How To Get To $10m Without Stressing Or Giving Up Your Life

Business is simply the marriage of supply and demand. We go to where there is demand, we go out and bring the supply. We're paid for bringing them together. And so often as entrepreneurs, we have an idea, we fall in love with the idea, and then we go out trying to hawk the idea without there ever being demand or sometimes even supply. It's just we're pursuing an idea and we waste so much time and energy to do that. So in your case, or your case or your case, the job is to create the supply where there's already demand, and then you go out and raise the capital to be able to fund that, but not until you've bridged that gap.

Today we're with our backroom Mastermind, which is kind of like my shark tank. And these are all entrepreneurs who have something cool up in the world. They have a vision of getting $10 million a year in top line. Some of them are at a million dollars, some are at five, some of them are not yet at a million. But they have something cool up and moving in, going through the biggest levers in their business for them to pull next. So a lot of times entrepreneurs will get to a certain level and then get stuck, or they get overwhelmed with the details of their business, or they come into capital constraints. And so it's our job, and mine is somebody who wants to invest in students companies to clear those bottlenecks. So we're constantly pulling them.

Up the chain. And you get the benefit of being in a room of people who have done it before or people who are way ahead of you on that process. So we have these regular check ins throughout the year as part of the backroom to clear those bottlenecks so that you're constantly moving up the chain and have a company that's more scalable and sellable and more enjoyable for you to run. So this is our quarterly check in with the backroom mastermind, our little shark tank that I'm actively looking to be a part of these businesses. So most masterminds are just buddies getting together, chatting about business. There's a ton of value to that. I'm in groups for that specifically. But what we try to do is I have an investment fund that exists to invest in businesses that I advise because I know that if I curate the entrepreneur and if I work with the entrepreneur, that that business is going to grow. So we raise money to invest in those businesses and we have this board of advisors that will get people into retail or partner them with influencers, help them smash it on Amazon. So we Bring in this board of advis and basically incubate a business so the members here get the benefit of being in that room. But there's also the goal for myself of I want to invest in these businesses and I've got a thousand ideas and not enough time to deploy them, not enough time to do all them. So I'm looking for partners on those as well to work with them to go do the next business idea. Because I always work better when I'm with partners and when I'm with people that I enjoy working with. So this is not just a come hang out with your buddies group. This is also a find an investor, maybe an advisor, maybe a board of advisors who are going to incubate that business into way more than it would be if it was just something that you, you did on your own. So that's what makes this different than your traditional just get into a room and hang out with your buddies type of a mastermind. If information was the problem, we would all be billionaires with perfect absolute.

So I have made the mistake of spending years of my life creating content.

I consider that a mistake and a failure in my entrepreneurial career. Whereas your job front facing is to go get in front of and inspire the people who want to take an action and then charging to help them take the action.

So your goal is not to bring anyone on their call to adventure and you don't need to handhold anyone for free. Sam, it's your job to charge for the value and the value is them taking action. And by them spending dollars on the action, they are more likely to take the action. So this is why I don't think content.

Like teaching content really changes people or helps your business. You're getting them to invest in you. Correct. And that could be the purchase of a physical product, it could be the purchase of an info product. It could be signing up for an event.

We were having the discussion at our quarterly meeting.

Chris, I think you posed the question. We were considering doing a course, something like the 12 month millionaire building a million dollar business in 12 months. And the question was posed. Our most watched video on YouTube is.

Building a physical products brand to a million dollars in 12 months. If someone just watched that, why would they buy a course for the exact same information? Because that is the process of taking action and that is where the value is actually created. Does that make sense when I say that? Not so much.

Which part? Well, it kind of means you're going to be challenged if you engage more fully. Is that what you're Getting at? What I'm getting at is that you as a business owner or you as a business are not required to give away a ton of teaching content before an action is taken. And you might do your customers a disservice by doing so.

The action is that a ten minute warning? Okay. That is.

The action and the value happens when a transaction is made.

That YouTube video was great content though, at least for me personally, in terms of, of getting me more comfortable with your brand and got me into the capitalism conference and then eventually here, the.

Back room.

Flipping that a little bit to say that there is, I found value.

In that content that you shared to get me more comfortable making that next purchase decision, which is the conference.

Yep. And so where I've made the mistake in my career is I've said, great, somebody watched this, what's the next piece of content that I'm going to do before I ask them to take any action? So if capcon didn't exist or if this group didn't exist, we would never meet face to face. Right. That means we can't do business together. It means that I can't invest in your company. It means I can't invest in the fund that you put together to buy up all these businesses. And so if none of those transactions exist, then we lose all this possible potential. So the action that really mattered was the transaction that got us to more business.

So the point is we put a lot of attention to what content we're going to do. And that's not the most important question. It's not the most important piece. The most important piece is the audience, which is leads that turn into potential transactions.

So these are the four areas that we're focusing on for profitable launches. Working with influencers in the way that we've outlined. Using Facebook groups that are either temporary or exclusive.

Using email lists with the exact methodology that we've talked about very publicly in this group. Then using Facebook ads, sometimes in combination with Messenger. So if you have not seen any of this stuff that Paul has been talking about in the Facebook group with his ads, there's two really important things here. One, his ad is doing really well because he has this piece. It's a new unique product. And if you notice his video that has quintupled his Shopify sales in 30 days.

Does not have any content. It is all about what the product is. The product just happens to be different. It's five reasons your kids are gonna love cozy phones.

So.

That'S the content, super simple, super focused on this. That's Part one, Part two is he had nine duds. One of them did really well.

And so spending your confidence in ad spend, this is you, right, Matt? Your confidence in ad spend comes from testing a lot until you have one winner.

And your question was, do I allocate money for ads or do I allocate money for inventory? You should always, forever and ever, amen. Take cash, I.e. retained earnings and put them into multipliers. Have we talked about this? Okay, so anything that you can predict, you should consider financing. Predicting, like inventory orders. If you know that you're probably going to need $50,000 a month in inventory for the next 12 months based on last year's sales, you should probably be financing $50,000 a month in inventory so that you've got $50,000 of capital that you can risk. Risk on ads, risk on hiring, risk on taking off the table and going, I don't have to worry about money anymore. And all of that frees you up to put it into other areas. Whereas inventory is predictable, you know what, for the most part, you know what's going to sell and what's not going to sell. So that should be financed with some outside capital. Whereas the new stuff, that's not yet proven, you want to free up as much of that capital as possible so that you can find the next breakthrough. So for you, that might be taking 25 grand and putting two grand into 12 ads and seeing which one hits one of them will hit, hopefully. And you scale that sucker that's so test small and scale really big. And if you have this piece, then the ad spend becomes much more profitable because you're getting the responsiveness that we've talked about up until this point. What does that mean?

I just obsess over things that maybe move the needle, like barely at all. I don't know that maybe one day, if it moves the needle a lot, I celebrate that and double down.

What would you call that role? If it wasn't Matthew's role and you hired for that role, what would you call that?

It would be like the analysis. It would just be like performance analysis.

So based on. On the profit that's currently bringing to the business, what salary do you give that person?

That's always my catch 22. If I'm not myself putting Gary V. Hours, then I wouldn't want to hire somebody. And then also.

This is a thought exercise. If you were to hire someone.

To be as productive as you are of tinkering and analyzing how much profit is that adding to the business that you would have to spend to replace you.

I have no clue. And that's what alarms me because I'm.

Not sure how to analyze the ROI.

On any of my given actions because I have technology for all the ones I can analyze and I do analyze all of that. However, there's certain actions I can't quantify because they're potentials and they're like, let's experiment on this in hopes that it might one day result in a breakthrough, which is kind of a wishy washy metric.

Okay, so.

What I'm getting at is you mentioned that if you were to normalize your salary that the company wouldn't necessarily be profitable. So your job as an analyst probably isn't all that valuable.

No, it's not.

And so you're probably spending your time on $18 an hour tasks when it's your job to go be pursuing the breakthrough. So the point that I'm making is the way you scale is that you free yourself up to go look for that next white space. And that white space is the same idea of investing in multipliers in the same way that the first product you ever sold that you spent $10,000 on, that's now a half million dollar a year business, half million dollar a year income stream. That was a breakthrough. And you need as much free capital as possible to go pursue the next multiplier. But the same is true with your time. It's your job to free up as much of it as possible so that you're not doing the work of an $18 an hour employee, a $30 an hour employee, $100 an hour employee, $1,000 an hour employee. It's your job to go find the next multiplier. Is Amazon your best play or do you need to be going to other distribution models Now? You have no way to answer that right now. If you are bottlenecked in your business. If you can't be freed up to go find those things, and you said you're not involved in the day to day operations. If that's the case, I would say your focus needs to be where do I go get different distribution model, different distribution strategies rather than the one that you're totally focused on. For you, that distribution model I think is licensing. So if you have one market specifically that's killing it in terms of party supplies, then you should be going and getting every niched opportunity for party supplies possible. And there are resources in the group to be able to do that. And you need to be completely freed up to go close that next deal. Close that next deal until you are so bottlenecked closing deals that you have to be freed up from the deal making process because there are other opportunities that you need to pursue and you are spending most of your time testing and tweaking. But you said, and I read it, you know what the model is, but you're not following the model which is preventing you from scaling. So you need to be removed from the testing and the tweaking and the things that are probably $18 an hour tasks so that you can go pursue the next breakthrough which is either branding, releasing new products, finding different distribution models or something else and we can war game what that is. There tends to be and I had this exact fear, I still deal with this today, of once something is freed up, where do we put our focus. And part of that is because as workaholic entrepreneurs it takes us sometimes 8 to 12 days just to decompress. If you're on vacation with no email.

I mean just to have the creative capacity again to be thinking about the breakthrough. Because we're so conditioned to find problems, which is what you're. If I were to put a title to your job, you are a problem finder.

And of course no one else can relate to that. Your job is to find problems, get angry about them and get mad the people who are responsible for this problem.

So as problem finder, you are not breakthrough finder. And that's going to keep you from having an eight figure business. That's going to prevent you from having a $5 million business that is going to be. You are getting paid in direct correlation the value of the problems that you're finding within your own business. Which means that revenue is going to do this because you're going to be tweaking a broken ship rather than be entrepreneurial thought leader driving the vision of something. Does that make sense?

You having a brain gasm right now? You have a very orgasmic face on your.

What, what I understand you're looking to is you have a few tasks you want to start offloading and you want them to be done as well as or better than you handling them yourself. And that's probably what's keeping you holding onto them. And so what you believe right now is that a $600 a month VA might be able to do that. Yeah, definitely. On a social media front. Okay, so first I'd probably ask you are those the greatest drivers of your time or of value? Is there really is social media? Are you really that great at social media?

And the other piece is, are you going to get a higher ROI from an agency that specializes in that or from a VA who's following your systems. And if your systems are really good, that's one answer. If it's you guessing, it's a different answer. If it's providing roi, it's one answer. If it's just something that keeps you busy, it's another answer.

So that's very different than somebody who can do customer service on the side. If you can get somebody who has a few clients doing customer service and you're going to rent them for two to three hours a day and they're going to be better than you and they have a network of people that they're interacting with that's doing the same thing, that's a much better use of capital than hiring somebody that you have to manage, if that makes sense.

Because I don't want so much time having to manage someone. I just want someone who can do it right. High quality, minimal direction. That's my goal.

So you're doing this like three hours a day, probably two hours per day. Okay. So if all you did was read a freaking book during that time, it is a much better use of your time. If all you did was go to the gym for those two hours, it's a much better use of your time.

When I travel, I have to do email. It's really frustrating and the wife gets mad at me for having to work.

I'd be mad at you too.

Yeah. I mean, you're running a multi million dollar business and you can't even step away from it.

But it's on autopilot.

So your job.

Until we see you next in May, is to go spend $10 an hour, $20 a day on somebody to take this off your plate and for you to be bored two hours a day.

That'd be great.

Yeah. And you come back and tell me how much your marriage has improve.