What's the Biggest Bottleneck In Your Fund? Investment Fund Management Tips

Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Today we're talking about something that's been rattling around in my brain the last little bit. This last month I've been talking about a lot, but we've been growing quite a bit. My fund has doubled size in the last 2 months, and so we've been hiring people. I've been shifting people around, moving people. I think I've hired, I don't know, 7 or 8 people in the last 2 months amid coronavirus, if you can believe that. And something that's been just ringing through my head, and I know you guys have, you know, you guys are all running funds and businesses right now, is It's hard to manage people, right? It is a difficult thing to give people tasks, keep them on point. It's a full-time job to be a manager, right? It's why you have managers. And so we were, you know, me and my business partner were talking a lot and we're trying to figure out where to move people and what pieces and stuff we could do. And we had one guy, amazing dude, he works for us. And we, for whatever reason, you know, we were busy and stuff and we had him working on t-shirt designs. Actually, this is for Investment Fund Secrets, this kind of community, right? So he's working on t-shirt designs, which are actually pretty cool, they turned out. But after he— so he He did like 4 or 5 mock-ups, he's actually really good at that and he does lots, lots of different stuff and I was talking to my business partner at the end, I was like man, like was that really his highest and best use of time? You know, he probably spent 2 or 3 days doing that and getting all— I mean not fully but that was one of his projects, right, that took time and we both said no, no way. And something in my mind that's been rattling around is what is your highest and best use of time? For everybody, myself, my partners, my employees, What is their highest and best use of time? And right now, we're in the startup phase, right? Young, we're scrappy, we're scaling, trying to grow, and we need everybody focused on one goal and one thing, and we have all of our revenue goals split out for each month and week and quarter, and so I— and we started to do this in our team meetings, is ask the question, does that project get us closer to our quarterly goal of this much revenue, and is that your best and highest use of time? Those are the 2 questions I kind of ask and let them answer and see and for the, you know, the guy that was doing the t-shirts, it was not, dude. He is an incredible guy, can do lots of different things. We had him working on t-shirt designs of all things, right? He could have been doing 20 other things that would— are more profitable to the business than that and so that got me thinking too about myself and I actually realized this last 3 weeks that I was the biggest bottleneck in our company, me. I was looking at what was going on, what was slowing down our business and I looked at it. I was like, man, those are all Things that— and I had this big kind of, you know, man in the mirror moment of like, man, that's all my fault. There were, you know, things that needed to be filmed, contracts that needed to be signed, there were emails that needed to be responded to different partners and stuff that needed my approval and I hadn't done them because I had all my hands everywhere and we're hiring and just growing and scaling and I realized I was the biggest bottleneck. And so we sat down, we restructured some things of hey, this email, let's have it go to somebody else so we can get things done more efficiently. I guess unbottlenecked me and I actually hired a new person to come help me me essentially take off a lot of stuff and so that things can get done more efficiently. That was a kind of an interesting moment to say, man, I am the biggest problem to growth in this business right now, which is a— that's a good problem to have, but it was a problem that I think a lot of business owners don't realize. And in my fund, same thing. It's happened, you know, multiple times, and I finally realized it's me. Like, I gotta figure this out. So we've hired new people and given tasks and delegated better. And it's so hard as a small business owner to say, I like— there's things that I know I love to do and like I can do them, I think, the best. I want it done a certain way and if I give them to an employee, they're probably going to do it, you know, 80% as good as I could do it and that's okay. First off, that's the feeling but usually what happens is you give it to somebody and they start out, they're doing 80% what you could do but you keep helping them and teaching them and they end up doing it 100%, maybe 120% of what you could do because they focus on that one thing and they actually get better than we do as the entrepreneur. As you know, as entrepreneurs and small business owners, we have so many skill sets and so many random things. I would probably say I'm a 5 out of 10, I'm a 5 skill set on like 8 different things in the business and I've started to hire on people that are 7s or 8s or 9s in those skill sets and putting them in those pieces because it unbottlenecks me and they actually can probably do the job more efficiently than I can but highest and best use of time. On a different note, looking at if you haven't started a business yet, if you're thinking about it starting your fund or first syndication deal, what is your highest and best use of time right now? You spend, let's call it 8 to 10 hours a day, at work doing something right now, hopefully, to make money, right? The goal of work is to make money. If you weren't making money doing something, you probably wouldn't do it unless you're like a school teacher and you, you know, love teaching kids, which is awesome, right? There's other— some professions, but most people probably listen to this podcast, I'm guessing you go to work every day to make money primarily. Yeah, you like your job. Yeah, you like the people you work with, but if they weren't paying you money, you probably wouldn't go. If you have 10 hours a day you're spending to make money, okay, what's your highest and best use of time in those 10 hours? Is it continuing to work, maybe a great job, you're gonna grow in that job and maybe get equity or shares, whatever it is, or be a partner. Looking over the next, and I'm not talking short term, I'm talking, you know, not 1 year, I'm talking 5 years, 10 years in that profession. Do you think looking back your highest and best use of time would be trying to, you know, do well as an analyst, make it big, maybe be a partner, a VP one day, or looking back and saying, hey, the next decade I could probably start 8 businesses in that time. Do you think one of them is gonna Be bigger, one of those 8, that's how I looked at it. One of those 8 is gonna be bigger than what I'll make on this slow trajectory from scaling my career. I decided my best and highest use of time was starting my own business. It's funny, you look at guys like Jeff Bezos, right, or Bill Gates, these richest men to ever live, right? Jeff Bezos though, if you look back at the first, let's call it 2 years of Amazon, when he wasn't making— he was making zero, right? No money he was making, but if you look at his entire career, how long they ran Amazon and put out his hourly, like, so he's worth, I don't know, it's like $120 billion. He's like a billion dollars now or something, right? And you split that out and timed out all the hours he spent on Amazon for the last 20 years, what would be his hourly rate if you just, you know, divided that out? And to be a— just to put this in perspective, if you made a dollar every second, so $60 a minute, $360 an hour, pretty good hourly rates, it'd be about $72,000, I think it's $72,000 a day you made. It would take you 31 years To become a billionaire. 31 years to hit a billion seconds, okay? So Jeff Bezos in 20 years has made $120 billion. You look at his first 2 years of startup where he wasn't making any money but if you average it out, he was actually making every day, you know, probably near— I don't even know the math and I probably should have done that before. I would say about $5 to $10 million a day. Wow, right? He didn't know that at the time but that's what was going on and looking at your highest and best use of time, Now, that's pretty, you know, to start Amazon and be the— that's pretty big but let's say, you know, your business does moderately well and it ends up making you, you know, $50 million, right? Okay, let's look at your best and highest use of time when building that business from the ground up. What would be your hourly wage and that sweat equity at the beginning when it's averaged out over time? This is a concept I've been thinking about a lot with employees, what's their best and highest use of time, myself, What should I be focusing on? For me, it's pretty much growing the business. For me, like the fund, it's new clients, new deals, and then also new investors. That's like the 2 things I've been focusing on, and recently it's actually just been— I've been more on the money side. I have a partner doing the new deals part. We've kind of split those jobs so we can focus on one thing, and I've been doing a lot of money raising and capital structure and bank financing, all that kind of stuff, and he's been doing the deal side of things. What is my highest and best use of time? What other things can I systemize and build systems around So that can free up time for me to do things that only I can do. Hope that helps. Something I've been thinking about. I think that, uh, that mindset has helped me a lot and helped our employees. I keep telling them that— what's your highest and best use of time? And I think it's helped us all grow faster. Anyways, let me know if you guys have any questions, comments. Hit me up on Instagram, Bridger_Pennington, or go to investmentfundseekers.com to learn more of our stuff. Anyways, thank you guys, and I'll see you later. Bye.