Your Roadmap From $1 To $500k Per Month

Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour, where the running joke is, this is going to be much shorter than an hour because we are once again hyped up on caffeine. And not only are we hyped up on caffeine, we are hyped up on official ship. 30 for 30 swag hats, big upgrade. I think we look good in these, man.

Official. I'm gonna start wearing this to the gym. And when people ask me what I do, I'm gonna say, I live on a boat and I fish for my food.

There we go. Well, we are back from Cabo. We made it back in one piece. Our last episode, our most popular so far. Thanks for everyone who watched that. Thanks for everyone who wrote up their takeaways. Same lesson goes for this one. If you write up your takeaways, we'll pick one lucky winner with a free spot into our ship. 30 for 30 cohort, starting in July. A lot of things in that video that we could dive deep on. And I think our plan is going to be honestly, rewatch it. Like, I thought about this morning if we could almost do a reaction video to that video, because we filmed that so off the cuff. We were super tired. We were ready to get out of there. Like, we sat down, we thought we were going to do like a two minute episode. And then it turned into a 40 minute. Just like, here's what we learned. Here's what we learned. Here's what we learned. And so I almost thought, why don't we just watch that back? So I'd watched that before, and now I'm realizing we have a ton of things we could talk about. But I think today we want to do the bottleneck analysis and kind of roadmap.

Yeah, that's actually doing a reaction video would be really cool. But, yeah, I think each one of those topics deserves its own space because they're, you know, we touched on it, but they're such rabbit holes. But yeah, I think this is a cool topic of bottleneck analysis also because it's so clearly where we are right now. Like, I think you have these phases of a business where you're either confronted by the next bottleneck and then when you overcome it, you go through like a second phase of then optimizing the thing that you just broke through. So think of the bottleneck as how you get to the next plateau. And then you have to go through a period where you're like, I broke through. Now I have to clean up all of the things that I just Rushed through. Like, think about how many different seasons we've gone through, Dicky, where we make some huge leap forward, and then we go, oh, we have to spend two or three months now cleaning up the growth spurt that we just went through.

I'm starting to piece this together. And as I look at our past, it's like there's a couple months of a slog where you're trying to figure out what that bottleneck is. You're not growing, you're not really sure why. You're trying a couple of different things. And then you figure it out, you go and solve that bottleneck, which usually takes less time because you just go and build one thing, right? The removal of the bottleneck is like a couple weeks, but the slog before it, where you're like, why aren't we growing? We're doing the same thing. Like, do we need to just keep doing what we're doing? What do we need to change? And then you solve that bottleneck. I think everything doubles pretty much. Like, if you look back at our revenue growth, it's always been like a double. And then when you double, everything breaks or something breaks with what you just did.

And.

And then you optimize. So I think you hit the nail on the head. And as I look back at our last two years, especially the last year of what we've done, probably a year and a half since really January of 21 or January 22. It's. It's been that constant find the bottleneck, get extremely, like, antsy when you're looking for that bottleneck because you just can't find it. You're like, what are we doing wrong? Does it need to be this? You. You chase a ton of shiny objects because everything looks like it'll work. And then you try that, and it's like, I wish we could have had the, hopefully the operational discipline we have now that I feel like we're about to go execute on with scaling up, ghostwriting to some of the things we've done in the past and might help us move faster.

Yeah, I mean, I think the. The meta concept here is part. So I like, everything is both a combination of hard skill and. And soft skill. And I feel like the hard skill in this sense is literally what is the bottleneck? You know, you're looking at it in a very. Just business function. You know, I have inputs, I have outputs. What's keeping growth from accelerating? But I also think there's the other side of it, which people don't talk about a lot, which is you know, or you have an inkling as to what the bottleneck is, but in order to solve it, that means you have to do something that you haven't done before. And human nature is, I like doing the things that I already know how to do. So when you look at your list of these are the things that I. These are my options we all naturally gravitate to. These are the loops that are easier to close. These are the loops that are more comfortable to close. These are the loops I know how to close. But all of those sit in the bucket of none of them are the bottleneck. So it's an interesting human nature question, too. And I see it with a lot of my friends also who are building businesses. It's like they know the thing that they need to do, and then they spend their time doing all of the things except for that one thing, because that one thing is the new and uncomfortable thing that they haven't done yet. And so that's why so much of quote, unquote, entrepreneurship is like getting. It's not just the ability to recognize the bottleneck in a business context. It's also emotional, Becoming more and more confident at your ability to go. That's the new thing. That's the thing that's keeping me from growing. I just have to ignore everything else and ram my face into it.

Yeah. Confronting the true bottleneck is usually Alex from Mose talks about skills, beliefs, character traits. And I think recently for us, it's been a belief of. And at different seasons in the journey, the bottleneck is some part of one of those three. And I think as you get higher, it's almost all beliefs of like, okay, we could go do this. And I can see how this is all kind of coming together in a framework we should really write up. And it's. So we sat down in Cabo and made that bottleneck list. And as I look at that, that was really an optimization list. It was more leads, more conversion, tighter operations. I think those are the three bottlenecks you can have on, on any profit center in your business that you want to double. But the amount of work that it takes to double one of those at certain points is far more than starting a new profit center that then you could optimize. And I think where it would be helpful for people is to paint, I think our roadmap on doubling. And it's rough, double, but it's basically 10 to 20, 20 to 50, 50 to 100, 100 to 200 and 200, 500 per month. So Always thinking in a monthly. Because with how quickly you move, like, thinking in annual run rates and things like that just doesn't make sense. Because if you're operating at a high level and moving quickly, your monthly run rate is what you should be focusing on.

Yeah. Just to clarify, for people, it's. It's because you're. Pretty much every decision in the business comes down to monthly run rate in the sense of costs, you know, is like, if you have labor, you're paying people per month. Right. So you need to know, am I generating enough each month to pay them per month? Or if you're running ads, how much are you spending per month? Like, everything always comes down to per month. And someone said it at the Mastermind, Dickie. And I'm so glad. Someone. I forget who it was. It might have been Neil Patel when he was speaking and he was like, he's like, I don't care about lifetime revenue. Do not tell me how much money you've made over seven years. Like, nobody cares. The only thing that matters is how much you make in a year. Because the year is the reflection of the maturity of the business. And then the year is divided down into. And what are you doing per month? And in a business like ours, because it's like a cohort model that's a little bit lumpier. It's not like a consistent SaaS revenue or something. The monthly then just has to get averaged into, like, roughly what are you doing per month relative to what you do in a year?

And here's the framework I want everyone listening or watching to think about is when you're doing this bottleneck analysis, the folks in question is, what do I need to do to double my monthly run rate? So if you're at 10, the question is, how do I get to 20? If you're at 20, how do I get to 50? 50 to 100, 100 to 200, 200, 500? If you're constantly asking that question, the answer's going to differ at each stage. What you work on, what you prioritize. And so why don't we walk through our stages starting back at 10 to 20k. I don't think we should cover 0 to 10k because there's so many different paths you could take on that. You could have a course, you could have a service, you could have a digital product. The thinking is just, you need to sell something to someone a couple of times. And Alex from Mosey says that a ton. It's just to get to 10K. And really all the Way to a hundred. You're gonna focus on selling one thing, but, like, my first 10k was from 5 different sources. Podcast curation. I was ghostwriting for someone. I launched a digital product. Like, you kind of have to get through that slog until you have one thing that is generating 10, 10 grand a month. And. And then you can start asking these questions. So you really don't have a bottleneck in the beginning. Your bottleneck is you just need to do more.

Yeah. Real, real quick. I, I do think the, the crystallizing point on 0 to 10, because you said it is most people can figure out a way to get to 10, but they duct tape together three, four, five different income sources. You know, so you have people who are like, I'm doing 10k a month, but it's like half of that's coming from, you know, they have a client and they do freelance writing. And then 25% of it's coming from, like, they have an Airbnb. And then another 25% is coming from, like, I sell notion templates. Right. It's like coming from all these different places. And until you can get to, I'm doing 10k a month off of one thing, you can't scale it. Right. You can't scale you doing five different things. So it's. It's actually like, less about the revenue number, and it's more about getting to that first milestone around 10k a month, doing one specific thing that you can do over and over again. Because otherwise, then you can't have a scaling conversation because you can't scale. Doing like seven different things. I think that's the one piece that's important. Going from 0 to 10.

That's an extremely important point. And you will get a sense, which is why we talk about making those small. You know, Dan Vasilo, I think, popularized the term small bets. We were trying a bunch of different things, and you look at the ways we've made money in the past, we had tons of different ways, but ship 30 hit and got to 10, 15, 20K in that January 2021 cohort, where it's like, okay, this is clearly a scalable vehicle. And so our roadmap, we can do a whole video just on that 0 to 10k for both of us. But once you're at 10, it's, how do I get to 20? And to be honest, at that stage, so just keeping the framework in mind, you can get more leads, so you can just get more people who are interested in buying it. You could get better conversion which is the people who find out about it then buy it more. Or you can have tighter operations which allow you to scale faster, or you could have a new product. Right. So you can basically pick one of those four things at any point in the journey to try to double. And the whole goal is to take those four things and say which one is the easiest to go and do right now? Because within each one, there's going to be one single thing that could remove that bottleneck. And then across all four bottlenecks, there's going to be one that is clearly the roadmap or the, the blockage of the roadmap. And I think from 10 to 20, it's just, you need to talk about it more. More people need to see it. Because if enough people buy it that where you make 10k, you're not even scratching 1/100th of a percent of the Internet's scale, which means you just need to find out a way for more people to see it.

Yeah. What's really interesting is, so as we're talking through this, I'm thinking back on if this holds true for when I was building my ghostwriting agency. And it's funny how it actually is almost identical. Like whether you're selling a digital product like ship 30 is, you know, info education digital product, or you're selling a service getting to 10k, getting to 20k, even getting to 50k, is really just a function of you need to present more people with the offer. And with ship 30, that essentially meant, Dickie, you and I go, we need to write more on Twitter. Which is basically all we did. We were just like, let's just write more on Twitter and get more people to know about CHIP 30. And yeah, that was literally the only thing. And then with the ghostwriting agency, it was like, oh, we literally just need to cold email more clients. And in both of those cases, I think a lot of times where what people misunderstand is they think like, it's so funny how the brain does this. They, they on one side of the spectrum think, I need everybody. And then on the other side of the spectrum think getting 50 people is going to be impossible. So it's almost like you believe both sides at the same time. And if you start to do the math on this stuff, it's like, in order to get to 20k a month, you don't need that many people. And so. And what's interesting is as we get further along and you talk about going from like 50 to 100, the reason that I don't think it's smart to focus on anything else in the beginning other than just introducing more people to it is because if you don't have enough people buying from you, there's really no sense in trying to come up with the next thing. You're going to sell them because you don't have enough current customers. So you need to get a decent amount of current customers in order to then have enough people to sell. You know, 20% of them are going to go, great, I'll buy the more expensive thing that you have, the backend thing. So I think that good. It's a good framework of zero, you know, 10k, 20k. And then like right around 50k is all just, I need more people on the front end. And then above 50k, then you can start thinking about the back end from 10 to 50.

The important thing to keep in mind here too is you need to be constantly improving the product. That is the whole goal. You're getting more people in and then you're listening to them so you can improve the product. So not much else there. Like we did our first 50k month, I think March 21st, something like that, where it was like 10k in January, I think it was April 21st. So about four months, five months into ship 30, something like that. And the key for us was just we wrote a bunch of viral Twitter threads. Like I got shouted out in Tim Ferriss. My Twitter audience grew, so did yours. And we were sitting around 50k with ship 30 at like a $250 price point, something like that, like not very much at all. And the takeaway there was all we were trying to do was improve the product and tell more people about it and improve the product to a point where everyone who took it was telling their friends. So everyone who was joining ship 30 absolutely loved it because we focused on the community, we focused on making improvements and that started to spin the flywheel. At 50k, you face a couple of different. And it's funny to look back on this and we, we need to do a full sit down, like pull up the. Pull up the stripes, pull up the email communications, pull up all this painting the whole journey. But 50 to 100, I think you can continue to sell one thing. You just need more people who see it to buy it. I think that is the key function there because it paints pretty clearly with what we did. We did our first 100k month in October or November of 21, towards the end of. Because I still remember we had 100k and I was still working at Blackrock at the time. And I was like, oh my God, this is a real thing. Like, I got to, I got to get out of here ASAP like this. Because the original goal with ship 30 was 10 grand in a year. I was like, if I made a thousand bucks a month, like, I'd be a king. And we did a hundred, I think, in October. And the key change we made was the ultimate guide and the email course, which was people were learning about ship 30 because they were seeing it everywhere, but the only way they were going to get more information on it was the landing page. So we got to 50k with no email list, nothing but like people talking about it, telling their friends and going to the website. And then to go from 50 to 100, we just needed to. You can look at it. We just needed twice as many people who saw it to buy. Not that difficult. Meanwhile, we continue to write a ton. So we were still increasing leads, but that email course was the key to get from 50 to 100.

Yes. And I actually forgot this until just now, but we, we sort of juiced the numbers and then we realized that we were making a mistake. Because remember how we got from 50 to 100k was we also sold the more advanced cohort.

Write the course or write the ship. Right, the ship. Right, that's.

And write the ship was like. It was like the advanced version of ship 30, basically, and it was more expensive, but it was also a four week live cohort. And for us, you know, if you go back and trace the thinking, it made sense. You know, we were, we were at around like 50k a month, give or take. It was kind of lumpy revenue because of how the cohorts work, but roughly. And we realized in order to like, the. The next fastest thing that we can do is to just have another thing for sale. Right. So we're already sort of thinking in that direction. The mistake that we made though, the mistake was, well, like, even though digital products and cohorts are more scalable, we sort of were like, well, let's just do what we did again, just charge a bit more, which is very time dependent. And I remember when we would run those cohorts, and specifically I was doing the live sessions of this. Right. The ship thing is that was really taxing, like really taxing. And so it was a weird thing where we found a way to make the revenue go up. But the amount of time and effort that we had to put forth in order to do that was also very high. And so I think through the end of like 20, 21, we were doing that and we were seeing the chart go up, but we were also sort of like, this isn't sustainable. And that's what made us ask the question, like, maybe, maybe we have the wrong like back end offer. Right? And I think the reason I point that out is because even like for us, I think sometimes people look at our journey from the outside as just, you guys just had it, you had it all figured out, it all just magically worked. And we've made a lot of mistakes. It's just our ability to iterate through those mistakes is very fast and very high. And a lot of times you'll, you'll see the bottleneck and you'll try something and either A, it won't work and that doesn't mean you should stop, right? It's like, try something else. And B, even if it does work, it might not be the best version of whatever option that you have there.

Man, I forgot about right the ship because our last right to ship cohort was in May, May of 21, and I just pulled up the stripe. We did 60k in May 21 and then 120 in June. And what happened in June was we wrote a bunch of more viral threads and captured so much of that attention on the email course, while also changing our backend from right the ship to joining. At that time it was the membership and it was such a cleaner continuity where we were able to basically add 50% to our LTV just by saying you could come back to ship 30 cohorts for a year. And then I look at this chart, we went back under 100 for the rest of the year until November. And that was obvious. Like, that was an interesting time, right? Because lockdowns had ended towards the summer in 21, people wanted to go back out. There was that huge boom of stimulus money and then another round and then lockdown started hitting again at the end of 21, because I remember they were trying to bring me back into the office in like October and I was like, oh my God, I have to quit. No way. And then it started going through New York City again. And so we didn't have to do that, but the big realization there was, okay, so we got to fifty, a hundred we fitz around trying to get to with different backend offerings and the same marketing on the front end. And we kind of hit that 70, 60amonth plateau. And then we hit on changing the back end to the membership. Paired with November being a realization for us as product sales. I had no clue. And I guess the whole world knows this, the E Commerce world knows this. But like everyone spends money in November, December, just how it goes. Like you buy things in November and December, just what people do. And I was like, oh, what's happening? And look around it. Everyone was like, yeah, it's like seasonality. People just, it's the holidays. Like it's mostly a made up time of the year where everyone's like, all right, just start buying things. And that was what got us there. So I kind of lost my train of thought a little bit. But from 20 to 50, 50 to 100, the big takeaway was at 100. We needed an additional product. We found it, but it took us a couple of iterations.

You know what else I forgot too was up until that point, a lot of the education that's now in ship 30 wasn't there. Like, ship 30 was largely an accountability program. And a lot of what we teach, we taught in the, the upsell. Right. The ship. And I think we had, you know, we came to this crossroads and I, I remember this pretty vividly where I think it was also a crystallization of our relationship to Dickey where we realized that ship 30 would be a lot more valuable. We could like, what's, you know that phrase of how do we make it.

Insane amount of value at a laughably low price.

Thank you. Yes. In order to, to achieve that, if we took all the education from the high ticket thing and just dumped it into ship 30, we were like, I bet we're going to make people even happier. People are going to talk about it more. And for us, I think that was a crystallization of like, both of us going, like, we're really all in on this. Like, we're really just going to combine our two brains and like this is all just one thing. And when we did that, that worked. People in ship 30 were blown away because they felt like they were buying an $8,000 course. But it only, at the time it was like three, four hundred bucks. And it also, it was also a really good forcing function for us to go, okay, you just. And I think this is a great exercise for everyone. And I try and do it with myself all the time. We basically said, okay, we're going to take our high ticket thing, which was our first attempt at something on the back, on the back end, and we're just going to put all of it in the low ticket thing, which was ship 30. Now what? And I think if you can think that way of going, let me take the thing That I think is most valuable and put it into the thing that is more accessible. Like, there was a huge correlation for us of the number of people who were blown away in ship 30 who wanted to talk about it, who wanted to write about it, who wanted to refer other people after we made that decision. And then it was a great forcing function for us to go, okay, like, now we don't have an upsell now what? Which forced us to invent the Captain's Table, which is what became the continuity. But I think bringing it back to these bottlenecks, it's from 50 to 100k a month for us was. It was very challenging at that time. We really didn't know what the levers were. We didn't know what the right decision was. We were just trying things. We even tried this thing called the Jet Ski, which was like eight people. And it was like a small creative writing class and everyone loved it. But it was far from the most scalable thing that we could have done. So we were just trying all these different things. And eventually we started to learn, you know, what did people really value the Most about ship 30? What would they value most? Continuing on with a sort of like membership program, which we ended up building into the Captain's Table. What sort of education would they want in the Captain's Table? How do we make it even more valuable? You know? And it. That was a solid. I mean, until we got to 100k a month consistently, that probably took us like six, seven months. Like, that was a pretty solid amount of time.

We were back under 100k in the middle of 22 because just the way things worked out and we committed to the Captain's Table and all that. But I think one framework just to crystallize there is people ask us a lot about pricing and our overarching pricing framework has been how can we provide an insane amount of value at a laughably low price? And so with our free content, we take everything that we teach in ship 30 and we give it away for free. And our threads and our ultimate guides and things like that. So everyone goes, wow, that free content was an insane amount of value at a laughably low price. Then they joined ship 30. We pack everything that we would charge 10, 20k for in like a group high ticket coaching program. Put it in ship 30, where everyone who joins goes, that was an insane amount of value at a laughably low price. And you continue to build that equity with all of your customers, both who are consuming your content, who buy your products. And that's what really maximizes both the goodwill that you build with them so they go and tell everyone else and the ability to sell them more things. Because if you build trust with free, build trust with the first paid, it's like, of course I'm going to buy the next thing from you because I know you've delivered on all these things.

In the past once we got to around 100k a month. So in that sprint, right? So we talked about this at the beginning of. As you push through a bottleneck, then you inevitably have to go back, you have to backtrack a little bit and sort of clean up what you just did. And right when we, like right when we push through the bottleneck was really getting clear on, okay, you know, this is how we make ship 30 more valuable. This is what the captain's table looks like. And then as soon as we started having both of those running, you know, you had people buying ship 30 and then you had recurring revenue in the captain's table. And now we had two things to manage. Like, then we went through another three months of, oh, we have, we have things we need to clean up. Like, we need to clean up our CRM, we need to clean up how we're tracking the payments, we need to clean up, you know, who's looking after the communities we need to clean. Like, there were all these new things that we had to clean up. And I think this is also something I don't hear a lot of people talk about, which is so much of growth isn't constant growth. Like, if anything, you're actually better off growing and then pausing and sort of cleaning up what just happened. Because the business is different from 20k a month to 50k a month.

That.

Those are different businesses. 50k to 100k a month, those are different businesses. And if you don't take the time to sort of pause and crystallize the new level that you're at, it either falls apart and goes away, or you just go onto the next one and then you jump one more level and then things just break even even more. Like, that was especially in hindsight, that was the biggest mistake I made with my ghostwriting business. We went from 10 or 20k a month to 200k a month in like 11 months. Like, it just was nonstop. And as what I should have done was pause at, you know, 50K and crystallize the processes, you know, then get to 100K and pause and crystallize the processes. When you skip that, you're. You're leaving yourself very vulnerable. For growing too quickly and not really understanding what were the levers that got me here and how do I make sure that this is, this level is solid before I ascend to the next one.

Yeah, I just pulled up our stripe again. The number of lumps where it's like new thing. And then it kind of broke again and we needed to go fix a bunch of things. And it wasn't really until July of 22 where we had both of those going at the same time, sustainably doing 200amonth. So 100 to 200 was getting that back end fulfillment and operations done. And then we've really been in the last four or five thinking, okay, what is the next step? What does it look like to go from 2 to 5? And I think what we've settled on and what we've realized is that it's not more leads, it's not better conversion, it's not better operations, which we thought it was and is easier to think that that would be the answer where, okay, yeah, let's go tweak this thing. But to double from here, none of those are going to work right from here, none of those incremental things would get from 2 to 5. So again, requires new thinking. And that is how we settled on ghost riding being the next thing because we can clearly see, okay, what would it take to get like it comes down to almost daily numbers, but the last two months as we've done this Ship 30 cohort, we've seen other potential ways to get from maybe 2 to 250, 250 to 3, etc. Etc. But none of those are going to get us to five. So it required a whole new way of thinking which is similar to going from 1 to 2 requires a new profit center. I think 2 to 5 also does as well.

Yeah. So this is where, you know, the journey might not be linear, but it, it ends up working to your advantage. So when we made that mistake selling right. The ship originally, I feel like that played into our decision here quite a bit because conventional thinking would go, okay, we're at around 200k a month, how do we get to 300? Right. Or how do we get to 400? And I think the easy answer would be, well, let's just do the same thing that we've already done, but let's just do another live cohort. Right? And that's basically what right the ship was. It's like, oh, let's just pick a different topic and make another ship 30. And what we learned, you know, a year, a Year and a half ago was, if you think about it that way, you know, running one ship 30 is taxing. Like even though we've built all of it. And like even just showing up for the calls and just running the cohort is taxing and trying to do two of those. It's like, yeah, again, it might be higher numbers, but it's the same mistake, right? You see a little revenue bump and then you're like, this isn't sustainable. And part of, you know, you know, Dickie, we talked about this at the beginning of. You have to go through this period of figuring out a, what's the bottleneck and B, what's the right way of solving it. A big benefit for us of the ghostwriting program is realizing that selling something high ticket in multiple thousands, totally different for a couple different reasons. One is that high ticket inherently means fewer people paying more. Right? Whereas ship 30 is more people paying less. And those are two completely different experiences. And so when you're selling high ticket, you don't need a ton of people. We need less people paying more. So that solves a problem of we don't have to manage some giant community in order to get to the next level. Right? The second one is, and this has taken us so long to learn, and I want to crystallize this framework as much as we can over time, is that when you are selling information, it has to be lower ticket, right? Why are some of the most brilliant books you've ever read $20, right? Because it's just information. But if you're selling the accountability or the outcome, you're guaranteeing an outcome, specifically if you can guarantee a financial outcome, right? We're going to give you the skills to go make X number of dollars per month or per year. You can charge a lot more. And that if there is no other framework that people take away from us selling information, it's that or info products is that when you're selling just the information, it's low ticket. When you're selling more of the accountability or the outcomes, you can charge more and more and more. So ship 30, for example, we provide accountability, right? So we can charge a little bit more. So $100 product, maybe it's an $800 product. And we also give education, we also give all of these things and we also give like the implication of, and here's some of the lower hanging fruit outcomes that will happen which people accomplish. But we are not guaranteeing any sort of financial outcome or career outcome or anything like that.

This is a really important framework that you just said. And so you're either selling information or implementation. Information is always going to be cheaper than implementation. But all information doesn't have to be the same low ticket price. And here's the counter example. When you are promising or not promising but leading to some kind of financial outcome, the information will still be more expensive because it is more valuable than the information for a non financial outcome. Right. So here's a different example with let's compare ship 30 to a real estate wholesaling course where right away someone's going to be able to make 10 20k a month if they put that into practice. Ship 30. If we were to sell just the ship 30 information it'd probably be $150 async product and we might do that in the future. And then to core based course, $800 doesn't tie to any kind of financial outcome. It's really still a good amount of information and they have to put it into practice themselves. Look at then the same example but a real estate wholesaler where one is here's how to go and get your first three deals and make 10k a month. That as a webinar could probably be three grand if it was just information because the people who get that information are then able to apply it in a high return on investment rating way. But a coaching program that is done with you and helps you with the actual implementation of that would be 10 15k. So both of these information is going to be less expensive than implementation. But the market you're selling to and the promise you're making, which really comes down to the target market, the more specific you can get, the more lucrative the outcome you can promise, et cetera, et cetera, that how that flywheel works. But I wanted to crystallize that because yes, information will always be less than implementation but more valuable information tied to an outcome can be priced higher than regular information that is, you know, non outcome focused.

Yeah, that's a, that's a great nuance. And also too you know, so we just shared that video of the mastermind that we went to in Los Cabos. And what's interesting about that decision just to tie it all together is you know, if you're at like 200k a month and you're trying to figure out how to get to 500k, you're looking for things that don't require as much of your time because that was the mistake we made with ride the ship. And it's not to say it's not going to take Work. It's just you're looking for how do I build businesses or pieces of this business that aren't solely dependent on me or us, Right? And another one of the benefits of high ticket is that when you're selling things that are high ticket, multiple thousands of dollars, you're usually doing that over the phone. It's more of a sales call, right? Because you need to talk to the person because they're like, I'm about to make a significant investment in myself. And what I learned building a ghostwriting agency, and as we've gone down the rabbit hole of selling high ticket info products and trainings is that that also means that you don't have to be the one selling it. You can build a sales team, which also means it's not solely dependent on you. Right? And so part of the challenge of going from roughly 200k a month to 500k a month and beyond is you have to completely change your thinking in how do I build things where I'm. I'm not the bottleneck, Right? How, how can I build things where other people can help support me? Whereas I think it's fair to say, like, you can get to. Most people can get to a hundred K a month where it's like just them or it's just them and a contractor or two, or it's them and a contractor and some AI, right? Like you can be the business up to a hundred K ish a month, but beyond that, all of a sudden you can't be the bottleneck anymore. And so a big reason why we paid, you know, 68 grand for Cole Gordon's mastermind is that the mastermind solved a lot of the specific problems that we were trying to figure out. And I want to emphasize this for everyone where you think, you know, like, really understanding who you're selling. This mastermind's like, hey, are you stuck at around 100 to 500k a month? Do you want to have a high ticket offer and do you want to know how to build a sales team to sell your high ticket offer? And Dickie, you and I are like, yes, yes, yes. Those are the three problems that we are trying to figure out right now. And if you do the math right, 68 grand sounds like a lot until you realize, well, if I spend 68 grand in order to accelerate a year of this learning and then go build a business that doubles our business, right? It pays for itself in less than a month. And so this, this is the sort of, to me, this is the coolest part about Business period, is that at every level, your thinking changes. Your whole everything about the context of the world you live in changes. If you're at 10k to 20k, 20 to 50, 50 to 100, 100 to 200, 200 to 500, 500 to a million, they're all different. And so I love that now we're in this phase of, you can see how much our growth is dependent on us completely changing the way that we think in that we have to no longer be the bottleneck, we have to build things where we create the system and then it sort of lives on its own.

So many takeaways with what you just said, because that with each level of thinking requires you to almost become a different person. Because you have to recognize I can't operate the same both on a personal level and on a business level. Like, who I talk to, what I consume, where I go to learn. Right. What I say no to. Like, think about at this point, how many different ways we could make 50 grand in a month, a thousand at least. Right? And the, the most difficult part is the emotional of literally a year and a half ago, we would have jumped on that opportunity, but you have to continue to say no to more and more lucrative opportunities as you grow. And that is, I think, the most difficult part. Because we got back from the mastermind, all we were inundated with was people doing 15 different things to make X amount a month. And we're like, oh, we can do that, we can do that, we can do that. And I think you can whiplash your team if you come back from an event like, we need to do this and, and then we're going to do this, and then we're going to do this, and you end up just chasing a hundred different shiny objects. So we had to sit down and say, okay, what is the one thing? What is the one bottleneck? How can we deprioritize everything else? While also, and this has been a huge realization for me is I've reframed shiny objects as shiny opportunities. And that has helped me instead of think, thinking, oh, I need to go do this, I should be doing that, I should be doing that. It's put me at a good bit of peace because I know we're going to be able to grow and iterate forever because we're not doing all those things. So rather than from a place of scarcity of like, oh, I need to go start running on LinkedIn or I need to be building on Instagram, look at what this person's doing. I need to be running Facebook ads, YouTube ads. It's, wow, we're doing this much a month, and I'm not running Facebook ads or YouTube ads or all these other 10 different things you could do to grow the business. And I returned that was the most valuable part of the whole thing, was, wow, there are a lot of ways to make money in this space, and there are a lot of ways to do business. And so I got back like, all right, let's just pick the one that we can do the best right now. And we're probably going to do a lot of those. And if you extend the time horizon, 5, 10, 15 years, we're going to be a good spot. So that was my personal takeaway.

Again, it's the barbell, hard skills and soft skills. And so much of this is really not, you need the business framework, it's part of it. But the majority of this is the relationship you have with yourself, and it's your willingness to change how you think, change how you act, change your habits, change your responsibilities, because each one of these levels asks something different of you. And Dickie, I think. I mean, think about how much you and I have had to evolve over the past two years at each level and change the way that we work and change the way that we operate. And. And that's something I would love to write more about, is the interpersonal adventure you go on when you build a business. Because so, so much of it gets talked about as just the literal things.

Right.

You're building a business, what's the revenue, how many customers? You know, it's just all the literal stuff. But really, you see how many people get stuck at each level, usually because of something going on within themselves. It's either a faulty belief system or they can't change, or they don't want to change, or they can't embrace the new thing that's being asked of them. Right. And so there's probably a whole rabbit hole for us to explore there as well.

Yeah. The business bottleneck is always your personal growth. And so when you hit a limit, any kind of plateau in your business, the first thing you have to do is figure out what's changing the business. But what that usually ends up meaning is to go and execute that change that you've identified. You have to change as a person with what you're doing. So I'm excited to keep making those changes and levels up. And that's why I tell everyone, if you want to learn more about yourself, don't go on a backpacking Tour through Europe, start a side hustle. Because the bottleneck of that side hustle is going to be your personal growth and your skills. Like, you'll learn more in the first month of trying to sell something to someone than you will in Croatia backpacking. So that's always my advice to recent college grads. Don't take a gap year to go explore a different country. Take a gap year, start a side hustle, start a business. You're going to learn far more about yourself and the world and human nature, psychology, everything. If you have something for sale. So this was fun, man. I think we're going to look back on this one in a few months. Hopefully we've solved this bottleneck. Future me, if you're watching this, hopefully you have solved the bottleneck to get from 2 to 5 and now working 5 to 1, which we think is going to be another profit center. But it also could be more leads.

Who knows?

We're not going to get ahead and solve problems we don't have. And I think that's the number one thing we could leave with everyone here is you might watch a video like this and start to think in the future, like, oh, here's all the things I need to do. Take it back to your current bottleneck. Say, what do I need to do to double what I'm doing now? List all the different ways, stack, rank them, which one's going to be the easiest to implement and implement that one. All while continuing to compound your reputation through high quality content, making friends, networking, staying on just the good side of everything. Because I think one caveat I make, there are a lot of ways you could double that are not going to help you double over a yearly horizon. And so that deserves its own point is that what you're optimizing for is to double and sustain. You're looking for a new run rate, not a new spike. And that was most people have promotions, Big players have businesses. Businesses are things that sustain. They compound promotions or things that spike and then go right back down. So with all of these, you're not looking for the short term way to double your revenue. You're looking for the long term rate to double your run rate. And if we can help you find that with this video, let us know if you're on YouTube. Leave us a comment with your biggest takeaways. We will give away one free spot to our next ship. 30 for 30 cohort. CO. You think I miss anything?

No, I'm just so glad you said that point at the end because that's that is arguably the most important piece of it all is it's very easy to make things double today or this month. The question is, will it stay? Will it be sustainable? So I'm really glad you pointed that out.

And that's also a note to ourselves because we have to think about that all the time too. So I think that's it for this episode. If you're listening on Spotify or Apple podcasts, could you do us a huge favor? Leave us a five star review. Leave us a comment. If you're on YouTube, write up your takeaways. Leave us a comment there. If you're on Twitter, write a thread with your biggest takeaways. We will like share and retweet that. And that's it for this week. If you have any requests for future topics we could dive into again, leave a comment, give us a DM and we will see you in the next episode of the Espresso Hour. Have a good one, y'. All.