How to Get SO Rich You Realize Money Has No Meaning
In this extensive monologue, the speaker recounts his rapid wealth accumulation—from $1 million at age 27 to over $20 million by 29—by emphasizing three core strategies. The first strategy is building a powerful brand, illustrated through a gym‑software launch (ALN/Allen) and a series of analogies about branding bulls. He explains how brand trust translates into higher conversion rates, click‑through rates, price premiums, and repeat purchases, citing examples like Apple, Warren Buffett’s See’s Candies, and his own leads book. The second strategy focuses on dissecting a business’s money‑making system into its smallest inputs and outputs, identifying which activities directly drive revenue (e.g., scripting, recording, outreach) and eliminating low‑leverage tasks such as unnecessary meetings, data‑driven distractions, and non‑impactful projects. He introduces the “give‑ask ratio” as a metric of trust building, where each positive customer interaction deposits value into a relationship. The third strategy is scaling those high‑leverage inputs through automation, delegation, and one‑to‑many mechanisms, ultimately leveraging other people (employees, agencies, affiliates) to become “lead getters” who advertise on the founder’s behalf, creating exponential compounding growth. Throughout, he stresses the importance of clear role definition, continuous questioning of employee contributions, and focusing on activities that maximize revenue per minute. The talk concludes that mastering leverage—turning time into high‑value outputs—allows entrepreneurs to become so wealthy that money itself loses meaning.
Chapters
When I was 27, I had just over $1 million in my bank account in cash. By the time I was 29, I had over $20 million. By the time I was 31, it was more than that. Here's how to get so rich you realize money was never the point. But first, you have to get rich. There's 3 strategies, and the first one is building a brand. So the first time I saw the power of brand was when we released a new product to my existing distribution base of gyms, which was a software called ALN, which then later became Allen. There was a certain percentage of gyms in my distribution base who weren't able to attend the launch or see the webinar live. And what ended up happening was crazy. All of a sudden, started getting hours later calls and texts saying, hey, I heard that Alex offered something. Here's my credit card. Just sign me up for whatever it is. And I was like, wait, they haven't seen the actual pitch. The realization was they just had a history of positive experiences when giving me money that they got more back, that they were like, oh, here's another time where I can give money and get more value back. Great, I'll utilize the opportunity. And so I was like, whoa, this is something different. I've never had this before. And so I was like, I need to protect this as much as humanly possible, and is there ways that I can do even more of it? And so let me give you 4 visual examples of how branding even came to be. And so back in the day, you'd have bulls. Look at my beautiful bulls. Those bulls would originally be unmarked, and so people had no way of differentiating between their bulls and other people's bulls. They started branding, literally searing their own logo or whatever into the bull. And so let's say we've got our Nike bull here. Great. Now we recognize that as a logo and we like that person. If we have that experience, then we're going to treat the cow differently than if it were unbranded. Now let's say that there's a brand that we don't recognize. We would then treat this bull like all other branded bulls in that it's a category that we just know that it belongs to someone else. The third scenario might be, let's say that it belongs to somebody that you hate. And so we have branding that you recognize and like, well then you'd be nice to the cow and take it home. Branding that you recognize and hate, you might capture the cow, kill the cow, and eat it for yourself or steal it. Branding of somebody you don't recognize but know that in general it belongs to someone, which would then change your behavior. And then finally, a cow that was unbranded in general and you would treat it like you treat all cows that have no owner. And so The reason this is important is that fundamentally the point of branding is to change behavior of the person who sees it. All of this is an indication of past experience. It's saying, hey, treat me like you would, treat me like you'd wanna be treated. Treat that cow like you would wanna be treated, which is exactly the point. No, but the owner is communicating something to anybody else who sees the cow. That's the point. We want to brand our product so that they treat it ideally like something that people like and love, which might mean that they buy it quickly at higher prices and over and over again and tell their friends versus not buy it, tell people terrible things, dissuade their friends from buying it versus I don't know, maybe I'll take a risk on this thing. And then it's going to be the quality of the creative that's going to have to communicate. And this is again why if you had a really fancy brand and it looks high end, then they're just going to extrapolate what they know about high end brands in general. To the purchase. Okay, this looks like a premium brand. I understand why they're doing these things, but I don't have history. Now, if you make the purchase and they have history, then it would shift into one of these two categories. In a word, Steve Jobs describes brand as trust. I define trust as predictive power based on past experiences. Just as much as you can trust someone to do a bad job, you can trust someone to do a good job. And so the idea here is obviously to build trust that we will deliver on our promises. And so fundamentally, You build that by making promises and keeping or over-delivering on the promises you have. But brand is a big amorphous topic. And so how do you measure this in dollars and cents? And so there's basically 3 things that brand translates to in terms of economics for a business. And so the first is conversion rate. Now, what does that mean? So conversion rate is the percentage of people who, when presented with your offer, choose to buy it. And so let's say that you have a bad brand or no brand at all. A bad brand would be that you have a past history people trust you to do bad stuff, you have lower than neutral. If you have no brand, it would be based on their experience with other businesses that look like yours. And so this is also why, quote, good branding, even if you don't have a history of reinforcement, can still be important because if you walk, talk, and quack like somebody who is a scam artist, you will have people treat you like one. It's not just your experience, but their experience with people like you. Fundamentally, like, This is what racism is about. But people prejudge people because that's how we go through life. If we had to start at zero for every single person we met, we would use up all of the cognitive load that we have. And consumers, like all humans, try to use shorthand. We wanna learn based on the things, put a label on it, put it in a bucket, and not think about it as fast as possible. And so from a conversion rate perspective, a good brand means that, let's say neutral would be, let's say you close 20% of people who you get on the phone with at a specific price point. At negative, which actually get that. I'll just put up with zero here, negative one, and then positive maybe. And this, the thing here is that this could go as high as you want. Like if you have an unbelievable reputation, like plus, plus, plus, maybe you close 80%. And what's interesting about this is if you look and maybe here it's 0% because no one, everyone hates you and you basically have to rely on people who don't know who you are, advertise wider and wider to find people who have yet to meet you, which is a terrible way to live. So brand gives you an increased percentage of people who will buy when presented with your offer, just like the guy who didn't even need to get presented with the offer. Just knowing that I had an offer, he was willing to buy it. And the reason I use Apple as a great litmus test for this is that I think Steve Jobs is one of the best brand builders of all time. I mean, people lining up to buy whatever his next product was because of his past history of keeping his promises and overdelivering on it. And so number 1 is conversion rate. This is like, if you had nothing else, this would be worth it. If you could 4x the amount of people that bought your stuff at a specific price, that would give you a material advantage over everyone else. But branding doesn't stop there in terms of its business benefits. The second is CTR. Now it's like, okay, what does that really mean? So it's actually conversion rate again, but just earlier on in the funnel. And so let's say again, you have eyeballs, you've got people who see your promotions in whatever way you advertise. So that could be making content, that could be outreach attempts, responding to emails, basically the number of engaged leads. Having a higher click-through rate means people take the first action. They then convert on a landing page or a Shopify page or whatever. They're either buying a product or they're scheduling a call. And then on the call, they have a higher conversion rate as well. And so basically you can think about this as conversion rate throughout the entire process from the beginning to the money. And then obviously, if you continue to do a good job on resells, repurchases, etc. So let's say that generically at -1 and then 0 and then plus here, you might have a 0.5% click-through rate. And then here maybe you have a 1% click-through rate. And then maybe here you have something like a 3% click-through rate. And this is super standard. Like, this happens all the time, especially if you're going after markets that already know who you are. When I launched my Leads book, we had never run ads before. And so this was all novel. And there was a past history of the first book. So the first book has, I think, like 26,000 5-stars at the point of making this video. There was a lot of anticipation for the second book. And so the CTRs were like 6% for our ads. And so people were signing up for the book launch for something like a dollar, which is crazy, and I'd never had anything like that before, especially at scale. And so I was like, man, these are some of the benefits of building trust with an audience. And so from the conversion rate perspective, if you think about those guys who bought at the ALN launch who weren't even presented the offer, they just found out that I had something to sell, those are people who otherwise in a neutral or negative business certainly wouldn't have purchased. They would've either needed to be convinced if they were neutral, or they just would've not wanted to buy to begin with if they were at the negative side of the spectrum. That's how you can just demonstrate visually what the experience of having a higher conversion rate looks like. More people buy when they're presented with the offer. And I'll give you another really tactical example. My offers book on Amazon, the actual page itself converts at 30%. So basically a little bit less than 1 out of 3 people who visits the page buys the book. Now, I think there's a variety of reasons for that. One of them is that many people who go there got referred via word of mouth, which we'll get to one of the big compounding things from that later. But the second thing is that even if you don't have word of mouth, when you have, you know, a 4.9 rating and you've got 26,000 people who rated it that, then you have high confidence that it's going to deliver at least a decent product. Now, the third big brand benefit is price point. And so this is one that I think is probably more commonly touted. And Warren Buffett describes it like this. He says, if you have to say a prayer before you raise your prices by 10%, you have a bad business. And so the idea is that if customers love your product, they will be more willing to pay a premium to get it. Rather, they are paying down the risk of buying somebody else's product. And so they buy your product with the existing promise, and then the extra is basically their insurance that they pay you knowing that they're going to get exactly what they expect. I can't overemphasize how important it is to pay down people's risk. Like, risk is one of the, the 3 primary levers in terms of value creation. And so this is why McDonald's, for example, even though their product in and of itself is not that good, it is consistent. And consistency in and of itself reduces risk. And people just like to have their expectations met. Now what's interesting about this is that to meet everyone's expectations, it means that you'll have to go really high because some people have high expectations, some people have medium, some people have low expectations. And so if you want to meet the expectations of a large percentage of the audience, you will have to try to overdeliver when the people who are the most demanding, you will simply have delivered. Now, other people you will have overdelivered for. But I think this idea of like you're always going to overdeliver, I don't think is true. I think you just have to try as hard as you can and a larger percentage of people will be satisfied. Now, with this price, in any competitive market, if you can raise price by— let's say this is your revenue and this is your profit before. So this is our neutral brand versus our plus plus brand.. Okay, so let's say that they have the same base economics. So the cost of doing business is the same between these two businesses, but this business can simply charge 10% more. By doing that, they basically double the amount of profit that they're able to make as a result of their brand. There's one more point that makes brand make you even more money, and it just took me way too long to realize this. Because I got really good at marketing and sales early, and I came at it from the perspective of like, I just need to go find more people, when it's so much more profitable to find the existing people that you have, that you already have done business with, and they want to continue doing business with you. And so I solve now for how do I get people to always want to do business with me again, rather than how do I find more people. And so the fourth piece is repurchases. And so just like Apple, like I was mentioning earlier, They have such an amazing system of getting people into their ecosystem and then buying again and again and again. And it would take a tremendous amount of effort to get someone to disconnect all of the products they own, their phone, their computer, their, their music, whatever, their app stores from their existing ecosystem of digital hardware. And so the fourth benefit is that not only do you get more people to respond, more people to convert at higher prices so you can make more profit, that profit then gets multiplied So if we have our neutral example, let's put— I'm going to have to put the other one over here. Now we already have a higher price point, so we're already making more money than this guy. But not only that, the next year some of these people might buy again. What do you know? Now our cost basis is going to go up because obviously they're buying something else, right? But so is our absolute profit. Uncle Warren, for example, every single year for See's Candies has raised the prices, and that's typically in accordance with costs. Of cocoa and butter and, you know, the commodities that actually create the product. But he has, I think on average, and I'll have to look this up again, but I'm pretty sure on average, like some of the highest years were 17% increases, and that's like year over year. But his average was much higher than the price index increases. And so basically he was able to continue to see that once someone bought their chocolates, they would continue to buy them over and over again, even with a higher price, which then leads to Okay, from a repurchase's perspective, Keven said this. He said, if you buy your darling See's Candies for Valentine's Day or her birthday or whatever, and you guys enjoy them together, he said, we've got you for life. And the point there is that they now cost— they spent the money to acquire you one time, but then after that, you keep buying again and again and again and again. And that extends the LTV of the person. So you're getting more people interested who are then going to buy. At higher prices, so there's even more gross profit per unit, and they're going to buy again and again and again. I can hardly imagine something that would be more powerful for a business. There's a concept of the give-to-ask ratio, and I talk about it here in my Leads book in the content chapter. And the reason that this is such an important metric is basically this is a history of reinforcement. How many times have you reinforced positively before you ask for something? But this is the part that people miss, and it's because most people's products aren't that good. Their ask in their mind is perceived as a negative, and the give is obviously received as a positive. And so you make this media, you give out this free stuff, that gives you more and more pluses. Some people like to think about it like a bank account. You add more deposits and then you can withdraw. But when listening to Jobs talk about this, he actually purely talks about it from an asks perspective. He says, if people buy our product and they absolutely love it, then we have provided more value. We put a deposit into our relationship. He said, if people buy our product and they hate it or it's just mediocre, then we have withdrawn from that relationship. This whole idea of give-ask, many people talk about this in terms of like content and then monetization, but it actually extends all the way through the business. And in the perfect world, you give in the content, and when you ask for money, it becomes a give. Because as soon as they buy the product, they're like, oh my God, this is amazing. Which is why, for example, I think that like I try to get people to start with the books because it's the thing that I've spent the most time on. And cost relative to value is, Pretty insane. That allows me to give yet again and create a positive history of reinforcement with an audience. Brands compound over time, not because necessarily media compounds, but media is just a measurement tool for word of mouth because like your audience will grow because people will share your stuff. Like try and get it down to the people when analyzing these kind of like amorphous ideas. Like what happens when a brand grows? It means you did a good thing and then that person tells another person., and then that person experiences the benefit themselves, and then that person tells another person. And so the output of the brand is the trust with an audience that grows rather than logos and color schemes and fonts. Like, it's none of that. It's just how many people trust me. But the reality of building a brand is that it's kind of like a friendship. Like, imagine meeting somebody and being like, we're best friends. If they said that the first time you met, you'd be like, that's a bit weird, right? And so building a brand is a lot the same thing. It takes time to build trust, and trust is predictive power based on a past history of experience. And so you have to develop that past history of experience. If somebody does something nice one time for you, you're not immediately going to be like, oh, I trust this guy with my life. It's like, well, he did one thing. But if he does thing after thing after thing after thing after thing for an extended period and then makes an ask, you're like, well, I kind of owe him money. He's done a bunch of stuff for me, right? And so that's the idea is that it just takes a long time. Now here's where it gets— where there is high arbitrage with brand. With media and technology, one person can give to a million people at once in a very small way. And so the idea is, okay, how can I give to a million people at once over and over and even in a fractionalized manner such that in 10 gives or 20 gives or 50 gives, I've now given effectively 3 full gives or 4 full gives to somebody so that they might be willing to quote, return the favor based on their cultural rules. And so in those 4 ways, building the brand makes you so much money that you will have the first step taken towards realizing it wasn't the point to begin with. The second way to get so rich that you realize that making money was never the point is to know the inputs and outputs of your money-making system. And you want to break those down to the absolute smallest action. That way you can scale it while sustaining your margins. So whenever Leil and I get overwhelmed, right? Because it happens all the time. You basically clear your plate and then you add more stuff to your plate and then you're like, oh man, I'm overwhelmed. Then you clear your plate again. And that's, I honestly, I think a lot of that is just like entrepreneurship. When we look at our plate, what we do is I look at every single activity that I'm doing on a weekly basis and I say, how does that tie to how we make money? And it's trying to understand what are the inputs that I'm pushing into our money-making system and are there things on here that are either too indirect or just not actually driving anything at all? And so for example, I took over a department recently and I canceled all meetings that were recurring, where people were just sharing data. And the main reason was that, that, that data was not being used to change behavior. And so either the data is not correct or useful, or we need to learn how to do something about that data. And so if we spend all this time going over data and do nothing about it, then that time is completely wasted, both in the collection, storing, and analysis of data, but then also the reviewing it with a team of people. And so unless something changes what we do, we don't need to track it. And so this gets you much more targeted on the few things that matter. So Sharan Srivatsa, he's a public CEO, he and I talked about this at length. He basically posits that for every company, it's 1/10 of the employees that are actually creating the majority of the economics in the business. Like there's a core team that really is the one that moves the whole machine. And a lot of the rest of the people are there more or less for the ride. And the idea is, what is it that those 10 people do? What are their inputs that drive this machine? And I think that being able to identify what those activities are, not the general morphous words, but what the actual activities are, like, is it writing an email? Is it writing ad copy? Is it filming content or filming ads? Is it reaching out to a certain amount of people? Is it reaching out to customers? Is it hopping on a certain number of calls, sales calls? Like, all of these are activities that will drive revenue in the business. You basically look at a lot of other stuff that many people fill their calendars with, and the majority of it doesn't make money. And if the point of a business is to generate a profit through providing value to a marketplace outside of the cost of delivering that value, then you want to put as much into the value creation as possible, as little into the cost basis as possible, and do it as many times as you can. And everything that's not those things ultimately detracts from the efficiency of the system. And so think about it like this. You have a money-making system, you have a box. Now in that box is your general activities of doing business. So you sell tables, you sell books, you provide services, whatever your thing is, is you have a cost of delivering that thing and you have a price that should be above that cost. And then that discrepancy between those two things is how you make money and you spin that wheel as many times as you can. Where this gets important is you have to understand the inputs into the system. And you have to break it down to activities. Like, I can't explain to you how incredibly powerful this is to both understand this for yourself and explain it to your team and be able to revisit it on a regular basis because the inputs will change. And so, for example, if I were to say, hey, Alex, what do you do? What are the inputs in the Acquisition.com money-making system? There's many things that occur in Acquisition.com, but you as the founder or the entrepreneur you're basically pushing the first domino over and then there's many subsequent activities that happen after. And sometimes there's 2 or 3 dominoes that are occurring that you're pushing. But what happens is when we describe what we do, we use lots of amorphous words that have very little connection to what we actually do. For me, for example, like what are the things that I actually do? My inputs for acquisition.com, right? So let's say that acquis— geez, let's see if I can spell my own company. There we go. Acquisition.com. There we go. Oh God, now it's ugly as shit. Hold on. There we go. There we go. Nice, nice clean C there for everybody to see. All right. So I script stuff. Okay, cool. I record. That's something that I do. I check in on status of stuff. I review things and give thumbs up or feedback. I review deal metrics for deals that we're considering doing in ACU. Acqventures.com or ACQ Ventures, which is our venture arm we just started. I present to the team when we have kind of like new direction that we're taking. I also review Portco metrics and decide where the money goes, both within acquisition.com and then within the portfolio companies. When I say money, I say generically like the resources that we have. So we're going to allocate this person here, we're going to allocate these resources here. And so this is like what it actually is. And this is today. Now these things shuffle over time, but you can notice here that these are me describing actual activities, right? So what you need to do is now if I'm going to look at this, there's going to be some things that feed them, this machine, and then there are going to be some things that are me actually doing the stuff in the machine. And so this, for example, these are feeders. This stuff feeds in. This is, you know, me providing feedback, me driving stuff. These are all for feeding this machine is how do we get more attention? How do we get more business owners to know about our stuff? How do they, you know, they can buy our books so they can learn to trust us. And then eventually, you know, maybe there's a deal down the line. Big picture, we've got these feeders that feed into this machine, and then we kind of have what I would consider these are all the things of delivery, right? These are how I, how the actual machine works and makes money. The reason that defining the inputs is so important is that many times when you look at what you actually do, you aren't doing things that drive an increase in number of customers or an increase in LTV. And so if you think about this, like this is the LTV, this is the number of customers, and you can basically drive growth in only those two ways. And so you have to dial in what is actually the thing that makes money here. And whenever you have a deadline, for example, all of a sudden your ability to focus gets really clear. And I think the reason for that is because you have no time to waste. And so most people do like spend like 90% of their time on stuff that doesn't actually drive the needle, and then only 10% of the stuff when they actually need to make money. That does it. But what would happen if you actually spent all of your time on the inputs that mattered most? For example, I write 2 emails a week for the Mosey Minute, which is what I send to the, to the whole list, which is kind of like very tactical business concepts. It's very high leverage for me. It takes me about an hour-ish per email that I send, and that is something that drives awareness, it drives business, it drives value, it drives portfolio companies, it drives everything, right? And so that's an input, right? And so it's getting very clear on most of the things that people do that are just not that. And so whenever you scale an input or like the inputs that you have in terms of your money-making system or the inputs of what you do in order to feed that system, you essentially have 3 options for scaling. Option number 1 is you can automate. So you can get a machine to do it. All right? Now, some things are very difficult to automate. AIs can automate a lot. Sometime in the future, there will be an AI version of me that can probably make content better than I can. And We'll cross that bridge when we get there, but that would be something that could happen. The second is that you get other people. So that means that I'm having somebody else then make this content for me. Now, there's— I want to be very clear, there's degrees here. A lot of people like to think in binaries. It's like, okay, well, can I get somebody else to script this stuff? Can I get someone else to check in? Can I get someone else to record and review and give feedback? So then the only thing that I would have to do is record. Yes, of course I could. And so the idea is you don't necessarily need to replace every single part of what you do, but you can just basically chunk down the inputs into, okay, this one someone else can handle, this one someone else can handle. And then the final component of this is that you can do one-to-many. Now what does that mean? If like this is already a very leveraged acquisition system, right? Because it's me, one-to-many. You're watching this. It takes me one time to say it, but many people can see it. But if you had a one-on-one method of reaching out to people, say cold outbound as your way of getting people in, or maybe you get affiliates one-on-one, then you're either going to have to automate that way of getting affiliates one-on-one. You're going to have to get a team of people to do it, or you're going to have to switch to a mechanism that allows you to continue to do it, but do it to many people at once. And so I think through this whenever I have to kind of scale any kind of delivery or marketing is, is this something that I can get other people to do? And this also works on the back end right here. So it's like, okay, can I get other people to review portfolio metrics? Can I get other people to decide where the allocation is? Again, these things are very high leverage for me, meaning I don't have to put a lot to get a lot from it. And so it's worth me developing that skill set even deeper rather than potentially delegating it. But long term, in my opinion, every business can be delegated. It's just that you have to find stars and you have to find people who are better than you. And oftentimes that's tough. Like, could Steve Jobs delegate being Steve Jobs? Well, I don't know. I mean, they have yet to really make anything as good as what he made. You know, if Elon died, would, would all of the companies do as well without him? I don't know. That's where it's like, okay, he has to automate or get other people as many people as he can to do all the other stuff and the stuff that matters most to him. Like, for example, he says all my companies have zero marketing except for the fact that they have the most popular man like in history being the person who's running them. And when I say popular, I just mean it from an absolute perspective. People know who he is. When he makes a tweet, a gazillion people see it. And so if we were to— we probably could add this up and see what his total impressions are per month, both directly on X and then also in terms of shared volume of the amount of pages that share his interviews and the Rogan stuff and YouTube. And so like there's no marketing department because they have a one-man marketing department that in and of itself is worth, I mean, billions of dollars. And so I see everybody as an individual contributor at the most basic level. Like everyone does things and they are just either directly tied to some sort of outcome that gets customers or makes them worth more. Or they are not, right? And so I would encourage you— this is especially for— this is me talking specifically to business owners right now. So there's 3 questions that I like to ask an employee. Number 1, what do you do? And they will use amorphous terms, and you're like, no, no, no, like, not analyze. What do you do? What does that mean, right? Until they can define it in a way that, like, okay, you look at numbers on an Excel sheet and you try, and then you see if some are above a certain threshold or below it. Okay, got it. So that's what you do. Now, do you know what I do or what we do as a business? Now, a lot of times people can't even explain it back to you and they work for you. So if they certainly can't explain it to you, they're definitely not doing something necessarily that's going to help it. All right. What do we do? And then here's the third question. How does what you do help what we do? And it ties what they do to the outputs of the business. And so fundamentally, let's say that someone says, I am in finance. Okay, cool. What do you do? I compile and tabulate our expenses versus what we generate. And when something looks above benchmark or above our historic average, I flag it to make sure that it is worth spending money on. And if we do well in a business line, I flag it to see what we did better. And if we do poorly, I flag it to see why we did worse. And so that is what you produce. Now I would then say, how does what that does influence this and this? Now the intelligent finance person would then say, I influence the decisions about what we spend to get more customers and how we make them worth more through doing more of the things that increase value and taking away things that add to costs. And that would be a very real answer as to tying their inputs into the outputs of the system. And so you have to be able to dial these things in first to connect your actions to what makes a business money, and then scaling those actions through automation, other people, or gaining leverage on that activity. I'll give you 3 major money sucks that people do that are not this. So number 1 is they will work on projects that are not going to drive the main objectives. So it's like they want to reorganize Asana in some way, right? Or whatever your project management thing is. Okay, we have this massive reorganization. Fine. Okay, great. Now it's taken up a lot of time. Or you redo your entire website, which takes you a ton of time. But is it really the constraint of the business? Is it the thing that's going to generate money? Or you should— should you just split test your headlines on your landing page? Right? Like there are other things that will drive more customers. And so basically, like, I can give you a list of 1,000 things that you could do to grow a business. The question is, which one of them will grow it the most? And so most people spend time on activities that they enjoy, that drive very little business to the business, but they can mentally masturbate to the idea that they're being productive because it's business-ish. It's related to business. And so it's almost like they're doing arts and crafts and hobbies while they're doing business, but those aren't the main drivers. The second thing is that they spend too much time on meetings. And this is a really common one, which is that people are social. People like to talk to each other. And so if they get an excuse to do it, they will do it. One of the most frightening things in the entire world, which I recommend you do, is actually look at how much everyone makes per hour. So look at their annual pay divided by 2,000, and then look at a meeting when you, when you have 10 people on it, right? And then all of a sudden you're like, I paid $500 for this meeting. And if you went out to dinner and took everybody to dinner and then you paid $500 for dinner, people are like, oh my God, thank you so much. It's so generous of you. It's like every meeting is that. And so unless you can show how this is going to generate us $500 plus— now mind you, you need to get a return on that. So you probably need to get something like 4 or 5 times that amount of money from that meeting, then you probably just shouldn't have it. And where this gets really, really nasty is once your business gets big enough, employees in general start meeting with each other. And so it's like you're not even involved and these, these losses are occurring on a regular basis. Sometimes people call it time theft. I don't think the intention's there, but I do think that the end result is still the same, which is that the business becomes less efficient and bears more cost to deliver the same product. The third big kind of like hole that I see a lot of times is people who spend an inordinate amount of time on data that doesn't change what they do. So I'll give you an example. I could track what the temperature is of every room that I walk into. I could track the amount of words that I say on a meeting. You could track anything, right? Some people, especially small business owners, and sometimes even on your team, will just love to show you all these Excel sheets of all this data that they've tracked. It takes a huge amount of time and they get all these percentages and all these ratios. And then you just have to ask the question, why should I care about this? How does this change what we do? And I ask this question over and over and over again because so many people love to be like, oh no, we're data-driven. It's like, are you data-driven or are you data-distracted? And this is the litmus test. This is the very easy litmus test. If this number goes up, does it change what we do? If this number goes down, does it change what we do? If this number changing doesn't change what we do, we don't need to track it. When you ask that question over and over again, because people are like, well, we want to keep an eye on that. I'm like, why? Let's take it to the natural extreme. Why? The world is increasingly quantified and being able to, with automation and software and wearables, like there's so much technology out there that wants to quantify everything because they know that people have an obsession with data, but not all data is useful. And so most businesses, you can figure out the metrics on the back of a napkin and figure out if you like it or not. That back of napkin way of running a business, in my opinion, is an exercise in thought discipline of the entrepreneur. If you know the clear inputs that drive the business, which for you might just be, I have to script, record, and edit content. It could be, I have to script, record, and edit ads. It could be, I have to do a certain amount of outreach attempts or manage a team to hold them accountable to doing these outreach attempts. Like there are a certain number of things that actually drive the business. If the data that you collect does not change what you do with your inputs, then you don't need to track it. You can reverse engineer this to figuring out first, what are the inputs that actually drive the output? And then secondarily, what data would change how I do these inputs? If you find out that the CTR dropped on your ads, then you would probably change your hooks, you change your targeting, that would change what you do. So it makes sense to track that. If like number of tags on a social platform, you could track it. Let's say it goes up in general over a month. What are you gonna do? Now you might say, well, I'll make more of the content I made that month, but if you made a variety of different pieces of content, would you then have to track it daily and see if there was a spike? Okay, I got more tags in this. Okay, okay, wait, stay with me. How does getting more tags translate into us making more money? I can show you a number of people who get lots of tags and lots of likes and lots of views that don't make more money. And so again, it's not only like maybe, maybe it tracks to what we would do, but does that track to us making more money? So if you want to get so rich that you question the meaning of making money, then the first thing you can do is make sure that all of the work that you do makes you more money and stop spending time on things that make you nothing, although they are fun distractions. Which leads me to the third way of getting so rich that you realize that making money was never the point, which is get other people to advertise for you. I remember the first time I ever had someone else sell for me. So I had to go home for Christmas. This was the first year of owning my gym and had to go home for Christmas. I went home for Christmas and this is while I was still going home for the holidays. While I remember I was driving home and I got a call and I had hired this sales gal and I had taught her my script and we were still running ads even though I was the one selling. And I was the one who had done every single sale since the beginning of the business. She sent me a text that was like, oh, I went 2 for 4. And I remember I got so emotional in the car while I was driving that I felt like I almost had to pull over because I got choked up because I was like, "Oh my God, this could actually work without me." And it was the first time where I realized that this could actually be a thing. It's not just like Alex working really hard and I have to make the money. If no one else makes the money, then— It was the first leading indicator of transitioning from a job to an asset. Once I had that loop, I got really addicted to it. I was like, man, I wonder if there are people who could train without me training. I wonder if there are people who, like, and I just looked at all the things that I did and that obsession has not really ended since then. You have to get other people to advertise for you in order to have more leverage, okay? So leverage is about getting more for what you put in. And fundamentally, like, in my opinion, all of entrepreneurship is mastering leverage. It's why it's core to our logo for acquisition.com. This is a fulcrum. And because all of us have the same inputs at the base level, which is time. And so the people who get the most for their time are the ones who get the most money for their time by doing activities that generate most revenue per minute or second. Imagine I had to just get customers. Well, at some point I would max out the amount of hours per day that I could spend doing it. No matter how efficient I get, I'm going to have to trade time to get it. If I'm doing it on inputs, outputs that are directly correlated, a 1-to-1 ratio, I can do the ratio faster, but I'm still going to have that connection. I can be more efficient, in terms of getting better at that skill. But as long as the base metric is still there, I will be capped based on hours per day. So walk you through 4 levels of this. And I talk about this in my Leads book, which is the second half. We're just talking about lead getters. All right. So I'll draw this out in real time for you so you can actually get a voiceover on it. So basically at the very, at the very beginning, imagine that you are getting leads for your business. Okay. So this is just you. All right. And so let's say you get 100 leads a day that you're calling or you're reaching out to or whatever. Now you can do this. Now your work's going to be high and your throughput's going to be fixed. There's nothing more you can do to it right now. The next level here is that you do this thing, but then instead of getting leads, you get a lead getter, meaning you get other people to advertise on your behalf. And so functionally, instead of getting like you reach out to 100 people, you then get someone else. Here's someone who's not you. Ta-da! Let's make them smiley. There we go. He's smiling. He's very happy to make you money. Okay, so this person now spends their time getting you leads. Okay, so we, we just had to do this once, and then this created this node— how I like to think about it— of lead generation, right? And so boom, this, this one day created this node ongoing. So who's more efficient, the guy who just continues to work here, or the guy who works gets one person and then that person works on their behalf and doesn't even have to do this. He still gets the same output. All right. You sticking with me? Like, look at our return here. Return was 100 versus 300 in terms of units of effort versus return. But here we're getting way more. And every single month this guy does more, we still keep getting a higher return on this initial base. Now, let's say that the next month you do this and you get another guy. Right? And this guy gets you more leads. So now you're working the same amount you were before, but now we've tripled the amount. Well, here we've doubled it because you're getting lead getters first. But the third day you would have tripled it, right? You keep getting more leads via these other people that you've been attracting. And so there are different types of lead getters that you can bring into a business. You can bring employees into a business. So imagine I recruit somebody, and then I pay them to help me make content. I recruit somebody, I pay them to help me make media, right? Of course you can do that. The alternative is that you can go recruit an agency who does this work on your behalf. And the only real difference there is just the nature of the, the pay relationship, but it more or less works the same way. Now I will say this, the businesses that grow the fastest will typically have two different types of lead getters. They will have the lead getters that come naturally from their existing advertising activities. And so you, let's say, are continuing to advertise to get customers, but these customers now become lead getters on your behalf. They then are the ones who are bringing more people into your world. And that is what will end up compounding because over time, in order to have a compounding business, which is what you need in order to get a really big business, you can't scale media indefinitely. Like at some point, like you will get such diminishing returns that it won't make sense anymore. You have to eventually rely on word of mouth. Mind you, this is if you want to get super rich. If you want to just get medium rich, like you can make $10 million just knowing how to market and sell. And just find people who don't know who you are. You can absolutely do that, but I'm trying to talk about getting mega rich. And so you have to get leverage over basically lots of other people in a decentralized manner. All right? So if you get employees or you get agencies, those are centralized. Those are people you have direct relationships with. You have to scale that, those, those relationships, right? Whereas if you had affiliates, which are other businesses that basically operate independently, that have your, have your customers and then send you business, or customers that operate independently and then bring you more business, that decentralizes the activity so that they continue to advertise on your behalf far beyond your ability to manage them, right? And this is really setting up a system of incentives such that they want to do it without your prodding, poking, and, uh, well, I guess prodding and poking. I don't know why you're poking your customers, weirdo. And so a big visual here is that you've got customers, affiliates, employees, agencies, right? And so these are businesses, these are individuals. These tend to be more centralized. These tend to be more decentralized. And the reason this is so important is that if you think about how this flow works, it's like you're going to do the core 4. And these are the inputs that we were just referencing. These are the inputs. And then these are the outputs of those inputs. You're going to get employees who are going to help you.
