It's Actually Pretty Easy to Get Ahead of 99% of People

It's actually pretty easy to beat 99% of people because most people do the wrong stuff. And for me personally, I have a portfolio of companies at acquisition.com that does over $250 million per year. And I make these videos because I am really just shouting at my younger self of all the mistakes that I was making by working a lot on things that didn't move my business. The vast majority of growth-isms for the most part are wrong because if they were right, then people would do them and then grow. But most of growth is counterintuitive. So I want you to imagine your business as a tree. Okay? So let's say you've got this tree and it's planted in the ground and you're like, where's the top of the tree? Don't worry, we'll get there. And the height of the tree over time, let's just imagine is your revenue. Okay? So as the tree gets taller, your revenue goes up. Okay? Now the problem is, let's say that you have these little offshoots, right? That's these little, these little, these little, these little growth. Hey, these, these are B+ problems. Hey, we should add this thing to our email sequence. Hey, we should do this thing for our follow-up. What happens is the resources from the tree, from you, from the ground that are going into this thing are getting shot out to the side. And so you are growing, you feel like you're solving problems, but you're still here at the same revenues you were last year. But once you cut these things off, then all of the resources go right into the trunk and they just keep growing. And then your business continues to say, focused on the one thing that is going to move the tree up the most. So it's not about the amount of tasks that you finish, it's the amount of growth each task gets you. And this is why even biblically they talk about the way to keep a tree healthy is to prune it. And pruning literally means you're cutting things off. Commitment is the elimination of alternatives, which means Commitment is literally the recipe for growth. It's that you focus all resources on the one growth path that you get the most for. Right now, you have a big list of things that you think you should do. And what often happens is that you will do number 5, number 3, maybe number 2, because those are the ones that you're like, oh, I can knock that out pretty quick. Oh, I can knock that out pretty quick. But what ends up happening is you get to the end of the day and you still have that number 1 thing that's sitting there on your list. And that number 1 thing you probably know is the most important thing that if you only did that 1 thing, it would make the rest of the things on that list irrelevant by comparison. But what ends up happening is that we do the B+ problems all day because it makes us feel good because we know how to solve them. The A+ problem is usually one that's a little bit hairier. It has more variables. It's more complex. We have to get into systems. We have to do more analysis. And then we have to iterate to figure out how to solve it. And so because of that, we prefer the fast dopamine, or whatever you want to call it, of solving the quick problem rather than solving the most important problem. So fundamentally, most people want to do a good job. I have found this from the people who work at my companies, is that they want to do a good job. And so what they're afraid of is that if they have this problem that's underneath of their purview, that you are going to yell at them and say, Oh my God. Ah, look at these fires, right? But the thing is, is that if you just say, dude, there's this massive fire right here that's burning and by far will burn everything to a crisp far more than these itty-bitty fires will, that means that it's okay that these burn. And so when I do a prioritization, especially if it's a big turnaround thing or we gotta turn department around, something like that, like this is the most important thing in the business. I set the agenda up front and I say, hey, as of this point, nothing that has happened before today, anyone is accountable for. I will blame no one for anything. And so if I ask you in the future of this conversation, who made this or what made this happen, I am not asking to blame you. I'm asking so that I can understand the problem better so that we can solve it together. And by saying that, it's like, as of this moment, there is amnesia from the past. No one here will be responsible. And so by doing that, the pressure in the room, they're like, whew, okay, we're all on the same team. And going forward, if you get, and like, I think you have to be specific with this. It's like, John, if you get complaints from CS about this stuff, your turnaround's being slow, that's okay. You can tell them I said it's fine. Hey Sarah in legal, if you're having this issue and people are like, hey, we gotta get these contracts signed, tell them, I said it's fine. And remember, I pay everybody's paychecks. And so at the end of the day, I'm the one who's gotta sign it. And I'm telling you it's okay. As hard as it is for you, 'cause you guys all wanna do a good job, to let these fires burn, we have to flex. We have to focus on this one. Otherwise this one's gonna burn us to a crisp. I was on a call with one of my portfolio teams and it was a paid ads team and they were having issues with pixel tracking. And this issue had been going on for 3 weeks and it was because everyone was distracted. Everyone was looking at all these different, funnels and pages and follow-up sequences. And fundamentally, if the pixel is not bringing in the right traffic, none of the conversion rate optimization ever will matter ever again if the pixel gets worse and worse and worse because we're seasoning it with worse data. And if you're like, what the hell is Alex talking about it? Don't worry, it's just paid ad stuff. But fundamentally, if you're on a paid ad team and you know what I'm talking about, if that is wrong, nothing else matters. And so the difficulty, and this is what's tough, is that you have to look at all the other problems and be like, oh yeah, all this stuff sucks. We're gonna ignore that because if we don't fix this, none of that matters. And even as I was going up and pulling up some of the pages, I was like, God, this is ugly. And I told her, I was like, this is so ugly. We should fix this, but we're not going to today because today we're going to fix this problem. We're going to fix the pixel. That's it. And once we fix the pixel in all of these 7 funnels, Once it's fixed, then we can go on to the next thing. But the next thing, because if you reassess, you might find out that once you fix the pixel issue, some of your conversion rate issues might go away, 'cause maybe you're getting the right traffic in there, which is why you have to always reassess after doing the solution rather than trying to force-feed, like, I think these are the top 10. Would you put 8 above 7? Who cares? You're not even gonna work on it. You're just gonna work on the 1 and then get that done. And then you will see with this new reality in this new context, Which of these now will move the needle the most? And so Frank Slootman, who is a 3-time IPO entrepreneur, talks about this in his management book where he basically focuses every company on only one thing. And so he says some companies have 5 objectives, some companies have 3 objectives. His companies are only allowed to have one because once you do that one thing, and this is something that I have found from my experience, is that let's say you had that list of 5 things to do, you have those 5 quote priorities, If you do the one that matters the most, what you will often find is that number 2 through 5, sometimes 1, become irrelevant. Other times, something over here actually all of a sudden becomes the next most important thing, which means that if you had done number 3, number 5, number 2 on your list, and then done number 1, then you figuratively would have wasted all of the time doing 2, 3, and 5, because by the time you did number 1, it actually made those solutions irrelevant. Everything that I'm talking about right now is based on a concept that we call the theory of constraints, which is that you have one thing in your business that is limiting your growth. It is the constraint of your growth. And once you deconstrain the business, the business will naturally grow until the next constraint. And so if this is valuable for you, you can always go to acquisition.com, and this is obviously only for businesses that are doing over a million bucks a year. So acquisition.com and see if you qualify for one of our workshops. Right now, the average workshop that attends does $3.5 million a year. So it's a decent size room. 25% over $5 million, 50% over $1 million. And so it's for legit business owners. We talk about this type of stuff that really moves the needle for businesses in a big way. Fundamentally, the goal of strategy, which is the big fancy word that people use, is to prioritize limited resources against unlimited opportunities. There are unlimited things that you could do to grow your business. You could run TikTok ads, you could run LinkedIn ads, you could, run LinkedIn outbound, you could optimize your site, you could improve your sales conversions. There's a million things that you could do to grow your business, but there is one thing that can grow your business more than the others, and that one thing would pale or make everything else pale in comparison. And so when people are considered excellent strategists, translate that into they are excellent at prioritizing. But the real best strategists see all of the moves, and probably some moves you don't see, that maybe the number one thing on your list gets you a 2x, but there's another move that has a number one that's a 10x. And so fundamentally, you have to prioritize against all things you could do, known and unknown. And the people who move the fastest in terms of distance covered are the ones who get the most for every unit of effort, which is not about how fast they do things, but how much speed they cover with the things they choose to do. And so let me give you a different analogy that you can think of with. So a lot of people have a little wheel on their car and they're thinking, how do I make this thing spin faster? Right? They've got this little wheel, and they're like, I just got to go around and around and around and around. Right? But what they don't think about is that you could have a wheel that's this big. And if you just do one revolution, you get more than this one does in 10. And so we want to just think, what is that one big wheel that if I just roll it once, it makes all of the wheel spins that I have on this tiny wheel irrelevant. So let's imagine you have your to-do list, right? You've got your 1, you've got your 2, you've got your 3. That's a 3. There you go. You got your 4, you got your 5. The thing is, is that most of the times these are B and C level problems because you know how to solve them. Yay. But this one is the A+ problem that you have no idea how to solve. And so we spend all day, every day, just crossing these things off, and then we are happy at the end of the day. But then we're sad at the end of the month because we still haven't solved the one big problem. And so you have to be comfortable with the idea that you might not solve it for 1 day or 2 days or 3 days or 4 days. But if you do solve it on the 5th day, you get the A+ solution. That gives you— it takes your wheel from a wheel that's this big to a wheel that's this big. And from that point going forward, when you're rolling, you're getting that much more for every revolution. And so I want to make this super tactical for you. Once you've identified what the priority is, what the one thing that matters most is, then typically humans, us and your team, will likely not want to do it. It's very much in our human nature to just continue to work less and less because it's easier. And so these are some tactics that I have done to pull the future forward. So number 1, if you change the meetings from end of week to end of day or twice a day, you will communicate how much more important it is to you to get those things done. So if you have a weekly cadence for something that is the priority for the business, then you should be meeting far more than once a week, probably more than once a day. Number 2, once you've determined that that is the priority and you have a cadence and deadline associated with that because you're getting feedback loops that are installed much faster,. Then you want to eliminate everything that's not that. Now, they may sound obvious in retrospect, but it, it isn't in reality, especially if you have a team. And so the way that we eliminate is by saying everything that you are currently working on is not as important as this thing, which means you need to let some of these fires burn. Once you have set that deadline and you've eliminated everything else, Then we increase the frequency of communication. So obviously the meetings set little mini deadlines because you want to get things done by then. But in-between communication also needs to ramp up. So if you check in on someone after an hour after meeting and say, hey, where are you with that? That communicates a very different idea of the urgency around the priority or the problem that you're trying to solve. Now, once you have that communication loop in there, what you want to also do, or that I have found effective, is to make winning obvious, clear, and present publicly. So that means that if you have a dashboard, if you have a progress marker, a thermometer, something to show anytime someone sees it, the progress that is being made, it acts as a reinforcement loop for the entire team to get things done. And if you wanna go real advanced mode, put a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow saying, "Once we fix the conversion rate on our page, then we will all get this thing together." And it could be we all go out to dinner. It could be, "Hey, everybody gets the rest of the day off," whatever day we finish it. Like, you can make the pot of gold whatever you want, but it also shows what's in it for them. So it's easier to say committed than to stay committed, which is the only thing that matters. Now, as the boss, first in the beginning, you're boss of you, but over time, if you develop a team, you become boss of other people. And so what I have found is that you can't just increase the priority, you need to also increase the commitment. And so commitment, I define it as the elimination of alternatives. And so let me give you a simple example. Marriage, the ultimate commitment relationship-wise, means that you eliminate every other person from your life, literally, who's not your wife or your husband that you will ever date again. So you say, You are the only person, I eliminate all others, and that is a commitment. If you're in health, if you want to commit fully to something, then it means you have to eliminate everything else that is not that thing. So that's where you throw away all the food in your kitchen that's not aligned with your goal. You pour out all the alcohol. You eliminate the alternative so that the only thing left is to do the thing that you committed to. And within the context of business, you have to eliminate everything that is not the priority. And the thing is, is that it's very easy to say you're committed. And I've noticed with my teammates, a lot of them were like, "I'm committed," but it's very hard to show that you're committed. So if you wanna teach this process to your team, this is how I think about it. Number 1 is you prioritize. You say, "There's lots of things we could do, but if we just did this one thing, this would be the most important." The second thing that I do is I create urgency. So I say, "This is very important. This is when we're gonna be meeting about it. We have to get it done by this time." But you can't do that without also eliminating everything else that they have on their plates. It's not fair to say, hey, we're now just gonna make this incredibly important thing that's due tomorrow, but you also still have to do your normal work. It doesn't work. They're just like, it's not gonna work, especially on a continuous basis. And if you do 1, 2, and 3, then what's going to happen is that you will solve it and you will solve it significantly faster than you thought because everyone will be focused on solving it and everyone will get out of the way to make sure that it gets done. And then you look at your list and you reassess. And then you reprioritize, you set the new urgency, you eliminate everything else, and you keep going. And the difference between a bad strategist and a good strategist just comes down to the thing that they choose to believe is the most important. So this is how I applied this 4-step process to the paid ads team that I was talking about earlier. So first off I said, okay, here are all the things that are wrong with our marketing. And then I said, and we're gonna ignore all of them except for the pixel issue. Then I said, okay, we're gonna meet end of day today because this was first thing in the morning. And people were like, well, I have a, I have a meeting right now. And I was like, oh yeah, is it with me? And they're like, oh no. And I was, they're like, well, should I? I was like, yeah, don't be on the meeting. And I was like, and if someone gives you a problem, tell them they can talk to me. Then I said, that also means that whatever you're regularly doing for the day, it's not that, it's now this. And then we went through every single line item of what had to happen for the pixel to get fixed. And we assigned every single line item to each person. And I said, how long do you think this will take? How long do you think this will take? How long do you think this will take? And by the way, I'm asking, I'm not asking for days here, I'm asking for minutes and hours. All right, and by the time we're done, it's like, great, so it looks like we can get all this stuff done in the next 6 hours. So we're gonna meet again at 4:30 today so that all of you guys can show off your work and I can tell you how great of a job you did. Then at the end of this, I said, okay, now every single person tell me back what you're going to do now. And so here's what's interesting. People came back and they said something and it wasn't what I said. So I said, let me say it again. You're going to do this, you're going to do this, and this is going to reroute here. Say it back to me. And they said it was like, right, write it down. And then I go back to the person, ask them again. Once everyone gets it right, great. We're going to meet in a few hours. I'll see you then. At the time of me making this video right now, I'm between the calls. All right. Which is why I'm so fired up. So once we get on the call, once the pixel's fixed, guess what we're going to do? We're going to look at the next thing on that big old list and say, all right, we had 20 other things we need to do. But tomorrow we're going to work on this one and we're going to solve that. And the thing is, is that so many businesses, what they have— and there's this great analogy for this— is that they have this graveyard of half-built bridges. They never get to the other side of the river because they never finished the bridge. And so the thing is, is that the company is spending resources building all of these bridges, putting these bricks here, but they never get one of these dollars across to the other side into their bank account. And so this is honestly where most businesses lose all their money, is building these half-built bridges because no one focuses on completing their work. So we had a portfolio company that had a show-up rate issue, and so they had a sales event that they ran regularly in order to turn prospects into customers. And so we noticed that they were getting a very low percentage of their prospects to show up. Now they were complaining about lead quality, things like that. And so we said, okay, if we only got the industry standard benchmark of leads who show up to this event, we would increase the revenue of this business by 35%. And given the margin of this business, let's say is 10%, we would more than triple the profit of this business. Is there anything else we could do with the resources we have that would give us that kind of a return, a tripling of profit for no risk in the next 30 days? And since the answer was no, then we said, great, everyone in this company, the only priority that you have is to get this number to go up. And so then we did a number of things to make that 1% go up. And as a result of that focus, the business did grow by more than 35% because every single person in the company was aligned with it. And guess what also happened? Other things fell by the wayside. Other things that were not as important started to burn. We had little customer service issues. We had little issues in the sales department. These were all little things that normally would've taken away from the team's focus on that one thing. But because prioritization is so powerful, If you get the one thing right, it makes the rest of it irrelevant. The thing about doing easy problems is that they're so tempting because we all want to have that quick win. We want to have one or two wins. Hey, I want to get my momentum going. But what ends up happening is that you, you eat half your day and then you get a couple calls, a couple interruptions, and then the day's gone. And the next day you still have that number one that's sitting at the top, but you fill it up with two or three more easy wins and you never get the big wins to happen. That continuous parade of little wins never moves the ball forward. You never get the breakthroughs. You never get the growth. A big part of why those A+ problems are the big hairy problems is because they are soaked in the unknown. We don't know how to solve them. And so I want to give you this frame of understanding that I have, which is When you have these other things underneath, 2 through 5 on that list, you typically know what you need to start doing, how it's going to go, and what it's going to look like at the end. The number 1 problem, you typically don't know where to start, and you don't know what to do, and you don't know how it's going to end. But you know that if big picture, if you solve that one thing, everything else would be irrelevant. And so part of beginning to solve that problem is learning to understand the problem itself. And so you can't feel like you're not making progress when you're trying to understand it and wrap your arms around it. And so there's an old saying with how do you eat an elephant? You eat it one bite at a time. And so you just have to start pulling the thread, which is how— that's my term. It's like I just start pulling the thread and see what comes. And then as I pull the thread, my next pull becomes more and more obvious to me. But you don't know what the next pull is. You don't know what the next step looks like until you take the first step. And the reason we don't is because it's unknown. Long-term, you want to make sure the team understands what the priority is, and that's what you're doing as the boss. But if you want to have faster communication cycles and more people immediately aligned with the priority of the business, then what you, and this is something that Leila and I have worked a lot on, is increasing information transparency across the company. That's a lot of big words, but it basically just means that you want everyone to know the same stuff. Because if everyone knows the same stuff, the financials, the conversion rates, how we make money, the profit margins, then everyone else has the same information. Now that might freak you out as an entrepreneur, but I remember when I was listening to Sam Walton's autobiography, he talked about one of the big fears that he had was like showing all the financials. But guess what? The biggest companies in the world are publicly traded and every single employee can see every single thing you could possibly imagine about the company, and yet they still function. And so it is 100% a an irrational fear that entrepreneurs keep by thinking that no one should know. And so I have over time continued to loosen up my, my, my, you know, white-knuckle grip on information because the more people who know everything, the more people who can help me solve the problems. If you were to come tomorrow and say, guys, this is the priority, like we're gotta do this, a lot of people will get overwhelmed because they don't know because you also told them something last week and the week before was also a priority and they're not done doing that yet. And so, one of the practices that I'd like to do is to pull up their agenda and say, show me everything you're working on right now. Okay, because you'll find out that some things you asked them for 2 months ago that they might still be working on. And even if they're not working on it, it's taking their attention because they know they're not working on it, they think they should be working on it. And you're like, oh, I totally forgot I even asked you to do that. Oh, we solved that other problem already in that other department, which makes this problem now irrelevant. So, Sorry about that. If you have more frequent loops where you can look at that list and say, oh no, this is more important than this. Don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. This one we can deal with next week. Table it. This is what I want you to work on and this is how I'd start. You can give someone so much less anxiety around the work, so much clear direction, and it gives you the opportunity to give out attaboys the moment they do it. And if this is going to help you make more money in your business, here's two more videos like this that'll help you make even more.