You can make way more money than you think

There's a single reason why most people stay broke and most businesses stay small. So I've been in business for 14 years. I own a portfolio company, acquisition.com, that last year did over $250 million in aggregate revenue. And the number one excuse that I hear from entrepreneurs about why they haven't grown is that their market is saturated. It's too small. There's so many people. It's super competitive. It's Red Ocean. Everyone has these different terms like, I don't want to start this thing because there's so many people doing it. Here's what's insane. 99% of people who say this are completely wrong. And so unless you're selling to 140 people in a rural town in the middle of nowhere, your market is prob. Probably 100 or a thousand times bigger than you think. And the average entrepreneur has tapped into less than 1% of the actual market. And so there is a massive gap between how you see your market, how you perceive your market, and how big it actually is. Once you figure that out, you'll realize you've been looking at your business through a keyhole when there's actually a massive door in front of you that you can open up and see what it truly is. And so what I'm about to tell you, completely change how you see your business's potential is total, addressable market. And you'll see why it's actually good to go into saturated markets. Why Red Ocean's great could actually be an amazing opportunity for you. And it starts with understanding why this limiting belief exists to begin with. For the most part, in my opinion, is that people want to protect their egos. They say that their market is too small, and that's the reason they haven't been able to scale. I can't scale my ads past $1,000 a day because I think I've saturated my market. No, bro, you haven't saturated your market. You haven't saturated Facebook. Your ads suck. You don't know different levels of awareness. You only know how to advertise to an avatar that understands the solution and product that you're selling. As soon as you get above that, there's a much larger market above that that could actually buy your stuff. But because you don't know how to advertise, you're unable to reach it. And rather than say, I do not know how to advertise in a way that gets more leads, I do not know how to scale, instead you say, the market is too small. Real now I wanna Be clear here. If you have a local business, it is possible, like my 140 person example, it is possible that, that you're in a market that literally there's 140 people in your market and you're in the middle of the Sahara desert. Yeah, it's probably not going to work. But most of the time, even in local markets, if you're in like an A market, you know, or A market or B market, there's a million people in your city, there's 400,000 people in your city. If you need 200 to make business work, you are fine. There's other things that are holding you back. If you're in basically any other industry which you can look up from like Google industry revenue, the likely that you have tapped your market, it's almost impossible. And the thing is, is that it is still one of the most commonly stated things and least commonly true. And so I'll tell you a quick story about this and then I wanna show you a really powerful visual. When I had gym launch, I wanted to start doing Outbound. Rather I didn't wanna start doing outbound. I was convinced to do outbound. Cause the story I'm about to study. So I had a conversation with a guy who was a lead sales rep. We were recruiting him in and I asked him how they currently get leads at his company. And he was actually in the gym business. I didn't find this out until I got into the interview and he was selling gym software. I asked him how much they were doing a month and they were doing 10 million a month. And I was like, holy cannoli, I've never even heard of this business. And I said, okay, well then how are you getting all your leads? He said, oh, we just do outbound. And I was like, that's insane. I didn't know outbound could generate that kind of demand. But here was this company that I had never heard of that at the time was doing five times more revenue than I was doing. And it broke a belief for me. So let me give you this visual that I think is super powerful for understanding this. So let's imagine that this is 100% of the pie. This is the entirety of the market, right? So if you had 100% access to the market, you'd be super happy. Now this is what happens in people's minds when a competitor comes in. So you say, oh my God, there's them and there's me. Oh, I guess I will be medium happy about this situation. And then let's Say you have two more competitors that come in now you're very sad because you're like, wait, I used to have this whole pie. Now I only have a quarter of the pie. This is false. This belief set will keep you poor or at least poorer than you would otherwise be if you adopted a different perspective. So you currently advertise in one way using one specific platform and one specific medium on that platform. And. And so this little red slice of pie here. Right, what is it in actuality? Well, let me show you. This is what that little slice of pie looks like when we actually consider the size of the market and the aggregate attention that exists. It's so small, you can barely even see that it's happening. And this could be just all the different platforms on which content, let's say content is how you get your customers. Maybe this is Instagram. This is Facebook. This is TikTok. This is YouTube. This is X. This is radio. This is TV. This is Taboola. This is Google search. This is direct mail. This is email. Right. Like, you can keep going. This is school, all of these. And you're here and you're saying, hey, I think I've cut my market and into, like, there's only. There's only. I only have a quarter of the market that's available to me. But wait, there's more. We still have our ads circles, which you're currently doing nothing with. Just imagine all these circles fill up and then wait, but wait, there's more. Now we have our outreach. And on here, we could do direct mail, we could do DMs, we could do DMs on Facebook, we could do DMs on LinkedIn. We could do DMs on TikTok. We could do phone calls, we could do every single way that you can contact another human being. One on one is the different ways that you could do outreach. And so when you look at this whole thing, you had two competitors or three competitors, 1, 2 and 3, that came into your marketplace and you said, oh, therefore, this is now super crowded. But the reality is that you're this tiny little sliver of this one way that you get customers on this one tiny platform. And I haven't even added in the next layer of this, which is on that one platform. Are you maximizing every way to advertise on there? I make a couple Instagram posts. Okay, cool. Are you making stories? Are you making images? Are you making carousels? Are you doing all different ways of doing that? Oh, I make YouTube shorts. Okay, great. Are you making YouTube longs? Are you doing YouTube community posts? How many of them are you making? I told you that I wanted to shift this belief for a second because many of you are not being limited by your market, not even close to it, even if you were. And I want to take the opposite perspective for this. For a moment, let's imagine that you're in the absolute biggest red ocean. Red ocean, Big. It's super populated. There's blood in the water, right? Do you think the business advice niche is populated? Do you think there's a lot of red ocean in business advice? Yeah, probably right? Should I have not gotten into this? The bloodier the water, it means the more fish are there. And so where there's the fiercest competition, there's also oftentimes the biggest rewards. Now, that being said, how do we merge this concept with the idea of you should niche down? Wait, Alex, I thought you wrote a book that said, hey, the riches are in the niches. Right? So how do we merge these two ideas? Let me explain. Cause I get questions about this. In the beginning, you want to artificially constrain the pond that you're going after so that you can compete in a place where the sharks aren't swimming. Okay? So you want to be the biggest guy in a puddle. That's what you want to do. Biggest guy in a puddle. And then you say, you know what? I'm going to go from a puddle to a pond, because I think I'm too big for this puddle. And so you grow, and then you go to the pond. And then once you go from the pond, you say, you know what? I'm gonna go to a lake. Now I'm in a lake because I'm an even bigger fishy right now. I'm in a lake. And then eventually you get to the point where you say, you know what? I think that I'm big enough to go into open class, open market, and fight in the ocean. Now, if we were to look at this trajectory, I started as a trainer, and I talked about nutrition and stuff, and then I talked about gym stuff, and then I started talking about business stuff. So you're going to have evolutions where you can get big enough for a pond that you can move on from the pond to the lake and the lake to the ocean. It's just that it's directly correlated with your skill and your experience. And so the reason that the. The riches are in the niches is that when you're there, number one, you're competing against fewer people. And so the upside is capped typically. Now it's usually capped at way higher than you think it is, but it is capped to a degree and that's okay. But as a result, because we are niche down, we're able to charge niche prices which give us more profit, more pricing power because there's fewer people, there's fewer things to compare you against, right? And so there does come a time where you can go move the market or move your market rather to go after a different segment or a broader segment. So let me walk, walk through what you get, how to think through this evolution for a business. So let's say that your current business is this little dot here, okay? There are five directions that we can move with this dot we can go. So let's imagine this is a, you've got a triangle of a marketplace, okay? So this is where you, this is where you inhabit. You can go up market. All right? So for example, in my gym launch days, I could, instead of serving single location, fragmented gym owners, I could go to franchisors, right? Multi location owners and franchisors. So I have one off gyms here. Now the next direction. So this is direction number one I can do direction number two is I can go down market, which should be that I could go after trainers. There's way more trainers, they have way less buying power, but there's a lot of them. There's fewer franchisors than there are gyms and there's fewer gyms than there are trainers. Pyramid, right? So that's the second thing we can do. The next thing we can do is we can go adjacent. So instead of gyms, I say, you know what? I think I can help Kairos. That's what I think I'm going to do. I'm going to take my systems and I'm going to go into chiropractors. That'd be an adjacent market. I could also go broader, right? Which would mean that I would look at this way, which means instead of gyms, maybe I talk about health and wellness in general. And so that means that I could go after Chiros Med, spas, anybody, you know, weight loss clinics, all of these things are now broader or I can go narrower. So instead of gyms, I say I'm only going to work with spin studios, I'm only going to work with dancing studios. So this is our fifth, this is our fourth, this is our third. So that gives you five directions that you can go in to change the direction of the market that you choose to play it. Now I outline this. And what's interesting is that most people who are especially smaller business owners have never even defined this to begin with. And they pretty much just accept people's money as long as they have a pulse and a credit card. There's obviously two requirements. Well, let's say pulse is optional as long as they have credit card. Kidding. That they accept. But the thing is, is that, like, you want to get really, really clear on this, because if you don't, your customers will be confused because they won't know what you're really about. So the tactics for you, if you're like, all right, I am not getting. Because typically people will say that they are in too small of a market because they're not getting as many leads as they want, which are two completely different issues. Right? And so if you can at least believe. Believe that, you know, believe the idea that I have that there is other ways to get customers than you're currently doing, which I'll refer to back here. What you do is you say, how do I make content in more places? How do I make more of it? How do I make it better? And then eventually you say, how do I also run ads? How do I also pair outreach with that? And that is how you can achieve omnipresence as a business. And so you need to do more in more places, even better consistently, for a long period of time, because it's unlikely that you've actually capped the market. You were just too unskilled to capture the significantly larger percentage of the piece, and that's okay. And that's what we stay in a niche for the short term. And then eventually, as you get better, you can expand it and expand it and expand it, and you keep eating, and that's all right and totally normal. Real quick, I have a gift for you. This is the $100 million scaling roadmap. It's something that my team and I put 200 plus hours into building and breaking the stages of scaling into 10 steps. All right? And so what we did is we broke down everything that got us, basically got us stuck, and what we did to break free at each level of the business. And if you'd like to know what product marketing, sales, customer service, recruiting, human resources in finance look like at the stage that you're currently at, this is a free gift. So all you have to do is go to acquisition.com roadmap, you can plug in your business information, and if you want our help, you want my help to help you break through whatever level of scaling you're at this is not a promise. I'm just saying I'd love to help. On the thank you page, you can book a call. Every month we have a workshop out here at my headquarters. You actually talk to my real team that does our marketing, does our emails, does our ads, does our copy, does our sales, does our finance, does our recruiting. The real people are doing this at a very high level. And what's really cool about that is that they can typically find and spot what the constraints are in a business like that. And so it's one of those valuable things that I could possibly do. Obviously, you know, space is limited based on our actual headquarters, but if that's interesting on the thank you page, you can book a call. No pressure. This is a gift. Either way, it's absolutely free. Now, I said at the very beginning, if you're a local market, you can. This can sometimes bite you. So I want to give some of the local guys, which are usually like 35% of people are listening to this. So I'm going to go real quick for you guys what you can actually do to expand how much you can make with just a single location. So number one is you can expand your actual location. So that means you knock down walls, you add seats, you just increase efficiency. Like, how can I get more from my existing four walls? How to get more out of it? Like, for me, when I started getting too crowded at my first gym, I, you know, cut the class times from 45 minutes to 30 minutes. And by doing that, I got, you know, one and a half times more classes in. I cut out the, like, breaks between classes. So again, I could fit more people in. I could also extend and open more hours, all of those things. Expand your existing location. The second thing that you can do is what I just walked through, which is you add more channels. So, okay, you're posting on Instagram, are you posting on X, are you posting on YouTube, are you posting on Facebook? Are you posting on TikTok? Like, you expand channels. And I would say that many of you guys have heard my rule of one avatar, one product, one channel, until you get to a million dollars a year. The only exception to this is sometimes local businesses. Now, if you're in, I would say, an A or B market, you could totally just do that to get. To get to a million dollars a year if you're in, like, a C or D market. So I would say I don't know what the numbers are there, but I'm assuming it's probably like less than 50,000 people. In like a 10 mile radius where you're at, if you're less than 50, then you're going to probably need to use more than one channel to get customers because there's just, there's just not as many people. You have to, you have to saturate that tiny market by getting in, in front of more people in more places. The third thing that you can do is you open another location so you can expand the current one, you can add channels to drive you more into the current one, but at a certain point, you're going to max out your four walls. And so you just open a new spot. And I see that as the eventuality of most of these businesses. And I think this is kind of interesting because a lot of people feel like they're like, I don't know if this is a $100 million opportunity. It's like, well, yeah, your one store is in a hundred million dollar opportunity. But you being able to duplicate and nail the model and then scale the model absolutely is. And so if you have the goal of getting to $10 million a year, you can pretty much do it in any business. If you have the goal with, with the exception of if you are a brick and mortar and there's 100 people in your local market, probably not. But outside of that, that business model, even if you were in a tiny market, could get to 10 million a year, you just open up in new markets. That's all you do. Right. Most people's goals are achievable within their current vehicle. They're just too impatient and believe that there's another shiny object that somehow will get there faster. But if you take the natural extreme and say, if I only did one thing for 40 years, do I think I'd be successful? Probably. And so if you knew that to be true, then that would give you a very strong reason to stick with whatever you're doing. Because let me give you a visual for this. This is the cost of switching. So if, let's say that you're in year three of your current business, okay. Or current opportunity, it doesn't really matter what it is. So this is one, this is year two, this is year three. Okay? Now what people want to convince themselves is that they're like, I want to start this new thing. Okay, that's fine. You want to start this new thing. So let's see that year one of this new thing is higher. Okay, that's fine. This one is a little bit higher than this one on year two. But the thing is that this is year one of this year, but it's year four here. You're still behind. And not only that, growth when you get bigger is easier than growth when you're smaller and you're like, okay, well maybe this faster rate of growth I'll be able to catch up. Okay, well now you're year two, but now we're at year five over here. Right. And so the head start that you give yourself by sticking with something like sticking with it is how you get the head start. It's how you keep the head start that you already began. That's something I think so many people miss when they're trying to go to this next opportunity. Unless there is something inherently wrong with the assumption that you have and skill is not the deficiency that you need to overcome, which it often is. Most of the time people get stuck on things that I call features, not bugs. And this isn't my invention, is that there's an element of your business that makes it hard. There's an element of every business that makes it hard, but that's what makes it a business and that's why you're compensated for it. If you're in the cleaning business, the difficulty you're going to have is attracting and retaining high quality talent. If you're in the fitness business, the difficulty is attracting customers and customer retention. Because people are inherently really shaky about staying with their fitness goals. But they typically stick with their cleaners for a really long time. Right. And so every business has elements that make it shitty. It's just the name of the game. And you know what, I'll give you a different frame on this. So if you were to think about different business models. So let's think about. I doubt many of you guys have heard this, so this is pretty sweet. So let's say that you've got E Commerce, you've got, let's say you've got service, you've got, let's say info, education, media and let's say you've got SaaS. Alright, so software. Okay, so let's say that these are four different opportunities. Each of these opportunities has a different shape. So info looks like this starts really fast, very difficult to scale. SaaS is the opposite. Starts really, really slow, scales really, really fast. E Comm is more like this. You can scale fast, but there's difficulty with typically cash flow because you have to continue to buy more inventory, you have supply chain issues, you have to switch suppliers, switch 3 PL so they can handle your volume. All of this stuff happens as you continue to grow so it's more like. It's more like this. That's the shape of E Comm. Right? And then service businesses are more like this, the slowest, but they are steady. And so when you see these four shapes, many of you guys just hit the crappy part of whatever the opportunity that you're on is and then say, there's something wrong with my business, therefore I should stop. Rather than seeing it as what it is, which is this is just the nature of how this business works. This is a feature, not a bug. It's gonna be harder for you to attract really good talent in engineering and build software. And you're probably gonna be not profitable. Cause most software sells for lower ticket, most for a period of time. And it takes a long time to get a product to actually be good. And so you're gonna basically burn money, burn time for a long period, and then eventually you can scale to the moon. But it takes a long time, sometimes years to get there. And a lot of people don't have that level of tolerance. Info, on the other hand, is kind of the exact opposite of that. You can make a lot of money really quickly, a lot being relative, right? You're probably not going to become a billionaire, but you can make a million dollars. And then very quickly it gets very difficult to scale it. I'd say like info specifically, more like coaching, things like that. And the reason for that is because there's almost no revenue retention. People don't stay around. Once you learn something, you learned it. That's why people graduate school, they learn, right? Service businesses. The issue is people, because it's a very people, people, heavy business. You have to constantly be hiring, onboarding and training. And it depends on the service you're providing. If you provide weight loss coaching service or weight loss services, I use that as an example, obviously, because I came from that. It's easy for you to get talent because lots of people want to talk about fitness and weight loss and food all day because they're like really into it. So it's actually very easy to get good talent and for below average prices because people would do it for free. On the flip side, customers never want to do it and so they're canceling all the time. If I had an accounting firm, it's the opposite. Accounting firms have super high annual stick. What's the difficulty with accounting firms getting the people who can do accounting? And it's almost always this balance, right? If a lot of people want to do it, there's going to be a lot of competition. There's very low barriers to entry and as a result customers have lots of options and they don't want to do it themselves. If there aren't as many options and you have supply constrained industry, then you're going to have issues getting talent fundamentally. And you can look at this at the business level, but you can also look at the, at the industry level. And so I talk about demand constraints and supply constraints at the business level, but you can see if you are way off track based on do you match with your industry, if your industry, and by the way, if you are the inverse of your industry, you're usually doing something either really wrong or really right. Side note. So great way to think about it. If you can be supply demand constrained in like the cleaning business example that I gave, if you give demand constraints, as in, I could take a hundred times more customers than I currently am with my cleaning thing, well then you've either figured out something really amazing with cleaners to like attract them in and like you're about to go hyperscale, or you're just starting out, you haven't done anything yet. There's either something really right or really wrong with what you're doing, but most of the time you probably match the same constraint of your industry. And the problem with not being experienced is you think there's something wrong. And so then you end up spending multiple years not being all in on your opportunity and, and then being upset that it's not growing as fast as you want it to grow when in reality you never really gave it a shot because you're always looking. You're kind of like the, kind of like the guy who's in the marriage that they're like, you know, they were in love a while ago and you know, things are okay. But, you know, he's got a wandering eye, right? He's always looking. He's always, you know, trying to look for the next thing, the next girl, the next whatever. And he's like, well, my marriage isn't good. It's like, well, no shit. You're spending all your time looking at these other opportunities rather than doubling down on the thing you got. And when you double down on the thing you got, usually when you take the marriage, it takes way less time. I would, okay, I'm not going to make broad, sweeping statements on marriages, all right? But I will say that in my experience, from my N equals one marriage, it takes way less time to go from like we're upset about something to we're really good than it does to Create the loyalty, the trust, and the track record that you have from that marriage with someone else. Real. So with that being said, that was my piece de resistance, if you will. That was the thing that I wanted to talk about today that was top of mind, is that so many people think that their market is actually limited when reaction, their mind is limited. And there are so many ways to advertise, but you do not have the skill to advertise it. And so I'll leave you with a really powerful question that I think is worth asking yourself when you're in these situations is instead of saying, there are no good salespeople in my market, or no one can sell like I can sell, or I, you know, it's really crowded, which really is usually a translation for I can't get enough leads, or leads cost you much, by the way. But you say these statements, just frame it into a statement that you control. Meaning I don't have the skill to get more leads. I don't have the skill to attract, hire, manage a good salesperson. I don't have the skill to get employees to behave in a way that is according to the goals that I have in the business. Those. As soon as you state it in that way, guess who owns the outcome? You. You become source. You become the one who can change it. And so I would just like. It just does not serve you to cast your power outside of yourself and give that as the reason for why you lack the success that you want. Here's the crazy part. You could be right. And so what? Like, some prizes aren't worth winning. Like, if you want to play the pity game and you want to win the pity award for a person who was born with most inconveniences or person who had the worst things happen to them, you can win that award. The question is just, do you want it? Is that prize worth playing for? Is it worth competing for? For me, when I hear or see a situation like that, there's also something that I think is the same power, if not more powerful, which is this person was able to win despite that. And that's a story that only you can have. And the more fucked up your childhood, the more fucked up the things that you went through to get to where you are are. The stronger that story is for the people who follow behind you and look up to you, the more you can serve as an example of for other people who have suffered the same things that you've suffered or suffered worse than you suffered. And I think it's like you rob yourself of that opportunity by protecting your ego and saying that it was because of this other thing. And maybe you're right, but wouldn't it be cooler to be right about the fact that that was true and you won instead and you won anyways and you succeeded despite that? I think that's a much cooler story. And I think that if we use the story frame, which is one of my favorite razors, which is that when you're 85 and you're split between two choices in life, pick the cooler story, because at the end of your life, it's the only thing you're left with anyways. And when you have these two choices, there's usually the hard thing, which is the right thing and the other way. And the reason that I think you should always take the hard thing is because if the easy thing were the right thing, you wouldn't have had to make this decision, because you would have already done it. And so you're only hesitating because it's harder than you expect.