The Mathematics of Business, Explained

I've been in business for 14 years. Acquisition.com, our portfolio does over $250 million per year. 9 weeks ago, just at $106 million in sales alone, making the Guinness fastest-selling nonfiction book of all time. We doubled the formal record. And so that is just my credibility for what I'm about to share with you, which is 12 of the most important kind of rules of thumb that I've learned or picked up along the way in my business career that you can use to analyze your business to know where you are versus where you could or should be, whether this is a problem to solve or something that you just need to manage and pay attention to. And so this will help you allocate where you're spending your time within the business with a clear yes/no answer of, am I doing a good job or not? So let's dive into the first one. The first one is close rates versus pricing. So if you sell people stuff— now this would be specifically for people who sell with a salesperson in person or a salesman online, so on the phones or Zoom if that's how you fancy it— um, I want to kind of give you kind of a tier ladder list to think through in terms of rules of thumb.. And so the reason that there's a relationship between obviously price and close rate is that if you lower the price, we know our old supply demand curves. If you lower price, demand goes up, et cetera. Um, the idea is if you're closing at 80% or more in whatever you sell, so 4 out of 5 people you talk to buy your thing, you are typically underpriced by 3 to 4x. That might sound mind-blowing to you, but that is just the data that I've, again, rules of thumb that I've collected over many years of business. Now underneath of that, let's say that your close rate isn't necessarily over 80%, but let's say it's 60 to 80. So you're closing between, you know, 3 and 4 out of 5 who are there. You're probably underpriced by between 2 and 3x. So if you're currently charging $100, you might definitely consider going to $200, and you might have a $250 or $300 in you, and you'd be able to make more money. Now the next tier above that is between 50 and 60%. So as we get close, you'll notice that the, the jumps compress. If you're between 50 and 60%, typically you're underpriced by 1.5 to 2x. So that $100 price point should probably be 1.5, so $150 or $200. Now, if you're between 40 and 50% close rates, you're probably between 1.25 to 1.5x underpriced, meaning now you should be at maybe $125 or consider $150 as a final price point. Now, if you're like, okay, between— I'm at 35%, well, you're between 30 and 40%, which for me is appropriately priced under the assumption that You have all of the selling mechanisms in place to educate a consumer prior to the purchase so that you're not creating a pitch or spiel. Instead, they've already consumed all of this stuff prior to the pitch, and then the entire close call is about personalization and helping them make the decision. That is appropriately designed sales motion. If you have that sales motion and you are closing 35%, you're appropriately priced. Now, sometimes people have that close rate, but they don't have any of that stuff. And in those conditions, then you still probably have a double or triple on your price if you set a proper sales motion in place.. Now, if you're below 30%, so that means that less than 1 out of 3 people who you talk to buy, then you either have an avatar issue, you're selling to the wrong person, you have a sales motion issue. Um, and I fix those 2 first before ever considering lowering price, because it almost always is the thing that the sales team might consider wanting to do if you have a bad culture on your sales team or an entrepreneur who's afraid. But more realistically, raising prices is almost always the direction that businesses go in with one clear exception, which is if you have a business that has unlimited scale, let's say you sell a software product, that pricing is going to be, that pricing decision is gonna be incredibly important to you because it balances two of the strongest influencers on the value of your company, which is gonna be if you lower the price, it will also typically increase growth. And so you've got your gross margin, which is what the price dictates, and also the growth as a result. So if you have these two things, then you lower the price, growth rate goes up. If you raise the price, gross margin goes up, but growth rate goes down. And so the idea is we want to maximize both of those things. Now that's only for SaaS companies, which probably like 5% of you here. For everybody else, that is kind of my point here, which is that you probably have an unscalable business, which 80% of businesses are. Unscalable meaning they're service-based. And in those conditions, there's only one way you go in service, which is up. Because if you play it out long enough, you get good, you get enough demand because you're good, you can't service everybody, so you change your chart, you go up, you go up in price, and then around and around you go. And the faster you spin that loop to going up in price, the more you will progress in business because your gross margins will go up, your reputation will go up, you'll be able to hire better talent because you can pay them now, and it becomes a virtuous cycle versus the vicious cycle of trying to serve more people and paying less, having lower gross margins, hiring worse people, having worse customers at lower prices, and around and around you go into the toilet. So that is the end, end-all be-all. That is the pricing ladder that I use between price and close rate, which brings up rule of thumb number 2, LTV to CAC. So you'll notice a lot of these are relationships between numbers. And the reason that's important is it's not like, oh, your price should be this. That would be ridiculous. Every business is different. But when we take two different pieces of the business, which is typically paired or antithetical in nature. So like an example of this would be like speed and quality. These are things that are going to be ratios. So you want to settle as many support tickets as you can, but you want to make sure that the support tickets are done right. If you cleaned buildings, it would be, I want my cleaners to clean as many places as they can, as long as we still get 5-star reviews or we still get, we still get retention, we still get referrals. So it's always going to be relationships between two things that are paired, which create rules of thumb. And again, these are not written in stone. These are rules of thumb. So let's get to the second one, LTV to CAC. So for those who don't know, lifetime value, how much a customer spends with you, how much gross profit you make over the entire lifetime of the customer. CAC is cost of getting that customer to the door. So in plain speak, that's how much money does it cost you to make more money? CAC is how much money it costs you. Lifetime gross profit or lifetime value is how much you make. Now, a very traditional rule of thumb here in the software world was 3 to 1. And this has been pushed all over the internet. And many businesses took that because all these big tech giants and very huge company CEOs talk about 3 to 1 as though it's a rule of law. And I want to say it is true under specific conditions, which only apply to like 5% of businesses. So let me give you the other scenarios and what I consider to be ideal for them. So 3:1, and this relates to— I don't have anything drawn. Hold on, I'll draw this for you guys so this will make more sense. So let's imagine— do we have overhead cam on? Okay. You guys digging this? All right, so we have our attraction, right? How we get people in the door, that's number 1. We have our conversion, which is how do we actually get them to give us money, number 2. And then number 3, we have our delivery. So if we were to use a binary scale of 0 or 1, 0 or 1, 0 or 1, Then we would say if we have zero, basically unlimited scale, I put zero operational drag for attraction, conversion, and delivery, what is that? That's probably a SaaS product, right? You can run ads to a checkout page and then the SaaS, the software does the delivery, right? All the way zeros all across. And so for that, when you have all zeros, 3 to 1 between how much it costs you to get a customer and how much you make is an appropriate, ratio. But what if one of these three things includes a human? So let's give a simple example. You run ads to a checkout page, and then you have somebody who does delivery. You have a human being who does delivery. Well, as soon as that occurs— or said differently, maybe you run ads to a salesperson, and then you have some sort of lighter touch delivery on the back end. In any of these scenarios, I want to now have 6 to 1. Sorry, this is a 1. I want to have 6 to 1. Now, why would I double this? So let me explain. As soon as you add a human in the loop, as soon as you add a human to the system, you're going to have lumpiness or inconsistency. So what do I mean by that? If— let's use the salesperson example— you're running ads to a salesperson, as soon as you get to a certain point where you've capped that salesperson calendar, what do you have to do? You have to hire another salesperson. And what happens when you hire a new salesperson? That person's not going to be as good as the main person, especially right off the bat, and maybe even ever. And so we have to build into the business padding so that we can incur the cost of training somebody up and also having them suck. Because if we're at 6 to 1 with our one guy, or rather if we were at 3 to 1 with one guy selling, as soon as the next guy comes in, we're below 3 to 1, right? And so we have to be at 6 to 1 so that when that next person comes in, we have some, we have some We have some cushion, got a little cushion for the pushing, if you will, that gives us, again, padding. I keep saying padding. So you're probably here padding a bunch of times, but that's what it is. Now, let's say that you've got 2 of these 3. So now let's say we're, we're running ads and we have a, we have a manual person who's taking the phone call closing. And then delivery is also service. This is honestly, this is many of you guys is that you are in service businesses and this is like, this is what it is. Okay, when I'm in this situation, I want 9 to 1. Now, the reason this is so difficult for people to wrap their heads around is that most people want to scale when their business model has not been nailed yet. And so that's why we say nail it, then scale it. And so people get ahead of their skis, they overexpand, they bring on, you know, they try to open more locations or bring on more reps too fast because their ego is tied to the number rather than looking at the fundamental economics of their business and saying, is this ready to scale? Because if I had the pick of like, I would rather scale really fast for 3 years and then realize the business is broken or spend 3 years just nailing all my, nailing the model, getting all the metrics right and then scaling it, I would obviously pick the second one. But the thing is, is people, if I say that to you, most people would be like, well, of course I pick the second one, but people don't behave that way. And so what you say you would do versus what you actually do are typically very different. And so because now I have 2 humans in the loop, I'm gonna have inefficiencies on delivery when I bring in a new rep or a new technician or new whatever, who's not gonna be as good, not as effective as the other people, I gotta be able to eat that. If I have a bad salesperson, when they come in, I'm gonna have to be able to eat that. And so now I gotta be at 9 to 1 to have the cushion to scale. And then finally, along the same line of thinking, if I have 3 people all the way through, I've got humans who are doing the attraction, humans who are doing the conversion, and humans who are doing the delivery, then I wanna be at 12 to 1, all right? Now, I wanna put this in perspective for you guys. One of the gifts that I can hopefully give is frame shifts, is the change of perspective. So, let me know in the chat, the first year of Gym Launch, when I started running ads, okay? So we had automated here, and I would say we were like probably a 0.5 here. It has half media, but we had half kind of like some support reps that help with tech stuff. And then this was human-based, all right? We had a phone sales team. What do you think my LTV to CAC ratio was? Let me know in the chat. 5 to 1, 10 to 1, 4 to 1, 6 to 1. What do you guys think? What do you guys think? Let me see some numbers. Let me see some digits. 6 to 1, 4 to 1, 9 to 1, 2 to 1, 30 to 1. Liam, nice, 30 to 1. 3 to 1, 15 to 1. I appreciate the belief, guys. Arpit, 100 to 1. You crazy mofo. Uh, Ronald, 5 to 1, 25 to 1, 20 to 1. Okay, you guys want to know what it was? I'll tell you. The first year of Gym Launch, my LTV to CAC was 100 to 1. I spent $100 grand and made $10 million. Wild. Recommend. It was wild, wild times, okay? Now, how is that possible, right? How is that possible? Most of the money that I've made in my life has happened during these distinct windows of opportunity where there was huge arbitrage between what it cost me to get a customer and what a customer is worth to me. And I've had that happen 4 times in my life. And each of those times have been above 30 to 1. And so the reason I'm so adamant about this is that I know, because I've had it happen, that you have to just keep beating up the system. You have to keep tweaking the money model, which is why I made the book Money Models. You have to keep cranking on this thing until eventually you crack through that lever. And so you see 12 to 1, people like, that's crazy. I'm like, this is the minimum. And again, this is if you want to scale big. You can absolutely run a business that does 6 to 1 and, you know, make a million bucks a year, a couple million bucks a year. Like you can do that. I'm saying, if you want to see what the biggest companies in the world have, they have absurd LTV to CAC. Now, what is— there's only two ways to improve that ratio, right? Way one is you drive CAC down to zero because there's only two long-term winning strategies in business. Have extremely low CAC, which means you build massive brand, A, or B, you have a product that is viral. Those are the two types of things that create really big companies on the cost side. On the other hand, you have the extremely high LTV side. So look at a company, I'll give you an example of each. So Facebook is a company that wasn't, oh, we have unlimited LTV. No, they have a business where CAC approached zero. And so if you can get CAC to zero, you could figuratively get 8 billion people for $0. And when you do that, even if you make a couple hundred bucks a year on them, you still make a lot of money. On the other hand, you might have a company that's like, Salesforce, right? And a company like that, they might make $1 million or $5 million per year on an enterprise-level customer. Now that customer isn't coming to them for free. Now they do have some brand, of course, that's gonna offset some of those CAC costs, but there's still going to be huge costs of getting those customers, especially the larger customers with contracts. They have to bid against other CRMs, et cetera, et cetera. And so both of those are big companies. The idea is that you have to know what type of company you're going and your winning strategy to scale. And so to make this extraordinary LTV to CAC ratio, One of these has to approach zero or infinity. That's the game. So that's the second rule of thumb. Look at your three steps. Am I zero to one on attraction? Do I have unlimited scale on attraction? So if you're like, what's an unscaleable version? This would be like, I do manual outreach. That would be human in the loop versus I run ads or I make content. Conversion here would be checkout page is scalable. Human phone team or sales team in person that has a human delivery. If I sell services, I'm going to have humans. If I sell software, I sell media. That's going to not have humans. I sell physical products, for example, that would still not have humans by my definition. That's the idea. You can see what your LTV to CAC ratios are. You can see where you're at and whether you need to improve them. Which brings me to rule numero tres. That is Spanish for rule number three. I think it'd be regalo, but like, let's not get crazy. Oh no, is regalo gift? Why I messed that one up? Either way, hopefully you're with me. Real quick, I have a gift for you. This is the $100 million scaling roadmap. It's something that my team and I put 200+ hours into building. And breaking the stages of scaling into 10 steps. All right? And so what we did is we broke down everything that got us, basically got us stuck and what we did to break free at each level of the business. And if you'd like to know what product, marketing, sales, customer service, IT, recruiting, human, uh, resources and finance look like at the stage that you're currently at, this is a free gift. So all you have to do is go to acquisition.com/roadmap. You can plug in your business information. And if you want our help, you want my help to help you break through whatever level of scaling you're at. This is not a promise. I'm just saying I'd love to help. On the thank you page, you can book a call. Every month we have a workshop out here at my headquarters. You actually talk to my real team that does, does our marketing, does our emails, does our ads, does our copy, does our, does our, does our sales, does our finance, does our recruiting. The real people are doing this at a very high level. And what's really cool about that is that they can typically find and spot what the constraints are in a business like that. And so it's one of the most valuable things that I could possibly do. Obviously, You know, space is limited based on our actual headquarters. But if that's interesting, on the thank you page you can book a call, no pressure. This is a gift either way, it's absolutely free. So rule number 3 is rule of 100. So fundamentally, if you're trying to grow the business, I have never seen a business not grow when they implement the rule of 100 when they're starting out. And to be clear, this works for all levels. So it's either rule of 100 on your first acquisition channel or rule of 100 and ideally for 100 days. So 100 and 100, right? And if you're like, wait, 100 times 100, you're like, you're right, that's 10,000 actions. And what happens when you take 10,000 actions in one specific direction, you tend to get results. And the amount of screenshots of content and reach and impressions that I've got from people who actually tick the box 100 days in a row doing 100 actions, that they get their first customer, most people get it by the third week. But you have to commit to doing 100 days, and it's kinda like the idea of the heart of a missionary versus a mercenary. You have to commit in your heart that you're gonna do 100 days, and then it happens very quickly. If you try to do this for 100 days to try and prove me wrong, congratulations, you won. You're still not succeeding. Probably not the perspective because it won't change anything in my life. All right. And so where this becomes a symptom that you can recognize in your business is volatility. All right. And I said this applies to all levels. So if you're a bigger business owner, you take the rule of 100 and you just apply it to new channels. And so if you're like, we run Meta ads, it's like, great. Well, we need to just take the same perspective on how we're going to run YouTube ads or Google ads, right? If you're on content side, it's like we make, you know, reels. Awesome. It's like, okay, we do it on this platform. We need to do this on a second platform. If you're doing outreach, you— every time you expand into the new platform or medium or channel, you would implement the Rule 100 yet again. Now, if you're a smaller business, which most businesses are small by, by statistics and reality, 95% of businesses less than $1 million. So here we go. If your business feels feast or famine, meaning if you get a sale this week and then there's nothing and there's nothing and then next week you get one and then two more weeks and then one, two, and then another three weeks of famine, the issue is not that you have, quote, inconsistent lead flow. It feels inconsistent because the timeline you're measuring it on is too small. So if I were to look at it year over year, if you're the type of business that does a small amount of advertising, you might sell about the same number of customers every single year., but that volatility or the perception of volatility is a symptom of insufficient volume. You're not doing enough to get enough out. Now, if we expand that time horizon, let's say that we expand it to 30 days and let's say that you on average get 3 customers a month. Okay. 30 days, 3 customers a month. That means you get 1 customer per 10 days. And so that means that in 10 days, what we can reverse this into is that there is an amount of advertising that is occurring. Either through content, through word of mouth, through outreach, through paid ads, whatever, affiliates, people referring to you who are partners or centers of influence, if you will, or we're sending you business, that in that 10 days there's enough advertising for one sale to occur. And so the idea is, okay, well, if I can just look at the amount of advertising that I'm doing, probably haphazardly over a 10-day period, and then do it deliberately instead of on accident, on a daily basis, then I could take what I do in advertising in 10 days and do it in 1. And if I do it in 1, then I'm going to get the same outcome as doing 1 sale every 10, and I'll get 1 sale every day. And so the companies that are doing 30 times more sales than you are typically doing 30 times more advertising than you are. Real. And so I've put this in perspective. Many I've seen— I mean, because obviously businesses fly out here every, every week. Attackbusiness.com, so I know a lot of numbers around what businesses are doing at different revenue levels. If I look at a $1 or $2 million business and I look at how much content they're putting out just on a pure volume basis, and the thing is, is like, of course there's quality of content, but the thing is, is if, if you look at it across all pieces of content with the outliers already baked in that, you know, that 1 out of 10 or 1 out of 100 are gonna be super outliers. Of course, the top 1%, the top 1 out of 100, the top 10%, you know, 1 out of 10. Um, with that volume baked in, things tend to normalize again. And so we make whatever it is, 450 pieces of content a week, right? Almost 500 for simple math. So we're looking at 30, you know, 25, 30,000 pieces of content per year. And many of the people that are at $1 million are doing something in the neighborhood of like 1 a day. And so they're doing 365 and we're doing like 25 or 30,000. And so we get 9 or 10 times the, sorry, way, way more than that. Sorry, that's 1,000 times, 1,000 times the outcome that they are. Now you can even do it you can make the argument that I'm even less efficient than they are, but diminishing returns are still returns, right? So like if I do 1,000 times more than you, but I get 100 times the outcome, I'm good with that. And I think this is the piece that people really mess up is they see diminishing returns and then think, oh, I should stop because my return per action has gone down rather than thinking I'm still getting more and it's still worth it. And that's the part that I think most people who are smaller miss out on. The amount of conversations I've had with small business owners who are all about optimization. Again, there's nothing wrong with that. You just can't have both. You can be like, I want to optimize. It's like, fine, you can get the most for the least, but you're not going to get the most, period. And the difference is that the people who want the most are the ones who win. Which leads me to rule number 4, lead response times. So rule of thumb here, for the love of God, please call your leads within 60 seconds. I don't know how How many times I have to say this across how many videos? And it's just like, do you hate helping people? Do you hate having more revenue and more profit in the business? Would you prefer to pay 4 times more per customer than you currently are because you are like, you know what we're going to do? So this person just opted in. They're like, you know what? I really want to solve this problem. This company looks interesting. And then you're on the other side saying, let's let them cool off a little bit. They're a little, they're a little too hot and heavy, you know what I mean? Like, let's make sure they don't make a decision that they would regret. You know, I don't want them to take that wallet out too fast because that might be unreasonable. And so let's let them simmer. Let's let them marinate for a couple days. And you know what? Let's let them date around. Let's let them call some other businesses so that by the time we finally get to them, if we ever do get to them, they have a lot more information from different competitors so they can compare the pros and cons of our business and our offering to everyone else. So that we can get in a pricing war all the way to the bottom. And so when we do that, not only are we spending 4 times as much as we should to acquire a customer, we're also not able to make as much per customer because your close rates will go down on top of that and so will your gross margins. And so it's one of those like— I think Brian Johnson from Blueprint was talking about this. You're like, where is he going with this? I'll bring it back home. He said he has boiled down like however many years of doing all this research and stuff into one number, which is your resting heart rate before bed. He said, if you show me that number, I can see your soul. To me, I would say LTV to CAC would be that number. But underneath of that number would be, would be your lead response time. And the reason for that is like, it's how you do one thing is how you do everything. And I have some elements that I take offense to that particular term, but I do think that it is a way of doing business. How dedicated to excellence are you? Right? And if you know, if you know, this has been proven, over and over again in business studies and in the real world, right? Saying, hey, you're going to 4x your sales. People think, yeah, but I can't afford to hire somebody to call my leads in that speed. Well, do you think if you had 4 times the revenue you currently do that you'd be able to afford it with the revenue that you would now make from that person? This is how business works. You invest and then you get something back. That's how it works. But this is the first time I think I framed it the other way around. Look at how much it costs you to get a customer. If you divided that by 4, would that improve your LTV to CAC ratio? Would that be the thing that you need in order to scale? Do you think that if your leads cost too much might be a factor of the fact that you don't know how to sell? So when I look at rules of thumb, it's like, well, I'm gonna attack these areas first because there's huge returns for minimal effort. Talk about, you know, maximizing, optimizing. For the love of God, please call your leads quickly. Sorry, a little passionate about that one. All right, I think the spirit moved. I'm sorry. I don't take it back, but we can just move on. Okay, which brings me to rule number 5, 70% calendar utilization. Okay, so this is a rule of thumb. So when you have more salespeople, there's another issue that starts to come up, which is my sales team's underutilized or they're booked out. So what's the sweet spot? The reason this is important is because, well, if you miss it, you will— let me, let me go either extreme. If you have your sales team completely booked out, fully utilized, here's two things that happen as a result that are bad. Number one is that your total lead conversion will go down. You will make more sales because they're booked out for sure, absolute will go up, but your conversion rates will go down, meaning your CAC, your cost to acquire customers, will go up. Which is, depending on how sensitive your numbers are, could be very bad for the business. And so that utilization happens, and as a result, one, people have to start booking out further and further because tomorrow, the next day, they're all booked out. They can't find convenient times. So one, it's further out, and so show rates on further out appointments compared to sooner appointments goes down. Number two, show rate on appointments that are inconvenient versus convenient— maybe they do it a little sooner, but it's still not the time they'd ideally like. Show rates go down. Number 3, what happens if a sales guy is making calls all day long? What are they not doing? They're not doing outbound. What are they also not doing? They're not following up on the calls that they should just, they have 6-inch putts, they have some tippins that they need to do that they just aren't doing because they're on calls all day. And rightfully so, they should be focused on, like they should reasonably focus on the leads that are in front of them. But it is your job as the entrepreneur to move their calendar, better utilize their time so you can maximize conversion, okay? So on the other extreme, let's say that you have 30% utilization. So, you know, 70% of their calendar's empty. The problem with this that I found is that sales team morale can start to drop because they don't really ever get in momentum. So if you have like 2 calls a day, like the calls sometimes mean too much. And so guys have kind of commission breath. They're like, I have to close the sale. Right? I'm not going to get paid. And so it's a balance between both those things. So I've found 70% is kind of the sweet spot. I don't let it get above 85 and I try not to let it drop below 60. And so that's kind of give you a range. I would say 70, 75 is right around the sweet spot for this. And I'll explain the reasoning why. When we see conversion rates, as in we get 100 leads, we want to maximize the conversion of those leads, which functionally is what a sales team is supposed to do. Why you have a sales team rather than just a checkout page. If we want to maximize that conversion, then we want to give the time, we want to give 1, enough times for the prospect to book soon, 2, enough time for that time to be convenient for them. Both of these things increase show rates. Number 3, we want to have the salesperson have enough blank space in their calendar so they can work their pipeline and bring people back in. And I remember the realization I had around this was we would have high weeks and low weeks with ads in terms of booked calendars. But our sales remained relatively the same. And I was like, how does that work? And it was just because when a big wave came in, the guys were really inefficient. And when there was, you know, a famine, if you will, and there was more empty calendars, the guys squeezed their pipelines. And so I was like, man, if we just squeezed our pipelines all the time, we would just make, on the high weeks, we'd make so much more money. Well, how do you do that? You typically need to hire more salespeople. And I'll say as a personal note, I have yet to make less money by hiring more salespeople. So like, when in doubt, sales tends to drive business. And I also have some belief around the fact— and this is most cultures, not our shared acquisition, but the vast majority of sales cultures— guys will get fat and happy. They will make enough sales to make whatever that nut is for them that they don't want to work that hard anymore. And so I would rather have the guys just below whatever that, that, that amount is, so they're always striving, they're always squeezing the pipeline, rather than you know, they can sell to their goal within the first 2 weeks, and then they take the last 2 weeks of the month off. And that's where, you know, entrepreneurs will say, hey, do I need to change my sales commissions? Maybe. But more often than not, it's like you can just add salespeople so that they can squeeze their opportunities better. All right, which leads me to rule number 6, payback period. Actually, that felt very aggressive. Payback. So what is payback period? It's how quickly you can recover the cost of getting a customer. Now for me, ideally, I try to do within 30 days. So payback period in general is how fast you get the money back from what it costs you to get somebody. My goal is within 30 days. Why? Because just about every business owner, at least in America and at least the developed world, can typically gain access to a credit card, which gives you 30 days of interest-free money. Now, the reason that's important is that if you have interest-free money, that it means that you can grow without money out of pocket, and that allows you to have limitless growth. If it— if I can take $100 of credit card money, which I don't have to pay anything for until the end of the month, and I can take that $100 and go get me a customer, and at the end of the month make that $100 back, then at the end of the month, I owe no one anything and I now have a customer. That is the power of this. Now you can repeat that ad infinitum, which is Latin for lots of times, into infinity. But let's not get too technical. So the reason that I use that as my rule of thumb is for that very practical reason. Now, you might think to yourself, well, our payback period is 90 days. There's nothing wrong with that. It's the same as like, you know, we had LTV to CAC at Gym Launch of 100 to 1. It didn't stay 100 to 1. It was 100 to 1 the first year, right? And over time it ended up being somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-ish to 1. Um, but the idea— because as you scale, more levels of, of infrastructure will get introduced to the business, and so that will drive down operating margins, and that's okay as long as you have a business that scales. Now, back to payback period. You can— I want to shift the perspective on this, which is that, like, even if you currently spend and get paid back in 90, you should still think to yourself, like, Is there a way, is there a money model, is there a setup, is there a configuration of pricing and products of what I currently have without introducing operational drag or too much operational drag that could pull cash forward? And functionally, this is literally what the entire book for money models was about, was driving more cash flow forward. Now, if you have a business where you're funded from the outside, A, or B, you're a very large business that has huge capital reserves, you have a huge base of recurring customers, then you can get more aggressive. Of course, right? Like if, if you're going to go head to head with, you know, Apple, then sure, they can, they don't need to get their money back in 30 days. I mean, they are a bank at this point. Like they can, they can borrow money from the entire world and fund whatever they want. Um, but for again, everybody who's watching this, most of you guys are bootstrapped. Actually, can we do a poll real quick? All right. Let's say who here is bootstrapped versus has investors. That's it. Bootstrap versus investors. Okay, great. So 1 out of 25 of you guys, you don't have to worry about the payback period, but you still should, which is all the investor pros. Now, all the guys who have outside investors, I promise you, you will get investors frothing at the mouth if you can show that you can get payback period within 30 days. Number 1. Number 2, if you have payback period within 30 days, guess what you also don't need? Investors, because you don't need their money to scale, which gives you a huge amount of leverage into when you're getting into your fundraising period. Now, that's the 1 out of 25. For the other 20 out of 25 of you who are bootstrap business owners, y'all are like me, which is that I like Bank of Alex is what's funding this stuff. And so we have to think, are there initiation fees? Are there setup fees? Are there— is there an onboarding process? Is there an on-ramp? Is there a front-end defined program or setup that I can sell? Can I, can I bundle in some sort of physical product upfront with my services? Can I sell a bundle of an extended period of time to cash flow at day 1? Can I do a buy 1, get 2? Can I get them to pay for the last month up front? All of these are different tactical versions of solving for the same problem, which is I want to pull cash forward so I can recover CAC within that first month. Because when that happens, I'm telling you, like all of my businesses, every single one that's gotten really big, we have been able to recover what it costs us to get a customer in the first 30 days, period. So it's the strongest recommendation I can give you. All right, with that being said, let's go rule number— that's a 6, there you go— rule number 7, gross margins. So gross margins are wildly misunderstood, which is interesting. Um, if you are, if you are a business owner, you have to learn the language of business. All right, it is, it is for sure there are different languages, but there's, there's not a huge amount of words you have to know. You might need to know like 100 terms. And think about this as like you were studying for a test, right? Like learning 100 terms, not that hard to understand. And almost all of them are relationships between two things. That's what almost all of these terms are. So what is gross margin? It's one word that's a relationship between two things, how much you charge and how much it costs you to deliver the thing. And the difference between those things is your gross margin. To be clear, that's not your net profit margin. Which is a different ratio, right? Between two— not necessarily ratio, but the difference between two different numbers, right? But your gross margins are very important because it is what dictates everything else in the business. So what do I mean by that? If you— like, your net margins cannot exceed your gross margins. Think about that for a moment. If you have— if you're like, man, I'd love to run a 50% net margin business, that's an amazing goal, and I love that goal for you. If your gross margins are 50%, that means that you can have literally no other cost besides the thing you sell in the entire business. You can't have any cost of acquiring customers. You can't have any fixed overhead. You can't have any employees that are not specifically in delivery. You can't have any admin, any help. Of course, now the likelihood of, of you getting to a 50% net margin when you have 50% gross margins is basically zero. And so this is why— and traditionally small business owners will undercharge because they sell out of their own wallet, right? And they sell out of their own wallet in two different ways. They sell to their own wallet because they don't have that much money. And so they feel bad charging other people when they don't have much money because they're like, man, I get what it's like to struggle. And I think there's nothing wrong with that. It's just understand the business is not going to grow and you're not going to help more people. The other reason they sell to their own wallet is that they believe that the service they deliver is not that valuable because they know how to do it. So to quote the Joker, right, my father always told me when you're good at something, never do it for free, right? And so the idea is that like, you, I, like, if you're good at fixing cars, right, you're like, well, it comes naturally, it's not that hard, you gotta know where the, you know, it's like, it's what we do is really straightforward. To you, to you. But to a customer, we have to sell off the value of what their life would be like if they didn't have this problem solved. That is what we have to charge off of. And when we charge off of those prices, then we create more opportunity for gross margin. Now, All right, here's why this is so important. Let me give you a math example that will blow your minds. And I always, you know, everyone gets heart palpitations when I say math. So let's just say a money example. Okay, so let's give you a money example that'll get you really happy. All right, so let's say that I've got some service that I deliver, okay, and it costs me $100 a month. Okay, that's what it costs me in services and whatever. All right, so if I want to have 80% gross margins, which I said these are rules of thumb. My rule of thumb for services is at least 80%. Okay, so I want to show you two different scenarios here. So at 80%, at 80%, this $100, I have to have $500 has to be my price. Okay, at 70%, and I have $100 costs, Oh, who's— who can do this math for me? All right, I got to do this. All right, 100 equals 0.7. Julian, you were pre-med, do it for me. Or I'll, I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what 90% looks like. Equals $1,000. All right. Where is it? Where are we at? Why you jackasses keep asking? Thank you, Gross Salons. Is it 350? Is that it? We should, we should know this. I feel like as a collective community, we should be able to figure out when 30%. Okay. So it should be 100 divided by 0.3 is what it should be. So 100 divided by 0.3, right? It's 330. Thank you. So that would mean that $233,000 should be 70%. So $233,000 divided by $333,000. Correct. Thank you. Okay, so $333,000. Okay, so look at how big of a difference this is, right? Between these, between these numbers. Look at how, like, when people are like, oh, well, my margins are at 60%, so I'm close to 80%. It's like, bro, we're not even close. Like, you're in a different stratosphere. Okay, so let's take this to the natural end. If you have a business, let's say, that runs 20% margins at net margins at the end of the year, what you can pay yourself, right? If we say, hey, is there a way you think we could go from 70% to 90%? Well, that, that sounds like it's not that big of a deal, but when you go from 70 to 90, what happens to the actual margin? You double. You make way more money. And sometimes it means a lot more than that because sometimes the incremental margin is all margin, whereas every dollar revenue up to that point covered costs, right? And so what is our— we make $233 here, right? We make $400 here and we make $900 here per customer. Big difference, right? And so when people hear these numbers, because these numbers look similar, they think that these are going to be very similar and they are not. And so this is why I'm so adamant that 80% is my minimum. I target— like, that's my baseline. And then from— like, I will not get into a business with less than 80% gross margins. I won't do it because I know that I then have to run everything else off of this 80%, right? So if I want to have a 50% net margin business, I only have 30% left. I got 30% to cover everything else. I got to cover rent, I got to cover admin, cover insurance, I got to cover I gotta cover marketing, I gotta cover sales, I gotta cover everything else with just this 30% so I can have 50% left over. Is this ringing with you guys? Is this making sense? Even if it's a service-based business, bro, this is for service-based businesses. Not to you in Australia. This is for service-based businesses. And this may, this is why, like, So ideally, I like to have— I mean, again, this is minimum, and I know this is going to blow your minds here. Like, I— like, one of the first things we did when we fixed gyms is we made sure the pricing was at least 80% gross margins. That's a service business. Now, some of you are like, well, that's not possible. Of course it's possible. It's not possible when you sell a commodity. If a customer can look at your thing and somebody down the street's thing and say, these are about the same, I'll buy the cheaper one. You sell a commoditized service just like you can sell a commoditized product. And so you might have salt and salt and you got FSG salt and whatever, you know, Pink Himalayan, it's salt, right? And so how do we make these two things different? We have to brand. It's Pink Himalayan versus just normal salt, right? And they charge a premium for that. And so you have to figure out how to reconfigure. If only there were a book written about how to make an offer that's decommoditized so that you could achieve 80% or higher gross margins, that would be amazing, wouldn't it? And for those of you who don't know, I wrote a book on this. It's called $100 Million Offers, 27,000 5-star reviews. You should read it. But I want to draw this because this, like, if you're trying to figure out what's wrong with your business, it's usually because your margins are off, you're mispriced. But again, sometimes this is, this is the, this is the fundamental mathematical problem with the business. But this might really be the symptom of the fact that you have a commoditized offer, A. B, you have a sales process that doesn't function properly, right? And so that's the big idea. So if you wanna run a high margin business, then you have to run exceptionally high gross margins for whatever it is that you sell. Okay, cool. That math was tough, wasn't it? All right, so let's do rule number 8, rule of thumb number 8, if you will. 30-day cash collected. So this is an add-on to the 30-day payback period. So what is the exact amount of money that I want to have collected within that 30 days? It's going to be COGS, so the cost of delivering, cost of goods sold. I'll just write out cost of goods sold. Now the goods sold can be services too, to be clear. So it's cost of goods sold, how much it costs you for the stuff. Plus cost of getting customer. Okay, so if we have the cost of getting the customer and the cost of whatever we got them back, we want both those things together. We want whatever we collect to be greater We want the gross profit of the cash we collect in that first 30 days to be greater than this plus this. The reason this is so magical is that once this occurs, customer comes in, you acquire that customer, and then you have to deliver on that customer, and then that customer pays you back all of that cost. And then what can you do? Go get you another customer. That is why it's so magical. And so that is what the whole point of this 30-day cash collected thing is. We want to pull it forward. Cool. Great. Now manufacturing, steady with Zorro. No manufacturing, you have different margins because you have cost of goods sold and that's going to be a little different. I would, to be fair, I would still prefer to have a business that has 80% gross margins, but with services, for human services, I, I have that as my rule of thumb, is that I always want 80% or higher gross margins. Okay, that brings us to rule number 10, which is functionally rule number 9, but we're calling it 10 because I skipped number 9. Let's just go with it, which is churn and retention. So I want to only have to acquire customers once. The reason that most businesses cannot get big is because they are always filling a leaky bucket. Now you've heard this terminology before. But think about how difficult it is to acquire a customer. It's a lot of work, right? And to go through that entire process only to lose them, to have to go get another one, is exhausting. And so you want to be— and this is John Paul Digiorno, uh, this is a quote from him. He said, you don't want to be in the sales business, you want to be in the reselling business. And so what he meant by that is how do we get customers to just buy again and again and again, which does come down to product primarily and then brand secondarily. And so the idea here is that for your business to be A, significantly more valuable, but B, way more fun to run, you wanna keep the customers you have. And so when you're a small business owner, you're typically just barely figuring out what's going on. And so what happens is people will typically try to scale too fast before they've actually figured out revenue retention and churn. And so what are quote, good benchmarks? Well, good benchmarks for anything B2B is you probably wanna be above 80% in terms of retention annually. So that means that if I get 100 customers, Jan 1, right? So this is January 1st, let's say 2025. Jan 1st, 2026, I want to make sure that I have at least 80 of these customers. Now this is where people get confused. Let's say that they grow because they get better at marketing sales throughout the year. They, and they come January 26th and let's say they're at 160 customers. Is how many they have. They think, oh, well, I definitely retained all 100 customers and I also got 60 more. Uh-uh. We're looking at of the original 100, how many of them made it to here? This is the issue. Now, you can take whatever your annual retention is and then you can basically reverse engineer into what your lifetime value of a customer is. So if you have 50% annual retention, then you can take whatever someone pays over a year. Let's use simple math and say, Someone pays $100 per year. If you have 50% annual retention, then it means that you can basically double it. So you divide it by 50% equals $200 is what you're going to make from a customer. Now here's where this gets really wild. Let's say that you have 80% annual retention. Doesn't seem like that much different, right? It's only 30%. What is it actually different from a math perspective? It means that you're going to get functionally 4 turns, 5 turns, 5 turns, because every year you're going to lose 20%, right? And so simple math on that is around the back of napkin on that is about $500. What? Como se dice? A lot. Mucho dinero. All right. And so think about 2 businesses, and this is why this is so important. The cost of getting customers between different businesses is typically very commoditized. So CAC in an industry is a commodity. Think about how weird that is as a sentence. If there's two social media marketing agencies that both sell generically similar services, now of course we don't wanna do that, but this is how the industry by and large works. If you have two different businesses that are selling the same, relative, relatively the same thing, the cost of getting customers there is typically about the same. Here is where one business can become 5, 10, 100 times more valuable, is that those customers are worth 5, 10, 100 times more to the other business. And so they are able to play a huge arbitrage game so they can spend way more money in the acquisition than the business that only has, call it, 50% retention, right? This guy's getting 2.5 times more per customer than the first company, even though maybe the cost of getting the customer in both these scenarios might be the same. This is where there's a huge amount of alpha or kind of arbitrage above what market could get in terms of improving a business. And so right now, if you don't know how many customers stay with you year over year, definitely worth figuring out. And so that is my rule of thumb, is that I target. And so for each of these numbers, as I'm sharing them, is like, this is my target, this is what I want to get to. And if I don't have that, I see this as a huge problem in the business and I have to go fix it. Otherwise, I just know that I'm going to create a— I'm going to scale problems, right? When you scale problems, they just get meaner and uglier and they have more faces on them, right? You do not want to do that. And this is where most people's ego gets tied up in it, which is why most entrepreneurs can't scale. All right. So rule number 11, what is a good rule of thumb for how many people prepay? So a lot of you guys, some of you guys follow my stuff. I'm obviously a big fan of pulling cash forward because of all the reasons I already mentioned. One is if someone prepays for a year, no one can churn. If you prepay, right, you're gonna pay for the year. Can't really churn out, right? What other benefits happen when you prepay? Well, if you, uh, prepay, you get all that cash today. If you get all the cash today, what can you do with that cash? Go get more customers, right? Think about this. Everybody here should at least give a 10% discount for getting paid in full today. Why? Because the value of money today is typically at least— or at least that same value of that money in a year will be worth 10% more. At minimum, you could take the money, put it in the darn stock market,, right? And then wait a year and it would be worth 10% more. All right. And so like at minimum, that is a— that is the amount that I'm willing to give to pull cash forward. All right. Now, what percentages, rule of thumb, should you expect? So let me give you a couple. So if you have, call it a, a, like a buy 10, get 2 type deal, like you pay for 10 months and you get you get 2 for free, you can expect somewhere in the neighborhood of like 15 to 20% of people to take that offer. All right, if you give discounts in excess of that and you give bonuses for people prepaying, and so the way I think about that is 3 ways you can do that. How can I deliver something to them faster? How can I make it less risky? And then how can I make it easier? So if I say, hey, you can prepay, and if you prepay, you skip the line. Ah, that sounds nice. Hey, if you prepay, you'll get a dedicated concierge versus being in group. Hey, if you prepay, I'll also add in our guarantee, or I'll double the length of our guarantee, right? So these are some of the things that you can manipulate in terms of variables to pull cash forward. Now, when you have a moderate discount plus one or more of those kind of like ancillary benefits that I just rattled off, you should expect 30 to 40% of people to prepay. That's a monster difference in terms of cash forward. Now, simply offering that, for many of you, if you're not doing it, will pull cash forward. Now, a corollary to that is whether you have a third-party financing company. Now, this is directly from a firm. So I know a lot of the high-ups at a firm— not a lot, I just know a very high-up at a firm, I'll just say that. A handful of them. And the metrics that they quote is a 35% increase in sales overall. Kind of interesting. So not only does that money come forward, if you have good financing, you can also increase sales overall. People who would not have been able to buy are now willing to because they have more convenient ways of paying. So that kind of gives you a double whammy of, oh, people who wouldn't buy did, and they went from not buying to me having all that cash today, which is why having very good financing partners can be a a huge game changer for a business. Now, I will put this little caveat in place, which is that financing will not save your business. If your food sucks at your restaurant, financing it will just get more people to find out that the food sucks faster. All right, so I've never seen a business get saved by this, but I have seen businesses grow for sure by making some of these deals and putting them in place. Now, let me give you a couple payment structures that you can use that have worked really well for me. So right off the bat, if you just say like, hey, people go into monthly, it's like, that's a way way of doing things, but I would prefer to sell durations and then say, cool, prepay and get guarantee, priority, and concierge, right? Let's pull it forward. If they still can't, I say, great, let's split it half now, half in a month. Now, this is a little, little pro tip on this: half now, half in a month— I might sell 3 months or 6 months of stuff. There's no need for me to wait 3 to 6 months to get paid. I still want to get paid now and in 30 days because they got the money. I might as well ask Right? Worst they can say is no. After they say no to 2, I say, great, let's go for a 3rd payment. Again, 1, 2, 3. Even if it's a 6-month or 12-month, I want to pull that cash forward. Now, a little pro tip again is always ask what— if it's to, uh, if you're, if you're talking to a wagee, uh, ask them when they get paid and then align the payments on those days. If you're not talking to a wagee, you can ask when they have the, uh, the majority of their deposits hit. When they are the most cash flush in the business, and then you can set it for those dates. You do not need to coordinate payments with your delivery. Now, one of my favorite methods of payment so that I can pull cash forward is something that came out of the Depression in the 1930s, which is something called layaway. It might be something as old as time. I'm sure it was in 2000 BC, but I just know from the, from the Depression because of course I lived there at that time. And so the way it works is simple. You start paying now, and when you finish paying, you get the thing. Very straightforward. That's it. So you can— I remember, and I remember the first time I did this, um, I had— I was selling— this is with Alan. I was selling, uh, we had these big onboardings. What Alan was, uh, higher kind of enterprise SaaS. So we would sell to agencies, uh, it was $25,000 white label, and then they would use it kind of as their own operating system. And so it cost $25 grand to kind of like get onboarded. And so I would do 2 agencies at a time. We do a full day onboarding with me and my team and we'd help them get set up, walk them through everything, etc. Right now, I remember having 2 partners who were on the phone saying they're like $25 grand. They're like, that's awesome. And then they said, can we split into payments? And I said, sure. And they said, well, how many payments can I split it up to? And I said, as many as you want. And they were like, oh, amazing. We'll just spend, you know, we'll just do $2,000 a month and we'll pay it off, you know, this year. And I said, okay, cool. So we'll just set your onboarding for a year from now. And they're like, oh, we got to like pay before we come in. And I was like, yeah. And they— this is why it was such a reinforcing moment for me. They just said, oh, okay, well, we'll do half now and half in a month. And we'll be out next month. And so what's cool about layaway is that when people understand that, like, the faster they pay, the faster they get, they are now incentivized to pay it off as fast as possible rather than you trying to pull it forward, which is why I'm such a big fan of layaway as a payment option. In addition to that, collections become significantly easier because they haven't got anything yet, and so they've already decided they want this thing. I also like layaway because people have anticipation. Think of the last thing. Maybe you were a kid when you did this, but like, I remember there was a pair of Oakley sunglasses that I thought were the coolest ones. You might have remembered them. They were in, um, X-Men. Cyclops had that like orange, that orange pair. I think I was like, I don't know, young when that came out, and I thought he looked like the coolest guy ever. So I saved up for a whole summer doing chores to buy $160 sunglasses, right? Which is absurd, but I, I think they were $120 or $160 at the time. Inflation. And they were like the hottest, coolest sunglasses. So anyways, I save up the money, I get the sunglasses, and I remember the anticipation of being able to get the sunglasses at the end of the summer was better than the sunglasses ever were. In fact, it was so good I literally never wore them because I was so afraid of losing them because I'd spent so long to save them, which was also a great lesson in like sometimes you got to just learn to spend money and enjoy what you spend. A different thing for a different time. But that being said, you also benefit from that customer anticipation anticipation when you set up the payment this way. So there's a lot of benefits to doing this way, and the biggest one of all, you risk nothing. They pay before you deliver anything, and so you get to have the cash before you have to risk delivery. So those are all different ways you can accelerate cash flow in the business. Um, I'll give you a— let's see here, do I have, do I have any more notes that I wanted to go over? Yeah, I was going to give you guys some rules of thumbs for like different kind of conversion metrics. So one of the simple ones would be like, if you're doing— this thing is there's so many variations, so it's like If you're closing off of meta leads for in-person, it's like you should close 10% of the leads that you have. So you get 100 leads for an in-person service business, you should close about 10%. If you're above that, amazing. If you're below that, you probably have some opportunity for improvement. If you're closing off cold webinar leads, if you're selling to broader markets, you're probably looking at 2 to 3% conversion of those leads as in webinar opt-ins to sales. If you are a little bit more niched, then that can go up to 5% of leads. The craziest I've ever seen, and like, again, that's leads, not shows, right? Or people who are there during the offer. That's just overall, like you had 100 people opt in for webinar. All right. If you have a salesperson that's in person, right? If you're going to someone's home, again, my rule of thumb with salespeople in general with a proper sales process is 35%. I would like them to close at least 1 out of 3 of the prospects that they're getting in touch with. Typically, if it's higher than that, I will raise price. If it's below that, then I will fix the process before I would even consider lowering the price. Web pages, most times it's gonna be between 1% and 2% in terms of conversion rate on those pages. I'll give you a fun factoid for school. So I think school right now is at like 4%. It's really good for school about pages. And it's because when you have trust in a platform, that starts to increase your conversion overall. So I'll give you a wild example on this. Again, these are rules of thumb. Um, my Amazon page for my books, so like offers, for example, this is the last time I looked. Um, we convert roughly a quarter of the traffic that hits that page. That crazy. That's 1 out of 4 clicks buys. Now what you trade off when you have a platform like an Amazon, right, is that I'm not making all that money. Amazon's basically making all the money and then like paying me a small commission. And so you just have to play with the numbers there, which is like, okay, instead of it being, you know, 25%, I'm getting 2.5%. So I'm getting 10x the conversion per click and I might be getting 1/3 the gross profit. Is it worth it? Yeah, I'm still making 3 times as much money, right? But you just have to understand the difference between those things. I'll leave you with a final rule number 9, which is my— I'm filling the holes back up for rule number 9. Anybody remember Love Potion Number 9? I might be dating myself, That was a movie. You can Google it. Anyways, I'll bring this up, which is this: industry averages are dumb. And so what do I mean by that? The amount of times I've had a conversation where someone says, hey, you know, manufacturing, these, these, you know, these are, these margins are pretty good for manufacturing, or hey, you know, our margins are this in our industry. It's like, If the average American is in debt, divorced twice, overweight, and just mid as fuck, right, why would I want to have that be my bar to compare myself against? You say you have this— I mean, so many, so many, you know, business owners have this hatred for their competition. They hate their competition, they want to crush their competition, and yet you want to measure yourself by the same stick that your competition measures themselves? Well, it's a great way to be average. Right, is use averages as, as your determination of whether or not you're good. And so I would highly encourage you to just ignore averages altogether and play to win. And that is just something that has really served me well, which is like, somebody will come into a space and will say, well, you know, you'll learn, you know. I know you guys have seen this clip of Tiger Woods when he's doing his first interview before his first Masters or something. And the guy's like, he's like, well, you know, how do you feel being so young, you know, coming on the Masters Tour? And he's— I don't know how it gets to it, but he's like, I'm here to win, or I'm playing to win. And the guy's like, you'll learn, you know, you'll see. And then they play it forward like a year or two or whatever, and he's there with his jacket talking to the same guy, and the guy just has to like eat his words. Like, it's so visceral. Like, the moment is amazing.. And so like that is what I envision when I go into an industry that I don't know anything about. It's like, that is the advantage. I'm not going to— I'm not going to— I'm not going to operate within your frame of reality. Like, why would I operate within the frame of beliefs that what the average person has achieved is what I will achieve? Why would I say that is the appropriate outcome that I should be shooting for? What? Because fundamentally, when you quote an average to say this is good enough, you have accepted that you are no longer going to try to get better. And I just wholeheartedly reject that. Like, like the winner of every category is not the industry average. And I can almost promise you that they don't look at the industry average because why would they care? Like there's only like one rule that matters, which is physics. If it's as long as the rules of physics allow it to exist, there's no reason these— that we cannot get this outcome that we desire, period. And so I'll get asked the question like, do you think you can have, uh, margins in a manufacturing business that are above 10%? Yes. You know how I know? I also have a friend of mine who does complex machinery. You know what his margins are net? 70% net. Well, what does that mean about his gross margins? That means they got to be way above 70. You want to know what— how he did it? He builds machines that he sells to big industries that automate a function of different workflows, and he will charge $400,000 and a machine will cost him $17 grand because he has know-how. And so if you think about what a business is, a business is functionally a black box that transforms raw materials into an output where the value is higher than the inputs. That's it. That's all a business does is we have raw inputs, we transform these inputs into something that is more valuable at the end. That is all the business does. And when we do this over and over again, over an entire civilization, we take many raw inputs and we, we increase value. And that is how the entire world moves forward. And so with that being said, those are my 12 rules of thumb that I've learned in business, different ratios that I use as my guideposts, my lights, my lights, my— what's the light towers? What are those things on the edge of oceans? Lighthouse. Those are the lighthouses that guide my path. And I hope they serve you as much as they have served me.