I Scaled to $40M Using Creator Flywheels (Here's How)

If I scale my business, doesn't that just mean more work? No, no, no. That's not how it works. A lot of what it comes down to is understanding how to build flywheels. If you can take a linear process and bend it around and close the loop, you know, you're actually trying to get every step to flow into the next one, then it can turn into a flywheel.

That flywheel, 10 days later, has created $95,000 in sales.

I probably only spend an hour a week on the businesses.

I just got like 30 hours a week back.

If I scale my business, doesn't that just mean more work? Right? Like, this is hard. And you're saying you could build a billion-dollar business. And I'm like, let's— okay, so that's 50 or 100 times more revenue. So that's probably 50 or 100 times more effort. And you and I have spent a lot of time being like, no, no, that's not how it works. In fact, you have to invert that in order to actually achieve any level of scale. But I think a lot of what comes down to is understanding how to build systems and then ultimately flywheels. When I first heard about flywheels, it was from Jim Collins in Good to Great, and I think that's where most people encounter it, where he's saying like, you know, these great companies all have a flywheel, and then he only talks about it at the highest level, right? Like, this is Amazon flywheel of lower prices leads to more sales, more sales leads to more revenue, which then leads to scale, right? Right. And that scale allows them, uh, to lower prices.

It's like riding a bicycle where it's just gonna start going, the wheel's gonna start turning. So your business can have an overall flywheel that's like, this is how the entire business runs. And then your business can also have flywheels within the flywheel. So there's a flywheel that your whole business runs on, and Amazon runs on a flywheel, right? Like every large business, this is how they do it. They're finding the flywheel within their company. What drives it? What makes it go? That's not us pushing the boulder up the hill, but it's just naturally happening, right? You can't help but get to the next step when you take action one.

So let's talk about flywheels as it means in your creative business. 2008, and I'm in Lesotho, and there I learned a business lesson that was one of the most impactful things I've ever learned in my career. We were building a well. Now, Lesotho has inconsistent electricity, so we wanted it so that their source of water, right, was not reliant spent on electricity? You're probably thinking about something like a hand pump. This might be totally fine, right, if you don't need a lot of water, but this is not going to work if you're trying to provide water for hundreds of people. And I want to take a second and look at the physics of this. Every downward stroke on this gets me water. On the upward stroke, nothing happens. If I stop putting in energy, I stop getting an output. That's not what we installed. We installed something called a flywheel. Now, the flywheel is this large metal wheel that sits on top of the pump, and it is really difficult to move at first. Then as it starts going, it gets easier and easier, and then eventually I can do it with one finger. And this is just pumping more and more water. It's a circular motion carrying my momentum forward, and the effort that I put in carries through. I'm going to put in less and less effort over time and get more and more results. How does that even work? Well, it actually works in real life in physics. And it works with this concept. The professional entrepreneurs take things and they say, hey, we're going to create systems, usually linear processes. Something gets kicked off, say we publish a podcast episode, we land a new client, there is a linear process that kicks off as we go from there, right? And that's what most people need to do. And, uh, you're going to have all kinds of linear processes in your business. Uh, if you don't, you will never—

it's working a checklist. Yeah, right. Like, it's like you do this, then that, then that. You've checked off the list and now you're done. And the next time this thing needs to happen, you're starting from the beginning and checking off the list again.

Yep.

So still labor intensive.

Yeah. And so that's where the last process or the last change comes in. If you can take a linear process and bend it around and close the loop, then it can turn into a flywheel. And this is actually what's quite challenging. This is where You know, you're actually trying to get every step to flow into the next one. And like what you were saying of, you know, we can't help but do this next step. Yes. Each step is the inevitable conclusion of the previous step.

Yes.

Which is another way that Jim Collins talks about it. And that brings you into 3 different laws of flywheels. Law 1 is activities flow smoothly from one into the next. Law 2 is each rotation is easier than the previous rotation. And Law 3 is each rotation produces more than the previous rotation. When you do this, it gets to the point where you have something that operates smoothly, gets easier over time, and then ultimately produces more and more over time. There's this idea that people talk about of like, if I publish consistently, I'm going to run out of things to say. So it's like, okay, what if we can make a flywheel that continually gives you more ideas of what to talk about? Like, my newsletter goes out every Tuesday. I want to have a process that the more subscribers I get, the more ideas I'm given to write about. And so I do is I have this flywheel where it starts at the top where new subscribers come in, and then from there it's going to go to, uh, an onboarding sequence where it's going to send some of my greatest emails, you know, my best content. And then email 3 or 4 in there, it'll say, uh, hey, thanks so much for, uh, subscribing to my newsletter. Just want to ask a quick question. What's your biggest struggle related to learning how to build an audience, how to design, how to grow your business, whatever it is that I'm teaching. I'm going to capture all those responses, either a label in Gmail or something a little more advanced. And then when it comes to write about my topic for the week, instead of like racking my brain to try to think about what I'm going to write, instead I just go into this repository of struggles and frustrations that people have, and I look through that and I say, oh, this seems interesting. Joe's problem seems interesting. Let me write about that. I'm like, dear Joe, And I answer his question and I teach that thing. And then of course I go and replace that with, you know, subscriber.firstname, whatever personalization I'm going to do. And I make it generic to everyone. And that's my newsletter that goes out. And that content, the promotion of it is what gets me more subscribers.

That's the magic of the flywheel is that once you start taking this action, you can't help but get the results. And that's what you want for your business or any aspect of your business that it just flies without it feeling like effort over time. And I imagine at a certain point you're like, no more responses. We have too many emails to write.

So I wanna share my favorite flywheel when it comes to like demonstrating each rotation produces more than the last. And that is Sahil Bloom's, uh, million subscriber flywheel. He has simple goals. He's just a, just a man who wants a million subscribers on his email list. You know, what more could you— well, what I love about it is he's laser-focused on this. He's got a book coming out and he says like, look, my content is fantastic. I know how to build an audience. And if I stay laser-focused on just the goal of growing a newsletter list, then I can get to a million subscribers by the time the book is released.

I actually don't want to sell anything. I want my book to be the first thing that I ask people to buy and to a fault. And so like like I don't do brand deals. I have a pretty large Instagram account now. Like brands constantly want to pay me to do whatever post or thing and I just don't do it. Like, yeah, if I buy your product and I use it, I'll talk about it, but otherwise I'm not going to do it. And so I was always like really apprehensive about it was really the genesis of it early on. And then I realized that people actually really wanted to know more about the things that I was using or involved with or doing because they were aligned with the ecosystem I was building and what I was trying to do. And we— you and I did a launch together for a newsletter growth agency and we announced it and like in a day it brought in like $500 grand a month of lead volume or something like that. Like crazy for a high ticket service, like a $5,000 a month service, that much. And so that kind of stuff started to blow me away and I started to realize that you shouldn't be afraid of selling. If you're proud of the thing that you are putting out into the world, you can never be afraid of selling it.

Correct. And so the way the process works, he drives new subscribers from social. So primarily Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Those, he's using very traditional techniques to bring them into his newsletter. One, just saying subscribe to my newsletter. Two, right, offering lead magnets, you know, incentives, uh, other things like, hey, here's how to plan your year, download the free guide, right? Uh, any of those things. And then he's also, you know, going on other podcasts and sharing content and, and just It's a pretty traditional playbook. Once someone goes from being a subscriber, then they drop into ConvertKit's creator network, right? So that's where he's partnering with other creators and, you know, they're recommending each other. So it's sort of a multiplier step that happens when someone signs up to his list. It also promotes the other creators. When someone signs up to, you know, one of those other creators' lists, it partners him, it promotes him. Now he's writing a newsletter twice a week, and so there are, there are micro flywheels that run that newsletter writing process, how he's coming up with ideas, how he's writing it out. You know, he has someone on his team who's helping to format and put it all together so that, um, he's not spending too much of his time on that.

I would also imagine that the newsletter itself provides the content that exists on Twitter.

Yes.

And social media, like probably there are bits of the newsletters that they've written in the past that they're taking and publishing on social media, which then creates new subscribers.

Yep, exactly. And so then those 2 newsletters that go out each week, they're sponsored, right? And so he is getting paid for each one of these newsletters. Let's say at, in the early stages, it's $1,000 per newsletter, right? Mm-hmm. And then he's taking all of that money that he makes because you have to remember he has only one goal, that's to grow his newsletter list. He does not care about making money from this, it's just to grow the audience.

And so he's reinvesting all of that into ConvertKit's partner network of paid recommendations where he's saying, this is the most genius thing I have ever heard, I just need y'all to pay attention.

So good, I love it. And so he's able to go in there and say, hey, I will pay $1.50 for every engaged subscriber that another creator sends to me. And I guess define engaged, you know, it's they open 3 emails in the first 14 days, something like that. And then he can set a budget, say $8,000 a month, right? If you're saying 2 newsletters a week, $1,000 per newsletter, he's generating a little over $8,000 a month. Then he can dump all of that back in and that's going to give him subscriber growth. So as you walk through it, right, the more new subscribers he has, the more people who receive his email, which means he can sell sponsorships for more money, which gives him more to reinvest to grow the list, which gives him more new subscribers, which means the list is bigger, which means he can sell sponsorships for more, which gives him more to reinvest. So an early rotation of this is going to maybe kick off a few thousand subscribers, right? But then later on, it's you know, tens of thousands, 50,000 subscribers. And so when he put this in place, he was at a little over 100,000 subscribers. And then, you know, now we're recording this 10 months later, he's over 600,000 subscribers. And this flywheel went from kicking off 5,000 subscribers or 10,000 subscribers a month to now it's kicking off 50,000+ subscribers a month. Amazing. And he finally got to the point that he's making so much money off newsletter sponsorships that he no longer reinvests all of it. He actually pulls some of those profits because he's like, look, $25,000, $30,000 a month on ads, that's enough. And let me take the other $20,000 or $25,000 as, as profit. Okay, so Cody, you've built a pretty epic content business and I want to start talking about that of how as a creator you've actually staffed your team and built, you know, the logistics and flywheels behind the scenes to create the amount of content that you do?

Well, it didn't start out that way. Started out with one person. I ran the business not as a business, just as a hobby. It was a blog for about a year plus. Then I got my first hire. That first hire's name was Nikki. Shout out Nikki. And she basically was a jack of all trades, did everything, and, and helped me figure out, was this actually a business? Should we sell something? Or was this just a newsletter that we were going to grow called Contrarian Thinking?

Can I pause you for a second? Tell me, how are you making money during this time?

Zero. Oh, like otherwise? Yeah, I was running a private equity fund with 3 other partners.

So you still— you had another business, basically?

Yeah.

Because I feel like people always have that question of like, how are you doing this for free?

Yeah, I think it's the best way to do it. Yeah, honestly, it's really hard to ask for people's attention and their money upfront. You got to choose between the two.

Okay, that's interesting because we've talked about when we talk about flywheels in these like workshops and everything that we teach, where a flywheel can only have one goal. And if you try to have two goals and most people are trying to grow an audience and make money from the same flywheel and it never starts spinning well. You know, if we're talking about a flywheel, the biggest thing that I see that makes a difference in a flywheel is how long can you keep it running? And most people are focused on, you know, the quick wins. What results can I deliver this week or this month? And the real magic of the flywheel is how can I run this every single week for 5 years or more and just get these like compounded small gains. Even if the flywheel never improves, just the fact that you stayed consistent on it puts you in the top 10%, you know, of results, uh, probably in your market or industry. But then when you get that like optimization step, you know, in your loop closer, then, and you know, you're getting better every week, even if it's the tiniest bit better. Then you're going to get the really, really big compound gains.

I learned compounding from my personal investing portfolio. It started at minus $50,000 and it's now at a million dollars, just my, you know, stocks and crypto. But you see the compounding over years and then you go, oh my God, that's what people mean. You don't feel anything. You don't feel anything. You don't feel anything. It seems like stale. But then, whoop, what's going on here? And then it accelerates in, in the very end of the compounding effect.

I want to talk about the flywheel behind StoryGrid, because we did an episode about flywheels, introducing the concept, walking through, saw Hill Bloom's flywheel and a bunch of them that we've implemented across ConvertKit. So I think listeners are familiar with the concept now. And you've got a flywheel for StoryGrid that I think is just phenomenal. Like, I understand how it all fits together. And then I think your audience, because you did an episode on your YouTube channel explaining it, your audience understands how it all fits together. The plot thickens inside StoryGrid's evil master plan.

I think it's better to just tell the truth. So I just made the video and I'm like, look, here's how we make money. Our goal is to build a publishing house that publishes the greatest fiction ever written. Turns out that's really fucking hard to do. So when we tried to go about like taking manuscripts like other publishers, that wasn't working. So we realized we need writers that can do two things. One is write really well, but that's kind of a given. The other is let us kick the shit out of them when they do it wrong and they just keep coming back for more because that's what I did. Like if You know, we've been doing the podcast— we stopped doing the podcast, but we did it starting in 2015. There was over 200 episodes, and it's just Sean kicking the shit out of me in my writing year on year.

Writing scene sucks, here's why.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that's what we need, is we need writers that will like stick with it. And so we started a writing program that's a 3-year program that builds from how to write a great sentence, because it is not subjective, it is objective, how to write a great sentence, all the way up to writing a book over the span of 3 years. I'm trying to put every creative writing MFA program out of business because our training is so much better. And so, and it's all built on one-on-one feedback. So every week you turn in, you turn in your work and you get one-on-one feedback and you have to go try it again. And so, okay, so now we have a great training business, training for writers. So at the end, they're writing books that hopefully they'll let us publish. All right, great. How do I get people to join a 3-year program? Because people aren't just going to come off the streets. They've never heard of us. Or maybe they've read one of our books and they're like, well, you know, how do I know you're not full of shit because you're expensive and it's 3 years? Okay, well, we're going to join— we're going to start a 6-week workshop. All right. So this way people can get a little taste. They can come in and I can guarantee them I can make them a better writer by the end of 6 weeks. And that is the guarantee. If they feel like they haven't, they can get their money back. So far, 100% of students have said that they have. So, it's a 6-week workshop, but it's also expensive. It's $1,200 right now to do a 6-week workshop because, again, they're getting one-on-one feedback every week. So, how do I get people into that? That's why I do YouTube. And so, I put out YouTube videos twice a week teaching all the different aspects of writing based on Shawn's research. It's all coming from Shawn. He's the genius. I feel like I get to work with Einstein while he's coming up with the theory of relativity. So, Shawn has built an entire narrative theory from the ground up and I just teach aspects of it on YouTube. And that's the way I bring people in to get them on sales calls so that they'll do the 6-week workshop, so that they'll do the 3-year program, so that they'll publish books with us. And like you said, the flywheel, what I, what I get out of it is teaching the workshops and teaching the training. I don't do most of the teaching. I do some of it. I extract where people are struggling and the ideas they find most interesting, and that feeds into the topics that I put up on YouTube.

One of the things for the people who have personal brands, right? Particularly if you sell a service or anything that you sell where your customer is like, you have to show up, only you, I will accept no one else, right? Or maybe that's just in your head.

Yeah.

Um, but that's what you believe. I had a customer who's been with me for a very long time and she brought up an old program that we did a couple of years ago and it was our very first time really trying to take me out of the coaching experience and delivering this entire experience with my content, right? Like I created all of the material, but I had other people delivering it.

Mm-hmm.

And these other people were like quote unquote experienced coaches that came in, but they didn't necessarily, they weren't as experienced in our content. Anyway, long story short, that was like our draft zero of taking me out. And she was saying these things about it were good, but these things not so great. So like it wasn't the most glowing report, right, of her experience of that program that happened several years ago. And I said to the president of my company, I was like, that was draft one. That was our shitty first draft of pulling me out. And if I, and it was hard, right? Like there was a lot to figure out. I was all over it working behind the scenes, training people and like trying to help them help customers be happy and like so much work, right? So that's the, that was my first rotation law too, right? Like first rotation was not that easy. Did not seem that profitable. However, if we would've never taken that first rotation and tried it, we wouldn't be where we are today, where we have thousands of happy customers and they don't talk to me. They're not looking for me, right? Because they're getting results without me. And so now each rotation is producing more than previous rotations. So that's just another example of that. I don't know if that makes sense, but I just thought that was very relevant because I think when people hear the billion dollar creator criteria, they're very afraid of like, how do I take myself out of it? Without losing all of my customers? Well, you have to create this flywheel and then do the first rotation and know that it's gonna be hard the first time. Then it's gonna get easier and easier as you do it, cuz you figure out what's key that I have to train these people. So now I have a coach certification where I've trained them for 9 months. So now when they deliver, they're doing such an amazing job because they went through this. So it's like, if we offer this coach certification, we can't help but recruit more very, um, experienced or like smart coaches, right, that have the knowledge, and then they can't help but help our clients get results. As our clients get results, then some of them will want to become coaches, right? And then we— it keeps the flywheel going, right? There's a flywheel there of training people. We basically turned this coach certification into a pipeline of amazing coaches for our programs.

There's so many things I want to dive into there. First, You touched on something really interesting that when you're contrasting a hand pump process, right, which is in this case you showing up, you teaching first, that can be really good, right? You can make a bunch of money off of a hand pump process. Not— and I did not tens of millions and definitely not hundreds, right? But you can make millions, which is amazing. But often when you switch to the flywheel, it's going to be worse. At the beginning. It's going to be worse and harder, right?

Yeah.

And that's why most people say like, I'm gonna systemize all this, I'm gonna build it into a flywheel, and they're like, never mind. Yeah, it didn't work.

Never doing that again.

Not worth it. Now you pushed through and you said like, wow, that was a wildly painful rotation and we barely got anything for it, but we completed the rotation. Okay, now what can we do? What can we optimize on it? And then as you do that, and we should dive in in a second to the things like why a rotation gets easier over time, but really once you did that, it gave you something to work with and then you notice, okay, this got slightly easier.

Okay.

This is even a little bit easier. And then now you're like, I don't know, that shit just runs, you know, I've got people.

And I'm being, I'm actually being told, we actually don't need you to do that call anymore. Like, thank you. Thanks, thanks for your contributions, but please go away.

You might disrupt the flywheel. You might come in and— Correct.

Now, now I am in literally a disruption to the process that they've built. Yes.

What's interesting is that a lot of businesses can implement a similar flywheel. Like, I was talking to Tiago Forte, uh, when we were in LA. His business is called Building a Second Brain, and it is about, uh, teaching people how to store and track and recall information so that you have, um, you know, just these amazing productivity systems and everything else. And what we came to is that, oh, he needs implementers, he needs coaches in his business for people who— sure, they, they'll go through and learn it all themselves, but like the systems require management, it takes work. And he can't be the one coaching everyone on this. And so I basically cloned your flywheel to the best of my ability into his entirely unrelated business, right? He's not teaching.

Yes.

Business and marketing and growth and sales and all of that. It's entirely different. But the core flywheel, totally the same, right? Where he has this, this main large flywheel for the community and content and sales and then this adjacent smaller flywheel that siphons some number of people off, trains them to, you know, the best students basically, trains them to be coaches and implementers, and then provides that value back? I'm gonna say coaches. This might not be the term that you use, but this is where someone comes, uh, or implementers, right? That actually might be a better, a better term, though implementer, another problem with it, and that implies a one-time thing. Right, right. You actually want it where this is a recurring service as well. And so now if you're coming into someone's business, like, so we just did this where we paid someone to come in and clean up our whole Notion setup, right? And happily pay $5,000 for someone to do that, right? And, you know, but if I had, you know, it's like if it's following a specific methodology, then I'm gonna make sure that I'm hiring a coach or an implementer from the list of people that you said. And you can do it, I guess the difference is, the marketplace is that you're saying, here's 50 people, you choose what to do. Let me give you an example, a different example. I use an executive coaching firm called Reboot. [Speaker] Oh yeah, I know them. [Speaker] Yeah, and I think they're absolutely amazing. I've paid them for years. They charge something like $2,800 per month per coach. Right, so I pay them $16,000 a month, I think, for coaches for all of my executive team. Oh, you have multiple coaches? Yeah, so I believe in them that much that like all of my executives each get— $16K a month to this one company? Wow. Now, so their process, they're not like, here are the Reboot certified coaches, go on there and choose the right person. And I'm like, well, okay, do I want Andy or Dan or, you know, what's the right fit? No, they have an onboarding process where you get on a call with them and they understand about your business and they get to know you and, you know, personality, what the fit is and all of that. And then they make a recommendation and they say, this is the coach that we think is the right fit for you. So you have so much confidence in that recommendation. Yeah. And so I'm saying, okay, Let's say, let's work through this. You've got the certification, you now have all these coaches or implementers, and they have different specialties. And so now I come to you and I'm like, hey, I need the second brain implemented in ConvertKit. And you're like, okay, well, what's your experience level, right, with all of our principles? Okay, you know you have a lower experience level, so this type of coach. What type of business? Oh, you're in software, okay. So it's narrowing down, now it's gonna be one of these three people. Okay, what time zone are you in, all that. And then you're saying, Nathan, this is the implementer that is the best for your business. Here's the price point, all of that. I'm not paying them separately, right? I'm paying you as the company and you are paying them.

Right.

Right, or they could be still an independent contractor rather than a full-time employee, but that transaction happening, the trust is all through you, and all of that. So it's a very, very, it's a high price transaction and a very high trust transaction. And so the combination of that, right, if we were to go back to the previous page, we're all the way up here in price point. And so that, that's a big business. And now I'm like, I'm just getting excited thinking about it because I can just say like, I'm getting someone who's the right fit. You're not going to put someone on my project and supporting ConvertKit who is like, oh, I work with creators to help them, you know, creators who are early in their career to help them get organized. You might have coaches who that is their specialty, but I have confidence that you just assigned someone to me who's like, oh, I actually used to work in SaaS in a previous company. Yes. And I became obsessed with this and I love coaching and right. Right. That makes so much sense. So it's not just that you're sort of building blocks on top of each other, it's that they reinforce each other. Yes. Something else I'm hearing. Ah, flywheel. That's where that comes in. Yeah. So the things that we're doing, we're doing those 3 things and we maintain the course, right? You need— the training is key, right? Because you need to be able to take people through all of this. This is like the almost that just the doorway, the entry gateway that everyone has to pass through on the way to those things. Yeah. 4 C's. It's like a new framework that you just invented. Somehow we'll get corporate training in there. Oh yeah, 5 C's. But this, this is really interesting because it plays into itself because you're going to, you know, the course and the community, you'll have to figure out the balance between these two things. Because they could take away from each other, they could cross-sell in a really nice— like, they could be complementary or competitive, since we're only using words that start with C. But like, that's an interesting balance, you know, $2,500 for a course, $200 a month, you know, you got to figure out what the ongoing value delivery is, that kind of thing. But as you have that, you've got plenty of revenue coming in from there. The certification takes it up a level. This should be expensive. I think Rachel's certification is $25,000.

Wow.

I might be getting that wrong, but it's up there.

Wow.

Right? Talk about flywheels, particularly in sales, and you've got some really interesting processes here. How do you think about bringing these like sales flywheels into a business.

So building on, on your philosophies and Jim Collins' philosophy that the sales flywheel is something that you do and then it flows automatically into the next thing and it becomes easier and easier from there. I was looking with this question in mind with my own team on our own processes. So every 14 days we look at these boring processes, the marketing processes, the sales processes, the ops processes with 3 questions basically. First, what can we simplify for the clients? Can we cut something? Then second question, what can we simplify for us? Can we make any cuts for us, for our team? And then the third question is, how does this flow easily into the next value creation activity? Now this sounds theoretical. Let me give you an example from 2 weeks ago where we look at those 3 things in our own processes. So we don't know the answer yet when we start that session, but we do it. And we look at the marketing processes. Head of podcasting is Lou. And so Lou starts reporting about the current state of processes. And then he says, what could we cut? And he said, probably we can cut this part and that part. I said, okay, cool, do it. And then he says, and then the question, how can we make it easier to go into the next step? He says, Simon, I don't have a next step. And say, oh, what happens after? So, Lou, you are getting me on four podcasts per day. Okay, what happens after that? And he goes, nothing. I said, okay, are you measuring the downloads from. From each.

No.

Okay, so let's add in your spreadsheet. Let's add a column which. Which has number of downloads per podcast that Simon was on. And then, Michel, what could be the easiest step to your part of the marketing process, which is partnerships? We think for a couple of minutes and then Michelle goes, Simon, what if we pick the top 3 podcast hosts based on number of downloads because there is a resonance between your audiences there and then those top 3, they get the power hour with you, which means exploring strategic partnerships, joint ventures, et cetera. And I said, Michel, this is genius. Lou, can you do it? Of course I can do it, Simon. In an hour, I will implement it. I didn't know 30 minutes before what to improve, but 30 minutes later, we had a flywheel. And that flywheel, 10 days later, has created $95,000 in sales.

And there's leads coming from the podcast?

Yes. It's not a planned activity. I do podcasts to learn about things, to have sparring with smart people like you, to learn from the best and to learn about myself because I know what I think after I've said it. But what happens is that Michelle then follows up on these hosts and say on the top 3 and says, hey, do you want a power hour with Simon? And by the time that she follows up, they have already gone to my calendar and they say, Simon, and I look at the calendar and say, what do they want to talk about, Michel? Maybe that is a power hour. And say, no, no, no, they are— they are— they want to explore a sales acceleration for their own team. Because you're talking 45 minutes to somebody, that's— you are creating value or not.

What flywheel should you start with? And the tendency is I'm going to focus on the flywheel that's the most exciting or interesting.

Yep.

But I have a big caveat to that. Flywheels take time to get going, and most of us don't have time. And so if you focus on the most interesting flywheel, then you probably won't have enough time to bring it to life and get it really going. Uh, and so what I encourage you to do instead is to focus on the flywheel that frees up the most time for you. And so look at the process in your business where you're spending the most time, like dive into your calendar. Uh, dive into, you know, business operations, see what's the most time-consuming thing and build a flywheel for that. And then that new time that you freed up, use that to build more flywheels. But if you go the other way and build the most exciting flywheel first, you just won't have enough time to, uh, actually create a system that's really gonna work.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the first, um, flywheels that I built, but I didn't know I was building a flywheel at the time, was around newsletter creation. Writing my newsletter, I used to be like up on Saturday night at 9 PM or 10 PM or 1 in the morning, whichever. Sometimes I'd get up at 4 AM on a Sunday because my newsletter was supposed to go out at 6, and I'd be like writing my newsletter last minute. Um, and sometimes they were still really good, but like, that was so stressful every week, ruining my weekend, right, with this newsletter that I sent out Sunday morning. And when I finally created a process for the newsletter to get written that involved a copywriter, took me out of it. It involved like creating a voice guide, right? For how I talk and how I write. Like so many steps that went into that. But when I finally got out of it, I was like, oh my God, I feel like I just got like 30 hours a week back. It was probably more like 10, but it felt like 30, you know? Now you've got time to really devote while that's going and you can be refining it. Like you can now move on to something else. I think that's so brilliant to focus on first on a flywheel that can free up your time.

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