4 Steps to Unf*** Your Business

There are 4 big levers in your business that could be messed up. I'll show you how to figure out which one it is and how to fix it so you can scale your business. We had those 4 levers that I had earlier. We've got traffic, we've got conversion, we've got price, and then we've got churn. So those are the big 4 things. And so if we want to grow the business, those levers have to change or the business will not grow. And so for many of you, it might just be you need more traffic. Like the business model is fine. The economics are fine and you need more traffic. And so basically, at least my thought process that I have with this is I try and scale as much as I possibly can until something breaks. And then when it breaks, we fix that thing and then go back to scaling the shit out of it again. I mean, fundamentally that's what we do. And I mean, I teach this for businesses, but I'll walk you through it. What is gonna go to these 4 levers that we talked about earlier? Right, which is going to be your traffic, your— two Fs there— whatever, conversion, which is you tweaking your about page, making a VSL that's better, adding carousel images, tweaking the bullets that you have on your landing page. You've got the price which you can test, and then you've got churn, right, which has a big list of things that you can do. So these are the four levers. The things that you're doing have to ladder up to one of these four. If it doesn't ladder up to one of these four things, why are you doing it? All right. So like if we were to translate your objective with the free group, you would have to say, okay, I think that us reactivating the free group will increase traffic. That's fundamentally what you're doing. You want this traffic source to make you more money from your— towards your ticket or high ticket thing. And you say, okay, how much work will it take me to reactivate this group? Okay. Is there anything else that could get me more traffic than reactivating the group of the things that I have available? So right now, could me just spending more money on ads or making better ads make us more than me spending the time to reactivate the group? If so, forget reactivating the group, make better ads or spend more money on ads. Does that make sense? So once you figure out, and when we're picking which of these 3 things or 4 things that you're doing, the thought process is what, which of these is the biggest constraint in the business? And so if conversion rate, let's say for example on the, on the landing page is super low, then it might mean like, hey, before getting more traffic, I'm gonna, I think I can double my conversion on this page 'cause I haven't really spent any time on it at all. Okay, well then it makes sense to spend a day or two. Like, can I really clean this up and make it as crisp as humanly possible with the language that I use? Can I grab screenshots that are more meaningful that like you probably had more testimonials, things like that you haven't updated? Like, can I put that on there? Can I make an actual 3-minute VSL that, that is more compelling than the one that I just like tossed up there? Okay, that's probably a day of work. Well, it's probably high leverage because I can double the growth of the business by just improving this conversion metric. Pricing. Like, well, if everybody just pays you more, we already went through that example over here. Um, this could obviously make you more money. And then you have your big list of things that you're doing for churn. And so, cool. Which of these is the biggest, uh, thing that's constraining the business? You pick the one that you're working on. And then for me, I tend to think through this: more, better, new. And I tend to do it in this order most of the time. So like, I will just ask one of our portfolio CEOs, like, why can we not just do more of what we're currently doing? Like, whatever we're doing, why can't we just do more? So you'd have to make an argument to me that we should reactivate this group rather than just spending more money on ads. You have to make an argument that it's easier and it will make us more money than spending more money on ads. And if you came up with the argument, I'd be like, well, then forget about it. If we can't do any more for whatever reason, we have some limitation, like we can't post more than twice a day on Instagram. Like we just can't, or we can. It just like, we've seen that when we post 3 times, it doesn't, it doesn't yield the same performance. So 2 is kind of the sweet spot. Fine. All right. Then what can we do to make it better? Right. Okay. Cause if we can make those 2 posts just higher quality overall, can we like really think through the hooks? Can we make sure that they're tight, that they appeal ideally to the audience that we're looking for? If we do better, then the quality of the traffic will go up. The more views will go up. Does that make sense? Now, if we can't do any more, any better, then we need to try something new. And you notice that most of the times you can do more of what you're doing, you can do what you're doing better, which is why I so rarely do new things. Once you have something that works, that's the hard part. Once it works, it's like, how do we scale the living crap out of it? And the reason that most entrepreneurs, in my opinion, especially small ones, get stuck is that they find something that works and then they stop doing it. And then they get distracted by 6 other new things and they get completely spread thin. And it's been like, what's ironic is that the small business owner is the one who has the least amount of leverage. And you have the, basically your, your contribution, your time contribution to the income of the business is more direct than anybody else's, especially at this level. And so like you like saying, okay, I'm going to take a third of my time. That might just be like decreasing your business by a third. Um, and so you have to have a very strong argument for why that's going to make sense. And then for who, once you have a team, then that becomes the next thing. It's like, okay, we know we want to increase traffic. The way that we're going to do that is like, we can't do more posts on Instagram, so we're going to make them better. And this is the process that we're going to focus on getting better, which means that once a week I'm going to take 3 hours and I'm going to script out. I'm going to look at other people's content that have really good hooks. I'm going to write down all the hooks, and then I'm going to make content that I think is going to appeal to my demographic in a better way. Cool. Now, who's going to be, you know, if it's you, then you're the who in a lot of these. If the business gets bigger, then it's like, okay, Jeremy, you're running this. And then we just measure to make sure Jeremy does the job. That makes sense in terms of thinking through this. And so we just want to make sure that what you are doing is going to map to what's going to drive growth within the business. And I swear to God, so many times people are just doing shit that does not map to this. Okay, rant's over. One quick question on that. The first 4, is there like a certain priority that you would recommend for like, I'm a solo operator, I'm doing like 50 a month. B2C offer. Is there like one of those big four that you would recommend prioritizing first? Start here because this is how you have lifeblood in the business. So you have to promote, you have to acquire customers. Once this is relatively consistent, even at a low level, I then— this is me, how I think through this now, not when I was younger. Normally I would just be like, just do as much of this as you can, forget everything else. Now it's do enough of this so that we can keep Working on how do we, how do we find the things that people actually want versus what we think they want? And then are there things that we can remove? Like how can we delete things? How can we make this simpler? How can we make it more elegant? How can we shorten the models that we have? I mean, we're hiding Classroom for new people. Like think about this, like we've removed 3 calls a week. Like we're trying to take things away, not because we don't want to add value. It's easy for us to add the value. It's, but we want, we want them to consume it. And so consumption should be the highest priority for everybody here. In terms of making, like, how do they get value? They have to consume value, right? So consumption should be the highest priority. And so, um, we start here until you have enough flow going through the system that we can see what they really want. And a lot of times these simple things, like the last mastermind, I think we went through a ton of depth of all the things that you can do to reduce churn, right? It's like, so you experiment with that and this might be months while you're doing this. I mean, for context, school didn't hit like a like let's go hyperscale until like recently. And this was years, right, of getting the product right. Like obviously, like there's people coming in every day and there was enough promotion that we basically, that we could test and keep learning. But it wasn't like we don't want the world to find out about it yet because we want to get all these pieces right. Once these pieces are right enough, then you go back here and you scale the living hell out of it. Boom. Yeah, that's great. So right now the question for you is if you have really low churn, I don't know if you do, but from what you were saying, it sounds like you have low churn. Then, then yeah, do your traffic. Yeah, do more, do better at what you're currently doing. So you're running ads? Yeah. Do you spend more? Spend more, make them better. Top 20% of my best customers targeted towards them. Now that I have that insight and then just keep making that better and then just more, more better and then just spend $400 grand a month on ads. Yeah, sure. I mean, it's like an inside joke in my business. Like, he's just going to say more, better. So, yep, that's what we're going to do this quarter, just like we did last quarter, just like we did the quarter before. We're going to do more, we're going to do better. And if we do both those things, we'll probably make more money. And then if there's something that prevents us from doing more or better, then we fix that and then we go back to more, better. Does anyone have questions about what they need to do for this? Like, like you need— you're like, okay, am I— should I be spending more money? Well, if you're If your LTV is good in terms of, and your CAC is low, then yeah, I just keep spending.

I guess for like low ticket communities, you know, recently you had a video where you went like 7 things like handwritten letters, onboarding, exit interviews. For communities on school, like which one of these would you go after at the first?

Kirby, I feel like you have even more insight.

With you, the price sounds like the thing that's moving it.

Say again? The price.

Okay, because you've already experienced what that's doing, right? You know the average is around 20. You probably want to be on the good side of that, so figure out why you're not. Like, man, I would talk to your customers first. Like, why did you cancel? You want to talk to the people that canceled. You want to talk to the people that stayed, and you want to figure out what differences they have. And then if you find the people that stayed did these things, emphasize those things. If you find the people that left did other things, remove those. And so it might not be price. I'm just— yeah, it— but you told us, so, um, maybe it's price. So like balance that, and then, you know, with your traffic, you'd— you can drive more of that, and then you can play with about page conversion, you can play with that, and then when you're bored of those, go back to retention. It's the best signal for it actually. What the fuck is the school games? I wrote it down. That was the problem. If you didn't know what school was, you have— and you see an ad from Hormoz and he's talking about the school games and some leaderboards and coming to Vegas, people don't know what the fuck that is. So I wrote down what the fuck is the school games, and I was like, that is the problem. So, but that took me a lot of research to like find, right? I was talking to a lot of people. I was doing this with Kirby. It's quite an interesting process, right? And then we were like, okay, well, how do we describe this damn thing in a way that makes sense to like a stoner dude? Um, because it helps to use extreme cases like Steve Jobs tested products on children because like if they could understand it, anyone could understand it, right? So like defining the problem and then coming up with different ways you could solve it. I've been doing this with Goose and Kirby in the office all week. We probably designed— we came up with many different ways to describe what it is, many different landing pages, many different bullets, and we just kept talking to users, getting feedback, and kept iterating it. We probably made 30 versions. Some of them were so wrong, it was— I wondered what kind of tangent You'll never see it. But, you know, we actually, at the end of about one week, we landed on something. And now everyone we show it to instantly gets it. It's like we don't actually have to fully launch to find out. When you learn how you can use everyone to get like feedback and talk to people and show it to people and get their reactions, you can do a lot of fast iteration cycles without the harshness of like reality. Then when you launch it into reality, you have a way better chance, right? So that's how you improve anything. Like that, that's not the games, but that's what we were doing to the games recently. We, Kirby was doing interviews with all of the winners. That was overwhelming. Not many people were showing up. So we cut that. We just did one Hormozy Q&A a week, right? Attendance is up. Every viewing is up. People are now saying that it's way more valuable. And, you know, so it's— we were unlocking the one-day recordings after you got 3 customers. We were like, why are we making it hard to get the most valuable thing? Now you just need 3 members, they can be free, right? So like, what do people value? How do we make more people experience that? What do people not value? Take it out. What do people not understand? Re-word it. You see, it's all the same.

But I, I will, I will emphasize what Sam's saying is that there's a— it's so much more work than you expect it to be. And everyone wants like the one silver bullet that you're going to magically fall on it. But if it were obvious, you would have already done it. And so it's like, it's disguised. And that's what I mean, this is literally what makes business hard. And so I'll have a business owner on a Q&A call say like, what should my price be? And I'm like, I don't know. I'll walk you through the process of how I'd figure it out, but I don't know your avatar, I don't know your traffic source, I don't know the value prop of your community. And even if I did, I would say I'll start here and I'm going to do the math and I'll move it and I'll do the math. I mean, with a portfolio, same thing I was telling you, it was like we tested 50, 35, 25, 15. We just tested it. I was like, I don't know, we'll find out. And then they were all the same. And then I was like, okay, well, which business would I prefer? And then we go into that, right? And so just, just in terms of thinking through things like the amount of effort that goes into it, than most. I would say that like, as I've gone, as I've moved up in business, the, my understanding of the level of effort that's required to solve complex problems has gone up 100x. It's just, it's significantly harder to solve more complex problems. And that's also why the biggest paydays are on the other side of those problems. Because if they were really easy to solve, everyone would have already solved it. So it's like 4 hours and a cup of coffee and a bunch of data. And you're like, all right, let's try this.

There's a quote I learned from the software engineers at school. They say you have to make every detail perfect, but the only way you can do that is to limit the amount of details that you have. So inside of the school games, we have 8 videos. All of them together are less than 45 minutes. One course. We do one call per week, and that's it.

And once a month you get a download from here. The mastermind. That's it. Very easy to explain to someone. One call, one course, one mastermind a month.

And there's 13,000 people in there, each paying $99 a month. And they get the school software.

I have a question.

Yeah.

So there's a fine balance between— because if you're a leader of a big community, right? If you're showing up too much, you kind of almost lose your power, right? And if you do Q&As every single day, nobody wants it. It's not special. So how would you balance Q&A calls, making posts inside of the community, and just showing up and like giving people attention like that?

I'm sure there's a data answer for this rather than me just guessing. We could probably find it out, like what the best, you know, cadence is. I'll tell you, I personally, I think post twice a month in school. That's not planned. I just, I just kind of poke around and I see what people are struggling with. I made that niche post because I was really tired of people being like, what's my niche going to be about? And I was like, here's how you find your niche. And so it's just like, I just listened to what was the, like, there's, you probably noticed this in your community. It's probably like a pro, like a problem du jour. It's like people just kind of glob onto a single problem all of a sudden. And like, I felt like I was seeing more and more of that. So I was like, all right, I'm going to try and answer this.. And so then you make that and then it's like, hopefully, and if it does, if you put the thing in and then that problem still exists, then you didn't do it right. So it's like you have to do it again. You have to make it simple. You have to make it easier, whatever it is. You keep doing it until that one goes away and then like the next problem will occur. And the good news is that your customers will always have problems. Yeah. And so you just solve them.

I can tell you a good thing that works for me. So I spend a lot of my time reading what people are saying. Like I'm trying to understand what things people are struggling with. So I'm not in there just posting a lot. I'm in there listening the most, more than anything else. Most, it would be like 90%, it would be like a lot of time is spent listening, trying to figure out what is going on, what should I improve, what problems is the community facing, right? Then when I'm pretty sure I've got those problems, I'll even talk to some power users and I'll validate, do you think these are actually problems?, right? And then I'll make sure I'm clear on the problems first. Okay, now if I spend— now prioritize them. What's the most— what is the most pressing problem? Okay, number one. Now just focus on that. At least I know if I just fix that, I'll add some value, right? Yeah. So now I'll try to fix that, and I will try to fix that by research, experimentation, etc. And then I'll come back to my community and say, hey, I saw earlier you guys were facing this. It sucks. I fixed it. Here you go. And then it's like, that's how you add value.

Seriously, seriously, no, like I have this little template on my wall for emails, which is, hey, I made this thing for you. Here's what it does. Enjoy. Like CTA. Like that's like, that's my email template. Like it just makes it really simple. Like, hey, you guys were struggling with this thing. I made this for you. Here's why it's important, goodbye.

The hard part is finding the thing. Yeah, like I said, how do we make the school games funnel better? Well, what's the problem with it? That's the real question. And it was some stoner dude who had the answer.

Yeah, so you wouldn't have a schedule of like posting daily or a second, like every second day?

Or definitely not. That's like a Henry Ford production line for community. Like, we're not trying to pump out posts fast. That's not what makes it— that's not— that's not a good community. A good community is something that understands your pain and experience and delivers solutions and is fun. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, and isn't overwhelming and doesn't make me read 5 articles a day. I like value posts. Yeah, because I don't want to read a bloody article. That's a pain in the ass. Like, I want a solution or I want to laugh. One of them.

Yeah, I'm doing 17 lives a week in my paid at the moment. So yeah, but my, my feeling's telling me to put it in the free community. But I mean, that might be stupid because I'm trying to listen to what you guys are saying. You're saying no, we're just doing doing one now, and it's like, so I'm a bit the fuck, you know.

I think if you want to use all that, like, all that— so last, last games, a ton of people— I think it was last games, it was like, it was like the lives games. It was like everybody was doing like Instagram Lives. It might have been like maybe two ago. Um, and that the thing is, is like we have to separate promotion from delivery. So from a promotion perspective, you're doing lots and lots of lives, you're making lots of posts, you're making all this stuff. Oh no, I understand. I got you. And so my point is, is like, I would take all that energy and put it into promotion. So you get way more people into your community. And then the thing is, is that you, if you do 17 lives a week externally, it's okay that people don't consume all of them because if they consume one of them, then they might buy. Whereas if you're inside of the community and you're doing 17, they might be like, oh, I'm missing out on 16 out of the 17. I'm not, I'm not getting the value. If it's free, your cost is time. And so as long as you deliver a return on the time that they spend consuming your content, then they got, they have a positive exchange with you. And so you basically, it's like you can never promote too much. You can't put too much inside of the community. And so I would take some of that juju and put it externally to drive more through the box.

I think Hamza actually did like the opposite, like when he increased the daily coffee to like nearly every day. Um, his churn like reduced massively.

So I have no idea. Oh, he's messaging me like every day and trying to figure out like all kinds of things around churn at the moment. Um, I have my answer to him. He kept coming up with ideas. My answer to him was talk to your customers.

I recently was pretty public about this is that like I widened my content for I think either 3 or 6 months. I had like started sprinkling in some other, other pieces. I talked about how I eat and like, you know, how Layla and I run, you know, being married and things like that. And the problem is that you do get positive reinforcement from it. And so it's like he made some stuff on relationships and then people were like, oh, this is awesome. But the thing is, is like the wrong people were saying it was awesome. And so what was happening is my audience was growing, but it was growing with the wrong people. And so I had, I mean, I had this moment where like sometimes you have these like, I had a friend of mine come into, friend, acquaintance, I'd say, flew in and was like, he probably does $10 million a year. And he was like, yeah, you know, yeah, I don't listen to too much of your stuff anymore. And he's like, yeah, I was hardcore for like 6 years. And then I just kind of, I guess it didn't really apply to me anymore. He's like, I guess I'm not really like your avatar. And I was like, you're 100% my fucking avatar. Like you are exactly who I'm going after. And then I was like, oh, I'm a moron.. And I just basically, it's like you, you get, you get, it's a balance. Like you wanna listen to customers, but you also wanna make sure you're listening to the right customers. And so, I reoriented all my, my content, which maybe some of you guys have seen. And it's been 100% back to business has been the, the theme that we have internally. My guys know, is that if it's not business, we don't make it just very straightforward. Like it can be business adjacent. So like if I talk about, you know, prioritizing like tasks in my day that can have some element of productivity into it, but it's like, All my examples are gonna be business related. And so, but by doing that, when I looked objectively across metrics for site conversion, opt-in, book sales, applications to the portfolio, all of those metrics went up even though the average view per video went down. And so it's like, I'm not in this to get famous. I'm in this to make money.

That's a cool question. I wonder if anybody has, I mean, this might be for everybody, but like, has anybody done anything to when they do have a churned customer to get them back into being a customer?

Or do you—

Send a funny GIF.

You just send a funny GIF? In a DM. Ask CreditPannier, have you seen him? Yeah. Ask him for his message. He's apparently got some message he DMs people with a funny GIF and it gets people to reactivate.

He says it's like something like leaving so soon is kind of like the vibe is kind of.

Yeah, but you want to get the funny GIF. Of course.

Okay.

Yeah.

And it's just within school.

Yeah.

Okay.

So no email, SMS or anything like that. Our sales team has that for ghosted leads. They have a Kevin Hart meme that's like—

I think that might be it. Yeah, I think that's what he's using.

Yeah. And yeah, it like it gets higher response rates than any, any message.

This is kind of for both of you, probably you, Sam, as well. Definitely Sam. But I guess like when you're building, you know, a startup, And obviously, you know, you might have— sometimes you might have a little bit lack of capital, a little lack of resources. I guess, how do you get A-players to work for you and with you? And how do you like structure comp structures and all that?

So like, the vision for the business has to be big enough that smart people can fit their dreams inside of it. And so if you want brains, then you need people who like— they need to be able to believe that their dreams can come true within your vision. If it's again, if it's like, yeah, we've just got to couple groups that we're running and we're making money, then it's like, that doesn't like really get me motivated if I'm intelligent. I'm, cause like the best people have, there's no lack of opportunity for the best people. They have tons. Like you have to think about this as it's a totally different game. Like you're, if you're accustomed to taking people who are like, I really want a job, all of those people are irrelevant. You have to be people who are like, in some ways you are competing for them. So the more you're competing for a prospect, like selling them, And so if you feel like, like, I'll tell you a funny one is like, if you're interviewing people where you're like, sell me on why I should take you, if you say that to somebody who's actually really talented, they'll be like, I'm good. Like, they just like, they just don't like, I, you have to respond to this offer within 12 hours. It's like, okay. I think you hit the nail right there for me. Like their vision has to be, our vision needs to be big enough for their dreams to fit into it. You have to be able to say like, what we want to do is we want to make music money into the standard. For this. And then they have to believe with a decent amount of certainty that it's possible. And so like how you guys present, like you are absolutely selling them. And so like, I think Drew, this about on a past one, but everybody here understands, you know, lead generation, lead nurture, sales, onboarding, and then, you know, retention, ascension, right? That's the how you do with customers, right? This is the exact same process for an employer. You generate applications, you nurture applications, The sale is the interview. You onboard the employee and then either retain them or ascend them. It's the same thing. And so you basically have to understand the acquisi— like, this is when we get into scaling, because everyone's like, 2 or 3 people are like, what's scaling? It's just where the inflow of talent in the business matches the inflow of customers into the business. And you have to have an exceptional conversion process for attracting talent. This is where brand counts double. It counts once on the front end for customers and again on the back end for talent., and it becomes either a virtuous cycle or a vicious cycle. Either destroys your business, you have a bad brand because what do you think? What do you like? What, um, like great talent will look at your reviews and be like, oh, this is, yeah, nevermind.

They want to work at a good place. So I guess, and last question, I guess what would be the best way to like acquire talent? Is it just building a personal brand like in our field of work? Cause I don't think it's necessarily like I can't— I don't feel like I can find the right people on LinkedIn or something like that, you know, for what we're trying to do. It needs to be people who are kind of like already kind of entrepreneurs or people who are in more of like the sales or manager field.

It really depends on what role you're looking for, but I can promise you that very smart people are on LinkedIn.

Do you know how I, um, I looked— I got invited to speak at something and I looked at who else was speaking there and I saw Hormozy was speaking there. And I was like, all right, there's my opportunity.

That's the first time we met in person.

Yeah, honestly.

So how long ago was that? One year before I spoke about doing a deal. But you have to, like, be strategic sometimes.

Yeah.

And then so you have to kind of do this old school networking thing, which I fucking hate because that's like the only time I've ever done that. The whole most like the one deal to never do that again. But yeah, you kind of have to do that. I had to start going to like these software things. I had to start to meet some software engineers. I had to learn about their world. I had to ask people about why does— what do you hate as a software engineer? What do you like? What makes a good company? What makes a bad company? You have to like learn everything about it and network and do that. It really sucks, honestly. But if you're serious about it— I knew there was no way I could build Skill without this person, so I delayed starting it by a year just to find the person. Yeah, so I'm not even going to start until I find them. Like, that's how essential I knew they were.

That's why I tell everyone to not do software. It's just because the scale of how difficult it is to actually do it right is so hard that, like, No one, basically no one does it right. Even when you know, even if you know what you're doing, most people can't do it. And most people who are quote in the info world are like, oh, my info thing isn't sellable, so I'm going to build software. And they just think that like white labeling GoHighLevel means they own a software company. Um, like, but I mean, right. Or they create some widget that someone else can duplicate in 5 seconds that they did off with an offshore developer. That like if it actually did work, then that developer would hold you ransom. And then what? Like they just don't play it out 2 steps and the code shit anyways.

And it's all, it all sucks.

Like, yeah, don't do it. Yeah. And so we were like, you're just, you don't want us to succeed. That's why, because you're, you're doing something. I was like, no, man, I saw that Sam had put 5 years in it. I was like, great. Okay. I saw all the metrics.

I was like, okay, this is legit. I spent all my money and it still wasn't enough. I had to spend like twice that again.

Yeah. Good. Yeah. That's for that too, by the way. That's going to help a lot. I appreciate this for real. Yeah. I mean, the personal brand thing is just good for recruiting. Like if you have one, it's great. It helps a lot. But at the end of the day, if the business that you're trying to build solves a real problem and you really genuinely care about the problem, if you find someone else who also cares about that problem, they will be more likely to work with you.

Like that's fundamentally it. What do you—

sorry, last question.

What do you think about creating an offer to train people to do what you are trying to eventually staff for? Like how I'm growing?

Yeah, like, you know, like in—

yeah, you know, like there was a point, there was a point in time I had a closer program. I was training closers and I was staffing them, you know what I mean? And then I was— I stopped doing that because there's so many closer training programs. But right now I really need growth partners, people who can lead and manage our clients and kind of oversee everything. What do you think about like, I know there's a growth operator thing, but they're not, you know, like in my mind, like they don't have all the skill sets necessarily. What if someone, you know, created a program to train people?

I don't think you create another business to solve a role. Okay.

Depends if it's like, I know with a software engineer, no one's going to be any decent in 10 years. Maybe a prodigy in 6 or 7, but like, there's just no shortcutting that. Like, I mean, my co-founder's done 20. So the years matter. And the same is true with a lot of things. Like, there's just years. So like, but some other things might be different, like setting. Okay, yeah, you can teach that. Closing, yeah, you can probably teach that. But these more high-level strategic things. Yeah, that ain't happening. Like, it took me fucking 10 years. Like, so are you gonna wait 10 years?

No. Yeah, it's just like, fundamentally, every skill is trainable. The question is whether it's worth the return on effort and the resources to train someone with it. If you break things down enough, you can train someone to do anything. It's just that if someone lacks— has zero meta skills, they don't know how to read, they don't know how to write, they know how to talk, you could teach someone to do all that stuff. It's just why bother? So I'd rather take someone who's already here and then just nudge them if I can with proper training that just bridges the gap between all of the skills they come in with and then applying that to my business. You got it. Appreciate it. Yeah, always. I mean, the people is the reason that most internet marketers in general can't make money. I'm sorry, they make money, but they don't make like big money is that they just can't. They can't. They don't know how to operate people. And that's usually because they need like a right hand, a true right hand who can, who's as good as them. And like Layla will never get the credit that she deserves and that's fine. Um, but like the reason that all of our stuff is so big is because she's so good at, at building. Like she's an unbelievable builder. And so like the culture of the team is rock solid. I mean, the guys will tell you like Layla really runs the, like Layla runs acquisitions.com. Like, I really— she really does. She does help. Like, Layla runs everything. Like, I mean, I told you I have an empty calendar. I can't have an empty calendar and also have a business that's running unless someone else is actually doing it. Layla takes 15 meetings a day. She operates. She's coordinating things between different departments. She's checking on portfolio companies. She's having, you know, one-on-ones with people who are having some sort of emotional breakdown about some craziness, whatever. Um, she handles all that with a smile, you know what I mean? And so, but like, I, I was— we were talking earlier, like, I capped at $3 million a year, and then when Layla came in 24 months later, I took home $17 million in income net. And so the difference was that she liked people and I tried to avoid them, and that was the problem. And so she heard, like, Layla's genuine vision in life is to build a company that people love working at. That's her whole, like the whole reason that she like, she gets up, like her internal mission is to build a company that people love being at every day. And so her vision just fits within my vision. And so I recruited her to do it. But like, if we didn't do stuff that she liked, we'd like, she wouldn't build it. So I very much like, especially the more talented the people that you bring on, the more you like, Like they don't need pushing. Like they know what they're doing. You just need to make sure that they're doing it in the direction and you kind of do this. Yeah. The amount of training that you have to give someone is inversely proportional to the skills that they come in with. So the more, basically the less skilled the person, the more specific the instructions. Sam could basically just be like, hey, can you just promote school a lot? And I'd be like, yeah. He's not like, hey, could you make these posts and write this copy and send these emails and run ads and make the hooks like this. Like, that exchange has literally never occurred.

Like, I don't even know if Sam sees the ads before, before they, they go out. Almost. He texted me the other day, he was like, when does the activation stuff come out?

And I said, last Thursday.

No, like, for real. Like, I already did it. And then he was like, I've seen this. And I was like, yeah, I've already been thinking about that. We've got something coming. Yeah, like we don't even— I've already thought about the next 4 things and we've got things ready. So by the time Mosey has the idea, I'm like, yeah, we got it, don't worry.

Yeah, do your thing. And then I'm like, cool, let me tell you what I'm doing on the media side. It's like, oh shit, great. Like, these are all the things that I'm ramping up. This is the system we're putting in place. Like, we changed our cadence, like things like that.

It's like, oh dope. I don't even want to think about YouTube. So like, if I had to tell him stuff Oh my God. Yeah, but it's good to divide it like that because I can just focus on this stuff. He can focus on that stuff. Kirby can focus on his stuff. We have very good division like that.

Yeah. The amount of direction you need to give someone is inversely proportional to the skill they have. Yeah. If someone could just be like, hey, can you build this company?

And be like, sure. People will complain. It's always a sign I've noticed when people complain there's no communication. Have you— has anyone had this as an issue, like with teams? Maybe a lot of you don't have teams yet, but bad communication, communication, sometimes it's always the complaint. Yeah, I found it's interesting, that one, because you don't really need to communicate a whole lot when you get the right people. Like, well, Mosey said like a couple of words and I was like, don't worry, I got it. Like, already happened. Like, right? But sometimes if you hire the wrong person, there's no amount of communication that can ever make it work, and it's exhausting, and it just still doesn't work. And I think I understood this— I think I told this at one of the previous ones— but how you know what a good culture is, is this story of Google in the early days. So Larry Page searched for something, and the ads that showed up were not relevant to the words he typed in. He took a screenshot, he printed it off, he got a red marker and he wrote, these ads suck. He walked over to the engineers and he pinned it up on the wall and he tapped it. And one of them walked over and picked it off the wall, stayed up all night that night and invented AdSense, which is their— which has made them hundreds of billions. So he didn't sit down with him and be like, look, I think you need to do this and this and this and maybe this. He just said, these ads suck, right?

Is that clear communication?

I mean, to him it was. No, but that's what good talent is. You can just be like, this thing, yeah, do this. Yeah, maybe you don't even have to say do this. You can say, this sucks, sort it out. Like, and then they'll, they'll be on it. Or they might have already preempted what sucks because they've already been thinking about it. So I always remember that when people say, oh, like, you need more meetings or more communication. Like, that wasn't a meeting. First of all, right? That was, that was slapping something on the wall.

Yeah. One of the most difficult things, this is like, I think this is from an entrepreneurship perspective in terms of development, is like, has anyone here had another business before this? Yes. Okay. Did you achieve in this business what you achieved in your last business? Like in, like from how long it took you to get to that level in your, the business before versus how long it took you to get to that level with this business? Was it way faster? And so a lot of the reasons is because you already beat the bosses up to that level. So it's kind of like you're quickly retracing your steps and then you get to a level that you don't— you're to your level of incompetence. The difficulty, the thing that takes the longest in entrepreneurship is figuring out what good looks like at each level. And it's one of those things that's really hard to translate. Like you see the billionaires on stage and they're just like, I, you know, get great people and you're like, sure. But the thing is, is that connecting what great people to them looks like in their mind and what you think great people are, that is an ocean apart. And so, I mean, I tell this story and Sam and I were talking about this last time, but like, I, when we started meeting with private equity firms, uh, to, to, to look at transaction with Gym Lodge, I, we'd have these super long tables that were these boardrooms and I'd see their team all the way on this side. I saw my team all the way on this side. And I would just kind of sit there and listen to like the questions that they were asking and the responses that my team had. And to be fair, the team that we had had built $100 million plus company pre-COVID. Obviously I sold during COVID which actually hurt my valuation, but not the point. So they built a $100 million company, which is cool. But when I saw the, the talent on this side, I was like, oh, that's why these guys are gonna make $3 billion over the next 5 years, this team. And it was such a stark contrast in terms of the level of talent. Again, not disrespecting my team, it was just such a difference. That it was literally like after that immediately I was like, my whole bar was just reset in terms of the caliber of the people that even existed in the world. And everything was like, how on earth do I get those people to work for me? And so like right now some of you have like one person who's like, man, I couldn't live without that person. There's somebody who's literally 10 times better than that person that exists right now. And it's just trying to figure out what you need to do to get them on your team. But the problem that takes so long is looking at what good talent in general looks like. But even when it gets role-specific, like Sam had to do all this research to figure out like, how do good software engineers talk? Like, what do they like? What do they want? And so some of you guys are at a point where you need to like start hiring a sales director or something like that. Like what happens is like, this is the entrepreneurial journey, what it looks like. You bring someone on, you talk to a bunch of people and then you're like, I think this guy's good. You bring him in and he sucks. And that takes 6 months away from the growth that you would've had because your sales team drops and this guy sucked. You put bad processes in. Then you gotta fix the process. You gotta fire the people that guy hired cuz he sucked anyways. And then you're like, shoot, I'm gonna try again. You bring the next guy in and then sometimes it happens again and you're like, wow, this sucked. And then the third time, and sometimes this takes a year or two years and then you're like, I now know. And you get lucky and you get one who actually works and you're like, oh, this is what a great sales director looks like. And so the next time you go through your entrepreneurial journey, like you go right to there and then you're like, shoot, I don't know what a good customer success person looks like. And then you try again. And so it's like, however quickly you can work through that so you can start recognizing the pattern of A, what good looks like in general, and then B, what it, what good looks like for a specific role. That's how quickly you move through the levels. That's been my experience with this. And I wish I try and do everything I can to try and translate that into the stories that I tell with the content. But sometimes it's really tough because they're like nod, but like, that is, that is the secret sauce. Like that is, it is being able to recognize like what a good growth partner looks like, what a good— even a good agency. I've had good— I have good agencies that we work with now. Vast majority of them, 95% of them are dog shit. Some of you guys run them. So like, that's, that's, that's, that's the pattern recognition. That's the highest value thing that you end up learning as an entrepreneur is what, what good looks like.