How They Keep You POOR Forever

There's tons of other businesses that you can absolutely demolish who are making lots of money just by doing the basics. And if you execute that for 10 years, your business grows by default because your competitors won't do that. Growing businesses is hard because it's different than people expect it to be. The singularity of focus is so important. We get presented opportunities every single day that could distract us. And the thing is, the bigger you get, the bigger the opportunities that get presented to you. So the harder it is to say no. I want to tell a quick story about, about the woman in the red dress, and I'm going to relate it to business in the Matrix, one of my favorite movies. There's the woman in the red dress. And so it's one of the training programs that Morpheus takes Neo on the main character to teach him one simple lesson. And so they're walking through a crowd, it's normal New York, lots of people, Everyone looks different. And then there's this woman in this red dress. And Neo's head turns and Morpheus is still talking to him, trying to teach him a lesson, right? And then he looks back and Morpheus, he's like, were you listening? He was like, what? He's like, or are you looking at the one in the red dress? And he says, look again. He looks back at the woman and. And it's Agent Smith pointing a gun to his head. The thing is, is I see distractions and new opportunities. Shiny object as the woman in the red dress. And at every level of business, the woman in the red dress becomes more and more attractive. Because at first you have to say no to a thousand opportunities, then ten thousand, then a hundred thousand, and you have to learn how to say no again at every level. Because I thought that once I learned how to say no to the one in the red dress, I'd be done forever. But that's not true. She comes back every level. She just gets hotter and hotter and hotter. I used to think that, like, innovation was everything. And I think innovation is important to very, very small degree. But the vast majority of the business success is actually doing all the stu you know you should be doing, but you aren't. A friend of mine has a wife who's really popular, and they have literally 60 businesses. He has an Excel sheet to keep track of all the businesses he has. And I think they make about total between everything, maybe eight figures a year. And to some of you, like, oh, that's amazing, but hear me out. So we're having this long conversation and I just said, you know, if there were a magic wand and you could snap your fingers and eliminate all businesses but one, how easy do you think it'd be to grow that business? He was like, oh my God, it'd be so easy to grow that to like 30 or 50 million. I was like, then why don't you do that? And he said that that question has messed with him for an entire year. And he has, since that conversation, shut down business after business after business after business so that he could focus on the one that he thought was the biggest opportunity. Mark Zuckerberg didn't have side hustles. If you do one thing and you do it right and you do it all the way, you can get as big as you want. You can have a long mowing business that covered the entire United States. You could do that. You could have a cosmetics business that covers the entire United States. You could have whatever type of business you want that, that covers everyone. If you waited for a long enough period of time and didn't get distracted. It's one of my favorite quotes is by Neil Strauss. He said, success comes down to doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time without convincing yourself you're smarter than you are. It's the details that pay the dividends, the depth and the nuance of understanding how to do something. And so, for example, right now, obviously lots of opportunities that we have, I still don't feel like we're doing the basics. If we're not on every platform, why are we thinking about starting a new business? If we're not hardcore email marketing regularly and providing value, why are we going to start another business? If we're not even building the SEO out on our site, why are we doing something else? If we haven't completely built out the sales training for our sales team to keep their execution high, why are we thinking about doing other things? And so, so many entrepreneurs that I see who are talking about how they want to grow their business and do this next new thing or this exciting add on aren't even doing the basics and the thing, and I've said this before, but being advanced means that you never don't do the basics. And if you're like, well, Alex, that's going to take so much time for me to do each of those things. Welcome building a big business. Because big businesses do the same things little businesses do, but they do them better and they fill the holes in the bucket. And so if you were to think about a business as a bucket and you've Got water pouring in the top, which is the traffic or the eyeballs or whatever. And then the bucket is what you're keeping, right? So the first thing that you're going to do if you want to grow the amount of water you have in the bucket is you don't have multiple buckets. What you're going to do is probably fix the holes in the bucket. You got number one, fix the bucket. Number two, once you fix the bucket, increase the flow to the bucket. Once you've done that and you've completely maximized that, then you add new flow lows. But most people have never done that. And so the moniker that I remember about this is Better, More new. And so whenever I'm thinking about our business or our businesses in the portfolio, I think, have we maxed out better yet? If we have not maxed better yet, there's no point in incurring the risk of more or new because more is riskier than better. Better is the lowest risk opportunity that everyone has. Do what you're currently doing, do it better. Follow up faster, follow up more. Make better copy, make better creative. Optimize your site, hire better people, train them better. Have better management systems, better incentive systems. But you're like, but Alex, that sounds so boring. Welco to growing big. It's how you do it. You literally fill all the holes in the bucket that you know you should be doing but aren't. If you were to make a list of the top 25 things that you could do in your business that you are not doing the obvious things that you know would make you more money. If I emailed more, I would make more. If I did more reach outs, I'd make more money. If I made more content, I'd make more money. If I trained my sales team more. If I did more call reviews, I'd make more money. If I did reorganize our customer onboarding process, if I created a better cadence or training for our customer support team or customer success team, we'd make more money. Put out every single one of the obvious bullets that you had that you know would grow your business. Instead of doing the new thing, do those first and once you finish that list, what you will see happen. And this is why it's spiritually difficult as an entrepreneur because we stopped doing the old thing, we started the new thing and we got reinforced in that behavior. And so we learned the wrong lesson. We learned that when we start new things, good things happen. And so we think we should start new things. This is where it's Difficult. And we have to learn at each level. You started the new thing and you got rewarded. But now if you start another thing, you will get punished. And some people never unlearn that first lesson. And so you have to start switch from new to better. Because the innovation already happened when you got the product market fit. As soon as people started buying the thing you're selling, that's when the new needs to end for a while because now you just need to do better and more. So you fill the holes in the bucket with all the better and then you do more. Then you go from one piece of content a day to five pieces of content a day, from one sales guy to five sales guys, from one video editor to five video editors. It's about doing more. Once you fix the first one and make it better, businesses will grow by default and they will beat their competition if they do everything their competition does. But better. Because what happens is most entrepreneurship entrepreneurs will divert resources from their core thing. Think about the two paths. Boring entrepreneur number one, who finally finds product market fit. People like the stuff that they're selling and then they say, I'm not going to do anything new for the next five years. All I'm going to do is do this better and do more of it. That's all I'm going to do. And then you think about the other guy who says, oh, we got some product market fit. Fantastic. Now I'm going to sell something else. And I get to get my rocks off, get my jollies off over here thinking about all this new stuff, all this new marketing, all this new product, while the other business starts to wither away a little bit because atrophy starts happening, because the things that were there when you're overseeing it aren't happening anymore anyways. And not only that, it's never impro. And cost of media goes up, cost of talent goes up. And the business is literally getting worse relative to the market over time if you're not improving it. And so you got these two entrepreneurs and this guy is diverting resources that would have been allocated back to the same bucket to fill the holes as instead taking some of that and trying to build another bucket over here. Meanwhile, the holes are getting bigger in the first bucket because it's getting worse and worse and worse. And so then they find themselves with five buckets that are all tons of holes in them. They don't have the bandwidth to actually go to the one bucket and fix it. And that's when I asked the magic wand question. So right now if you have multiple things going on, how easy would it be to grow your business? If I could wave a magic wand, snap my fingers, and everything ended except for one. Pretty easy, right? So why not stack the chips in your favor? The thing that makes it hard is the discipline you have to have, not the concept. Strategy is easy. Execution is hard. It's the execution risk that is the much bigger risk for most businesses. If you deliver dry cleaning that is always clean, always and always on time, you'll have an exceptional business. The strategy isn't complicated. It's the execution is where everyone fails. But this is the thing, is that the strategy is the new and exciting thing. People allocate tons of attention, tons of time to new strategies, new ideas, rather than making the obvious truth of if I deliver everyone their clothes on time and they are always perfectly clean, this business will work. One of the things that we do when we're growing the business after understanding better, more new, when we think about anything that we're growing, is what are the need to believe? What do we need to believe for this to grow? We need to believe that people will always want things fast. Is that something I want to bet on? Yes. People always want a good product so that we clean their clothes perfectly every time. Do I believe that that's something that people want in the future as much as they want today or more? Yes. People will always want good service. Do I believe that that's on the future or in the day? It's one of the beautiful things is that when you enter a marketplace, something as boring as dry cleaner, boring as lawn care, boring is whatever is that. Oftentimes you're actually not competing. It's the smartest people in the world, the smartest people world are on Silicon Valley, all trying to make the next platform. But there's tons of other businesses that you can absolutely demolish who are making lots of money just by doing the basics. And what makes them basics is how hard they are to understand. But what makes you advance is how well you execute them. Like, it's not hard to conceptualize that you take 10 guys and each guy makes 200 calls a day. It's 2,000 calls a day. It's not hard to conceptualize that. How well did you train them? How well did you recruit them? What is their incentive structure? Do you listen to calls on a regular basis? Is there a leaderboard? Because you're thinking to yourself when you have that big list, oh, we need to do competition for the sales thing. Oh, I need to get that leaderboard set up. Oh, yeah, I need to be doing more call reviews. That is the stuff that grows the business. It's not the big idea. People always want leads. Promise you, you know how to get leads. You know how to get them better. You will make tons of money. People always need a place to live. You have better buildings that are cleaner and things run right and you treat your residents well. You have successful buildings. If you have lawn care where everyone communicates well and is cost effective and the grass always looks great and the hedges are clean lines at the cadence, that's perfect. Most people, you will have a good business. You might be competing against people who are not, who don't even think that way. And so you can absolutely take their lunch money, but you have to not get fancy. So when I was going through the sale process for two of our companies, bankers introduced me to a couple of other CEOs that they had done deals with because I, I wanted to know what it was like afterwards. Things like that, like, oh, we can just connect with these guys. So I talked to one of them and the conversation changed my life. He was a mercenary CEO. So he was a third time CEO that private equity buy a company, place him in, he'd grow it and then they'd sell it. And he had done that three times already. So super seasoned guy, he was a Long island guy, really thick accent. He said, you know, everybody wants the super fancy trick plays. You know, it's like, okay, hike, and then I, you know, fake to the left and then we go right and then it's actually going to be a reverse, you know, whatever. And then, and then we toss it and then what do you know happens? He catches it and then fumbles it. And the other team takes it down for a touchdown. He's like, no, we're doing simple backyard football. He's like, two fat guys in the middle run to the right, consistent yardage. He's like, don't be cute. And he said that. And it really changed the way I saw business. You don't need to have any fancy play to be successful. You just have to be willing to get the consistent. People want clean clothes. People want them fast. People want good service. And if you execute that for 10 years and you fill every hole in the bucket, your business grows by default because your competitors won't do that. This is where I say, like, business is not hard in that it is not complicated. It is hard because people cannot stay focused on the same thing for a long period of time. It's also because Once people make a certain amount of money, if they only did it for the income they're trying to find, the next thing that's going to make more income rather than the mission of the business. Because if you believe in the mission of the business, you will be willing to do it for an extraordinary long period of time. And I can tell you right now, from all the friends that I have that make shitloads of money, they've all been doing the same thing for a long period of time. So as much as the world wants to tell you, you should have 17 majors in college and you should taste everything. And I think there's value to that. It will not fight against the reality. Ben Francis started Gymshark when he was, whatever, 17, and now he's 28 or 29, he's got a billion dollar thing. Could he have tasted more stuff? Sure. He tasted from like 14 to 17, right. But then when he started that, he's been doing it for 10 or 11 years now. Now he's a billion dollar thing. The work needs doing and you just need to decide when you want to start the compounding clock in your favor, which means, how long can I commit to this thing? And so I would say once you've had a little bit of your entrepreneurial licks as fast as you can to learn those lessons, you have to think what need to believe is there that I do not think will change over an extended time horizon. And then serve that every day all you do is you look at how to do better and how to do more of it and it's going to kill you inside because you like doing new shit. And that's what was positively reinforced your entire life as an entrepreneur in the beginning. And then you have to unlearn that lesson, because that's what it takes to get big, is you do the same thing and you just do it that much better than everyone else. And that takes time. It is arrogant to believe that you are going to out compete other people who are fully focused on one thing. When you were split on five. Like, think about how arrogant it is to think that. And the thing is, plenty of people are arrogant. So many of you will still do this, but you'll also still be poor. So whatever some dude is, he's got a lawn care business and all he does is lawn care all day, every day. That's all he does, is mow lawns. And he believes that everybody deserves an amazing lawn because he's got a story of when he's a kid. And that was the only thing that his parents could do was cut the lawn do to. Even though they were poor, it was like something that gave them stats in the neighborhood. And he can remember his dad crying because somebody gave him a compliment on it. He hadn't gotten a compliment forever. Whatever that reason is, he's driven to make that company. And you got the other guy who's like, oh, yeah, I'm doing drop shipping, I'm doing some lawn care stuff and I'm doing some consulting gigs on the side for marketing and I'm, you know, I'm doing NFTs, whatever, right? He's got all these things going on. Who is going to win at lawn care? It's obvious. And yet we still live like this other guy. And so my hope is that you recognize that if that's you, stop. And I'm only saying this from a place of love because I had nine businesses before, before gym launch took off, before you think, oh, well, what I'm going to do, because I hear this all the time, I'm going to do them all and I'm going to see which one takes off. None of them will take off because any of them could take off if you just focus on one of them thinking that the outside market is somehow going to make you successful. Like you're going to pick the right bet when you can force any of them to be successful. Right. Provided you're not selling newspapers. An acquaintance of mine from high school and he said, hey, I've got a roofing business, you know, it's awesome. I said, oh, that's great. And he said, oh, yeah, we also do real estate flipping. I was like, like, okay, all right. He's like, oh, and we also do general contracting. Okay. He's like, oh, we do window stuff too. That's actually glass and windows. We do that stuff too. Because it's like, you want to be vertically integrated for real estate. I was like, dude, you're doing like 4 million bucks a year. Like, you're not vertically integrated. You're just distracted. If you look at the biggest roofing companies in the world, they're billion dollar companies. Billion, multi, billion dollar companies. You can do one thing to scale and make all the money you want. And you will only get there with the scale from the details, from the depth. That's how you get these compounding returns from doing the same thing over and over again because you get better, better, better, better at it. The other guy, who's got four things, he's never going to get good at any of them, he's just going to be barely good enough, and he's going to make barely good enough money. If you're not making money in any of the things, it's because you don't understand any of them well enough. Because if you can see anybody in your industry who's doing the thing that you're doing and making a hundred times more money than you, it's because they know it better than you. So how quickly you're going to pay down the ignorance, you're going to try and divide it by four, you're going to try and pay down the ignorance instead of one of them as fast as you can so you can start the compounding.