If I Wanted To Become a Millionaire in 2026, This Is What I'd Do [FULL BLUEPRINT]

This is the blueprint to making your first million dollars and I'm going to walk you through it step by step, even if you're starting with your first dollar. So there's 3 levels in the blueprint and level 1 is fundamentals and it starts with who you are. And the reason we start with who you are is because you are the foundation of everything that you want to have. And so there's a thing of me and the building blocks of who you are are first the knowledge that you have, the things you know about. Second, The skills you know how to do. Third, the motivation to actually do them. And fourth, the environment to make it easy. So, the first pillar of this is knowledge. In order to become a millionaire, the first thing we have to do is know what a millionaire even is to begin with. A millionaire means that you have over $1 million in investable assets liquid minus your house. So, your primary residence is actually excluded from this. Now, Now I'll give you a fun fact that you probably don't know. 1 out of 9 Americans is a millionaire. And the thing that separates the people who are the millionaires from everybody else is what they know exists. And if you're like, who are you to even say this? My name's Alex Hormozi. I own acquisition.com. Our portfolio of companies does over $250 million a year. And since 2016, every single business I've ever started has gone to over $10 million a year. And we have 3 companies that are worth over $100 million plus. So the reason that rich kids, for example, have an advantage over poor kids is because rich kids have parents who tell them about opportunities that exist that get better returns on their time. If you don't know private equity exists, you sure as hell aren't going to get into it. If you don't know that you can become an investment banker and sell companies worth hundreds of million dollars and get percentages of companies that you didn't even found and take on no risk, then you're not going to pursue it. And so I make these videos so that you can know things that that you might not naturally have around you or anyone in your surrounding area who knows that these things exist. And to give you some context, I was 22 when I started this journey and ultimately quit my job before I ended up starting my first business. When I did go to quit my job, I emailed a bunch of different gym owners because I figured I wanted to get into fitness because it was something I was into. And only one of them got back to me, and that gym owner was a business owner and he was making money. And so I moved out to California. I changed my environment so that I could be around this guy and this guy helped me learn the ropes and taught me about my first business, which opening a gym. And it was only after learning and paying for consulting for a gym business that I didn't have that I felt comfortable enough to begin on my own. So the second component of knowing who you are are the skills you have. These are the things that you do. And so what can be really deceiving about this is people say, hey, I want to be confident. I want to be charismatic. I want to be good on camera. But they make it seem as though it's a trait. So a trait isn't a real thing. What it really is is a bundle of skills. So let's say if you wanted to learn the skill of sales. And so underneath of sales, we may have being able to actively listen, being able to repeat back what someone says, nodding and keeping eye contact, being able to shake a hand firmly, walking into a room and being able to, project your voice, being able to have reasoned arguments with someone if they have some fallacy that they believe that you can help them overcome. All of these are subskills that if someone exhibits all of them, someone say he's a good salesman. Now if you have this first level skill, you can usually become a millionaire literally with just that. But then fundamentally, if you want to level up, you can learn Marketing. And marketing is basically sales done one-to-many. And so all the things that you learn how to do one-on-one, you start projecting to large amounts of people. And so this is just sales at scale. And so underneath of marketing, you would also have to understand media, so like where your communication is happening. You'd wanna understand headlines because that's gonna be the first line of communication. You'd probably have to learn something about web pages and you have to learn conversion, right? These are all subskills underneath of marketing that would make you a good marketer. Now if you know sales and marketing, then you know acquisition because that means that you can completely acquire customers. And so each of these skills stacks on top of one another and makes all of the skills retroactively more valuable. So the more you learn, the better you get, the better you get, the more you get. And so the path to becoming the person who can make the first million is predicated on the knowledge you have about the world so that you pursue the right path to get the skills within. And so sure, it's just as hard to learn how to pack boxes in a warehouse probably as it is to learn how to do sales. They take about the same amount of time to learn. This one just has significantly higher returns. And so this is where the knowledge shows you where to orient your effort so you get the highest returns back on the skills you learn. So now let's talk about motivation, my tiny little box of motivation. And so motivation fundamentally comes from deprivation. It's from what you don't have that creates the action or urgency around acting in general. And so for example, if I'm sleepy, I'm motivated to sleep. If I'm hungry, I'm motivated to eat. And so right now, if you're motivated to become a millionaire, it's because you lack $1 million. One of the easiest ways to become more motivated motivated in money rather than physiological stuff like hunger, sleep, whatever, is to surround yourself with people who make significantly more money. Now immediately you're like, wait a second, I don't know anybody who's a millionaire. Of course you don't, but you may be able to create a reference group that you compare yourself to who are millionaires. And so for me, for example, when I had my job in Baltimore, which is what I left to become an entrepreneur and start my first business, most people were just like, this is a terrible idea. Why would you throw away your college years? Why would you throw away this good job that you have that's steady and stable and looks good on paper and sounds good at cocktail parties. And it was because I hated it. And at some point I realized that basically everyone except for one guy that I kind of knew who we talk about our entrepreneurial dreams together, all of them thought this was a bad idea. And so at some point, this is where high agency or high self-belief has to become more important. Your belief about yourself has to be more important than what other people say about you. And so this is a perfect segue to my second tiny little box, environment. And so think about your environment as friction or a lubricant on your goals. And so if you want to change someone's behavior, you change their environment. So let me give you a really simple example of this. I can guarantee you that I can get every single person in a building to take their clothes off. How could I do that? I could do that by locking the doors. That's one change to the environment. Second, putting them all together in one room. Second change to the environment. Third, cranking the heat until it's 200 degrees. Eventually everyone would strip down because it would be so hot in there. And so you are that little rat in the experiment and you want to create the box around you that lubricates the activities that you want to do. And so fundamentally what you want to think about is how do I make it as easy as possible to work as hard as I can? And then how do I eliminate everything else that distracts me from my goals? More specifically, how do I eliminate everything that distracts me from doing the stuff that gets me the skills that takes me towards my goals. And so that means that it could be people, it could be software, it could be alcohol. If you just simply put this as your filter thinking, does this increase or decrease the likelihood that I hit my goals? Cut out everything that decreases the likelihood that hit your goals because sometimes that's easier to see. And then all that you'll be left with is nothing and time and the ability to learn and act. I've talked about something that I call the season of no. Which I've entered multiple times in my career as an entrepreneur, which is basically where you're not successful enough to be in the group of friends that you want to be in, but you want to have a completely different lifestyle than the people you're currently with. And so you basically just have to say no to everything. And that means that you're saying no to the social gatherings because you know none of those people there have the goals that you want and none of them understand what you want to do. It's saying no to the distractions and no to the entertainment that you do normally because you know that that's not going to increase the likelihood that you hit your goal. So for me, I gave up fantasy football, I gave up drinking with the boys, I gave up going out, I gave up really just like friend gatherings in general. And so the only thing that I did was I worked and then I went home at 5 and then I worked from 5 to 9. And so I'd work 5 to 9 in the morning, go to work, work 5 to 9 again at night. And so I had 8 hours of time that I could work on me and what I wanted to do next and 9 to 5 that I worked in the middle of the day, that was basically how I paid my bills. And if you're like, wait, there was no time. Yes, there was no time. I didn't have a girlfriend. I wasn't going out to the movies, right? Like it was just 100% focused on removing everything that wasn't getting me close to where I wanted to go. And if you're like, wow, this makes me a weirdo. Yes, yes, it makes you odd. And if you expect to be normal and achieve odd and outlier results, good luck. So we've just covered who you are and you've made a little bit of money. The next step is, Figuring out who to sell to. And I want to make this really real for you. And so a lot of people think that you got to make a million dollars, you got to sell 10,000 people something for $100, right? And that would be $1 million, right? That's, that's what that equals. But it's way easier to just sell 100 people something that costs $10,000, which also equals $1 million. And so believe me, finding 100 people, way easier than finding 10,000. And so the real problem that you're solving is what do I have that's worth $10,000? Well, the thing is, is they also don't have to pay you now. This can be split over 4 years, right? Which would then be $2,500 a year, which is now $200 per month. And for you to acquire the 100 customers, you're talking about 2 people per week, which is not that hard. And if you're reaching out to 100 people per day, than you getting 2 out of 700 people to be willing to spend $200 a month with you, all of a sudden this million-dollar goal becomes a lot more real. If you're trying to figure out who to focus on for these 2 people a week that you're selling to, that's what I'm gonna cover right now. You have 3 basic circles that I've identified from all the entrepreneurs that I've talked to. Number 1 is that you help someone who is like you overcome something that you overcame in the past. And so that's typically some sort of painful thing or some sort of problem. You figured out a solution to, and then you operationalize that for other people. The second is something that you're just very passionate about. So it's like you're really into this thing and then you help other people get into that thing too. The third is some sort of professional skill. And so that's like, oh, I used to do accounting or bookkeeping for this business, or I used to do building management, or I used to do property management, like whatever it is, you have some sort of skill that you learned in the professional marketplace that you help other people do. And so all of those things, Those 3 Ps, pain, passion, profession, are the 3 fundamentals that I look at in terms of trying to pick the who. So pain, passion, profession. Underneath of this, if you're like, okay, where do I wanna start? The reason that I like helping fewer people rather than more people in the beginning is because you don't have money and you don't have resources. And so if you're gonna start a business, you might as well start with fewer people that pay you more because it's easier to run that business. And so I like to use the, uh, the old Tesla analogy here, which is when Tesla started, he wasn't trying to bring in the Model 3 into mass market. He started with the Roadster, which was the most expensive version of the car because he knew that the fewest amount of people would be able to afford it. The other thing that this does is it actually positions you at the top of the marketplace. Then he moved down market and created the Model S. Which was now a $120,000 car. Then he went and got the Model X, and then he had the Model 3, and then he has the Cybertruck, which I think is Y. Anyways, the point here is that he basically worked his way down and went broader and broader and broader market as he continued to get resources and be able to redeploy them into broader and broader parts of the marketplace. And so for you, you're going to probably pick what pain, passion, or profession you're going to go to. You're going to start with the smallest version of that market that you can, the most specific, the closest to who you can help the most. And so I will give you this third little piece here, which is if you're for some reason split between two of these, like, well, I like this and I also overcame this thing, help the person that you can provide the most value to. Now, if you're like, okay, I can help this poor person go up by $10 and I can help this rich person go up by $100,000, then in a real way, that $100,000 is a representation of how much value you can provide that person, meaning go do that one first. Now once you've identified, okay, I'm going to start with a niche, I'm going to pick one of these 3 Ps, then you run them through these filters that I have, is that number 1, you want them to have the problem to solve. Now all of these things fundamentally are problems, right? They— there's not enough information about this passion. There's not enough information to this pain, or there's not enough information about this professionally. They want to learn, but fundamentally all of those are the problem. So you have to have a problem that you're trying to solve and the people you're trying to sell to need to have that problem. Number 2 is they have to have the money to spend. If they don't have the money to spend, but they got the problem, then you don't have a business around it. You got a nonprofit, which is not the point of this video. This is about making money underneath of this problem to solve. You want them to have the urgency, to solve it now. So this can't be something that they're like, oh, that would be nice. It has to be something that they want to solve right now because this will overcome all of the people who are like, ah, I'm going to think about it. They keep pushing it off. If you have cancer and somebody has a cancer treatment, you want it now. Now on the money side, you also want them to have the authority to spend it. So you want them to be the one ideally who's the principal, who's the one who makes the decision about the implementation that you're going to help them with. And I want to be really clear, I use these as thought exercises to help you get started and pick the who that you're going to serve. But at the end of the day, if I had to boil all of this down, it just comes down to this one truth, which is that you want to serve the person that you can provide the most value to. I'll tell you that a16z, Y Combinator, et cetera, they have one rule that they learned in years, which I will share with you, is that they now only invest in founders who already have experience with the problem. And I, again, I define problem very broadly here, that you have overcome this sort of difficulty and you've lived with the problem for 5+ years. If you've lived with it, then you intimately understand it because that means that you'll also intimately understand the prospect that you want to sell to. And so it kind of is like this hack for already knowing what their thoughts and dreams are, what the pains that they're experiencing, how they talk, the words they use. So it's kind of this big time warp of saying, oh, I already spent the last years of my life living, being me. If I can sell to people who are just like me, then I don't need to do 5 years of studying and figuring this out. And so for me, I had struggled getting into shape. That was my problem. I was not jacked enough. And so then I spent all my time learning about it so that I could become more jacked, so much so that I annoyed everyone at work enough that they were like, please quit this and start something fitness related. And so for me, that was the perfect first pick. Now I was between SAT prep, and why was that? Because I had been pretty good at test prep. I tested pretty well and I'd gone through a process of improving my own scores and I was like, oh, I could probably help other people improve their scores too. The other thing that I was considering was frozen yogurt because I actually really liked fro-yo at the time. This is before frozen yogurt boomed. And so actually was, you know, kudos to young Alex, it was actually not a terrible time to get into frozen yogurt. And so fundamentally it's like I had two things I was passionate about or pain. These are really just equal sides of the same thing, It was a pain and then I became passionate about it when I solved it. SAT, fro-yo, gym. And so actually all 3 of these were in this pain/passion bucket. And I chose to start the gym because frozen yogurt cost $150 grand to open, which I didn't have. Then it was really just between SAT prep and fitness. And I actually started on the SAT prep path first and then I was gonna partner with someone and then I'll just say it ended poorly. And because of that kind of negative experience and I wasn't emotionally mature enough, I said, fine, I'm not doing that. I'm just going to do fitness. So it was kind of like a process of elimination. I couldn't do yoga, didn't have the money. I felt like I got burned on my SAT prep thing. And so then I just ended up with, well, I guess I'll just do fitness. And so the only disclaimer that I have about all of this stuff that I just covered, so this is my warning, right? This is my warning call for you, is that you want to make sure that you're going to be in a market that's at least flat or growing. You don't want to get into a market that's shrinking. And so if I wanted to get into retirement homes for old folks, that's a growing market. That's a good thing. And so if you had just recently placed your grandmother and it was a pain process for you and then you figured out how to do it in a way that was really smart and efficient, then you could provide that solution to other people who are in the exact same position as you and it's probably urgent and they have the money and authority to do it. You just don't want to get into selling print newspapers today. So we've covered who you are, who to sell to, and you've made a little bit more money and now we talk about about what to sell. So there's 4 elements that I like to have in every product that I sell. Number 1 is that it's unique, and the reason for that is because I don't want anyone else to be able to sell it. The second is that it's expensive because expensive stuff makes you more money per unit. Third is that I want it to be sticky. I want it to be things that people don't just buy once but keep buying again and again. And the fourth is I want it to be air. So unique, expensive, sticky, rare, meaning it's something that doesn't cost me a lot to deliver. And so this is basically the relationship of your gross profit. It means it costs you a penny, you can sell it for a buck, and people keep buying it again and again, and no one else can sell it but me. So let me show you a product that everyone's heard of that actually matches all 4 of these. Coca-Cola. It's unique in that no one else knows the recipe for Coca-Cola. It's expensive relative to how much it costs. It might cost a few pennies to put this together. Really, probably the can is the most expensive part of the product itself and it's sticky in that, I mean, literally if you spill this on the floor, it is sticky. But on top of that is that when people start drinking Coke, they don't stop drinking Coke products for usually their entire lives. Imagine introducing someone to a product and then knowing that they would literally always buy your product. They'd always go to restaurants and order what you had. When they go home, they crack open your thing. When they eat food, they drink your products. That's a great business. So these are all exceptional things for making your first million dollars. Now if you want to make a gazillion dollars, then you want to add something else to this, which is scale. So if I just need to have 25 clients like I talked about earlier, then I very much, I could just do myself, give people time, give people service, give people some skillset and transfer to them. That's unique because no one else can do it because it's just me. I can charge a lot because it's just my time, which is the cost. And if I'm good, people pay again and again and again. And so these, like a normal service business with one really good person meets all 4 of these things. The issue then becomes scale. And so what I'll walk you through is different ways to make any product more scalable. I think that people have a massive misunderstanding about what it even means. So the first part is that it's not, is something scalable or not? It's how scalable is it? So this is really easy to scale. And then this is really hard to scale. And so one-on-one with you is harder to scale than let's say me adding another user on Skool, the software platform. And so everything about scalability has to do with something called the incremental cost of adding a customer. But all that really means is how much cost do we have to incur as a business to bring on one additional customer? The most scalable businesses bring on an additional customer costs almost nothing. Imagine your cell phone carrier. If another person signs onto their network of cell phone usage, it doesn't really cost them much at all to add the additional user. If another person comes onto Facebook, it's not that much. If another person comes onto school, it's not that much to add the person. And so all of these things are easier to scale. Now I will tell you one of the things that's very interesting about very scalable businesses is that typically they're more demand constrained. Meaning it's harder to get people to buy that stuff. Whereas there are some businesses that are very hard to scale. Think like a very high service business. So like accounting for example is harder to scale because it's hard to find really good accountants and be able to maintain that quality of service at a high level. Scaling a law firm, really hard because it's all about expertise, which means you have to get lots of people in. It takes a really long time to get them good enough. And you always have the risk of them leaving. And so oftentimes very unscalable businesses have partnership structures so that people come in so that they feel like partial owners in that business. But if you're the ultimate original owner, it can be harder for you to scale. Again, there are massive law firms. It doesn't mean that it's impossible. It just means that it's harder. Congrats, you're one third of the way there. And now we move on to level 2 and this is level 2. And we start with get them to buy. And there's two steps to this. Step one is they have to find out about whatever it is that you sell. And in fact, I wrote an entire book about this thing in $100 Million Leads, which is getting strangers to want to buy your stuff. All right, this is advertising. The second thing that you do is you get them to buy. So let's start with number one, find out. So there are 8 things that you can do to let people know about your stuff. The first 4 only you can do. The second 4 are things that other people do on your behalf. These I call the core 4. These I call the 4 lead getters. So these are the only 4 things that one person can do to let other people know about their stuff. So you've got warm outreach, which is letting people who know you know about your stuff. Cold is letting people who don't know you know about your stuff. Then you've got content, which is letting people who know you one-to-many know about your stuff. And then you've got paid ads, which is letting people who don't know you one-to-many know about your stuff. These are the only 4 things that you can do to let someone else know, to force them to find out about whatever it is you have to sell, because they cannot buy it unless they know you exist. Now, if you want to get more leverage, because this is about becoming a millionaire, Then you can use these 4 things to get lead getters. Now the first type of lead getter is a customer. This is the people who you actually get to buy. Now they can get, they can do the core for themselves. They can let people they know one-on-one. They can let strangers know one-on-one. They can be in ads for you or they can make content. That's when they make a review or they make a post talking about how great your stuff is. That lets more people know about it. The next is you've got employees. Employees do the same core 4 as you do on your behalf. So they do warm outreach, they do cold outbound, they make ads for you, they make content on your behalf. The next version of this is affiliates. So affiliates are businesses that already have your customers in their business. And so let's say I have a gym. If I want to get more people in my gym, I can make a deal with a chiropractor. And I can say, hey, I will send you patients when they ding themselves at my gym. And then when you have somebody who wants to lose weight because that's why their back hurts, you can send them to my gym. So that creates a reciprocal relationship between you and another business. And every customer they acquire, they can send to you and vice versa. And the last is agencies. So these are other businesses that specialize typically in one of these. So you've got content agencies, you've got paid ads agencies, you've got outbound agencies. In all of those, you'd still have to start with the core 4 to contact the agency. See, and then they would use the core 4 to actually advertise. So these are the only things any person can do to let other people know. And these are the types of people that become the targets of the core 4 that can then do it on your behalf. Now, if you're trying to get 25 customers, right, like I talked about, like you only need 25 people to pay you $10,000 a year for 4 years to become a millionaire. Okay? So the thing that you have, and that's assuming no taxes, I'm just going to assume this is international video. Uh, the first thing and the easiest is here is warm outbound. You just let people know who already know you that you have this thing for sale and that you're willing to help them. One of the easiest offers is, hey, I'll help you for free. So that means I'll put 3 hours or 5 hours of my time to helping you achieve some sort of outcome. And at the end, if you don't mind, I'd love to make you an offer about what it would look like to work with me for paid, for money in the future. Very simple offer. And the thing is, is when you offer 2, 3, 4, 5 hours plus of your time for free, a lot of people are willing to do that. And so fundamentally, just think about it like 5 sales calls that you do in a row, except it's really smooth and you're just providing value. And that way it kind of gets the jitters out for people who've never sold before. And when we actually talk about how to close, I'll cover that in much more detail. But this is the easiest way for people to start. Now you can pair this with content because then you let people know publicly, hey, I'm doing this thing, wanna hit me up? In fact, I'll put my hopefully first post somewhere over here. This is the first post I ever made to promote my business. And it was something called the Free Training Project. And I had already worked with people doing warm outbound for a year at that point. I think I had 13-ish customers, something like that. And then I published their results and I said, hey, if you guys want to work with me, I got a few spots open. And that's what became my first content post to let people know so they could find out about my stuff. Now, over time, I learned how to run paid ads and do cold outbound, which is like calls, emails, DMs to strangers. To say, hey, can I give you this amazing offer? And ads work the same way, except we call them up, bring them in, and close them. And if you're starting out, this can seem like a lot of stuff to do. You're like, oh, I'm gonna do all 8. Until you get to $1 million, you can just do one of these. And if you're going to do 2, do content and warm outbound. This is the easiest way to start. It's also the cheapest. Here, you have to have a really good skillset. This is also pretty cheap. It's just harder to do. But if you're gonna do cold outbound, you might as well start with warm. Start with people who aren't strangers and then level up to people who are strangers. But these ones are the least expensive way of getting customers. This is the most expensive, but it scales quickly. So once people have found out about our stuff, great. So now they know, but now we got to get them to give us money. So now we got to get them to buy. When I started my gym, I hated the idea of sales. I even had someone say, hey, you're a salesman. And I was like, I was disgusted by the idea. I was like, I'm an academic. And so then I had to pay rent and clearly was like, how do I get these strangers to give me money? And immediately learned sales. Now, over the last 10+ years, I've done 4,000+ consults. And it wasn't until I had to transfer that skill of sales to other people that I had to create a framework that was repeatable for other people to also close. I remember the first time I went home for Christmas, uh, I had an employee close their first sale without me and I got teary because I realized it was the first time that my business could make money without me. And so this is the framework I have, which is CLOSER. And so this is an acronym. And it's very simple and it's easy to remember. And the reason that one's smaller is not because R is less important. It's because Amazon, Jeffy B, decided to only send us 5 of the right ones instead of the 6th. So the first of the closer framework is clarify why the person is there. And so fundamentally, the big advantage that we have as a business is that these customers have reached out to us. And so we need to clarify why they're even— why they even took the time to reach out. Why did you respond to our ad? Why did you respond to my email? Why did comment on my post, whatever it is. If you have engaged leads, which means that they've responded in some way, then they've taken the first step. In basically every form of advertising, this exists. And most people aren't cold calling and then immediately closing. And so even in that situation, you would call them, set an appointment, and then on the appointment you would then say, hey, what made you take this appointment? What made this worth it for you? And then what we're doing here is we're clarifying the problem. That leads us to the next letter, which is L, which is label them with the problem. Now that may sound similar, but it's actually very different. So what we're doing is when we label, we say, huh, so it sounds like you are here, you want to get here, and this is the thing that's getting in the way. Does that sound about right? And so what we've done is we've said this is your current, this is your desired, and we've established a gap and sometimes an obstacle. Rarrrr, that's a monster. Okay, and what we want to do is we want to position ourselves as the sword that can kill the monster and ultimately get them to their desired end state. But we can't sell unless we have a gap, and that is why C&L are so important before you get into anything else. So for example, you're 200 pounds, you want to be 150, 50 pounds is the gap. The reason that you're struggling is because you don't know how to work out, you don't know how to eat— let me see if I can do a spoon here or fork, there you go— you don't know how to eat, and you have no one who's holding you accountable to making sure that you do these first two. In a B2B setting, it's like you're doing $10K a month and you want to make $100K a month. And the issue is that you don't have ads that are working or you don't have enough leads that are coming in. That brings us to the next thing. Once we've clarified, we're there, we've clearly labeled them with the problem. You're here, you want to be here. This is the problem. Then you overview past pain. All right. I call this the pain cycle. So you overview past experiences. The reason this is so important is that pain is what motivates action. And so you think about motivation in general, it's always from deprivation, like I said earlier. So you being overweight and reminding them of how overweight they are and the cost of being overweight this whole time, it basically further brings them this way. It expands the gap between where they are and then where they want to go. And the further that gap is, the bigger the rubber band is. And so remember, this is our amount of deprivation, which is the amount of motivation to get someone to buy. And so when we do the pain cycle, we simply say, what have you done before? How'd that work out for you? And then the pieces that they liked, you compare, you associate with your solution, and the pieces they don't like, you associate with why it didn't work and why your solution is different this time. Once you get to the end of, okay, what'd you do? How'd that work for you? Oh, it's different in this way. Oh, it's similar in this way. What else have you tried? You keep going through that pain cycle to continue to poke on that pain button to keep expanding the gap between where they are and where they want to go and the frustration in the present for not having achieved it. And so once we've overviewed the pain, now we sell the vacation. Yes, a lot of people, salesmen, this is when salesmen blab. This is when salesmen lose the sale. And the reason they lose the sale is because they just do this massive monologue and that doesn't work. Instead, what you want to do is come up with what I call a 3-pillar pitch. And each of the pillars is usually 1 or 2 statements. And then followed by an analogy or a metaphor. And so you say, hey, if you want to create SEO to get more leads, then it's kind of like— and then we basically make our transition— it's kind of like when you get a paycheck and when you have an investment account. Your paycheck, you work and you get paid every single month, but you put a little bit of that money towards your investment. Over time, that investment compounds until eventually it makes you more than what you make in your active. And so SEO kind of works the same way. Now realistically, there's really no similarity to getting traffic to a website as there is between paychecks and investing accounts, but it compares something that people understand with something that they don't understand so they can learn. And so fundamentally, you should come up with 3 analogies that explain each of the pillars of what differentiates your solution. If I was selling leads, which I came up with a script for mortgage brokers, it was the leads had to be exclusive, they had to be timely, and they had to be qualified. And so you just say, okay, Have you ever got on the phone with somebody who doesn't have money and they're just window browsing? Yeah, it's pain in the ass. Totally. Right. And so it's like, cool. You just give an example. You give an analogy that explains it. If it's something easy to understand, examples. If it's something hard to understand, metaphor. And the reason I call it self-education is that you'll notice that I'm not actually explaining much about the product at all. And the main reason is because they care about themselves. They don't care about our product. They care about their problems, not about our product. And the only reason they care about our product is if there's a way that they know with high conviction that's going to get them to their goal. And so we want to talk about Maui, we want to talk about Hawaii, we want to talk about where they're going, what it's going to be like when they're at 150, what it's going to be like when they're making $100,000 a month, not all the steps it's going to take to get there. We're not talking about TSA, we're not talking about taking your shoes off and sitting next to somebody who stinks and getting on the plane and having bad plane food. Because guess what all of that stuff is? I just gave you an analogy. And so once we've done S, we then go to E, which is explain away their concerns. So at this point, after you've overviewed the pain, you say, hey, I think I might have something for you. Would you like to hear about it? They say yes. And then you go sell the vacation. Once you've sold the vacation, you ask, you say, you ready to get started? Does that sound good to you? Any kind of closing question you want. Fair enough. Great. Now, if they then say anything but yes, I want to buy, you then go to E, explain away their concerns. And so the way that you explain away their concerns is that typically there's 3 big categories. So people blame their circumstances for why they can't do something. They blame other people for why they can't do something, or they avoid the decision altogether, which is basically blaming themselves. They give their power elsewhere. And so within that, you basically have 6 categories of questions that fall underneath. So one is they say they don't have the time. I'm too busy right now. Now is not a good time. The second is they say, I don't have the money to do this right now. This is too expensive. This is outside of my budget. Number 3 is they say somebody else has the decision-making authority. All right. The fourth is they say, I'm not sure this is right for me. This is a fit question. All right. Which is really just means that they have a preference that isn't aligned or that they believe isn't aligned with the product that you sell. Oh, I have to follow a meal plan. I don't want to count calories. Five is they blame other people's past experiences with them. And so this is one that we overcome with something I call burn you twice, but it's other people's products. And then finally, they avoid. This is a stall. This sounds similar to this, but it's actually very different. This is, I don't have time. This is, give me time. That covers the explaining away the concerns. There's 100 other closes I could give you, but those are the theories behind each of them. Finally, we have to reinforce the decision. So now we have somebody who's made the decision. They've chosen to give us money, which is amazing. We love them for that. But the thing is, is that sometimes people change their minds when they go away, especially if you're good at sales. And so when you have the R, what we're doing is we're reinforcing that they made a good call. Now this actually begins the handoff to onboarding. All right, so when you onboard a new customer, this is what happens in the first 24, 48 hours post-purchase. And what you wanna do is make as many promises as you can in that time period and keep them so that they feel— and we're talking like, hey, this is what's going to happen next. In the next 30 minutes, this is going to happen, right? You're going to get an email and then you can click that link and then this is going to happen. And you want as many of those things that you tell them to have happen to happen. And from this, we do something called BAMFAM, which is book a meeting from a meeting. And when you do BAMFAM, it means that no one ever gets left in the cracks. No one falls through. And so the reason that a lot of customers cancel is because you said someone's going to reach out to them. And they thought it was gonna take 30 minutes. You didn't set the expectations. It takes 2 days and they're like, you know what, this isn't for me. I actually, I've changed my mind, right? Instead, you wanna always have them. It's like a baton pass. It's like sales passes it to onboarding, onboarding 1 passes to onboarding 2, onboarding 2 passes to the senior engineer or the media buyer or whatever it is that you do to deliver results for people. And at that point, you've kept them through the process and you've reinforced, you know what, these guys are on top of it. They're legit. And if you want to make this extra magic, what you do is you pass on the notes. So, you never want a customer to repeat themselves. And so, the way you do that is that you take notes on every call. And so, if you get on a sales call for example and the setter had notes, then you can start the call being like, "Hey, I know you talked to Andrew and you said this, this and this. And these are the problems you're struggling with." They're like, "Wow, these guys are on it." And when that goes to onboarding and they have their onboarding conversation with Sarah, And then Sarah says, oh, I know you talked to Andrew and you talked to Jeff and you said these things. They're like, wow, this business is legit. Very small change, massive improvement in terms of how satisfied customers will be. And because this is all about making more money, the likelihood that they actually ascend and buy more in the future. Yeah. And if you're a beginner, you're the one taking all of these calls. So at the very least, take your own notes and remember what you're talking about with these people. And if you have multiple customers, review the notes before you get back on the call with them. Close more deals, make more money, save the world. We got them to buy, we got our first customers, we've made a little bit of money. Now we get them to buy even more. So now we got to get them to buy more times. And specifically, this is all the different ways that you can make a customer worth more money to your business. And so the idea is that the customers or the businesses that make customers worth the most are the ones that make the most money. Unsurprising. But there are 8 specific ways that you can do this with literally any business. So the first way is that you can increase the price. So for this example, let's say I'm selling gum. All right, so I'm selling gum and what I can do is instead of charging $5 for this, I can charge $6. It costs me the same amount, but I've now made more money. The second way that I can do this is I can decrease my costs. All right, so this thing was originally $5 and it cost me $1 to make. I can buy more inventory, I can do advances so that I can get this down to 50 cents. So I still make 50 cents more per box. That's the second way that we make any product more profitable for us. The third way we can do this is we can get them to buy more times. So right now I say, hey, you want to buy my gum? Great. But wouldn't it be cool if you got on a gum subscription so you get one of these every single month? The fourth way is to get them to buy something else that's new or different. All right. So right now I'm selling you this gum, but wouldn't it be cool if you got these Nicorette patches as well? So wouldn't these patches go great with your gum? It doesn't matter what you sell. You can have burger with fries, you could have an iPhone case with your iPhone. There's always something else that pairs or is complementary to whatever your core offer is. And sometimes you make more profit on this thing than you do on the main thing. The fourth thing that you can do is get people to buy more quantity. All right, so this is when the number goes up. So currently you're buying one box. What if you bought 3 boxes of gum? And so the difference between this and this is this is how many times they're buying over a period of time. This is how we're increasing the quantity all at once. So this is— think about this as bulk purchases, buying more volume. The second way that we can do this is increase quality. So now we say, okay, how do we sell you a better version of this? So these ones are 2 milligrams of nicotine, these ones are 4 milligrams. So if I have a box of the same size but I sell you 4mg version, then it might be a higher quality. Or maybe the nicotine in this one comes from a magic plant in the Amazon. Either way, we sell a higher quality version. If I were selling burgers instead of selling mystery meat, you could sell sirloin burgers, right? If you're selling iPhone cases, it would go from plastic to Kevlar. It would go from, uh, plastic to metal or wood. We have a higher quality version of whatever it is that we sell. And if you're selling services, there's a zillion ways you can make more valuable. But it's like you have higher quality representatives who are going to be answering your thing. You have priority support, you get answered first. You have extended hours, so you get more time. All of those things are different versions of higher quality. The next is that you can do the equal opposite. You decrease the quantity, you decrease the number that someone buys. So instead of buying 160 pieces, you just buy 20. So you can have a downsell. Now, the reason that this can make you more money is that it actually makes you more money per person you talk to, not per customer. And so what this is, you make money here when you take a no and turn it into a yes. So it's taking a no, a small no, turning into a small yes. And then later you have all these other things to turn it into a big yes. And then finally we go from something that's higher quality to something that's lower quality. So is there a version of your product that could be the, the discount version, the economy class version? And with services, it's literally the equal opposite. You have junior reps who answer it. You have extended times. You don't get calls, you only get chat support. It's all just thinking, what are different ways all the components and features that I have with my service? Most times if you have a service, you just have to— you haven't even defined all the standards you have. You just need to think through every single thing. What about speed? What about quality? About who they're talking to? What about the medium they're on? Is it one-to-many? Is it one-on-one? Is it recorded? Is it live? Like, all of these things are factors that make something more or less valuable. And so With physical products, the same idea, except it's usually going to be the ingredients and how new it is. This is an older model. Those are all things that decrease the quality. And so when you're looking at this, these are the 8 ways that you can get any customer to be worth more. And so if you're a beginner, you want to know the easiest one of these to make more money? Charge more for the exact same thing. And oftentimes when you're a beginner, you want to start low, so it's okay. But what I would recommend doing is what I call the 5 5 to 5 model. So basically every 5 you sell, you bump it by 20%. All right, very easy. So if we're at $5 for our gum here, the first 5 people, if everyone buys, no problem, we bump it to $6. So $5 goes up 20%, it goes to $6. And if the next 5 buy, no problem, then we go up to $7.20. And we keep going up by 20%, and you can keep doing this forever until people stop buying. And so then you just look at how much gross profit do I have times the conversion rate, and that gives you your perfect price. And so I'm telling you, you might be worried about what if, what if I sell fewer people? You just have to do the math and you never discount in order to make a sale. You can choose to test your price, but you have to stick with it for the number that you said you would. The second easiest one of these to do besides obviously raising the prices over time is just getting people to buy more stuff. This one requires nothing new from you. This one also requires nothing new. You're just asking them to buy again next month. This one gets them to buy more today. And so these ones are among the easiest that you can do as a beginner. This one, decreasing costs, super valuable for you. Usually takes more time for you to negotiate with vendors, get economies of scale, things like that, but still valuable. All these other things are things that you add to the business, which creates more products. Not to say that anything wrong with that, but it's typically a more advanced move. So these 3 right here are the ones that you want to focus on if you're a beginner. And this is a concept that you should understand how to master. This is the language of business. And so it doesn't matter what we're talking about. You should be able to apply all 8 of these to anything. So if I'm selling whiteboards, I say, okay, I can raise the price of this whiteboard. Next is I can get people to buy more whiteboards over an extended period of time. Wasn't that one great? Wouldn't it be great if you had more of those for your team? Or I could get them to buy 5 whiteboards today, one for every room in their office, right? Or I could say, hey, this is a, you know, flimsy metal whiteboard. Let me get you a wood one. It'll look better on camera. Or I can make it higher quality by saying, hey, I won't put my logo on yours so that it's not in all your camera shoots. The next is I can decrease how much it costs me to actually manufacture each of these whiteboards. This also increases my profit. The next thing is I say, okay, you got these whiteboards, but what about your paper, right? That, you know, would go great with your whiteboard. Rolls of paper. The next is, okay, can I decrease the quantity? Okay, so instead of buying 5, you buy 1, right? And then in terms of quality, we go the other direction. So instead of buying this wood one, you buy this metallic one. And if you're starting with metallic, then maybe you go from this metal one to really flimsy metal or an older model. You should be able to apply this to anything you sell. And once you've mastered this, you can become a master of increasing the lifetime value, aka how much people spend with you. Imagine this bucket is your business and imagine this is new customers coming in the door. If you don't fix this leaky bucket, they're never going to be able to stack up. And so once you fix it, you can flow all as much as you want, but now you're keeping your customers and your revenue compounding. And if you do that for a long enough period of time, while we wait for my friend over here to fill up the bucket, this This is a Cybertruck and this is $100 grand. And in the next 30 days, September, October, November, December, each month in 2024, I'm giving one of these to someone who's watching this video right now. And so the way that you win this stuff is by building the largest group on Skool within the next month. And last month's winner, just to give you some context, got about $50,000 per month in recurring revenue. And we make it pretty easy. So right now, 1 out of 2 people who starts a community on Skool that's paid makes at least $1 online. And oftentimes it's a lot more than that. In fact, right now the average is $1,360 per month. So no, this isn't going to get you on the Forbes list, but it can help get you started. And so if that sounds at all interesting, the best part is you can start your own community on Skool absolutely free going to skool.com/games. All right, join the community, have fun, make money, save the world, and I'll see you on the other side. And if you keep doing it over time, you'll have more money than you know what to do with. And you'll be overflowing with customers and cash. And that's how you create a cash flow explosion. And once you got people buying and people are buying again and again and again, now you're making a little bit more money. But the next thing you need is going to be help. And so you're going to have to have other people help you along the way because this is how you scale. And these are two mannequins that represent employees. So let me share a framework with you that's really expanded my vision in terms of how companies grow. And this has taken me years to develop. But fundamentally, I see the size of a company is always gonna be limited by the number of brains or the cumulative knowledge that exists within the company. And so that should make some sort of sense. Like the amount of total knowledge that exists is going to be the potential of the business, which is why as entrepreneurs, you have to learn more because if you make your brain bigger and you make your knowledge base bigger, look how much bigger the company can get. But the thing is, is that you don't realize that you can get 3 or 4 or 5 other people's lives built into the business by saying, hey, I don't need to learn finance. I'm going to go find somebody who's got 20 years of finance experience in this industry. Hey, I don't need to learn HR and recruiting because I'm going to find somebody who has that experience. Because what happens is, once you do that, the potential of the business You can't even see it because the peak would be all the way up here. And so this is the big unlock. This is how Steve Jobs built the biggest, you know, one of the biggest tech companies in the world. It wasn't because he knew how to build the iPhone. He knew how to build the team that could build the iPhone. And so the most valuable skill set fundamentally that you can have as a business owner is the ability to get other people to do stuff for you. And so on one level, you have the influence to get them to want to do that thing for you. And then everything else after that is enabling them to know how to do the right stuff. And so the first is the persuasion side. Now that I think I covered during the closer stuff. That's going to be the values you have, what you represent, and if people really admire you. And that's where you have to continue to level up yourself. This is the who you are part in order to attract the best talent. But once you have good talent, how do you make sure that they know how to do the right stuff? And so I call this the management diamond. All right? So it's very simple. So I reversed this from if somebody doesn't do what I want them to do, why would that be? The first reason is they didn't know that you wanted them to do it at all because you hadn't told them or you weren't clear about it. Now, if they know that you wanted them to do it, they might not have known how to do it because they're like, OK, I got that you wanted me to do it, but I just don't know how. The third is that they knew how— they knew that and how, but they didn't know when you wanted them to do it by. So they could have just been totally able, they just didn't know that you wanted it right now. The next is they knew that, how, and when, but they didn't have any motivation to do it. They didn't know why you wanted them to do it. And so when I think about each of these things, you can actually solve this. So you solve this through comms. So this is through clear communication where you include the deadlines, which is here, what you saw for this one, is that whenever you include what you want someone to do, You give them a time duration and then you ask them how long they expect it's going to take to solve the how. What we do is we have the 3 Ds, which is document, which is you figuring out a checklist of exactly what you do. Oftentimes when you're a beginner or when you're starting your own business, you have to do every single job. And so you know how to do the job better than they do. The problem is in the beginning you're more unconsciously competent or you do a lot of other things that you don't know that you do, which is what makes you successful. You're like, no one can sell like I can sell. What it really means is I don't know how to teach anyone like I can sell. And so that means it's a deficit on you, not a deficit on them. And so the first thing you do is you document step by step through a checklist what you do to get the result, whether it's making a website or it's doing outbound or doing sales or making content, whatever it is, you document step by step what you do. The next is you demonstrate it, which means you do it in front of them using the document. So you say, hey, let me show you how I'm following this checklist and then look at what happens. So I follow the checklist and look what happens. And they gain trust in the checklist, in the documentation. And so after you've documented and you demonstrated in front of them, then they duplicate, which means they now do it in front of you using the same document. And if they get the same outcome as you do using just the document, then you have duplicated the skill and now they can do it. And so they know how. Now finally, the why is a question of motivation. So I'm not going to be able to solve human motivation in one video, but what I will say is explaining and leveling up what this thing does within an organization. A lot of people do want to do a good job and they do want to be contributing members of society, but a lot of times we haven't explained how what you do here feeds this overall machine, which hopefully does some good in the world. And so it's simply explaining in simple terms how customer service, for example, it's like, hey, you do customer service and you respond to tickets using this process. We get happier customers. Happier customers stay longer, pay more, and refer their friends. And if we want to have this big mission, one, we want to make sure we're delivering to the people that we're currently serving. But on top of that, we want to be able to help more people over time. And so you very much are important to our whole business's success. And so if every person in the organization knows how they tie what they do directly or indirectly to you being successful as a business, then they have a larger motivation for why they should do it. And so if you ever have a conversation where you're like, why is my employee not doing anything? I would also suggest using this as a framework because then it's not— none of these blame them. You say, hey John, I asked you to do this and then you didn't do this. And so help me understand, was it that you didn't know that I wanted you to do it? Because I see this message here. So was that part unclear? Is it that you didn't know how to do it? Was it that you didn't know when to do it by? You didn't know why to do it? And let me give you the bonus number 5. Was there something blocking you? And so this is actually one of the most common ones of the diamond because what it is, is for example, hey, I could have the best chef in the world and I say, hey, make me an omelet. He understands what making an omelet is. He knows how to do it. And I say, make it for me right now. He's motivated because he's on live television. What's the problem? He ain't got no eggs. And so the whole point is, and I had this, I'll give you a real example. With my team, I was like, hey guys, why are you guys not getting these edits out on time? And they were like, oh, we wanna spend more time at home. We wanna spend it at the headquarters. And I was like, I built this massive headquarters for you guys. Like, why are you not spending time here? And so it turned out they knew how to do it. They knew that I wanted it. They knew when they needed to buy it. They were very motivated to do it. The problem was the internet at our headquarters wasn't fast enough. They were way faster at home. And so we spent $200 grand to get Google Fiber drilled down into the building so we get a gigabyte a second now. And now they all edit here. And so the thing is, is a lot of times as a boss or an owner, you have to see what are the things that are blocking because most people do want to do their jobs. But this little 5-part framework, this diamond, is one of the most valuable tools I have because this actually makes a productive discussion. Because either you can solve the constraint for them, or you find out that you've got somebody who, despite all of these things, still chooses not to do it, in which case, maybe it's not a good fit for them. So we had a new sales rep that came in, and we were really excited about him. And he seemed really sharp, really understood what was going on. And within 3 days, he was doing all of the stuff. But he came to us and was like, I really hate this. Now, that's something that I can't fix. If you hate talking to new people and talking to customers or talking to prospects, all day long, then sales is probably not for you. Now, that being said, we also want to break down like, hey, everything's got periods of suck. You got to learn skills, things like that. But if I check every one of these boxes and someone says checks all of them and nothing's stopping them except for themselves, then it makes the conversation really easy. It's like, dude, I don't want you to do something you don't want to do. No worries. So boom. Why do I bring a tripod here? If you're like, what are the 3 pillars of the business? These are the 3 pillars of businesses Alex understands them. The first, the tip of the spear, is acquisition. That's marketing and sales. That's letting people know about your stuff and getting them to exchange money in order to get it. The second pillar is delivering that stuff. So someone advertises, someone sells, and then someone has to create and deliver the iPhone. So once you advertise and you sell, now you have to deliver the product. You got to give the person the iPhone. So that comes from the design, that's product, that's distribution, that's delivery. In service businesses, that's customer success, that's onboarding, that's delivering the service itself. That is all the stuff that goes into this delivery. It's how you fulfill the promises that acquisition made. The third one, and this is the one that a lot of people forget, and this often limits businesses, is operations. So this is everything else that's not included in these two, but that support these two. So think IT, legal, finance, payroll, HR, recruiting. All of that stuff supports these two other functions. These are the core value creators in the business.. You got to market and sell stuff. You got to deliver that stuff. But everything else that has to exist in order for these two to continue to function— you got to pay taxes, you got to pay payroll, you got to send people checks, right? These are all things that must exist, but most entrepreneurs are severely lacking. And this is sometimes where the biggest outside help can come and help expand the overall business so that the potential of how big the thing is that you want to build can get so much bigger. And then you just keep adding more and more people to this, and you keep expanding the stool. But the 3 core pillars of the business remain unchanged. And so if these are the 3 pillars of the business and you want to take a partner on— so let's say that I want to take this partner, not necessarily a life partner, but I want to take a partner on in my business, because this happens a lot really early. And usually it's because there's so much work and you have no capital, and you're like, well, you know what, if 2 of us work, at least twice as much stuff will get done. The problem is most partnerships come from two guys or two gals who are buddies and say, hey, let's get like, we have fun hanging out. Let's, and we love talking about business. Let's do business together. But the problem is, let's say they both love marketing and sales, or they both love product, or they both love operational stuff, just like people and things like that. Well, then you actually are super top heavy. And what happens is this goes like this because you're over, over-indexed on one. And the tripod falls over. And so you want to be balanced in the business so that the business can continue to scale proportionally across all functions. And so if somebody is going to partner with you, they have to have a skill that you don't have, time you don't have, or capital you don't have. And from the skill perspective, it means they have to have one of the other legs of the stool that you don't have. From a capital perspective, that might be the thing that flows into the business that allows these people to work in the beginning when it might not be as profitable., or for you to buy inventory, for you to buy a machine that you're going to do the equipment with. Or let's say it's you sending the capital, somebody else is going to be running the business on your behalf as an operator or owner. Now they're putting in time or energy that you don't have because you're doing other stuff. Congrats, you're now done with Level 2. More money! And now it's time to go to Level 3. So here we are on Level 3, and I want to quick— take a quick pause to invite you, if you're a business owner doing over $1 million a year and you'd like to scale to the next level, I want to invite you to come out to our workshops here in Vegas to my headquarters to meet with me and my team, each of my functional directors who are working with companies in my portfolio doing hundreds of millions of dollars a year to help you deconstrain your business to get to the next level. Wherever you're at, if you're trying to go from $1 million to $10 million or $10 million to $30 million or $50 million, we've been to each of those levels multiple times before and we know what it looks like to have advertising go from 1 to 10. We know what it looks like to have delivery go from 10 to 30. We know what it looks like to have finance go from 30 to 100. And so we can help you deconstrain those things and help you ultimately scale. If that sounds at all interesting, I'm sure the URL's around here and we'd love to have you out. Otherwise, keep enjoying the vid. Let's go to the first level of level 3, keeping your advantage. So things are working, people are working for you, you're making sales. Now we want to expand the gap between you and everybody else. And if you're like, why is there a big seesaw here? I'll explain in a second. But the fundamental crux of all this is the big word leverage, which is— let's define it— how much you get for what you put in. So leverage doesn't mean good or bad, it's just how much you get. Now, if I do this many times and let's say I'm pumping something, then I'm doing more repetitions and the amount of leverage I get is proportional to the size of this lever, right? Now, if I want to get more for what I put in, then it means I would extend this lever all the way out here and I'd get more for every push. If I wanted to have less, which why would you, I would put my hands here and I have a much smaller lever. So it's much harder to do the same amount of work. And so how much you get is leverage. High leverage is I get a lot for what I put in. Low leverage is I get very little for what I put in. And so there's lots of forms of leverage in a business. And the idea is that you want to have as many working for you at the same time as humanly possible. So I'll give you a couple examples. So one, one that I've built mine on, is brand. It's reputation. So that means that if I have a brand versus not having a brand, the brand gives me leverage in a lot of ways. So number one is I have higher click-through rates. If I run an ad with a trusted figure, then more people will click than otherwise would have normally without a brand. That means I get more for what I put in. High leverage. Second, I get higher conversion rates. And so the people who click also have a higher likelihood of opting in, following through, and ultimately buying. And once people do that, then they're able to say yes, or they're willing to say yes at higher prices. Another form of leverage is people. If I can get more for what I put in, I only live one life, one lifespan, but I can get somebody else's life, basically their experience, to help propel my business towards my goal, then I get my life plus their life. And so that gives me more leverage. So I want to make this real for you. So imagine you see an advertisement for this blank t-shirt. All right. Are you inclined to buy it? Probably not, unless you're just in the market for white t-shirts. But all of a sudden, if you see this one right next to it, you might have a much higher likelihood of clicking, converting, and then buying at a higher price. So literally, if these are side by side, this might be $30 and this might be $5, and you still might be more likely to buy this one. That is the leverage that Brin gets you because they, for the same ad, the same dollars, get more sales for what they put in. And you can see leverage everywhere. If I write code and I write it one time and then millions of people use it, that gives me leverage. I did work once, people use it millions of times. So for example, if I write a book, then it takes me X amount of time to write the book. But once the book's written, I don't have to work again for the book. But if people keep telling their friends about the book and saying it's good, then it continues to sell copies and spread the word. That's leverage. I'll give you another one. So if I get— if I do this in the beginning, I'm probably really inefficient at it. But if I do this for days and days on end, I probably realize I got to put my weight on it. You know what, I can lock my arm out so I don't have to use my muscles, and I can just lower my weight onto this thing. So my skill gets better, and so I get more per unit of effort. And so skill is also another form of leverage. And so one of the most important relationships to get leverage earlier on in your career is understanding what work is. So work, which is what you do every day, is volume times leverage equals output, which means work equals output. So it's not about how hard you work, it's about how much you get for the work you do. And so if I have a lot of leverage, awesome, But if I have a lot of leverage and I do a lot of repetitions, then I get even more output. And so the thing is, and this is what people don't understand, is in the beginning you need to do volume because volume gives you skill. Skill is leverage. And so, for example, let's say I'm doing cold calls in the beginning of my career. If I do 100 cold calls and somebody who's been doing cold calls for 10 years and has an amazing skill set does 100 cold calls, he's going to get more appointments booked than I will. And so for the same work, same volume, he's going to get more output. So in a very real way, he worked more than I did. He got more for what he put in. And so there is a reciprocal relationship between volume and leverage, because the more you do, the better you get. And the better you get, the more you like it. The more you like it, the more you do it. And so this is the virtuous cycle of work. But you have to get started in the beginning when you have low leverage. And so the only thing you could do is compensate with volume. It means you have to do 1,000 door knocks, 1,000 cold calls, 1,000 cold emails. 1,000 pieces of content so that you can start getting good. And so one of my favorite and least favorite sayings is work smart, not hard, because the reality of it is that you have to work hard in order to work smart. And so now we just finished keeping your advantage, so you've made even more money and you're continuing to scale your business. And so now we move on to the next part of Level 3, sticking with it, because if everything's going well, the only thing The only thing that can stop you is you. And so I'll give you one of my favorite quotes from Charlie Munger, which I'll paraphrase. He more or less says, compounding is the 8th wonder of the world. And the objective of compounding is to never interrupt it. And so he talks about this to stop people from day trading and getting people to buy in and out of stocks. He says, you should be willing to buy a company and have the stock market be closed for the next 5 years because you bought a share of a company and you believe it's going to go up for a long period of time. So that's why you buy high-quality businesses. But the concept of not interrupting compounding is one of the key philosophies that I have around focus. Focus is one of the most important things of entrepreneurs. And if you talk to the most successful entrepreneurs, they talk about ruthlessly focusing for long periods of time. And Steve Jobs was famous for grilling his direct reports and asking them when he would start meetings, what have you said no to lately? And so I define focus by the quality and quantity of things you say no to. So if you say yes to many things, then you are not focused. If you say no, hypothetically, to literally everything except for one thing, you would define that person as incredibly focused, probably obsessive. But like, imagine a kid, for example, who did nothing but play video games all day. He's incredibly focused on video games. He doesn't eat, he doesn't sleep. I'm saying hypothetically, he does nothing else. He's incredibly focused. At some point, I'm not saying you do that, but it points out the hypothetical extreme of what focus really is. And so some people claim to be focused, but it's not are you focused or not, it's how focused are you. And so if you followed any of my stuff at all, I talk about the woman in the red dress. And the reason I love this analogy is it's perfect. So in The Matrix, there's this moment, if you haven't seen the movie, where Morpheus, who's the guide or the teacher in the story, is teaching Neo, the main character, about how the Matrix works. And so, they're walking through a crowded city. He's talking about something and he says, "Were you looking— were you listening to me? Were you looking at the woman in the red dress?" And he says, "What?" And he says, "Look again." And he says— and when he looks again, there's a gun pointed at his head. And so, he says, "If you're not one of us, you're one of them." And so, these are agents. Agents basically are the things that disrupt everything in the system. And so what appears to be a woman in the red dress, what appears to be this shiny object, this amazing thing that catches your attention, this big opportunity you think you should leave your current thing for, that is often an agent in disguise meant and sent to kill you and destroy your progress and your focus. But let me tell you how deceptive this is, and this is what it looks like for entrepreneurs. And so there's 5 stages that I think entrepreneurs go through. In the beginning, you have zero, right? And then you have uninformed optimism, which means that you don't know what you're talking about, but it looks really good. This is the grass is greener on the other side. Then you have informed pessimism, which is now that I got into it, oh, it actually isn't that easy to make money in this thing, even though my cousin's doing it. He's actually been doing it for 5 years. And there's all these other things I didn't know about. But now you know about it. You're like, ooh, this is actually a little harder than I thought. Then if you keep going, you have the valley of despair. This is where everyone gives up and everyone stops trying. Now, what happens most times is they never get to step 4. What happens again— well, I'll tell you step 4 and then I'll tell you what happens to us. So step 4 is you get to informed optimism. So now, remember the optimism here? Now you're informed about it. So you're like, okay, I get what it takes to make this work. And I can see a way for me to win. And then finally you get to here, which is you achieve the goal, right? You do what you set out to do to begin with, but you have to go through the valley of despair. This happens in every single business, especially when you're starting out. But what happens for most entrepreneurs is— dotted line— they start it all over again. And so they say, oh, you know what? I'm going to go find my point of uninformed optimism because there's another thing. It's not dropshipping. It's crypto. It's not crypto. It's wholesaling. It's not wholesaling. It's insert whatever opportunity you think is quick and easy. And I promise you, none of them are. Because think about it this way. If something were quick and easy, everyone would do it and already be winning. So I want to break this myth in half because I think it's so important because it is the number one thing that destroys most businesses is disrupting compounding. And I think part of the reason that this myth is proliferated is because the people who are selling you that myth make money on you buying their solution. And so what they do is they say, oh, the average millionaire has 7 income streams, right? And so you think, oh, millionaires have 7 income streams, therefore I should have. That's like saying, oh, the average billionaire has a private jet, therefore I should fly private to be a billionaire. It confuses the sequence. It's not that you get tall when you play basketball, it's that tall people play basketball. And so for you in your career, most people who make a lot of money focus all of their eggs in one basket, and then once they've achieved all the success, then they diversify. But after they diversify, their returns go down, not up. Bill Gates, for example, if he had never sold his Microsoft shares, right now would be a trillionaire. He'd be worth $1.5 trillion today. Instead, he's worth $100 to $150 billion. And the main reason is because he diversified after he focused all of his wealth building into Microsoft. Now, Steve Ballmer, his number 2 man, in the very beginning had a much, much, much smaller share. So I think Ballmer has like 2% or 3%, a tiny slice of Microsoft. Bill Gates had 49% when they went public. So he had half the company. And so today, Steve Ballmer, his number 2, is almost as wealthy as Bill Gates because he has stayed focused this whole time and never liquidated his shares and continued to grow Microsoft. And so they want to feed you this myth that somehow 1/7 of you split between all these things. They say try a bunch of stuff, see what works. The reality is any of these things can work if you concentrate all of your attention into one. Then, see, overflows. Then that is how you get an overflowing opportunity. You keep working it, you keep doubling down on it, and you say no to the woman in the red dress because you know that She's just the Valley of Despair. She's just an agent in disguise. And if you stick with it, you will win. And that's the thing that separates the people who win from the people who don't, is that they can just keep saying no to everything else. They keep saying, yep, you know what? That's an amazing opportunity for someone else. That's an amazing opportunity for someone else. And let me show you this mathematically. So let's say that you're in your third month, your third week, your third year, whatever increment you want. Of you developing some skill, right? You continue to get a little bit better every single year. Fine. Now you see this new opportunity that you're ground zero for and you think, man, I think I could grow faster by doing this thing. And so you have to reason. Let's say that you're on year 4 of opportunity number 1, that instead of saying, okay, well, I'm going to go to, you know, I'm going to go to my 5th year. So you're not— you haven't done this yet. So this is hypothetical. Instead, you say, you know what, I'm going to start this new opportunity. A new opportunity, I'm going to be here, which is higher than where I was before, and it's going to be at double the rate. Okay. But now I'm on year 2 here. Guess where I'm going to be if I'm on year 2 past this on this opportunity? And so you can't compare year 2 here to year 2 here. You have to compare year 2 here to year 5 here. And so this increment, I promise you, it's significantly easier to take something from $10 million to $15 million than it is to take from 0 to 5 in a year. So you finished keeping your advantage and sticking with it, and you've made even more money. We just keep making money. We're crazy. And so we move on to the last and final step of Level 3: get better and keep getting better. And so one of the key skills that I've developed over my career that I want to share with you is the ability to learn, but not in the way that you might think traditionally. And so what happens is, sure, in the beginning you want to get from courses and experts and things like that, But over time, what you wanna double down on is volume because what volume does is it gives you data. And then data, you can do something called a common factors analysis. So let's say that I make 10 pieces of content, okay? These are my 10 pieces of content. Hopefully that's 10. All right, now that means that within those top 10 pieces, those 10 pieces of content, there's gonna be a top one and there's gonna be a bottom one. And this is gonna be the one that did better and this is gonna be the one that did the worst. And so what I want to do is see what did the top 10% have that this one didn't have? What are the discrepancies between these two? And those discrepancies are the golden nuggets that build together to help you acquire skills. And so one of the things that people shy away from in the beginning is how low leverage you are. You have no capital, you have no friends, you have no other people who can help you out. So it's just you. And when you start, you suck. But the thing is, is that The pain of how bad it is and how hard it is in the beginning is the thing that forces you to seek out better ways to do it. And so you have to go through that pain so that you can seek out these improvements. And then all of a sudden you figure out a new way to use that lever that takes 1/10 the time. You figure out how to tweak your email headings to get way more open rates, or you tweak your offer to get way more responses, or you make your ad hooks better so you get higher, you know, people clicking the ad. All of those things are skills. And so this pain and this volume, and this is the poor part, getting a feedback loop going is what creates skill. So it's not just doing a lot. You have to do a lot so that you can see what works so that you can get better. Fundamentally, common factors analysis is how I learn everything because a lot of the skills that I have to learn now are things that no one teaches. There's no courses for what I, for what I'm trying to learn now. And so I have to just try a lot of things and see, huh, what did the top 10% have in common? And this works for figuring out your customer avatar. You're like, hey, what are my top 10% of customers? What do they have in common in terms of what they did and who they are? What are the bottom 10%? What did they do and who are they? Okay, well, I want less of those and more of these. And so this is a continuous loop that you do on your customers. The same thing works in your content. Where are the top 10 pieces and the bottom 10 pieces? What are the top 10 ads and the bottom 10 ads? What are the top 10 perfect sales scripts in terms of recordings? What do we say differently on those calls than we said on these calls? It literally applies to everything. And that continuous loop of progress and feedback is how you get better. And that is the core of leverage from a skills perspective. And so right now, if you're watching this video, maybe $1 million is your goal. And if it is your goal, then you have to deconstruct it to what you need to do from the very beginning. And what are the actions that I have to take? And you take these actions so that you can look at what worked and what didn't so that you can get better. And so this is fundamentally how you create goals. And no, this isn't your mama's goal video because you've already seen that. This isn't about SMART goals. This is about your relationship with your goals. And so this is something that I don't see people talk about, but you have a relationship with your goals. It is something that you're willing to sacrifice in order to keep. And so when I think about this for myself, I had a conversation with Layla, for example, where I said, you know what, I define love as what you're willing to give up in order to keep something. And so you say, hey man, that guy Rod, he must love that car because he continues to keep working on it over and over again. It still doesn't work. He must love that thing because of what he's willing to put up in order to keep it. And so if we think about that as the measuring stick of how much, not do I love something or not, but how much do I love something, then you can see in a very real way how much do you really love your goals. Are you willing to lose a friend over it? Are you willing to give that up in order to keep your goals? Are you willing to give up a girlfriend for it in order to keep your goals? Are you willing to give up a wife or a spouse for it in order to keep your goals? For me, the answer is honestly yes. And the reason that I have such an intimate relationship with my goals— sounds kind of weird— is because my goals have fed me more than anything in my life. They have helped me become the person that I want to be because they have oriented my behavior to help me do the activities that create the character traits that create the outcomes. And so I use that as my filter for the people who are in my world. So if someone comes in my world and I think, do I need to sacrifice my goals in order to keep you? Now, a lot of times it's not an all-out sacrifice. Sometimes I just ask the question, is my goal achievement more or less likely with this person in my life? And oftentimes it's just neutral, which then for me is, okay, well then you're gonna drain me of resources that don't get me to my goals that I could otherwise, those marbles, that I could otherwise keep focused on the main thing, which means I have to say no to this because I choose my goals over that. Now, this may sound extreme, and that's because it is. But you can't want to be exceptional and not be willing to be the exception. It is normal to be not normal, to have not normal outcomes. If you can't expect— this is a preference thing from the closes— you can't want my outcomes but want it your your way. If you change the variables, you change the outcome. And what I can tell you universally is that the people who achieve outsized returns are the ones who did outsized work and more specifically made outsized sacrifices in order to continue to be able to pour into that which mattered most. And so I'll, I'll be real with you for a second. I've hit my million-dollar goal. I hit my $100 million goal. And now I've been pretty public. I'm trying to document everything that I do to hit a million and beyond. And at the same time, the billion-dollar goal matters a ton to me, and at the same time, not at all. Because the billion-dollar goal is not because I want to hit a billion dollars for some reason. I can't buy— there's nothing I can buy at a billion that I can't really buy now that I can consume as an individual. Sure, maybe I buy companies or buy big buildings or something like that, but it doesn't actually change my day-to-day living. But the reason that I hold on to that billion-dollar goal is because I I would like to meet the man who I would become who's able to achieve that. And so for me, the quantitative measure of what my business has grown has been an indicator of my personal growth. And so I have a belief that either your business is growing or you are. And so when your business is growing, is going down, guess what? You're usually growing a ton because it's painful. And that's why they call it growing pains, not growing joys. It's not fun. But the thing is, is that most things in life aren't fun. Decline is painful. Stagnation is painful. Growth is painful. The question is, which of those pains gets you closer to where you want to go? Follow the steps in this video and hit your million. But you should want to make— as soon as you hit the million, set it for 10. And as soon as you had 10, set it for 100. Not because you need the money, because— but because you want to meet the man or woman who's capable of making that a reality. The biggest gains in life, the best players in life, play infinite games because the objective isn't to win. You're not going to win at business. Like, take it to the natural extreme. Let's say you become the richest man in the world. Let's say historically at the richest men, none of them was the richest man for their entire lives. They touched the top for a brief second, for a year, for 2 years, and then they disappear or they die. So it's this whole idea that's not even true. You don't win. The point of business is to stay in business. That is why it's an infinite game. The point of marriage is not to get married, it's to stay married. The point of fitness and health isn't to get fit or get healthy, it's to stay healthy. And so most of the games worth playing in life are not finite games, they're infinite. And so if you can adopt this learning mentality, then there is no end because you are the asset, you are the outcome. And so by saying Thinking that you are finished playing means that you are finished becoming. And for me, I don't want to stop getting better until the day I die. So we started your journey to your first million by figuring out what skills you needed to have, what knowledge you needed to know to get started, then figured out who you were going to sell to, then what you were going to sell them, then figuring out how to advertise and close in order to get them to buy. Then from there, we increased how much they were worth by getting them to buy more times. Then we recruited the people who needed to be on our team to help us along the way and scale. Then we keep and expand our advantage through leverage, and we stick with it to unlock compounding growth within the business and ourselves. And then finally, we get better through a continuous learning loop. And that is how you get to your first million. And if you enjoyed this, click the next video, which is 13 years of brutally honest business advice, because at this point, hopefully you'll have your first million or be on the way to it. And then I'm going to get you some harsh truths of getting from 1 to 10 and beyond.