi's team, you know, these guys that are business people, they spend the majority of their days doing content almost every day. That's all they do. So I was like, dang, I got to do that. I'm going to double down on that. The other side would be I run my funds. So it'd be the finance side, raising capital. And I think media and raising capital can go hand in hand because we do, we have 506 funds. So we actually raise capital publicly. We can because of the SEC regulation. Tomorrow after filming this, we're doing a big livestream call for following Partners. We're raising capital, doing a final close for Fund Launch Partners. We're constantly raising capital for Ugly Unicorn. That's an open-ended fund where investors can join at the end of every month. As we get leveraged through media, it's crazy. And that was very interesting to me. The funny thing about being successful is you do anything else besides be successful. So, we had another speaker come, Al Ramadan. He wrote the book Play Bigger. We are now, I've read this book years ago, but we are rereading it as a company because of how impactful his speech was. And I'm just like, we got to reread this. The concept of the book, of Play Bigger, talks about in their business categories out there, in at least in tech and most other categories, but specifically tech because it's easy to track because of public markets. 74% of the market share of a category goes to one company. If you— and sometimes it's 80% or 90% goes to one company, but at least two-thirds or three-fourths go to one company. Take search, right? You have Google Search. 90% of online search goes to Google. One company. Then you have Bing. You have Yahoo. You have all these other companies, right? Bing, by the way, look at 2011. Microsoft spends $1 billion developing Bing. They're going to come develop, get market share, crack back at Google. We're going to take back. They launched Bing. Guess what? 10, 15 years later, Bing, Total market cap of the search volume is less than 5%. Yahoo, less than like 2% of total search, right? One company dominates the category. So, the question he asks and we ask each other is, or I've asked on stage before, is what's the second largest search engine out there? The answer is YouTube, which now is owned by Google, but before it was YouTube. Interesting. The second largest search engine on earth is YouTube. It's a new category. Of search for videos. It's— search for videos on YouTube is much larger than Bing, much larger than the other ones. And it created a new category. And this category came out and Vimeo came out, Wistia, these other categories. But YouTube dominated 90% of video search. And that's why Google said, we got to buy a category king. They went and acquired YouTube and brought it into their house. Right now, there is another dominant threat for search, and that is ChatGPT. And AI-generated models. Again, it's not— if you try to go compete with someone head-to-head, it doesn't work. The category king wins the entire category. If you want to be successful in business, according to his book, he tells you should go create a new category and then be the category king of that category. We talked about this years ago with Fund Launch. We said, hey, we want to be the category king of the untraditional fund manager, someone who's launching a fund that's untraditional. And I believe we have actually dominated this category. There's a bunch of— now there's new competitors, but they all have scraps. We dominate, I would call 75% to 80% of the market for untraditional managers. Go to Fund Launch. And now as you grow, we're looking to do market expansion, go into other categories as well. But dominating that category, king, is crucial. When people come and pitch, you've seen pitches like this before. You know, if we just get 1% of Amazon's, you know, global market cap of, you know, online retail sales, we'll be, Millionaires. It's a flawed strategy. You should not try to get a sliver of a market cap. You should try to be the category king of a market that's much smaller. That's how you play business big. Amazon's a great example he shared as well. Sorry. Wow, we're talking about Amazon. Here we go. Amazon started at bookstores. They became a category king of buying books online. Then they started to expand into other ancillary businesses online, but still became— made sure they were a category king every time. Over time, obviously, we know Amazon, I think, dominates. It's like 50%. What if— I might pull it up. So in this category, Amazon is by far the category king. 75%, 80% plus of just all online transactions in the world. Amazon has 37% of just total, like every dollar that's spent online, $0.37 goes to Amazon. Which is just bonkers. OK? Then they did it. So, they're dominant category king of just online retail. They're +75%. Just total anything online, they're about 40%. Additionally, they went and they've now done market expansion. They launched, for example, AWS. They became the category king in data storage with AWS and server farms. Boom! Huge category. Now they're launching it. They have other ancillary categories they're going in, but they do market expansion by being category kings. It's a losing game to try to go into a red ocean category and go against you. So he walked us through an exercise together naming the problem. What is the problem that you are solving in this business? He then mentioned, try to name your category. Try to define your point of view. He's like, go ask all your employees on Monday, what's your business category? What's your point of view about that category? He goes, I bet you, you'll get dozens of different answers, if not hundreds of different answers. And because everyone's like, oh yeah, we know what we're doing. But do we? Do we know which category we are? We did this at Funnel Launch. We was like, what's our ERA system offer? I did it with a room of my top guys, guys and gals. Everyone had a different answer. We couldn't even come up. This is like my top people in my company at Funnel Launch. We all had different answers. Okay? So, we're working through this like, no, we gotta hone in. What is the— define the category we are in. So, a couple of things we've come up with so far. Our business category is we serve the untraditional man manager in the fund creation space. That's the business category. Our point of view is that any smart investor or business owner, big or small, can scale their business through a fund. That's the point of view we take. And our focus is to get someone their first fund launched as quickly as possible. Okay? Now we're working through these. These might change or like tweaked a little bit. That's generally the point of view we're going at as with Play Bigger. I'll give you one more example from Play Bigger as well with Al. So he shared on stage, he shared the story of Ryan Smith. So Ryan Smith, if you don't know, runs Qualtrics. He's a Utah guy. I'm in Utah. We know him well. He owns the Utah Jazz. He's now a billionaire. In 2016, he came to Al Ramadan and said, I have a problem. People see me as a SurveyMonkey, but just better. I go into an office to try to pitch some CEO or company to do surveys and they go, yeah, that's nice. Go talk to some low-level employee in the basement. Because yeah, you can do some surveys, but it's not important for the CEO of the company or the C-level executives to talk about this. And he goes, it's very, very hard to get out of this rut. We're just a— and he goes, we're not that. We're trying to be something different. At the time, they were about a billion-dollar market cap. SurveyMonkey was about a billion. I think they had another competitor that was like $2-point-something billion. So, Al goes on and he shares, we actually worked with them. And he goes, let's define a new category. What are surveys solving? What are they actually doing? And they came up with, they're solving the experience of what someone feels or knows when they touch your product or your company. That's what a survey is solving for. And they said, let's define a new category called experience management. This is how you manage the experience of how people come through. Now, that's nice to just change the name of your company. But furthermore, he took his whole dev teams. They took their— they had a big long line of product stack of all the features they had. They started to put them into segments. Silos. So they said, let's do experience management for customers, experience management for employees, experience management for vendors. And they did these different bucket categories. I think they had 4 bucket categories. And they relaunched essentially their whole company as with this EX, you know, or XM thing. If you look on Qualtrics, it's all around XM, experience management. And they said, we're going to define this new class called experience management. Qualtrics relaunches this brand. Ryan goes into a meeting with a C-level, and these are big contracts, $1 million-plus contracts they get from these companies. He walks in and says, you believe that your customer satisfaction rate is 80%. What if I told you it's actually 6%? Across the board, data tells us that people have a good experience with your customers, clients, all that kind of stuff, 6% of the time. And we can solve this for you through a thing called experience management. We can manage the experience of your entire journey. The CEO would not only just say, hey, I want to work, I want to help on that, I want to hire you. I'm going to take on this job personally. This is the most important thing in my company right now. I want to make sure the experience is amazing and I'm going to work with you directly. Qualtrics completely changed their business. A few years later, they had separated themselves from SurveyMonkey. They sold to SAP for, I believe, $6.5 billion. So 6x their market cap. As of today, I just looked up, at least on Google, they report about $11 billion market cap. Wow. They are by far the category king. SurveyMonkey is still about $1 billion. The other competitors, you know, $1.5 billion, $2 billion. They 10x, 11x their market cap in a few years by defining their category and restructuring and orienting their business to become a category king. Salesforce has done this. Amazon has done this. Apple has done this. You look at any big business, they dominate the category and they separate themselves from their competition by not competing with them by being in a new category. Huge takeaway from, from this event.