How to Grow Your Business SO Fast in 2026 It Feels ILLEGAL

The last 3 companies I founded and sold grew so fast it felt illegal. UseAllen got to $1.2 million per month at the end of the first year. Prestige Labs got to $1.5 million per month by the end of the first year, and Gym Launch got to over $2 million per month by the end of the first year. I'm going to show you the strongest growth levers I used to get these results so that you can too. Let's start with the first one, which is nobody knows you exist. And if you're under $1 million in revenue, I can virtually guarantee that basically everyone on earth doesn't know you exist. And so the first 4 hours of every day should be dedicated to solving that problem and going from obscurity to being aware. And so we do that by doing the core 4 more, which is you have to do more outreach, cold or warm. You have to make more content or you got to run ads. But the thing is, is you don't need to do all of them. You pick one, you go all in, and that's what you spend your first 4 hours every single day on. Now, the reason that I talk about advertising more so much is that advertising is a boom. And if you're like, what's a boom? It's actually a term that I started using internally for our business, which is a business order of magnitude change. All right, and so fundamentally, if you think about a business, there are many things that you can optimize. So you can increase your close rate by 10%, you can increase your conversion rate on your opt-in page by 10%, you can increase your email follow-up. All of those things are optimizations. And so the problem is with optimizations, you can only go to 100%, they're capped. But with advertising, you can in a very real way 100x the amount of people who find out about your business. And one of the keys that small business owners get stuck in is they get in this little optimization mousetrap where they're like, I need to move this. Oh, I was at 10.1 to 1 and now I need to be at 10.2 to 1. It's like, dude, just get 100 times the leads and your business will grow. So here's what most people think when they think about their given marketplace. So let's say you're a local dry cleaner, all right? You see that you're advertising on Facebook. And so you see you have the whole pie and so you're happy. So that's just you. Then you have you plus one other person. Then all of a sudden you've got half of the pie. Then it's you plus 3 other people in the marketplace and now you feel sad. But the reality is the marketplace is significantly bigger than you ever give it credit for. There are so many humans on earth. This is what it looks like in reality. You're actually only advertising on 1 of 4 different methods and the way that you're doing it is only on one slice of the medium. And then within that you have your tiny little quarter that you're taking up. And so the marketplace has so many different ways they can communicate using each of the methods of communication. So for example, if I'm talking about content, I'm like, oh, there's somebody else in my marketplace who's marketing on Instagram. Okay, cool. So there's that. But isn't there also other platforms you can do it on? And don't you think that maybe there's enough people in your marketplace to satisfy your business? Probably the amount of times that I would have a gym owner, for example, who'd come to me and say, hey, there's this other guy in the marketplace who's now running Facebook ads. I'm like, you only need 200 people in your gym to be incredibly profitable. And right now, last time I checked, you've got 1 million people in your city. And so you just have to get 200 of them. And so if there's 10 others or 100 other gyms that are advertising your area, even on the same platform, you still just need to get 0.00002% of of that audience to just come to you. And so you think that as these people enter, you're losing market share, but the reality is you're this tiny little speck and most people don't even know you exist. So the next growth principle is instead of trying to beat your competition, shrink your competition. Eminem has responded to hate in two ways publicly that I absolutely love. So the first is that when Will Ferrell confronted him about some things that Afrojack had said to him, He said, "Hey, Afrojack's been talking trash. Do you have anything to say about it?" And Eminem just said, "Who?" And then Will Ferrell repeated the statement and then he just looked at him and he was like, "Who?" And he was like, "Okay, yep, that's what I thought." And so the first is I'm so big I can't hear him. The secondary is that you kill them with kindness, right? So you either grow so big that no one can see them or hear them or you meet them where they're at on a different game, which is you play on kindness. And grace. And so in 8 Mile, Eminem tries to claim all of the flaws that he has so that no one else can say anything. And so I get hit on a lot, not like that, for talking about working a lot. People are like, that's not healthy. And of course I try to put disclaimers in every video. I'm like, do whatever you want, right? I get hit on for like, oh, I think he's trying to make money. Duh. I try to say it all the time. But people assume that I am trying to hide this from my audience. Of course I'm trying to make money. I'm in business. That's the whole point I do this. And that way, if I always start with, I'm here to make money, when I do something nice, then people are like, oh, well, that was nice of him, rather than me claiming that I have to be this super kind whatever person. And then when I try and make money, people are like, ah, shake their finger at me. Like, it's not good. And so I try and learn from Eminem and just take all of the negatives that I can think that somebody would possibly say and then just claim them as my own because Yes, we are all flawed and none of us are perfect. And so for some reason we are bothered when someone else points out our imperfections that we would readily state ourselves. We know we have deficiencies. What you want to do is overwhelm the marketplace so that you drown them out. You want to be so loud that no one else can hear them. You shrink them into irrelevance by comparison. And so there's two ways that you can become the tallest building, right? You can knock everyone else down or you grow so that they become smaller in comparison to you. And so everyone sees their little building and thinks, oh no, I should knock all my competitors down, right? When in reality, all you need to do is build the biggest absolute building there. And the thing is, is that you're going to block out the sun and your shadow will be so big that no one can even see these people. And let me tell you a story about this. When I launched my last book, $100 Million Leads, I spent a tremendous amount of time and effort across— I think at the time we had 7-ish million subscribers or audience size across all platforms. I emailed a bunch, I made a ton of content, we spent money on ads, we did outreach, we had affiliates going, we had all these different channels going to get as many people as possible to the launch. And when I walk around Las Vegas, because I live here, I will usually get stopped about 3-ish times when I do about a 60-minute walk. Mind you, I walk in a crowded area, so it's not like I'm just walking in the neighborhood, then that would just be weird anyways. And of course you should be recognized by your neighbors, but I'll get stopped by 3 people and every time for the month leading up to the launch, I would be like, hey, you going to the book launch? 19 times out of 20, the people would look at me and be like, what's the book launch? And I was like, how do you not know about this? Right? But it was this wonderful reminder that most people, when you get tired of your advertising, most people don't even know your first name. If you have deluded yourself into thinking that you should only have to say something once and somehow everyone in the entire world has heard you say that thing, you are kidding yourself. You need to become a master of variety in terms of how you can re-say the same thing in different ways. And taking the natural extreme, there's this fallacy that most small business owners think, and myself included for years I thought this, was that repetition in and of itself is somehow bad. So So let me explain. There's probably people on the internet, I personally follow a bunch of philosophy accounts, and so most of the philosophers are dead, and yet I still love to see the quotes they have because they remind me of the things that I want to follow, the way that I want to live. And it's not like, oh, another Seneca quote, does this guy never give up? It's like, he's dead, he hasn't come up with a new quote in 2,000 years, and yet I still like seeing the quotes even though I know I've seen them before. And oftentimes you serve that role for your audience more than anything else. Like we think that it's like, oh, I've said this one thing, therefore they have all changed all their behavior immediately and they never need to learn that again. But the biggest lesson that I've learned is that people need to be more reminded than they need to be taught. And in the off chance that you've received hate or you have a competitor who's talking crap, and it happens, this counts double. So instead of trying to beat them or prove them wrong, you only have two options. Option one is you grow so big that no one can even hear them. The alternative is that you kill them with kindness, which is that you do not beat them by proving that you are right. You beat them by proving that you are kind. And then by comparison, they will look bad. And so the only thing I can tell you about having dealt with plenty of it in my day is that on the occasion that I do choose to respond to hate, I try to respond with kindness. And so someone can just absolutely tear me one and just say like, "This guy sucks. He's terrible," whatever, right? I will then usually say, "Hey, you're right. I'm a super flawed person. That being said, it seems like you've developed like a big audience here and they seem to like you, and so congrats on your success." When someone sees that, it's very hard for everyone to be like, "Man, that guy sucks." It's just like now if I were to try and like list out all the points, all I do is invite more back and forth, which I don't want to do and it's a waste of my time. And so instead, you start all hate responses with, "You are right," because it's all they want to hear. And there's really nothing else to say after that. And so what's interesting is that oftentimes hate, if you boil it down, comes down to, I do not prefer the way this person does things. I have a different preference. And it's like, great, right? Like, I make money one way, he makes money another way, and therefore he is wrong. It's like, no, you just do the way you want, which is awesome because you do it your way and they do it their way, and the people who are attracted to that will do that, and the people who are attracted to you will do yours, and great. Like, I mean, of course there's engagement baiting and things like that because, you know, people want to get views and all that, and I respect it, I get it. But big picture, I think you can't take it personally because whenever I fall into that little trap, I think to myself, I'm a relatively developed monkey that is sitting on a little blue marble in a solar system that's in one of a billion galaxies, and I'm worried about some screen that has words on it of a made-up language that we had in the last 1,500 years of how we communicate face noise to each other. And when I think about that, I think this would be pretty silly for me to really doing a day over. So the third big growth lever, and this one's massive, is clear, not clever. All right, so what do I mean by that? Well, when I looked at the highest converting ads that I had run, and I do this pretty regularly, I look for different components. Sometimes I'm like, what's the hook? Sometimes I'm like, what's the color scheme? What's the visuals that are being displayed in the first however many seconds? And in this one particular pass, I just looked at the grade level of the language that was being spoken. And the reason I looked at that, it was, I think it was, you know, 1 or 2 election cycles ago, I had heard this research study that had stated that the president who spoke in the lowest grade language was the one that won the election over and over again. And when I heard that, I see presidential elections fundamentally as massive brand campaigns. And so I see that as they were able to communicate a message to a higher percentage of the population because they lowered the barrier to entry of comprehension. Meaning more people got what they said. And so when I hear that, I thought, man, I like to use all these big fancy college words and no one knows what I'm saying. And so all I do is feed my ego, not my bank account. And so I made one of my big marketing rules: clear, not clever. And so you want to take whatever communication is, look at your landing pages, look at your ad copy, look at the words you're saying in your content and say, Does a third grader understand this? And the point that some people try to make as a counter is like, oh, I don't want to talk down to my audience. No. When you speak in a more broken down manner, you help the experts understand it more easily and you help the beginners understand it for the first time. And so it's not that experts are all of a sudden saying, oh no, I don't believe that. Because listen, we get tons of very big companies that come to acquisition.com for investment and the guys who run those companies, very intelligent. But I try to make my videos in a way that people can understand them because who do I prove when I use a big word and then all of a sudden 3/4 of the audience can't understand it? And if the point of me making these videos is to make real business education accessible for everyone, part of making it accessible is making it interesting, making it fun, and making it comprehensible, which is just a fancy word for understandable. And what you guys don't see behind the scenes is that I will typically self-edit. And so I said distilled earlier in a sense, and then I said broken down for experts is because I said distilled and I was like, I have to use a different word, broken down. And then I said comprehensible. And then I said fancy word for understandable. And so I try to constantly catch myself in this and it's also made me a significantly more effective leader. So if I'm trying to communicate with my team, I'm not trying to say big words. I don't want to impress them. I want to change what they do. And so I've taken this to such an extreme that with my books I just use little, little stick figures, right? I have these little drawings. It's like, oh, Oh look, here's a guy who's walking on a path. Look, little apple, orange, big dollar sign, little dollar sign, right? We try to make this as simple as possible so that people can understand what's actually going on. Because if you can explain it to a third grader, and this is Richard Feynman who said this, this famous physicist. He said, if you can explain it to a third grader, then you understand it. If you can't, you don't, and you need to understand it better so that you can break it down. And so the broader the audience, the broader the analogy and the simpler the language. And so I'll give you an example. One element is the great language of the words you use. The second is what visuals or stories you use to depict them. And so if I'm talking to mechanics, I might use an analogy where I relate something they understand, cars, to something they might not understand, a business, right? If I wanted to teach a specific concept, if I was talking to the same, I was trying to teach the same concept, but I was teaching it to realtors, then I would probably use a house analogy. If I was teaching it to baseball people, I would probably use a baseball analogy, right? And so if you have a narrowed down audience, you will increase comprehension by using analogies that they all understand. If you're talking to a broader audience, then you need to have a broader slice of the market, probably a more human experience that all of them have. So if I'm talking to everyone, I might talk about food, I might talk about sleep, I might talk about driving, right? Because most people do that, assuming I'm not talking to children. And so you have to match the analogy to the history of learning from the people that you're trying to communicate to. And this is what takes your marketing and your advertising and puts it on steroids. And to put this to the test, this is something you can do right now. Look at whatever emails you send, run them through a reading grading level app, keep working on it until it's below 5th grade minimum, 3rd grade if you're awesome, and then send it. I did this to our email follow-ups and had a 50% increase in conversion. I didn't change anything about what I said, but I saw that as I got 50% more people to understand because the goal here is to decrease the friction of comprehension. So if we think about the elements of value, speed, ease, time delay, these elements are all impacted by complexity. And so something complex takes longer to understand. It takes more effort. And so, and it's harder, right? And so instead what we want to do is say, okay, how do I make it easy and faster? Okay, well then I'll just speak in a way that everyone understands. The next massive growth lever is proof over promise. All right? And so what this means is that in my earlier days, I would spend so much time on my promise, right? And I wrote a whole book on promises, which is basically offers, right? And I would obsess about the offer. And the offer is super important, but the only thing that's more important is proof. All right, so let me give you two hypothetical examples. Let's say that you've got Business One that's selling Thing One and Business Two that's selling Thing Two. Well, let's say they still compete for more or less the same audience, and Business Two says, we'll do X, we'll do Y, we'll do Z, we'll do W, and we'll guarantee X, Y, and Z, right? And you look at their reviews and they've got a 5-star rating and they've got 1 review. The other company says, "We'll do X," and they've got 11,382 5-stars and they've got a 4.7. Who do you buy from? This guy, obviously. But why? This guy has a better promise because you believe this guy. And so you wanna have proof up to your eyeballs. Proof is your single highest priority as a business owner or marketer or advertiser or promoter for your business. It is the one thing that you prioritize. Before I enter any new space, launch a new product, the first thing that I do is try and get beta users. I work for free in exchange for testimonials, reviews, and feedback, and sometimes referrals if I'm lucky. But in the beginning, that is the highest, most valuable thing that you can do. So people will say things like, never work for free, and you only hear that from people who don't make that much money. If you make a lot of money, you will know that you spend so much time in the free phase because getting the product right is so important, is such high leverage. And so the proof process both makes you convicted because you get the opportunity of many feedback loops to make your product better so that you then can collect the positive feedback that you can then advertise to get more people like those customers. And the most compelling way to advertise anything is show, don't sell. And if I just stand here and said nothing and I said, And I just stated the facts and told the truth. And I said, I have 11,382 reviews and our average review is 4.7 and I make pasta really good. And then, or I have one review from my mama and I make super fragilistic expialidocious pasta guaranteed. Which one do you like better? Obviously this one. You don't need to say much more. The proof is the pudding. The most important part of a message is the messenger themselves. They're inextricably linked from the thing that's being communicated. And this is what people seem to miss when they're making content, which is why I'm a big advocate of do epic stuff first, then talk about what you did. And if the stuff that you didn't do is epic, focus more on the doing epic stuff, not on the talking about it. And so I started this channel with a commitment to a vendor saying, I'll make 3 YouTube videos a week. And I was busy and I was like, I'm just gonna hit a webcam and I'm gonna talk to the camera. And that is how this channel was started. And the only reason, in my opinion, that people decided to listen was because I just so happened to have sold a company for just under $50 million. And so because of that, there was proof that I was able to deliver on the promise. Whereas somebody else might have a totally beautiful studio and have all these things, but they just forgot the one most important thing, which is why should I listen to you? And so either is going to have to be proof that you generated for yourself or proof from other people saying that you helped them achieve that thing. If any of these growth principles help you in thinking about your business differently so that you can scale faster or you need to send it to your team, it would mean the world to me if you shared it. That's my only ask, and appreciate it. So the next big thing is the hook. Now you're like, okay, I've heard about hooks before. Not the way that I'm gonna talk about it, alright? So the hook is greater than everything. Now you're like, wait a second, I thought proof was greater than everything. Well, the proof is gonna be contained in the thing, but no one's gonna see the proof unless you have a good hook, alright? And so the one thing that I think has consistently been reinforced, and it's just like a greater and greater percentage of my time is allocated towards this this one part of my advertising that grows my company the most, is I search for the best hooks and then I don't convince myself that I'm more creative than I think I am and I just keep using the ones that work. So think about it like this. These are the only 4 things that you can do to advertise any business. You can warm outreach, so reaching out one-on-one to people you know, cold outreach, reaching one-on-one to people you don't know, you can run paid ads, which is going one-to-many to people you don't know, or you can post content, which is one-to-many to people you do know. And in each of these 4 situations, you can double, triple, 5x the amount of people who open and respond, who click and watch your ad, who watch your content all the way to the end. And if you do something like that and you do increase the click-through rate by, go from 1% to 5% or 2% to 10%, which absolutely can happen, when you do that, you in a very real way can 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x your business with just that one thing. Remember I talked about earlier that advertising is a boom, it's an order of magnitude change? Well, what other one thing can you just tweak that then opens up the flow to the entire business based on how good the first 5 seconds are or the first 1 second? And so in thinking about hooks, I think about both the visual hook, as in what's happening, what that people can see, and then there's the auditory or verbal hook, which is what are the actual words that are being communicated. And we have, right now, we've reviewed our top YouTube videos of all time, and I made a video about 6 months ago saying what we found, which is our hook formula is proof, promise, plan. And so if you have the opportunity to make content, make ads, Run cold outbound. If you can include these, I can almost guarantee that you will do better than if you include none of them. And this is a force multiplier on any kind of advertising you do. And so when I think about like all the different things, all the effort that goes into advertising a business, if I can just do one thing, and the crazy part about hooks is they're the shortest part. They're the shortest part of the whole darn thing. And this is where David Ogilvy says, if you have written your headline, you've spent 80 cents of your advertising dollar. The more advanced the advertiser is that I meet, whether it's a content creator, somebody who's on outbound, somebody who makes paid ads, the more obsessive they are on the first frame, the first impression that someone gets because they know, one, it increases the likelihood that the person's gonna watch the rest of it and then potentially buy, and then two, it changes their entire perception of what follows. So we actually looked at this for speakers at an event, which was, if we changed the intro, the 1 to 2 minute intro that we had for a 60 minute talk, the person's net promoter score, so what people rated them in terms of how good they were, changed massively even though the actual presentation was the same. So simply how we framed the presenter, the person hadn't even gotten up on stage yet, changed how everything they did afterwards was perceived. And so if there's 2 minutes that can influence the score that you get, the customer satisfaction, the amount of prospects, the one thing to focus on is nail the hook. Let me show you the force multiplication of this. We just started reviewing short-form content on the content team and just doing a more regular activity of saying like, what are the things that make content do well? And there was a video that we were like, we think this thing is good. And so all we did is we took the same video that got like 40,000 views and then we just chopped out the first 3 seconds that was kind of like getting into the, into the video before the actual real hook was delivered. And by snipping those 3 seconds and then just starting where the hook really was, it went from a 40,000-view video to a 780,000-view video. So you're talking about a 19x improvement. So I'm talking about, you know, 1%, 2%, I'm talking 19x. That is why obsessing over the hook is so important. So the next big growth lever that gave us the super fast growth was more. So I talk about more better, and new as the 3 primary strategies of growth. You either do more of what's already working, you do what you're doing to make it work better, or you do something entirely new. Now most entrepreneurs love doing new stuff, and that's why it's called shiny object syndrome, and it's a cancer and you should get that looked at. But the very boring answer is the mundane more. You have to master more. And it's going, instead of zero to one, which is what most people love doing, oh my God, I finally got it to work. But actually doing 1 to N, which is how do I do this thing as many times as humanly possible without wanting to kill myself? And so here's the actual math explanation of this. More is typically the highest risk-adjusted return strategy. All right? And so what that means is if you can do something and you already know it works, the likelihood that the next thing you do works is much smaller. And so this is why once you have a control, meaning you have a specific landing page or ad or copy or email that you know converts. Whenever you deviate from a high-converting advertisement, the likelihood that the variant is going to beat it is typically low. And so you have to try a bunch of variations because all you're doing is messing something up that actually already works. If you had one sales guy and he's closing at 30%, well, you could try and obsess to get them to 35% or 40%, and that would be material. You know, you get a 25% lift overall, 30% to 40% is a 25% improvement. But you know what would be even cooler? Just hire 3 more guys and then you have a 4x or a 300% improvement. And so it's like, I could get a 25% improvement or I could get a 300% improvement. And me trying to change up the sales script also has a significant shot of me taking it from 30% down to 20 because it's a change. And so here's the thing is that when you change anything, you guarantee you incur the cost of change, but you do not guarantee that you get the benefit of change. And so in each of the core 4 methods, you do more outreach, which is cold or warm. You go from 100 reachouts a day to 200 reachouts a day. Paid ads, you go from $100 a day to $200 a day. You go from posting content, you go from posting once a day to twice a day, right? Those are how you do more. And when I talk to the most experienced advertisers that I know, the most experienced business people that I know, the most common thing we talk about is we kind of laugh in the back room of like, if people just, people just don't know how much more they can do. That's, that's honestly the real, that's the real is that when I, when I, when I have conversations with small business owners, they're like, hey, I don't think I can do any more, uh, ads. You know, I'm running, I'm already running $1,000 a day. I'm like, I mean, dude, there's businesses that run like $2 million a day. And so you usually have so much more runway than you think you do. And sometimes you just need someone ahead of you to be like, dude, you can like 10x this and nothing's gonna change. But they think because of whatever mental limitation they have, or like, you've never spent that much money on an ad before, you've never made that amount, is it gonna hurt my account? No, they want you to make good content. Is it gonna hurt my ads? No, they want you to spend money. Is it gonna hurt my outreach? You're going to people who've never met you before, so why would they know that you've sent it to another 100 people? People, right? Is that there's these perceived fears, but most of the times it's just between your ears. I'll tell you guys a quick story about this. So when I had my first, I would say, real business, which is my first location of my first gym, I had a mentor and he was a really good local marketer. And so he had a strategy for his tanning salons where he would bring in, I mean, thousands of customers every single quarter. And what he did was he would put out flyers. He just put flyers on cars and then had like a free VIP gift card and people would come in, and we flipped them into memberships. And so I figured, okay, I'll just run the same play. And so I did the flyers and I put 300 flyers out and I waited by the phone being like, oh my God, I'm gonna get 300 people in here, it's gonna be sick. And what happened? Well, my phone only rang once from the flyers and when I picked up the phone, the guy was like, hey, did you put the flyer on my car? And I was like, yeah, I did, like what time do I— but he cut me off and he was like, "You damaged my Mercedes!" And I was like, "Oh!" Click, and I didn't know what to do. And thankfully he never called me back 'cause I definitely didn't have the money to fix any Mercedes at that time. I called my mentor back up a week or two later once it was clear that no one else was gonna call. He said, "Hey, how'd the flyers work out?" And I was like, "Well, they didn't work out at all, actually." I was taking some attitude with him. He was like, "Oh, well, what was your test size?" And he didn't take the bait. He was like, "Oh, what was your test size?" And I said, "Well, what do you mean?" He was like, "Well, like, what'd you test with before you did the real campaign?" And I was like, "Oh, well, I put 300 out." And he was like, "300? You can't know anything with 300." I was like, "Well, what do you mean?" He's like, "I test with 5,000." He's like, "And then we put out 5,000 a day for 30 days." And so I was looking at his results from 150,000 flyers over 30 days and comparing them to my results of 300 in a day. And once I saw that juxtaposition, I was like, got it. I will never make this mistake again. It was very embarrassing for me because I was on the right path. I just didn't do enough. And so one of the big meta lessons of this is that what presents as volatility is typically a symptom of low volume. So if you're like, man, I only get like, you know, a sale every week or every other week, it's kind of like, you know, it's, you know, most days I don't get a sale and then every once in a while I get one. It only appears volatile because you're doing so little per day. But if I looked at your year and saw that you closed about, let's say, 12 customers in that year, you closed one a month, for example, every, every 3 or 4 weeks you get a customer, well, all I would do is look at your entire advertising activity for the year and say, okay, if we wanted to get 12 customers a day, we would have to do 365 times more advertising than we currently do. And if we did that on a daily basis, we would get 12 customers a day. And so you just take your total calendar horizontally and then you flip it vertically for a day, and that is how much volume is required. And so most people just think that it's like, oh, they're, They can't be doing more than like twice as much as me. But in my experience, the people who are crushing it literally are doing 1,000 times more than you. And that's the part that like until you sometimes you hear it or you have someone ahead of you say it, it doesn't become real for you. And it's why I make these videos is to try and like push as much out of my brain and history so that you can just get the story without the scar. And that's the whole point. Okay. So once you're like, okay, I have something that's working, I should just do way more of that, Awesome. Well, the next thing, the next power lever here is word of mouth, and it's not the way that you think. So word of mouth, people are familiar with referrals, you know, customers tell other customers or tell other prospects that your stuff is good, but what a lot of people don't understand is that negative word of mouth is significantly stronger and faster than positive. And so Disney did this big study where they found that it takes 37 tragic moments to make up for 1 magic moment. And versus, there's basically like a 5x versus 37x on, if someone has a good experience, they tell 5 people. If someone has a bad experience, they tell like everybody. And so a new business owner often will get customers pretty cheaply. And then all of a sudden costs start going up. And part of the reason that costs go up faster, 'cause you can actually put math to this, which is understanding the difference between CPM, which is cost per impression, And it's like, why is it M? It's mille, which is French for 1,000. So cost per 1,000 impressions versus CPL, which is cost per lead. All right. And so if your CPMs more or less stay the same, but your cost per lead has 2x or 3x or 4x, well, if it's not costing you more to reach those people, then it means that fewer of them are responding. And if that's the case and you're just going to still relatively warm markets, then the issue is that instead of having positive word of mouth working for you, which should be actively lowering the amount of cost that it takes to get a new customer, you have word of mouth working against you. And so people who would otherwise purchase from you heard something negative and then choose not to. And so now all of a sudden you have to reach 3 times the amount of people because 2 out of the 3 people who would have gone and bought your thing heard it was bad, and then now you only have one person who's just heard nothing. And so over time, the percentage of the audience that's neutral or hasn't heard of you gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And so it's way harder to grow off word of mouth that's positive, but it's really easy to get crushed on negative word of mouth. And for whatever reason, no business owner ever claims that they have negative word of mouth, but I can tell you half of you are below average. That's a fact. And this is why I emphasize the proof over promise earlier on so much because if I'm going to get negative word of mouth, which I know I am if I'm starting out, I want to keep that as concentrated and quiet as possible. I don't want anybody to know. Right? And so of course I'm not going to charge them money because the last thing I want to do is also have their money when they're upset. Right? So it's like, hey, I'm making this trade. You're going to get stuff. It's probably not going to be that good. My only ask is you give me feedback. Right? Tell me how I can make this right. Tell me how I can make it better. And when you ask those types of questions, you get the types of answers that can ultimately create more value for the customer. And then once you get positive feedback, positive feedback, positive feedback, now you have something that people actually want. Then you can introduce strangers to it. And of course you're gonna roll into the next issue, which is, okay, how do I keep that consistent? Because now it's not me doing everything, I've got a team, and we'll get into that. Ah, this is a really good one. So the next big growth lever is steal, uh-oh, what am I, what am I about to say? From? Yourself. So one of our portfolio companies, which is very large, hired a new advertising director. And that advertising director had came in with lots of new ideas. And so the founder, because he wanted to teach an important lesson to the advertising director, said, "Sure, let's do all of your ideas." And so he sat there, he said the scripts, he recorded all these ads, he took multiple days to do it. And what ended up happening is that they ran all the ads and they didn't work. And so he said, hey, crazy idea, what if we use the same hook that's been working for 3 years? And they used the same hook and the ads worked. And so think about it like this, Nike on its second year after Just Do It wasn't like, hey, Just Do It's kind of old, let's switch it up. It's like when you find a message that converts, you keep hammering the message. When you find the ad hooks and you find the the processes that work well for you, most times you'd be better served just continuing to reuse it because you will get bored of it far before your customers ever do. So believe it or not, there's actually math to support this. So Sergey Brin and Larry Page, I can't remember which one of them, is like a brilliant mathematician and actually was able to prove this ratio out. And so when you're stealing from yourself, you want 70% of all of your effort to go into Basically carbon copying the thing that works. And this works across all functions. This works for a sales script, this works for product, this works for reinvestment activities, like this rule works. The second is adjacent. So something that's just like one degree removed, right? So it's close to the core of what you normally do, okay? So instead of saying, starting a school community is the fastest way to start an online business, right? I could say that would be a hook and it's a hook that worked. I could say, One of the fastest ways to start an online business is start a school community, right? That would be a variation of something that we knew that those words worked, but it would be adjacent to it, not the exact carbon copy, but similar. Now 10 is, that means that 1 out of 10 of the things that you're putting your effort towards, all right, would be something that's brand spanking new, completely out of left field. And when you look at your effort in your business, I can almost guarantee you that you have this flipped. And I only say this because I speak from experience, is that this is what I would do. I would spend 70% of my time on new crazy things, new ideas, all the stuff that excited me, and then 20% I'd be like, oh yeah, I'll do something kinda different from what I was doing before, and then 10% I'll be like, fine, I'll maybe, and this is a maybe, most times like, oh, I already used that hook once, I don't wanna use it again. I don't wanna use the same hook that worked before in another ad. It's silly. Also, a different version of this from an advertising perspective of the 20% is you use the exact same hook but you have a different background. So it's just like a different variation. So it's like I could wear a different shirt, I could have a different setting, and I could still deliver the same hook, and to me that would still be kind of a 20% variation. All of your competitors are copying your stuff and taking what's working. When you find something that works, keep doing it. Deviation from what works is more likely not to work. Think about it like this. If you demolish a building, so let's say we build a building and it takes us 2 years to build a building, right? There's our building, took us 2 years. Demolishing it might take 5 minutes, just put a bomb, boom. Because the place of the bricks and the steel in that building, every other potentiality that those bricks could go to create not a building. But there's only one placement of that brick and steel that creates a building. And so you have unlimited options for destruction and only one for solution. And so when you do find something that works, the likelihood that when you change it and you move the brick and you move the scaffolding, that you destroy the building is very high. Something can literally go anywhere except for the right place. And so you can have more options and all of them be wrong. So once you're done stealing from yourself, then let's talk about emotional versus logical bias. This is a huge Spike, monstrous increase in business for me. So,