4 Ways To Get Ahead of 99% of People

You can beat 99% of other businesses if you only pick one thing to beat them on, but there's 4 that you can compete on. All right, so that's what we're going to talk about. The first of the 4 vectors is speed. How do I do what I'm going to do faster than everybody else? Of the 4 vectors, I'm starting with speed because I actually think it's the most important of the 4, and I think the reason for that is that humans learn behaviors with decreased latency. Meaning like Facebook and, and, and Instagram or whatever you're watching this on, like has trained us to come back, not because they pay us to come back, because they have compressed latency for some positive outcome. And the positive outcome they give us is a thumbs up. They literally give us a little red light and other people give actual money, but at a delay and they struggle to get people to do things. So think about it like this. You pay someone who works for you every 2 weeks. It's much harder to motivate them than if you actually paid them in real time. And paying someone in real time is actually so effective, it's illegal. Truckers, for example, used to be able to get paid per mile and like almost essentially in real time. And so they actually outlawed it because guys would just keep driving to the point of like insanity and wouldn't sleep for days, and it was unsafe. That's how powerful speed is, because that is what trains behavior functionally. The questions that we have to ask ourselves is, okay, if speed is gonna be my competitive advantage. It doesn't matter what we do, right? There's components to speed, right? So on one angle, like, you have to think about each of these larger vectors in smaller subvectors. For speed, it could be the distance between when someone purchases and when they get something, right? That's one vector of speed. The other vector is that if you're doing something on a recurring basis, how much time is it going to take each time? So for example, if I had a 10-minute workout, it's gonna be more valuable than an hour-long workout if I could get the same results. If I say I'm going to help someone get leads and I can help them get those leads in an hour, versus waiting a week to turn on the ads, that's more valuable, right? And so at all times, it's always like, how can we take what we're currently doing and do it faster? And I can promise you, if you just did that one thing compared to everyone else in, in your marketplace, you just delivered faster, you will have a sustainable competitive advantage over them and be able to charge premium prices for it. And what's really interesting about speed is that speed rarely actually costs more. It typically comes from idea alpha, meaning like idea over performance. Like you've thought through the process of the steps better than the competition has, and as a result, you actually can get better outcomes. Now, part of this also comes down to what types of customers you're picking. If you have 100 different types of customers, it's very difficult to do things quickly because you're doing lots of different things for lots of different people. This is why niching down also helps you provide more value, because you're being more selective about the customers you're picking, and then as a result, you can be more templatized in the, in the types of services and, and, and products that you ultimately offer. And so there's kind of 3 different vectors that I think about, uh, in terms of like, what can I actually do to improve speed? Because you're like, okay, I get that, but how do I actually do it? So number 1 is I want templates. All right. How can I take what we're currently doing and make these into templates? Can I have ad templates? Can I have email templates? Can I have landing page templates? Can I have presentation templates? Can I have at least templated steps that someone's going to follow? Right? All of these are just templates that we can pass on to somebody else. Create a repeatable process. If it's repeatable, they don't have to decide. Decision-making is typically the slowest part in the organization. So how do we remove all decisions to speed up the time of completion? The second one is pre-made. So if you're in physical products or even food, it's— I mean, fundamentally McDonald's changed the game in fast food because they started pre-making food. They already had burgers on the line. So when someone ordered a burger, they just handed it to them. And if you haven't seen the movie Founder, great movie, he experiences this and he's like, No, no, no, I just ordered. And they're like, yeah, that's your burger. And he's like, no, but I just ordered. And they're like, yeah, that's your burger. And he's like, huh. And it's this big aha moment, like, oh, this changes everything. And so sometimes if you know, there was a great Persian place I used to go to, it crushes in California, it's called Panini Cafe, go check it out. But they make amazing Persian food. But one of the things I realized is right as the lunch hour started, 'cause I lived pretty close by back then, they just started grilling chicken because they knew that they were about to get the lunch rush and they knew that they were going to have people who wanted Doojeh kebab, shout out for those who know. All right, and so they just thought ahead of time and it became really valuable because I would show up and be like, doojeh kebab, extra rice, my whole thing, and they would just boom, they would deliver for me because they didn't even have to make to order because they just knew certain amount of things are always going to have demand. And even if for some reason someday they're not going to hit that, the benefit they get of the vast majority of their customers immediately getting served and how many tables they return faster more than paid for the small extra chicken that maybe they didn't— they had to throw it at the end of the day. The third element here, and this happens a lot with services, is availability. Now what does this mean? I'll give you a couple examples. If you have a spa or a salon or something, if you have more availability for people to book, it means they want something and they can immediately get it faster. They can get the appointment with you to get their nails done, get their hair done. Basically, the sooner you can have that availability, the more you will be able to convert and the more people will be willing to pay. And so if someone says, hey, I have an appointment in 4 days, or I have an appointment in 1 day, they're probably far more likely to come to you and be willing to pay more for that one appointment. But how do you increase availability. Sometimes it means you have to pay people more or extend their hours or hire more people. But the reality is that this is one of those things that is one of the largest vectors in terms of increasing throughput on a business that is underappreciated by the vast majority of business owners. And so when I invest in a company or I look at a company, a lot of times I'm like, ooh, like it's one of those huge hidden diamonds. I probably shouldn't even share this, but it's one of those hidden diamonds that I can almost always drive 20, 30, 40% more through business by simply better staffing the hours. Even at acquisition.com, we currently sell 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and we're now investing so we can get to 20 hours a day because we have such a larger international market. We always want to increase our availability because I know the math behind this and it's a huge impact on the bottom line. All right, so the first vector, macro vector that you can win on, and you only need one, but if you have more than one, you just dominate everyone. All right, is that we went over speed. Now the second is risk. All right, so how can we make our thing not risky? Now think about McDonald's, the example I gave you. Well, they're both fast and they're not risky. So what does that actually mean? Now part of you are like, oh no, they're risky because of cancer and all this other stuff. Well, let's ignore that because why, why do people not care about this stuff? Actually, it's funny. Speed. It's not latency. If you ate a burger and immediately had something growing on, on, on you, no one would eat the burgers. But because it happens 40 years from now, no one cares. Speed changes behavior and lack of speed doesn't. So what about risk? So a way you can translate risk is reliability and consistency. It's a different way of saying it, which is when people buy— this is especially important for services that are recurring, where people get month after month after month after month, they keep coming back again and again and again. And so the question is, how can we consistently match conditions between the perfect and ideal state and every state that happens afterwards. And most people dramatically underestimate the amount of variables that exist in any given encounter. And so as a result, they have far less consistency than they otherwise should. So that's just the output. Now, what are the other components of this? So I'll say one is consistency, all right, in terms of decreasing risk. Uh, we can also consider that reliability. If you say you're going to cut someone's grass, but sometimes you're late or you, uh, show up a different day or you don't show up one week, like that's a major hit. People just don't want to deal with that stuff. Like they're not willing to. On the flip side, if you're the type of guy where someone's like, you know what, I could, I could undercut your lawn care guy, you know what, I could, I could clean instead of your cleaning person, a lot of people are like, you know what, I've been with Rose for 10 years and she's never missed a day. You're like, I just, I'm not willing to take the risk because she's already paid down so much. It's like, but I could do it for 20% less. It's like, it's just not worth it, right? That's real value that actually defends the business. Now, what other types of risk mitigation can we offer? All right, one of them is reputation, right? So this is where brand comes in. So the consistency, reliability typically happens after someone makes a purchase. But how do we, how do we shift the perception to the customer that they're going to have a high likelihood outcome that they're going to get what they want? Well, one of the easiest ways is that you've gotten somebody else exactly what they wanted, and that person found out about it. Now, if they don't know someone directly, but then they just heard lots of whispers, that's a reputation. You've done it enough times for enough people that you just have a reputation for keeping your word, right? And a lot of people, especially in the small business space, especially, especially in the direct response space, all of a sudden sometimes their cost to acquire a customer goes up rapidly and they're like, what's going on? What's happening? But the thing is, is that the CPMs in your industry haven't gone up by double or triple in that same period of time. So what is it? Is that your word of mouth? People believe in positive word of mouth. You think negative word of mouth doesn't exist? Negative word of mouth is like 10 times as viral. As positive. And somehow you think that doesn't affect your sales. Of course it affects your sales. People who would have otherwise purchased choose not to because of something they heard or read online. And so one is, okay, so we've got reputation, we've got— and we've got consistency. So how do we do this? How do we actually operationalize this? Now I've talked a lot about guarantees. I talk about in the Offers book, all right? Um, and a lot of people took that immediately like, oh, guarantees are the only way that we reverse risk. It's just one of the components. And I give that to people because I assume that a lot of people don't have a good reputation or don't have a reputation at all, or they don't have enough customers to really develop a process to become consistent. But these two things are how you deliver long-term risk mitigation. In the short term, you do guarantees. Now, again, and I— what's really interesting about this is that everyone assumes that I was like the guarantee guy, but like a lot of my stuff that I sell has no guarantees, right? But the thing is, is that there's four different types that I cover in the book. All right. The first is unconditional guarantees. When you're starting out, that's a great way to do it. Conditional guarantees. If you do this and it doesn't happen, then I'll do, then I'll do Y. What's my consideration, right? What am I gonna put on the table if you're gonna put this money on the table? And a lot of times people mess this up. Guarantees only work if you have stakes. So if you don't have reputation, you've gotta basically, it's literally like giving a payday loan. It's like you gotta put, you gotta take your watch off and be like, if you give me the money, I'll put the watch down, right? You can take my car. If I don't pay this loan back. It's the same idea just in business. You're starting out, you're like, here's my shirt. If I don't deliver these leads or I don't deliver a great back massage or I don't deliver a good fitness experience, you can take my shirt. Those are the first two. There's two other types of guarantees. There's implied and then there's anti, all right? So implied guarantees is one of my favorite types to use, which is just performance-based. If you're good at what you do, winners always wanna compete on performance. Think about your best salespeople. They always want the most upside because they're good. And so if you're actually good, be willing to put— it's another way of putting skin in the game for you, right? And so just put skin in the game, and people are far more willing to take risk if you take some risk for them. So it's like, we've got this big pile of risk. How much are we going to eat down versus the customer eating down? Now here's the cool part, is that you can shrink that pile of risk over time with reputation, which brings up the fourth guarantee, which is an anti-guarantee, which once you do have reputation And you are consistent. You don't see McDonald's saying, we guarantee that the burger's gonna be good. You just know it's gonna be good, right? Because you've had enough people. Now people are like, oh my God, McDonald's is not good. Calm down. You get the point from a business perspective. All right? So that's vector 1 is speed is how can we do whatever we're doing faster? Number 2 is risk. How can we do it more consistently? How can we do it more reliably? How can we, and in so doing, build our reputation over time? And that consistency and reliability, how do I do that tactically? It's actually looking at as many variables that affect the condition or can affect the outcome for the customer as humanly possible, and then actually trying to control for all of them. So B.F. Skinner, famous behavioral psychologist, said if many variables exist, many variables must be studied. And so you might find out— so like for us to make videos, we have like 100 different little golden BBs, little things that when put together make a good video. And if we just do 98, it's just a little bit less good of a video. If we do 97, it's a little bit less good of a video. And so we just try it every time. We learn a little bit more, we add to that list, make another condition that we didn't realize existed that mattered. We were just talking about one right before I did this video. So we did this big filming session where I did a walk and talk and it was hot outside, so I took my shirt off and I was doing it. It was in Florida, it was super humid. And that whole series of kind of like walk and talk things that I did murdered. It was like some of my— it was probably the single best recording session I've ever had in terms of performance of the clips in the session. So we were like, oh, walk and talks work great. So then I did another series of walk and talks where I'm just like in normal clothes, cuz it wasn't, it was actually cold out. I think I put a jacket on. And so I put a jacket on in the second one and literally it, I think it might've been the actual worst recording session that I ever had. What we got to see there is that it wasn't the walk and talk that was the thing that made the shorts valuable. It might've been me being shirtless, which I have other considerations for, which was like, maybe Maybe I'll start only Alex someday. But for now, those are the first two: speed and risk, or risqué, if you will. Now, the third one is price. It's cheap, right? So you can be faster, you can be less risky, or you can be cheaper. Now, we have a fourth one too, but let's talk about this for a second. I tend to be the sell for more, more expensive guy, but you can win with any of these three vectors if people absolutely know that your stuff's amazing, they'll be willing to pay more for it and they'll come to you instead of somebody else. If you're the fastest, they absolutely will come to you over other people because you can deliver all these vectors of speed. If you're the cheapest, people will absolutely come to you. Like, to pretend that price doesn't matter is silly. Of course price matters, but so does value, because value is a— sorry, the, the deal rather is the comparison between price, what you pay and what you get, right? And so something is appropriately cheap if you get tremendous value for a low price. But the answer is not hearing this and saying, oh, I will now lower my price. That is certainly a terrible decision. But instead, it's day one deciding our competitive advantage, the moat that we're going to build around, is being cheaper than everyone else. And you have to start that way day one. That means every component of the business, from click to close to delivered is organized such that you can pass on as much of that cost saving to the customer. And so, for example, um, if you were like, hey, I want to start a, you know, a marketing agency for small business owners, well, in general, typically a pretty bad business. Why? Because it churns out really high, their volatility reflects onto you. With an exception, if you can make the services cheap enough, I have seen it work well. But I mean way cheaper than you think. I'm talking $100 to $300 a month for services that most people charge $2,000 a month for. When you can do that, now you have something that a lot of people are interested in so that even on their worst day of business, they're like, well, I'm not gonna cancel that. Like it's, it's only $100, only $200. And it certainly makes way more than that even on my worst month. Right. And to the same degree, we, they basically, okay, if I wanna do this, right? If you're you like, okay, how do I actually build for cheapness? All right. So there's 3 ways that I think about this. So number 1 is you can have AI, right? Day 1. Now, a lot of you guys should already be investing in this stuff. Like, for sure, AI is giving the best employees 10x the leverage they had before. And so if there's ever been a time to have to pay people better, it's been today because AI is now taking your best person and making it 10 times as effective. So it's like, why would you not? Like, you're always like, man, if I could have 10, 10 Johns or 10 Daniels or 10, 10 Michaels, man, that would be amazing. It's like, well, AI is giving you 10 Michaels. And so be willing to pay the Michaels of your business more because you actually do get more from them now more than ever. So number 1 is AI. The 2nd is I'll just say automation because I think automation for some reason has like been forgotten about. There's still lots of stuff that can get automated that doesn't necessarily have AI, but you build day 1 with those automations in place. Now the 3rd is offshoring, right? We're nearshoring, basically paying significantly less for the same labor. But you're actually making this your entire business strategy from day one. We are going to win by being the cheapest. And if that's you, then you state that first and foremost in your marketing, in your sales. And what's really cool about it is typically when you're the cheapest, the sales are pretty easy, uh, marketing is not that hard. The difficulty is being profitable. But I've seen some tremendously profitable businesses that structure themselves from day one on being the cheapest. And a little, little tidbit, a little pro tip that I think a lot of business owners are gonna miss out on. And I think people are not, are not getting this. If you do all this stuff, let's say you do the offshoring, you do the automation, do the AI, you don't need to tell your customers. You can just have AI automation and offshoring into your business and you just sell a normal service. You don't need to tell them that you have a bunch of VAs in the Philippines. You don't need to tell them that a lot of your stuff is from AI. Don't say, hey, we're an AI design firm. Just be a design firm. And then charge the same rates or a good deal for design because you just have an automated backend. Great. Amazing. So that'll allow you to get more cash flow in the business and ultimately provide more value. All right, so 3 vectors so far. Speed. How do I do it faster than anybody else in the market? Risk. How do we do it more reliably and build a reputation better than anyone else in the market? Cost. How do we do it cheaper, consistently, and still be profitable than anyone else in the market? And finally, you have ease. Now, before I dive into ease, I wanna make this point. If you just went on one of these, you can have an incredibly successful business. If you could do multiple vectors, then you'll crush everyone real quick. Check this out. So if you aren't sure what strategic competitive advantage you should be doubling down on, um, I'd love to invite you out to one of our scaling workshops, uh, that we have here in Vegas at our headquarters, and my team can actually work with you on it. But before you do that, you can download our free $100 million scaling roadmap, um, where you can plug in information and it will give you basically your step where you're at in the scaling process. And ultimately give you the things that you can help get to the next level. But like I said, if you want help from my team, you can book a call after you download this. It's free. And we'd love to see if we can help you out. A quote that I like is the best for the most people for the least. And so best probably takes into account speed and ease and risk. And for the most, it's going to be like total number of people that it helps. And then for the least, right? It's like, and I've had different ones like unique, expensive, sticky air. How do I do something that no one else can do? How do I have it that they keep buying it? How do I have that I have high gross margins? And how do I have it so it's over and over and over again, right? So we think about these little markers, and I think about this when I'm trying to build a business, because ultimately these are the ways that you win. These are the strategic moats. So people talk about strategy, but fundamentally it's going to have to ladder up to one of these things. So if you're like, oh, by the way, what's Acquisition.com's? It's going to be this one, probably primarily. And then I would say secondary vectors are these. We're obviously not cheapest. Right? And so that's where I've built my business around. Now, if I had a different— now, not all the businesses in our portfolio are built that way, right? We have a teeth-whitening chain that's more around speed, ease, and cheapness, right? And so you get like, you have to make sure that the strategy is best tailored to the customer avatar you're trying to serve. All right, let's talk about ease. I wanna make a big point about ease. If you want to make your product more convenient for customers, You don't make something convenient because we want to, like, I want to do something to my product. It's actually the opposite, which is why I think most products suck. You make something easier by removing everything that is no longer required. You make something easy by saying, what is, what is hard about this? And then removing everything that's hard. And so what's cool about this process is all like, like easy is not the outcome. It's removing all hard and then easy happens as a consequence. Right? So like easy is not noticeable. It's like good design. It should vanish, right? Like if you look at an iPhone, an iPhone is the result of what happens when you remove everything that sucks about a phone and what remains is an iPhone. The, the UX vanishes into the screen. There's no menus. You just hit what you need. It immediately opens up, right? This is how we have to think about ease. And so this happens for services, it happens for products. And just like I was saying earlier, with if many variables exist, many variables must be studied. And the nice thing is that customers will tell you what's hard thing number 1, what's hard thing number 2, what's hard thing number 3, what's hard thing number 4. And you have that list. And then the way that you make something easy is one at a time, crossing things out one at a time until eventually people are like, man, this thing just works. And that takes work. Take a thing, figure out what makes it hard, remove all those pieces, And then what you're left with is something that's easy. This is the work. And I wish I could say this in 100 different ways, but like, honestly, that's the game. And so when we're thinking about this, it's like, as a customer, like you want to think again, click to close to delivered. So when a customer is coming into your ecosystem, into your world, how much information do they need to give? Do they have to give information, the same information on multiple calls? Are we passing calls between reps? Like, I'll give you a really simple example. So right now, you probably have, like, if you have a business that sells via appointments, right? You have phone calls, you have people who are making the calls. If you have multiple calls that occur in order for someone to buy, let me tell you what happens all the time. Call one, tell me about your business. All right, tell me about the size of the business. Tell me some qualification, blah, blah, blah. Okay, cool. So then let me set you up with Charlie. Charlie will get you set up. Okay, cool. Now we get on the phone with Charlie 3 days later. Charlie's like, hey, how's it going? What's the revenue of the business? What's the size of the business? What's the— you're like, dude, I just, I just told the— why am I telling— I hate you already, right? And so instead of doing that, let me show you. The thing is that this is a very binary outcome. This is a very binary one. A lot of them are more continuous, but this is binary. And the only thing easier than doing what I'm about to share with you is not doing it, which is why most people don't. Your salespeople, your setters, or your salespeople in general should take notes on the customers. And here's what's cool. If you start the second call and say, hey, had a conversation with Charlie. Charlie told me that your revenue is this, your industry is this, and the biggest issue you're dealing with is this. Does that sound about right? They're gonna be like, wow, they actually did some homework. This is a pretty buttoned-up operation. You know what that just made it? Easier. And so we have to think about every single little step. That's just the sale. And if you don't think that how you sell affects their perception of the quality of service that you have, you are kidding yourself. Many people will make a judgment based on how good your product is based on how good your sales motion is, how clean it is, how dialed it is. If you call someone in 30 seconds, they're like, man, these guys are on it. They would imagine that if you make a promise about speed later, guess what the past experience they have that they're gonna use as judgment is on? The sales process. And so this, again, I'm just talking about sales 'cause everyone, like, you know, everybody likes talking about sales, but, well, I like talking about sales, fine, caught me. On the flip side is the backend is the same thing. What's the onboarding call look like? What are the activation points? What are the touchpoints with the customer? What kind of reporting are we going to provide to them so they know that we're delivering them value? What things do we give? We're giving massage, we're giving a map, we show them where the pain is and we show them, hey, when they come back in, this is where you said last time you were in pain. How's that on a scale from 1 to 10 today? Wow, that was really good. Like, I mean, can you imagine walking to a massage place you've been to before and they're like, oh, last time you struggled with your shoulder. And the reason that so many people like just going with the same person is because the businesses have so few processes. And so it's like, well, I might as well just go with the same masseuse because she knows me.. But if every masseuse or massager, I don't know the male version, whatever, massager, uh, already knew the pain that you were dealing with beforehand, could you imagine what a superior experience that would be as a company? And then also how much more would you be able to keep customers? Whereas when the masseuse leaves, they take all the customers that went with them. Not very sticky. But if every massage person knew all the pain points of the business, that would make it easier. Easy is when everything that's hard vanishes. And that's all that's left is the value. If you're looking at these 4, how can I do it faster? How can I make it more reliable? How can I do it cheaper? How can I make it easier for the customer? The end state, the, the kill shot is that you have all 4. Now to have all 4, it almost always has to be tech. Now you can typically have 3 of the 4 if you have labor. All right. So if you have a service-based business, you're basically gonna need to pick 3, but specifically you need to make sure you have one. Now, why, why am I so hard on this one thing? Well, customers do not understand multiple benefits. Now they can, like from a messaging perspective. Now when they buy something and they experience it, that's different. But from a marketing angle, if you say, hey, we're the fastest, we're the least risky, and we're the easiest, it's too much. Just focus on the core vector. And if you're like, which one do I pick? Pick the one that values the most to your customer. Pick the one that they care about the most. And so if you know that your people care the most about speed, then speed's the Speed's the angle. If there's a huge cost when something doesn't go well with the business, then risk is the angle, right? Or the customer, whatever, right? And if, and it's just in general a huge pain to do this thing, then how can I make it easy? So I'll tell you, there's a, there's a lady that I know in Albuquerque, New Mexico that I used to, um, that I used to go to church with when I went to church. And she had a massive business in, in New Mexico and her entire business was built on one thing. Speed and ease. She had a DMV business where she just privatized getting people their IDs. That was it. That's all it was. And I remember her talking to me and she was like, yeah, they just passed a new law that everybody in New Mexico has to get a new ID because we just changed the license. And she was like, well, that's, you know, 12 million people times $50. And I just remember her saying that. I was like, How elegant, right? And the thing is, is that her $50 is like she was able to get people in and out in 15 minutes from the time they walked in the door to the time they left. Could you imagine how lovely of an experience that would be? Everybody, when they think about getting their ID right now, it's like just pain. All you think is just like waste of a day, just frustration dealing with inept people who have no urgency, no regard for other people, and just generally deal with you as a nuisance, like you're somehow inconveniencing them in their day of not working. That you have disrupted their day of not working by existing and breathing on them, right? Of course you hate them. And so she just had a business not hard to beat, right? When that's the standard. Again, there are industries that are like this that are privatized that still no one tries to compete in. And so if you want to get into a new space or you already have a business and you're like, how do I actually win? I feel like I'm the same as everybody else. Pick one and dominate. And so if you're wondering which of these do I pick, obviously you start with the customer reverse backwards, but let's do the DMV example I just said. Is she going to win on being cheaper than the government? No, I'm pretty sure it's free or it's a nominal price in order to get the new IDs. And so she's not going to win on cheap. But what else could she win on? Speed, ease. In other ways, the ease can also be like positive customer experience. Like those are things that improve the overall experience for the customer. Could she double her prices? I'll bet you plenty of people would be willing to pay $100 to not have to waste a day, right? So she doesn't have to win on this, right? So she has to pick, The one that, that now risk, I mean, as long as you get the ID, uh, I mean, you have to be good enough at this, right? But she's going to work on her reputation by being, having a reputation of being faster and easier, right? And so if you're trying to pick one, you pick the one that's going to matter most to the customer. And if you are competing in a space that has a lot of cheap or sometimes even free competitors, just remember this: fast beats free. So back in the day, there was Napster, which some of you guys may have remembered. It's probably before, actually. Probably half of y'all's time. There's something called LimeWire that happened later. There was Kazaa, there's all these different basically shareware things where you could share files with one another and ultimately just like steal music for free. I'll just be honest, that's what it was, right? So when that was happening, how did a company like Spotify come in not really free and beat them? They won on speed and they won on risk because when you downloaded LimeWire, you knew that you were downloading all sorts of viruses to your computer. Number one, and then number two, on Spotify, it was like, it was just, you just picked the song, you could immediately start listening to it. And so they beat an industry that was literally free by being faster. And I remember when I went to get Chipotle once, this was at University of Maryland, I was visiting the campus, and it has, I think it's like the number one highest grossing Chipotle in like the nation. This thing is packed, it's in the middle of like the commons or whatever, right? And it was happening to be Halloween the weekend that I went to visit. You can imagine. And so at Halloween for Chipotle, they do this thing where if you wear any kind of foil, you dress up like a burrito, they like give you free burritos, whatever. And I didn't know, I didn't think that that was the day that I wanted to go have Chipotle. So I walk up and I'm like, oh my— and it was, it was, imagine a grocery store parking lot. So massive parking lot. There's a Chipotle there. The line stretched through the entire parking lot. It was insane. And I just remember thinking to myself when I got there and I was like, I would pay $20 to just have the burrito that I want and not have to wait in this line, even if it's free. And that was the moment where I sensed that concept. Fast beats free. So if you're not sure, start with the customer, reverse backwards, look at the competitive landscape. You're probably one of these 4 vectors or maybe more. If you guys are like, man, this is so good. Let me tell you a cool little secret. If this just feels true, you're like, this is so true. Guess why it's so true? Because these 4, are the value equations. So your risk is your perceived likelihood of achievement. Your ease is your effort and sacrifice. Your speed is your time delay. And then your, your, your cheaper is going to be ultimately the dream outcome. Those are the elements of value. And so all I did is I put different words around something that is, these are the core elements of value. And because they're the core elements of value, those are the things you have to translate to your customer in your marketing as your one defining winning angle. And if you haven't picked up the book, you can go grab it. Um, it's free on my podcast and it's on Amazon and you can probably find it wherever you search it. Hey, if you like this video, you might like this video, uh, because it's similar to this one except even more awesome.