The REAL Reason You’re Not Making as Much Money As You Want

You're not making as much money as you want because you're working on the wrong stuff. You're chasing opportunities rather than solving problems. So a problem is something that threatens the future livelihood of your business. So it decreases the likelihood that your business will continue to exist. So for example, if you get customer complaints from your product, that is a problem. If your processor, you know, relationship becomes a red flag, that is a problem. Your sales team starts dropping conversions. That is a problem. These are things that threaten whether or not you're going to be alive tomorrow. Now, the second bucket are missed opportunities. These are things that you are not doing, but you should be doing in your business that could expand or grow your business. Here is the fundamental problem. In my life, I have almost equally colored them the same as just things to do. I need to fix the sales team. I also need to get this email We need to get this follow-up campaign redone because it sucks, right? Or it's not there to begin with. We need to get this retargeting across all platforms. Why aren't we doing that? And you probably have this list of what I consider should-dos, right? I know I should be doing all these things, but I'm not. And so this is where this gets really painful for the entrepreneur, myself included, which is we only have limited resources, but our list of should-dos is unlimited. The amount of opportunities taken to their natural extreme is that you have a business that sells everything to everyone. Think about it. At every point there's, there's, oh, we could have a product here. That's an opportunity for revenue expansion. Oh, we should add in this other channel. That's a possibility or opportunity for revenue expansion. And so what ends up happening is that over time everything feels like something that you should do. And then over time your list just gets longer and longer and longer. And unless you delineate which thing is a problem and which thing is a missed opportunity, you will get way overwhelmed. So this is why I think this is so crucial. Missed opportunities are typically more fun. They're exciting, they're new things, they're shiny, and that's why us entrepreneurs love pursuing them. The reason that I talk about focus and the woman in the red dress so often is it's because it's the thing that I struggle with to this day most often. And so half of these sermons, probably more than half, are actually just me yelling at me, to be clear. Now, these are really fun and exciting, and they tend to be around the things that you love. And so if you're a product person, you're probably gonna have a lot of product should-dos. If you're a marketer, you're probably gonna have a lot of marketing-related should-dos. If you're customer success related, same thing. So if you're finance, same thing. Whatever your thing is tends to be the thing that you like doing the most of. And that's where you tend to see the most missed opportunities because that's where you spend the most time. You can always see the next step, the next step, the next step, and you keep wanting to grab those other things and bring them to your business because you see how much money that we're, quote, leaving on the table. Problems, on the other hand, suck and they're not fun. And it's usually you going into something that you set up once and having to fix. You thought it was gonna work, but it's not being executed properly or there's some key problem that you didn't expect. It's basically you did something, a new piece of information came to light, and now you have to do something about it. The reason beyond what I just said of why you shouldn't focus on the missed opportunities, because there's obviously so many of them, and then taken to the natural extreme, it's literally everything, is also because when you prioritize missed opportunities, you grow your business. But guess what else happens? You grow your problems. And so if you have not solved your problem before growing the business, that problem just gets bigger. Some of you guys may have noticed that I've been making a little bit less content lately. And so I've been super busy on this big missed opportunity. I'll put it that way. And I've been pouring tons and tons and tons of hours into this big new project, like massive thing for 2025. And Layla basically came to me and she was like, I'm dying over here. Like, I need your help. I need you back, right? Like, your head's not in the game. Like, you're like, we're, we're doing business every day and you're over here trying to build the future. And the thing is, is this is not a problem to be solved. It's a dichotomy to be managed. If you're the visionary entrepreneur in the business, it's normal for you to live 3 months, 6 months, a year plus out. That's normal. But you can't take your eye off the ball from today. And so for me, this was a pendulum that I was swinging too far in this direction. And so she was like, dude, you need to make some content. You haven't, like, you're not, you're not, like, you're not spending any time on it. And so, um, to give you context, I think over the last 2 weeks we've had, have we even had a scheduled recording session? Yeah. So we've had about 1, we've had 1 recording session last week and this is now 1 today. And the ones that I was going to, I wasn't as prepared as I should have been. For those sessions, I was like, all right, all right, what are we, what are we talking about today? And then, you know, the team kind of basically gave me, gave me the talking points. And so for you guys, it may not be content, right? It may be you need to make ads. It may be you need to be looking at the outbound team. It may be our customer success is failing, whatever that thing is. It was the thing that's hard, right? And so for me, like, I, it's like, despite the fact that everyone thinks that I'm a content creator, this is not my main job. All right. And so My life is not, as much as I try, right? As much as I try to make more content for everybody, like it's not the main thing still. And so, but I let it get away from me. And so the thing is, is like I've given, I've learned to over time give myself a little bit of grace in saying this, I will never solve this. It is unsolvable, but it's simply about percentages of the pie that I'm going to allocate to now versus the future. And I get a little bit too over-indexed on the future. That's in my nature.. And so I have to overemphasize the present because this, if this doesn't work, then that will never happen anyways. And I think Layla has always been so grounded in today and I've been so grounded in the future. That's been our yin and yang. But we both try and meet in the middle. I have to pull her towards the future, be like, hey, let's like, this is where we're going. This is, we have to build it this way to get to here. And she's like, yeah, but that's a massive pain for me. And I will tell you something that I have, and now it's taken me far too long to learn, is that it's easier to solve small problems than big problems. And so when we were thinking about putting the sequence of what things we're going to prioritize, by the way, the TL;DR of this is this is strategy. Strategy is prioritizing limited resources against unlimited opportunities. These are things that you could do with these resources versus the resources you have. And so if you have a fixed pool of resources, the first things, and this is like, I'm re-looking at my, my list right now, are the things that probably suck. They are the problems. And that is where you can spend or should spend, in my opinion, your time. Because when you solve your problems, guess what else also happens? You grow. You would like my team to go over that list of things that you have to grow your business. The things that are the missed opportunities and also the problems and give you a step-by-step plan to solve those because we probably have solved them for businesses just like yours because we have a lot of different companies, probably bigger than yours in the portfolio. And so if you'd like that, we are holding workshops here in Vegas. This is my actual portfolio team. We hold them 1 or 2 times a month. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com and you can click the scale button. And if your business qualifies, we'd love to see you out here. Opportunities can grow your company. Problems solved also grow your company. But when you solve problems as you grow, you get growth through getting better. When you grow through capturing missed opportunities, you grow through doing more. And to be fair, I have no problem with growing through doing more, but I do have a problem when more also creates more problems. And so, If the goal of the entrepreneur is to allocate resources across the entire company to achieve the best returns, then we should be allocating more of our time towards solving problems that are coming up on a daily basis. When you have a business that no longer has problems, you will grow by default. And so my allocation of resources has gone in this direction. Now I want to zoom out and make this super tactical for you. You probably look at data, hopefully, if you follow my stuff to any degree, on a regular basis. Now, if you're earlier on, you have to go gather that data from tons of places. As you get more advanced, that data becomes pushed to you via dashboards or direct reports. People present those things on meetings, it's the first slide, and then you talk about the data. So I wanna give you a 201-level hack here that will change how you run your business. Number 1, the data that you choose to display must be there for a reason. One of the biggest problems that I see across our portfolio companies and even within our holding company is that my direct reports and my employees often over-report because they know I love data. And so they're like, look at all of this data that we have. But if you present me a piece of data and a change in that data does not result in a change in behavior, it is a waste of time. And so right now, if your data, it's noise, not signal, team should know what behavior this data influences. If our average view duration drops, then it could be from a number of reasons. But if it does drop, are we going to do something about it and what are we going to do? This also will target your discussions or orient your discussions with your team. And so if they come to you and say, hey, We wanna run a meeting about this. The end result of every meeting should be a change in behavior. It should be, what are we going to do? Now, if someone says, hey, I wanna report these trends that we're seeing, cool. And I'll give you a really recent one that happened. I had a vendor for a platform a while ago, and the vendor was telling me, hey, we should go for shorter versions of this type of content. And I was like, okay, why? And he said, well, because when we shorten it, a higher percentage of people watch it or consume it. And I said, why do I care? What does the view duration or listen duration have to do with any of the metrics that we have in this business? Can you prove to me that us getting a higher percentage of people viewing a shorter piece of content in some way drives our business? Now, If he then said, yes, pieces of content that have higher average view durations or average listen durations then create more shares, then I would say, got it, done, we're doing it. But if you just report, oh, we should do this because it improves this metric, how does that metric tie to getting us more customers or making customers worth more? If you can't tie why this thing or this metric that we somehow track that tracks to this, I do not care. And the reason I think this is so important is that we have such limited attention in business every single day that if someone's going to buy or bid for our attention, they better damn well have a good reason for it. And also, your team is limited as well. They are human beings too. And so they have many people, they've got Slack messages, they've got emails, they've got meetings, and then they have the work that they're actually supposed to do. And so if you have a quarterly, for example, and you have your whole team there, if you aren't clear about what change in behavior the data is going to create, you are wasting your time and theirs. If after that day or after that meeting you go back to business, you might as well have just taken the day off. Wrapping this back to problems and missed opportunities. You will probably have significantly more data around your problems than you will around missed opportunities. Missed opportunities are going to be purely hypothetical. We think if we get this percentage of people to convert and they pay this price, this is the revenue uplift that we have potential to capture. All of this is hypothetical. Fine. On the problem side, we have to look at what thing we're going to change to fix this problem. And so this is how we do it. We have 4 steps, all right? So if you're writing this at home, then this is the writer-downer part. Number 1 is the condition or the goal that we are trying to, the problem we're trying to solve, all right? This is how, this is current, this is desired. Cool. Next thing is what is the action? What are we going to do? And this is, to be clear, a hypothesis. Our churn rate is at 5%. Okay, we hypothesize that if we do a one-on-one reach out to every customer as they enter our, you know, buy our product, we will decrease churn. That's the hypothesis. It's an action tied with what we expect and the reason for taking this cost on, because it will cost you money to do this, cost resources. The third bucket, and this is the fun one, did we do it or not? So this is the before and after. So we have the problem, here's how we hypothesize it, we have what data that we want to affect. So churn rate was the percentage, we want it to go down, we hypothesize it's gonna go down by this much, cool. That's the before. The after is, did we do it or not? Very simple. Because you can have this whole hypothesis, get to the end of the quarter, get to the end of the week, and then say, oh, we didn't really do it. Okay, well then we didn't test the hypothesis. Now here's the fun one. Let's say you do it. Did what we expect to have happen happen? Because we're guessing that if we do this thing, churn will go down, but we could do the thing and churn could remain the same. And so it cost us time and it cost us money, but the problem remained unsolved. And this is the nature of business. And this is why your second business grew way faster than your first business, because you already knew the solutions to the problems that you were going to create along the way, and then you run smack into problems that you don't know how to solve. And this is why I want to hit on this so hard. You're not growing because there are problems that you need to solve that you're not solving because they're not fun and you don't know what to do. So instead, you're doing more of the thing that you know to do around opportunities, but you still have not solved the problem. And you've done this enough times that you've now grown the problems to the point where where it's stifling your business, and so you have to stop. And so you have to look at that big to-do list that you have, and you have to think, which of these are problems that I need to solve that will make us better, and as a result of being better, grow our business? And which of these are opportunities that are missed that we think that we could do but aren't doing yet? I would encourage you to take that entire list of missed opportunities, the MOs, and just move them somewhere else. And what I have is something called Alex's Big Money-Making Idea List. Everybody in the company knows about this. I have more ideas than we have capacity to implement. And I have learned through many years of working with Layla that I actually only get maybe 1 out of 10 or 20 that I actually get to do because you don't have unlimited shots on goal. That is the problem. So Jeff Bezos has the saying that is the beginning of this book, I'll actually read it to you because I think it's so, it's so significant. Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a 10% chance of 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time, but you're still going to be wrong 9 times out of 10. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is 4. In business, every once in a while when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tail distribution of returns is why it's important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments. Now, here's the one flaw, and Bezos is much smarter than me, much richer than me, but there's one flaw with the analogy. If you go to a casino and you have a a 100x payoff and you've got a 1 out of 10 bet, then you should make that bet every time under one assumption: that you can bet as many times as you please. Let's say you go to the casino and it's a $10 minimum bet and the bet's 100x payoff, but you only have $20. You're only going to get 2 swings, which means the likelihood that you fail entirely is 4 out of 5. You have a 20% chance of actually winning, an 80% chance of losing, period. And so this is, in my opinion, a more realistic take of what it's like to be a business owner. We do not have unlimited swings. We do not have unlimited resources. And so we have to be incredibly measured with which swings we choose to take. And so the highest likelihood swings are the problems that need to be solved in your business today. These are the sure money. These are the, as soon as you solve it, you cash it in. The things that are certainly not certain is the missed opportunities that are purely hypothetical. And so if you solve all the problems that you have at a current level, once you get to that, and there are times where you get there where everything's kind of humming along, that is when you look up your big missed opportunities list, your big money-making idea list, and you say, Now, which of these will I take? And here's the interesting thing. If you do this, you will find that many of the ideas that you were jazzed about 2 months ago, now you think are stupid because you found out more from solving the problems that actually give you more information that this is actually not a missed opportunity. And so it increases the likelihood that the swings you do take, the big swings, do result in the big payoff. And so I was like, this is like the ultimate sleep on it. Like if you have an amazing idea, don't tell them right then because you're gonna oversell everybody, you're gonna oversell yourself. If you sleep on it the next day, you're a little less psyched. If you come back to it 2 months later, you'll be amazed at how many of these things you just won't even wanna do anymore. And think about how stupid it would be if 2 months later after looking at all your ideas, 90% of them you don't wanna do anymore. It means that every one of those things that you shoved down your team's throat because you were excited about it, was a mistake. It was you failing as an entrepreneur because you got too distracted, you got too excited about shiny object, you got too into the stuff that you like rather than confronting the stuff that you hate that will absolutely grow your company. This is something that I'm personally working on and I'm heated about it because this has been such an epiphany for me in terms of— because I love any frameworks that allow me to better prioritize, that allow me to be a better strategic thinker for my business. And so this operationalizes better. What you guys can expect from me is, um, I will be prioritizing making more content for you guys. Um, I hope you guys have liked the deeper content stuff, like the real business stuff. I think right now, I'll tell you honestly, we settled on a 6 to 1 ratio. So basically 5 out of every 6 videos are going to be deep business stuff. Like if you guys haven't seen the last 3 videos that I put up on YouTube, especially the one before last, there's a banger case study on what we did to make $3 million more profit in one of our portfolio companies to increase customer satisfaction scores, decrease refunds and chargebacks, increase retention rates by over 40% just by fixing our onboarding process in this particular business. And so every company needs some sort of onboarding process, whether you're a physical products business, you're a software company, you're a service business, You need to have that stuff. But guess what? That was a problem, and it was a problem that we solved, and it immediately made us more money. And we should have put more attention on that even sooner because the reputation that we would have would be simply better, right? So like, the earlier you create that amazing customer experience, the more customers who go through it, the more people have positive things to say about you. And so I say all this to say, One main thing. Confront your problems today. Forget about your opportunities for tomorrow. Put them on the big list. Once you've solved all the problems, go revisit the list and then pick the one that has the highest likelihood of yielding the biggest return for you and then go all in on it. If this content was valuable for you, check out either of these two videos.