$100M Investor Answers The Most Important Business Questions for 1 Hour

a number of businesses just lined up over 2 days to ask me questions they range from $200,000 a year to $140 million a year and the crazy thing is is the questions between businesses are so similar that they apply to all of them and we pulled out the best moments that we think will give you the highest Roi enjoy hey Alex thanks yeah you bet so my name is Zach LaVine we sell Pain Management Services to New Yorkers okay um Integrated Pain so kpt um but like old people young people women men it we have

a bunch of avatars right now which is potentially a problem brick and mortar brick and mortar we're out of network insurance which is a dying which we'll get to reason we do 4.2 in Revenue you're mostly insurance or you're mostly cash mostly Insurance oh mostly Insurance out of network got yeah 4.2 want to get to 20 okay got it we have three offices and don't know exactly how to transition out of the dying business model obviously our industry is growing yeah so what business model are you thinking about switching to cash H I have a

bunch of friends who are in network and murdering it in network yeah do why don't you get in network we've just heard It's a Grind Comm you know it's commoditized down the bottom race to the bottom yeah why do you feel like the wind that you have right now is dying from out of network uh because reimbursements from payers are declining each year whereas inflation cost going up um and because the amount of people who have out of network benefits is dwindling as well it's mostly just corporate um and that's even declining uh yeah they're

just getting smarter and they want to push everyone in network so we're getting squeezed administrative burdens through the roof with prior R all this crazy so this is a therapy provider who bills Insurance he's dealing with an issue that a lot of uh out of network are dealing with which is that reimbursements AKA what insurance companies pay providers is going down but inflation and costs are going up and so that's squeezing their margins and for this individual he was making zero profit and so he felt like he needed to change his model quickly and so

basically had two options you could go Network which is you have guaranteed customers but you're getting in a lot of ways like lower quality customers that you know government and things like that are paying for Mass Market insurance is paying for or you can go cash cash pay right like you can people can just pay privately for whatever you want and so he felt more aligned with the cash payment and so either way though I think understanding what strategy is required to win within each of those paths was kind of the real decision which is

like what problem do you want to solve do you want to solve the problem of learning how to Market and sell customers because that's what it's like when you are in kind of the cash business right and if they've never done that before then that's a real that's a real Beast to get over on the other hand if you want to be in network then it's going to be a business all about operational efficiency it's about Returns on Capital and basically how efficiently you can staff up and how low you can keep costs across the

business because you have no pricing power right so it has to all be off of efficiency and so those are basically the two paths that he had and so I wanted to walk him through the the kind of the questions to figure out out which of those he felt more aligned with and it sounded like he definitely wanted to go more the premium cash pay version and so that was kind of the direction that I let him in so you basically see it as like I could either go in network and then make your entire

business model around operational efficiency um which is which is I mean I've got somebody who murder it doing that so I don't think there's anything wrong with that um or alternatively you just go premium be the best and be be private right be cash by so the question is how do you transition it yeah yeah I think we've decided as a team collectively we just don't want to be in network because of the lifestyle you know whatever I get it and who you deal with yeah yeah a pain um literally for you uh or really

I guess for them uh so fundamentally I think you just have to think about this as basically starting a business over but with resources already you don't really have to think about the service you probably have to think about the packaging itself so like what's the what's the grand some offer for this yeah um and you'll you'll have a number of like you're you're just going to become a normal business which is just like you will run advertisements and you will make offers to people and they will come in and then they will take their

credit card out and they will buy stuff from you um and so it's probably more that it conceptually feels complex more than it actually is and so it's probably a ripping the Band-Aid off thing which is that I would just out like so one is what channel of acquisition are you going to use I'm guessing right now is it mostly Word of Mouth yeah it's referrals okay business for a long time yeah so um one is you can start sell upselling existing customers so like obviously they have what's covered in from insurance but then um

you know upselling other packages that'll get your team a little bit used to being like it's okay to pay us that's from like a really tactical level uh but from an acquisition perspective you've got content you've got Outreach and then you've got you've got paid ads right and alternatively you could have Affiliates so we have to pick so of those four things which ones do you feel like you are better suited so from Affiliates it's like uh go to shoot injury attorneys or like you want to find the the person that they're going to see

prior to hitting you we've tried a bunch of that and the issue there is that they want to sent in network or if you're injury attorneys to workers comp cases which don't pay very well so so you don't want to go from that perspective so you don't want to do Affiliates content probably in my opinion probably isn't the the the best way um so then you have Outreach and you've got paid ads I'm going to bet paid ads is going to be your better bet since it's local it's pretty straightforward um operationally it's not complex

like running paid ads in a local area is like pretty easy um you drop a pen you do you say we need more like so obviously we have a bunch of different types of avatars so like really now like how would you say going about you're probably going to end up finding that you have one to three offers that actually convert and then the remainder of your business will be upselling and cross- selling when they walk in the door so instead of thinking about your businesses having like you know we have 15 Services we advertise

all 15 you're going to have one to three that convert really profitably on the front end and then the remainder of your business is cross selling and upselling so it's like you're going to have the most efficient door into your business and then you'll end up just cross selling and upselling people and retaining people from from from there and so like in terms of next steps it's you need to record an actual ad for an offer and then put it on meta and then drop a pin on the map and do a 10 mile radius

hopefully all three are close together and you'll run the ad that'll then go to either a CRM or if you're low Tech you can just go to Google Sheets and then you can have your front desk call them within 60 seconds and then if they don't pick up call them again and get them booked because your time is valuable you'll probably want to consider running some sort of Highly discounted assess on the front end so that' be like a $200 yeah x-ray or something like that that they can get for 19 or 20 you don't

care about that you just want a credit card on file so that when they walk in the door you have two things one is that when they walk in the door uh well one you you want them to walk in the door because they paid two you can charge a no- show fee if you want to um but typically if you're getting even a low ticket amount you'll be in the 70 to 80% sh rate so you won't waste uh so pay up front actually put out their credit card yeah yeah okay and just for

the for the discount offer now when they come in the door you'll do the assessment and then after the assessment you don't treat them you'll do the sale appointment then you sell at point of greatest need not point of greatest satisfaction so at that point is when you'll make the offer um and then you'll be like hey awesome do you want to use the card we have on file because you already have it on file because you got it earlier and makes so much smoother sale so the issue he's dealing with that he's at he's

at optimized stage he's 20 to 49 in terms of his headcount and the issue number one that he has is that he can't hire higher level talent because they expect full compensation and he basically has very little cash to bring in the talent that He needs right so that's number one issue that he's dealing with um he's spending money to grow but he's not growing money's missing and so that's an issue that he's dealing with in finance because he has so many kind of products and services the Improvement between those things has gone down and

ads aren't converted basically he doesn't have any real ads or real way of getting customers in and so costs are going up right and so these are the issues he's dealing with which is really common at this stage now let's look at what he has to probably do in order to improve it and so he has to create customer segmentation by cohort and activation process and then install sales training uh for his team so that he can start segmenting people and upselling them down a customer Journey path instead of marketing all of these different products

he basically needs to make one or two or three entrance points in the business then cross sell and upsell all of these additional services that might not convert as well in the front end but work very well for continuity or for upsells and down or even high ticket up sales on the back end and so he basically has to shift his perspective from somebody who builds Insurance that's just like whatever they take off the menu you know because Insurance encourages people to be like here's all the different services and this is what we pay for

them and so people just try and offer lots of stuff once you have a cash business it's all about efficiency of acquisition you're trying to acquire customers as profitably as possible and then Ascend them to the highest LTV and so this is basically what he has to build is the sales system the uh the ad assembly process to increase the volume of people coming in segment the customers and then learn to head hunt higher level roles once he increases the cash flow got it does that help yeah definely that's what you have to do like

you you have to learn how to acquire customers that are cash based and so that means that you have to run ads and you have to sell what would you do like if you were saying from a strategy standpoint like we have the current business that's doing 4.2 million in Revenue you're going to keep that business but your all of your discretionary resources are going to go towards this if you want to build build a bridge to tomorrow yeah should we do any of the more on the things that are still working within out ofet

networ like it's really just a you know we have limited resources how much should we spend on each profit we're basically at zero oh yeah it's part of the problem yeah we waited yeah we wait longer than yeah yeah I understand because you can't control how you're reimbursed no but we can remove the lowest reimbursement reimbursing patients which is like remove Medicare then we can lower our cost structure we could go that route I think that would probably be the first thing that I would do and then you cash flow so yeah you you use

the resources in terms of time and money to build the bridge that make sense yeah thanks a lot Alex yeah you bet so all of these things are on The Graduate list at this stage and that's because businesses behave in patterns by the way as a free gift for you if you like this scaling roadmap and would like to know where you're at you can go to acquisition. roadmap uh and plug in information and it'll spit it out for you exactly where you're at don't worry it's absolutely free so go enjoy it um if you

want my team's actual help on the thank you page you can schedule a call and we'll see see if we can help you out hey Alex uh my name is Henry I sell uh education I teach people how to fix and flip uh mainly the Hispanic market so it's only in Spanish uh we did 1.3 mil last year uh second year in business and we want to do 3 million this year so with the more better new right right now uh we only do two events a year big events 600 people and we upsell to

a high ticket uh 12,000 right and we convert 20% of the room more or less so that 80% that went to that room never sees me again I never sell them anything again okay and well that 20% they bought my high ticket the mentorship is a year sure and after that I don't sell them anything ever again okay so uh more or better do I just do more of these events and like NeverEnding looking for new customers for the rest of my life or I focus no you're good you're in education yeah and education graduates

people yeah that's how Education Works so if you look at the education system overall the way to create continuity in education is just always have something else to learn or to teach right like first year now you're an undergrad now you're a graduate student now you have a masters then there's a PhD and you get a second PhD like you just you just keep you know people just become endless students and so do you want to sell the business eventually or do you just want to make money uh make money I mean we're not no

it's fine no I prefer the truth um yeah I mean the easiest thing to do is just double the amount events you're doing either just do you can either go one a quarter or you can do two at 12200 and would you travel or just stay in where I'm at in Miami is that where you run them now in Miami yeah would do East Coast West Coast yeah yeah maybe Texas or something yeah okay so Henry is at the product tie stage and the issue that he's dealing with is that customers have nothing else to

buy and turn literally right there first line and he says it himself all right and so in order to graduate he has to connect his customer success to product and then make something new to sell them which is the backend so I recommended he follow exact that advice um and create either a higher level thing or if he wants to build out a continuity that actually sticks maybe considered down selling something that's maybe a cheaper annual fee uh for continued access uh to some of his services and events but the big picture though was what

does he want to do now if he just said I want to sell this company then we have to create some sort of Revenue retention so that it becomes valuable but for him he was like I just want to make more money and so then the obvious answer is like cool then just do way more and so instead of just the two events on one side of the US put two events on the other side just like that you can double the business with really no operational risk whatsoever I mean you have a really simple

solution like just run the same Playbook more times if I would if you were like I want to build a more valuable business then I would say take the year to figure out Revenue retention which is how do I get these people who pay me $112,000 to pay me another $112,000 or pay me $30,000 next year or even downsell them to something that's $5,000 a year but they stay right and focus on retaining that top tier that paid me the high ticket yeah but I think considering for the model that you have downselling the upsell

um I actually like a lot okay so if they paid you 12 maybe they'll stay for three year three to five um just to have access to the network and some of your vendors and the stuff that you kind of like provide um and I think that's something that people would be far more likely to stick with and so then you can basically think about your business as from a zooming all the way out perspective is that the $112,000 is actually going like offset CAC uh which is like you could break even the $12,000 if

you know that someone gets into a $3,000 year membership that's pretty much all margin that doesn't leave so it's like that allows you to spend way more than your competition because they need to make money on the 12 you can break even on the 12 and then you just have the stack of $3,000 bills that just keep stacking up that's like low low effort to maintain got it that make sense yeah it's good the nice thing is that you're honest about just wanting to make more money it makes this a lot easier yeah yeah yeah

don't say I want to make an impact so big make sure he's an education business and education businesses graduate customers because they teach you I mean if you do a good job you graduate that's kind of how School works right and so the real continuity and education is just more education right look at College then you have Masters then you have a PhD then you have a double PhD and then you're just crazy who knows all right so the point here though is that he could try and build a recurring Revenue stream from this business

but in all likelihood his goal was just to make more money and so why add complexity if that's not his goal so I was like cool just run more events and do them in different areas so you attract different customers hey Alex thanks for everything that you've done uh I'm James I sell custom Branch railings to homeowners okay I we did 420 or so last year uh I was I've read 10x is greater than 2X and so last night I was coming to me again like do I really just want to double or do I

want to try to 10x um and so what I want to try to do is to develop a network of product specifiers Architects designers contractors that can act kind of like a referral Network I want to shift away from the minnows and to focus more on whales we had one client last year about $50,000 worth of handrails and if I could get 10 of those in a year then I would double Revenue just with 10 clients so kind of what are my best strategies to go about achieving that so where did you Source the single

whale this year he found me it's all inbound it's all through search okay so SEO or PBC SEO okay I just started Facebook ads about three or four weeks ago they're going pretty good qualified about half of the lead so far so I would so if you want to go whale hunting then I think your your initial thought strategy of finding the architectural firms and engineering firms and whatnot is a good one um I would probably try the Outreach method um as my primary way because you can be hyper targeted in terms of who you're

reaching out to and the the key to making it work though is like what's in it for them to refer you business are you asking me that that's an excellent question Okay so Architects will typically in a plans like if they make a set of plans they'll specify what kind of tiles to use and what kind of Windows to use Etc so I've I've we've gotten plans in the past where it's like it's got the pictures from the website with the cad drawings and everything on the plans and so it's like how to persuade them

to do that kind of In Absentia and I should also note that we ship Nationwide so this is not like you know a hyper loal are you shipping or you are you doing installs or no no we haven't done an inst are you just you just actually we just ship product interesting got it then who are the decision makers well right now it's been primarily residential is what it sounds like right it's primarily home owners we've done some commercial work you know but it's primarily homeowners who are you know looking for something different and so

it's very what I call intentional inbound search it's like they're looking for something they are deliberately searching it out they find it you know we have uh a lead magnet kind of which is like 250 IDE it's SEO and I you know yeah well this is a fundamental change in business strategy so you're aware of that so with that comes risk because the highest risk adjusted return move or lowest risk I guess is probably adding like if I were like tomorrow what would I do I'd probably just add PPC in right now um because you

already have something that's working on SEO I would probably see how can I get way more articles written so that my SEO traffic can go up can I tackle more you know more keywords um that's like the for sure will work and make you more money play the going after Wales for sure can make more money because why not add zeros to things um it'll just be a completely different sale and you'll have two levels of sales so sale number one is going to be for the Affiliates and then figuring out what's going to make

it worth it for them and then the second level is what's you know what's the actual sale to the to the whale customer so what James has is he's using Affiliates to get customers which is this is inside of the leads book all right and so um Affiliates are businesses that have your customers that market and sell your stuff to them all right and so fundamentally I walk James through the three different ways that I have found that work best uh for Affiliates so who's the decision maker with the whales um like the final decision

maker is going to be is going to be the homeowner whoever is doing the project but so you just want bigger homeowners the The Architects have the ability to specify it and to put it in front of the client so like we also did another one which was about 60,000 for a guy that was doing a development of airbn in in Virginia he put up like six YT kind of things and uh you know so I had two B very big so both of them were Architects that sent you these the one was an architect

and the other was a construction company okay yeah so you're going to have to go B2B Outreach is the prime basically when you look at core 4 that's going to be your what you're going to do and then they're going to be your Affiliates and so the the million-dollar question is what's in it for them so my my proposition would be so there's three ways you can do Affiliates at least you know in the world of Alex so you have they sell your for you and they and they get a commission that's option one that's

typically my least favorite option but it is an option option two is that you give them some morsal of something that you sell that they can sell for 100% markup they could keep all the money but you get the introduction this is my favorite way of doing it the third way is that you um allow them to just bundle in your free thing with their services know with architectural firms it's not like they're going to bundle in a railing uh for their serice but just for everybody else like those are the three things so it's

like they bundle your your basically your lead magnet in for free with their thing they sell so it makes it enhances the value of their Revol package you give them the things so they can upsell your lead magnet for an amount of money that they can keep 100% of or they just sell your stuff and they get a kickback is there a version for this where they can just upcharge like you can do a small portion of this that they get 100% of 100% like I don't think so like maybe some kind of contractors or

architect discount we wanted them to be stupid to say now yeah because like the generic like you get 20% kickback is just like everyone does it like who here does 20% Kickbacks for anybody who refers your business you can raise your hand I'm not going to be upset okay and so the point is is that and you probably no one here has referred anyone else business and because no one cares that's that's kind of the point and so it has to be an irresistible offer and so if we give away the lead Magnet or some

think about it as like my CAC for a $50,000 customer is the cost of the lead magnet and if I close one out of three introductions then it's 3x the cost of lead magnet is my cost to Aire customer which is usually pretty darn good so what I outline with James is right here on page 237 is that there's three ways you can integrate your product into their offer basically getting an affiliate to sell your stuff and so I order these from easiest to hardest so first you can give away your lead magnet with every

purchase so they just give away your stuff for free uh in order to to get to get leads right so they'll sell their product with your lead Magnet or they'll just give your lead magnet away but either way you're not making anything from it they're just going to give it away second is that you can get them to sell your lead magnet separately to Their audience which is my preference right you give away something that has hard cost or real cost um and you let them sell it for whatever and then the cost to you

is just the cost of delivering the thing right and so if I had a marker business right I might say I let you sell one of my markers and let's say my marker cost me0 50 uh for whatever you want to charge for it and they're like I can sell this marker for $5 I be like cool you sell it for $5 but I now have a contact of somebody who bought these markers and I might call them up and say hey you've got blue do you want red and do you want green and do

you want black and all of these are $5 now my hard cost is just the 50 cents it cost me to deliver the marker and so the question is what percentage of customers do buy a blue marker byy the other three and so if I found out one out of two customers to buy a marker at0 50 cents end up buying these then my cost to acquire customer through Affiliates is 50 cents times two so the cost of delivering my lead magnet is the actual cost and here's the crazy part if they go make zillions

of dollars selling your thing great it means that you're going to make even more money upselling your stuff and so a lot of people get very greedy about what other people are making off of their stuff just focus on the money you're making whether the deal makes sense for you that's one of the piece of advice that ilila actually taught me she said never count the other guy's money um and it's a really good piece of advice and I'll will pass it on to you but it sounds like an irresistible offer to the Architecture Firm

because they're like we can just sell this and keep 100% you're like yep just make the introduction and I'll deliver that and then when you talk to the customer you're like yeah I'll deliver that here's one rail but you need 10 more and then you make the sale does that make sense I'm not entirely sure like people would order the entire project okay so it's not like you can just like I can't just ship you a sample and be like hey look here's a then you're going to have to do the commission B structure which

is not my favorite but um that's probably the way you're going to have to do it so either you can do the discount I mean I would say guys I have 20% that I can play with here so you can take all 20 and give them no discount you can take a 10% discount and then they get and you get 10% Kickback like this is what I got I'll make it work whatever way you want but this is my bare bottom price okay and I think that's what like that's the outbound strategy so should I

then in turn raise prices for direct consumer yeah I love that okay thank you yeah love that for you the reason I like that second offer because I think it's very compelling now obviously the third way you can do it is just get them to sell your offer and then have some sort of Kickback obviously many companies do this it has to be very compelling because almost every business I know is like yeah I give 20% at least in Services every business I know gives 20% uh you know Kickbacks for anybody who refers business their

way it's like yeah but no one does anything with that and so it has to be enough that would really change someone's Behavior so think about it like this is that the offer has to be good enough that it changes what they do with their business if it doesn't change what they do the offer wasn't compelling enough or you made it too hard right so it's either make the thing better or make it easier for them my name is Cody um I sell roofs of people um we did 140 million uh last year trying to

do 250 million uh this year trying to figure out how to follow the principle of giving away more uh you know guarantees and and bonuses when I have such high hard cost yeah and such a high ticket item yeah well what are gross margins right now uh 40% gross what's Net 10 to 15 okay got it um do you want to sell it or do you just want to keep it forever or well I actually just sold my roofing business and now we're part of a PE firm that that now I'm directing that that entire

all so you the platform yes okay so you're the platform and how many tukens have they done eight got it how long has it been since they started uh about three four years um I I just got acquired 30 or we just closed 30 days ago and now they're trying to roll everything into my brain brand and I'm chaos spearhead yeah yeah got it okay so sorry go back to the original question now I have like better context on this so how do I give a uh you know follow the principle of of give away

more value make the you know offer so good it's it's you know you got to feel dumb saying no when I have such high hard cost I you know I can't really do a money back guarantee I can't really give away more than a you know a roof well the question is is that the constraint like is that the thing that's limiting the growth of the business in in my theory yes because if I create a good enough offer then um I could roll that offer out to the other eight eight other brands and that

would be the biggest amount of Leverage that I could deliver you know in the shortest amount of time and is everyone insurance-based that's why they acquired us because we're retail and so so so you're the only guy selling just new rubs everyone else is doing storm chasing and damage repair and like that correct and what they want us to do is bring the retail model to the other brands um and add another layer is we sell everything 100% virtually so no inhome appointments it's it's all you know digital and so that's what they that's the

vision is is taking that you know Nationwide centralized sales virtually so you want an irresistible roof offer the greater the change the greater the risk that the change doesn't yield the outcome that you want in the business and so fundamentally you're always making a bet that you're going to get a higher return off of incurring the cost of change than it costs you to do the change right and so in this instance he is now you know 30 days in or 60 days post acquisition of his roofing company getting bought with seven other roofing companies

and for them to try and combine them he's the one who's supposed to like lead the effort of combining all this stuff and so the idea of like let's let's change the offer the offer is one of the highest leverage things you can change but it also affects every Department it changes how you Bill it changes how you sell changes how you advertise it changes everything right which is why it can change a business overnight but it can also destroy a business overnight and so when I see a business that in agre between those eight

has $140 million in revenue and $ 30-ish million doll in iida you're talking about a business that's got probably 300 to $400 million in Enterprise Value I would be very hesitant to immediately change something that's obviously working and so there's lesser degrees of change that have higher likelihoods of working that could still materially impact the business in terms of increasing the likelihood that it exits right and fundamentally I'm guessing that's what he wants to get his slice from centralizing the sales would allow them to decrease costs because they could not have guys on the road

it's just cheaper to do it it's also easier to hire sales people who are remote all of these kind of Downstream cost savings the other benefit is that when you hire remotely you have access to a bigger pool so you can get better salespeople at lower prices who close more deals and they could cut down all the the real big cost for this business is sales people who are unproductive all right so people who are they're losing leads on people who can't close and so by reducing costs increasing talent and increasing sales utilization all three

of those things reduce cost and increase Revenue which could disproportionately drive iida which is what that company is being valued on and so when I look at that I'm like this is a change that you have to do in order to sell the company and will result in revenue and E growth and so let's do this massive change first before risking the biscuit right because we might just found out that just from doing that we get a 25% increase in EA and that might be enough just bringing everything together plus adding the 25% you're like

you might be right as rain and at that point why risk it I feel like if I were in your position the first thing that I would do would be centralize everything first without trying to change basically I wouldn't I would take the model that I already know works is what was your Revenue before you did the before you were acquired okay you're doing 20 so I would like in terms of introducing levels of change so this is actually pretty good for everybody like I I will typically not try and change like five things at

once and so you centralizing all sales is going to get cost efficiency improvements and you're going to be able to have higher sales utilization so you probably cut off the bottom third of the Salesforce that's low performing that alone might give you a 25% lift in general because the best sales guys will take more of the sales and you'll have centralized all the costs like you have centralized all the cost right and so you'll have an increase in Revenue and a decrease in cost that's paired that would probably be my first step that was part

of the acquisition deal that's the only way I did the acquisition is if they were going to give me full control and centralize all so but like I wouldn't I mean I know the question was about Roofing but like that's what I would do first and that will probably take you six months or more um realistically um in terms of in terms of the offer to roofs um an offer that's worked really well in Home Services is instead of being a money back guarantee um I position has a profit guarantee so it's like listen um

you want your thing to be on time and on budget probably and so I guarantee that I will deliver it on time and on budget or I'll give you my profit which is 20% whatever and that way it's like you're not underwater and you still have 40% gross margin so you're not really losing on the deal um but then people are like okay so he's got skin in the game and so that's a way of closing significantly more deals because the two biggest um obstacles that well you would know this but in most Home Services

it's on time on budget and probably for roofs it's like and how much am I going to be displaced how much it's going to interrupt my life and so I would put my guarantee around those items and then just have a marginal amount that's back but it's really just because all they don't so the big thing just for every with guarantees is that people don't want their money back they want the roof and so they just want to know that you care enough to make sure the roof gets delivered and so that's really the the

solve for the guarantee is it just pays down risk of them not getting what they want and so as long as that gets accomplished you don't have to do it with money back you can just do it with some money back that gets him to say yes does that help does thank you perfect so he wanted a better offer despite all of those improvements and I was like okay I think I can I can think of something for you so if you if you look inside the offers book page 125 I talk about guarantees and

so this is the guarantee formula and so whenever you're thinking about adding a guarantee like this is what I think through so if you don't X in ytime we will Z like that is fundamentally what a guarantee is and most people I see a lot of times people just say I guarantee it but that doesn't mean anything you have to say what the terms of the guarantee are on a timeline what do I get if you don't perform right and so with this business and some people he like well I can't give them money back

guaranteed because I would just lose too much money understandable now if you have hard cost like he does then what we can do is we can just give something else we can either a lesser portion of money we can give something else for free and so the guarantee is a consideration it's what are we going to do to show you that we're just as invested as you in the outcome being positive right and so we basically incre we shift some of the risk from the customer onto us and this is this is all you're doing

as a business when you do a guarantee is they take some risk of buying and you're saying no I'm going to take some of that risk and so sure you can take 100% but in this in this situation he'd be taking like 200% of the risk basically he'd be losing money right and so the idea is again you can add stuff so hey if you don't get what you want I can add things which is like hey if you don't hit your goal I'll add more time which does work as a sales tool sometimes though

in the actual in the real world if someone's not getting a result they're like I don't want anymore from you I hate you right and so it does still work as a sale but it's one of those like mid right now alternatively you can go the reverse Direction which is take away negative which is a discount right so hey I can't give you all your money back but I can give you back my gross profit or I can give it back 20% or I give you back 10% right these are all things that you can

choose to give back and the thing is is it just shows that you have skin in the game and all we have to think about this is the point of a guarantee so I want to make sure I'm very clear here the point of a guarantee is not to have the craziest guarantee the point of a guarantee is to maximize net conversion all right so we just need to increase sales more than we increase refunds so proportionally we net more sales and if you can just do 10% back then that's enough to change behavior and

that's the point like if there's no difference between giving 25% back and giving 100% back in terms of the actual performance of the sale then give 25 and so you can move what you're guaranteeing in order to find The Sweet Spot and figure out what's actually compelling to your to your customer and most times the the things that you want to guarantee around are their biggest fears in Home Services stuff it's usually be around time and around budget right are they're getting it done on time they're getting around budget if it's other services it might

be different than that and so you'll know your services better but you want to you want to list out what their biggest spheres are and then Crush those with the guarantee hey Alex hello thank you for the content you create my name is m fatel I'm the founder of Alan okay so basically we sell tools to creators help them make more money and we also simplify how Brands collaborate with creators okay you see tools like software so software and ser agency tools so we have a music label a Creator Agency for big creators and then

a platform as well okay so I'm coming to that just in a bit I know the focus topic uh we made around 4.3 Million last year uh and basically my goal is try to get to 100 million right now the issue here is what's the split between the three in terms of Revenue uh 1 million for the Creator agency okay 1.3 million for uh the music label uh and then the rest is on the brand side okay my issue here I got 40,000 creators but only a thousand are making money M right and I've been

kind of struggling between going on a SAS model to be able to scale because when I do any social marketing we get a creator that comes on board but they don't make money right away uhhuh so it's not like you're you know and the longer it takes you to recoup your ad spend is not usually a good metric for scalability so I'm kind of pivoting should I go into a SAS model where right whatever I make from the Creator I'll just be like hey like just pay me that price and I take 0% from you

and then I just charge the brands the commission to collaborate with those creators this way I can scale the business in a much faster uh say the say the last part again so instead of me making percentages from creators yeah I provide them the same tools that allow them make make money and I keep 0% okay but then let's say they have to pay like 20 bucks a month sure but then I still make my money on the upside on the brand Side by connecting them with these creators okay so switch to a subscription switch

to subscription yeah okay um cuz now like I have 40,000 creators who signed up but I'm really making money off a thousand right and it's free to sign up and you only get paid if they get paid yeah so um you're in a prosumer audience so if you look at like Shopify for example um it's super it's if you look at the amount of people who've tried to build marketplaces almost all of them fail and it's my opinion that the best marketplaces do run as SASS and then once they get to scale they can they

can kind of push more Marketplace like shop Shopify for example like it's 29 bucks a month or whatever it is because they know that the vast majority like they make more money charging $29 a month and getting 4% on zero for the vast majority of stores but people continue to pay for the hope that someday they will make money um and so I think the idea of switching to SAS is not a bad one uh I am concerned about the four businesses that you have um so because in order to Win It SAS you have

to be like all in on software and so the alternative to that would be instead of letting creators come on for free you would charge them to come on which you could do it has like a onetime setup fee and then maybe increase the likelihood that they win either path would work but if the ultimate goal is that you want to build a network of creators then you want to have the lowest barrier possible on the Creator side um so I'm still thinking of a free tier and a paid tier with some minor benefits but

then if you really want to make money you got to end up paying subscription exactly yeah yeah you'll have to play with the feature set because that's always a a just the path of least resistance to getting to 100 Mil yeah so I think I think um adding the subscription for the base and then still maintaining the revenue that you get from the the the sponsors make sense I would maybe push back slightly on the hypothesis that they can't convert anything because it dramatically decreases the value of the network from the sponsor side what do

you mean because some people will pay for Impressions yeah and so those guys can for sure deliver those and so maybe there's like two tiers that you can sell you have another product on the ad side or media side um it's just something to consider perfect thank you that's you just validated my thoughts so thank good just wanted to make sure I'm thinking the right way no I think it makes sense yeah either have to basically you have to position his higher ticket and do premium wake glub on boarding and then select only for the

really good creators and that would be like you charge 5 or $10,000 and you really get them set up or you basically flip the other way go fremium um and then it's all based on like basically media Arbitrage where you're just running tons and tons of ads um to get people onto the platform and you just know what your average revenue per per platform user is perfect thank you y so this guy obviously has multiple businesses and he's you know sinning he's doing the cardinal sin of uh chasing multiple rabbits or more particularly many women

in the red dress that being said I still wanted to help and so he wants to build a software company if that's really what he wants to build then he's got to go all in because if SAS is one of the most if not the most competitive space that's out there I guess now there's AI but SAS is still competitive everybody you're competing against has is typically very well funded and also very smart and so they're going to have significant advantage and so if you think that you can split your attention and still beat them

it's a tall order right and so for him my whole goal is that at least he had Clarity on what he needs to do so that hopefully he get that business up and running as fast as possible uh so that he can basically shut off the other things and go all in hi Alex my name is Alex you can call me Alex Rodriguez and from Puerto Rico see from Puerto Rico so I'm a music attorney aado aado correct yeah so what we do is we have our constraint is focus yeah you think okay I have

so at least you said it yeah yeah so we have firm uh so basically it's three businesses yeah uh but today thanks to Ed and Sammy we got uh much much more clear what we should do but I would like to know how would you think about this because the the law firm side it's growing 20% year-over-year without me actually doing anything just redirecting people that comes to me to my law um and right now it's about 100K MH and then we have the educational side and that is making 200k and it's been stuck like

that in the last two years sure and we're building you get customers from organic yeah both are organic okay so if you don't have money to pay as as a lawyer you go to the educational platform and we are developing a contract uh automation software for big companies like major labels or publishing companies uh so right now the the product our software our goal with the software is to sell we are seeing that other that big music companies are buying Tech yeah so specific for them so they're doing everything manually we want to sell that

but we have a cash flow problem because we're selling to you know people without a lot of money and the service size does uh make money so our our our problem is where should we focus yeah you're but your what's what's monthly turn right now on the it's on the soft we got 100 people and we only have 40 active right now and how long you been doing it in the first year so you've retained 40% are they actually active though um so they're paying the people that are active are paying $3,000 per year and

there are only like four four four that are paying 3,000 and then what are the other 36 paying are paying 600 per year okay got it he has a very classic problem which is that you're good at doing something and you have two very different avatars and if you continue down either direction you ostracize the other so he's actually at the product High stage so he's 10 to you know 20 employees between the three companies the three companies that he has and so the issue that he has to have is he's got a niche down

qualifi leads are too expensive and the cap his ability to advertise that's fundamentally his big issue right and so he's getting he's got too many different customers so we have to Niche down his his advertising and basically message the new offer which for him was going to be the education and the software and so the million-dollar question for him which is what forced me to say I think that it made sense was and this isn't this is rare for me uh but was for him to go down Market which means to go for the smaller

customer that's more numerous most of the time you want to go up market and that's because those customers can afford to pay you like sell to the rich you know rich people pay better solve their problems that type of stuff I'm always always in that direction but because he said that 40% of his customers basically right off the onset were still paying him a year later to me that's fairly compelling that he's found some sort of product Market fit and so in hearing that I thought okay well Best in Class is like 60 plus% in

your retention for a consumer prosumer type product which is where he was at which is musicians who like want to make it in business but it's aren't that big yet so to me that'd be a prosumer somebody who's you know a little bit of above a consumer kind of business e oriented s gig is right and so the good news is there's lots of them the other good news is that there's new ones that get minted every day and it's a growing market so all those things are in his favor which is again these are

some of the reasons I like that the other piece is that he some of the old businesses he was going after I think though they are big I think they're going to have trouble over the next years with the AI stuff like I think they'll have a hard time pivoting and so I would be at least I would second guess going all in there not to say you can't I would just really consider it now the other piece of why I like this is that if he can move his Revenue retention up at the 12-month

Mark then he has something that will just keep growing year over year over year because getting those customers is not hard keeping them is hard but if he can keep them then he can probably blow the doors off this thing especially if the education can offset uh his CA or cost to acire customer okay so I think we we we chatt about this last night so you have a there is no right answer but there is a path that you have to pick and so either you're going to be an Enterprise company and you're going

to build only for that and I would say like you probably will just transact on the education side in order to fund this I in general don't like this plan but you could do this um because you'll be split attention and this is fundamentally why people raise money in software so they can just focus on one customer the whole time build the product and then actually get it to work okay that's that um because you said that you're retaining 40% in basically a um prerish Market which is where you're at I would be inclined to

say that you probably are pretty close to a decent product um so you probably have nailed something there because keeping 40% of people one year later on you know whatever it is for musicians that you guys have for contracts and whatnot um you could absolutely go all in on that and get that to like 50 or 60% and then you just need to have a different acquisition system so you probably just need to go spend money acquiring customers and that already cash flows because of the education side and are the people who are still paying

you on the software also educ customers or no they usually come from the education or from my legal services as well so I have some clients that be 80% of the job here the million dollar question the million dollar question is if they stop the education do they keep paying for the software yes because it's a one time Fe well then that's what what you mean the software is one time Fe no the education some they just pay and they're going to use the software as long as they so the only thing that we're solving

for is revenue retention on the software and so like Enterprise in of itself is not more valuable than lower Market it's just it tends to be stickier which is what makes it more valuable but if you can get a larger Marketplace easier to acquire customer to stick as well as a large Enterprise customer you've got a gold mine if that's true and so if you want to go spend money acquire customers with the education or media as your liquidation and then get you know 100% like but the goal that you guys should have is like

we don't care at all about the education all of your focus all the profit goes into just fixing one number which is that you need to look at M12 so month 12 retention um and just say like okay we're at 40 how do we get to 60 and then how do we get to 70 and that's all you're solving for because if you solve that then the thing will just keep growing and that's the beauty I mean that's fundamentally the beauty of software once you get it right is that it just keeps growing thank you

yeah and so for me that was um I thought the higher likelihood path and also because you already knew how to get those customers whereas getting Sony and and some of these large Brands could be significantly more difficult and so for me I saw that and was like I think that's the direction that has a higher likelihood um of succeeding given their goals infinite banking yes insurance you have 29 agents yes and you're uh needing to decide whether you need to be the face and get customers to feed your agents or you should go all

in on getting more agents and teaching them how to do lead gen yes cool um yeah so do the second one do the second yeah yeah it's it's significantly higher leverage cool so basically so think about this is what what problem do you want to solve so either you say I want to become a like you want to keep growing your brand top of funnel so that you just have more and more people are interested in INF Banking and then you have all these agents that you pass it off to so that they can you

know basically transact and own the relationship so that's like option one um that is I would say the lower risk path because you're already doing that today and so how many how many is it on Instagram that you do your stuff or yeah all on meta and YouTube okay and we're get in what's your followership uh from that uh 15,000 subscribers on YouTube and 12,000 followers on Instagram and 6,000 on Facebook yeah and what percentage of the leads come from that stuff versus whatever you do in person 15% come from online and okay where's the

rest come from the rest of it comes from referrals and networking and dude get agents I don't even know talking about for sure get agents go get agents yeah I thought I thought it was like you 60 70% of the business was coming from from your organic no most of it's coming from for sure that and then the challenge with the agents we originally it was all me teaching people how to do that how to go go out there and get business go Network go join BNI Chamber of Commerce whatever that's what works for me

and then we would get good people that were like hey I don't have any network so I said all right and they they asked where leads were and I said all right so let me go create leads and we started calling business owners CU that's who I was selling to but they were not showing up and they weren't really busy whatever we were offering wasn't whatever then I reread $100 million offers and $100 million leads and I looked at the value equation I said the best value I can give is to Real Estate Investors so

let me go get real estate investor leads and then we're calling them all day long and the people that I'm hiring don't know how to communicate with them properly so the only they end up just setting up appointments and then they hand them back off to me okay and they're good but I think it comes down to recruiting people want leads the first go where do we get your leads well if you say you have to go generate your leads they might go look at somewhere where they give them leads so we started giving people

leads so we make an offer to recruits that's good uhuh well I think that one is you could probably just take the existing brand that you have and just be more deliberate about the call to actions that you make and Bas because like if you talk about high level Insurance stuff that's going to attract both people who want to learn more about insurance but many of those people will be agents yes and so I think if you basically alternate the ctas you you'll be able to basically I don't want to say Chase two both you

know both but in some ways you kind of can double dip here because as long as the content strategy fundamentally doesn't really change you're just changing really the call to action then you can kind of get a little bit of the best of both but I do think that the big thing that you need to crack is teaching them to generate their own own weights like that is 100 like that's the limiter of your business so you need to bring them on and you need to have the training system to get to reliably get them

to self-generate like that's it like that's what you have to do if you do that the sky's limit and the 20 people that we have at of 29 that are just simply coming in and cold calling Real Estate Investors all day right now that are setting up an insane amount I think our offer is not great so I'm going to the drawing board with that but all those people now I got to go teach them I'm just teaching them how to cold call well they already are cold calling right huh they already are cold call

they are cold calling now well they're coming in I'm teaching them cold call rather than coming in teaching them to go shake hands and kiss babies you want to teach them the highest efficiency strategy for getting customers so whatever that is so you can just like whatever your method is that you think that highest percentage of people will succeed with that's what you teach cool so whether it's shake hands kiss babies or it's cold calling whatever or a combo of both yeah or com either way is fine um but like fundamentally like look at the

biggest insurance companies in the entire world they are that big for a reason and almost all of them they just they they are recruiting machines right like that's where fundamentally because like they're not a supply constraint business like you can sell as much insurance as you want right like you're not Supply constrainted right like you're just demand constrainted and so you just got to get guys and then put the system in place so that they learn how to sell and then that's the business heard heard thank you appreciate you yeah this is why there's higher

leverage of him getting lead Getters than him getting leads so this is the leads book 175 so right now he's in scenario one which is that he's getting leads right he's getting customers and he's sending those leads to his agents to close right look at a much higher leverage move let's go to scenario three where he spends the same amount of time advertising but every time he's getting lead Getters and so every month he's getting more agents into the business and each of those agents are now getting money now it's the same level of effort

for him look his line is still the same he's still working the same amount every day same amount every day but here he's got these new nodes that are generating business for him and so if you add up all of this these are all the extra customers that he's gotten just from this level of effort and so this has far higher leverage than this does which is why I recommended that he start making ctas in his content to both continue to generate because I don't want to kill the business continue to generate his normal leads

but also make it clear for agents if they want to join him and gain access some of the leads that he has um that he can come in he can train them and he can show them how to get the leads on their own which he can benefit from uh my name is Mike Nathan um I sell cellular therapy in home to the old affluent injured probably and athletic um we're new but we've got a million dollars in Revenue half at evida um we would like to get the 25 million in home or in home

okay got it we consider mobile Healthcare okay is it like guy drives out or is it you sending machines RN drives out gives you an IV infusion in your home okay got it um we like to get the 25 million we're built to be bought we want to exit so we think we're on The Cutting Edge of this what's stopping us is my team is awesome okay great and from the NFL to a lot of great we have great business to doctor B2B sales experience zero B Toc experience and that Playbook we're learning is wildly

different we have no idea what we're doing yeah so what stops you from just doing way more of the doctor stuff um it doesn't it doesn't quite pay as well meaning uh we have people that knock on doors to uh orthopedic surgeons who are looking for patients with alternatives to surgery PT chiropractors it's a lot of effort and there's some that are going to refer to you and some that just will not yeah uh so that's our constraint in a one market we in the Twin Cities it's a one market uh play we know there

are more people looking for this solution um so we want to understand what the B to C is if we go to then Dallas Philly La as we try to scale it we're convinced it needs to be a better Roi than maybe what we're doing right now what you so you're making 50% margins right so what's the cost to acquire a physician cost to acquire a physician M who refers you business cost of acquiring affiliate it's often times just it can be a physician so we don't track it that way but it's um $500 okay

so it cost you 500 and then what does the average physician refer to you in a year uh in terms of business 6,000,000 so I mean you're getting 12 to one there and you already know how that works so like what stops you from doing 10 times more of that oh we you're saying they don't pay well but that's part I'm not sure you're we've went through the woods and hit all the people that are going to refer us the number is not amazing or at least I just know there's more there I assume there's

more there's got to be more than the you know the 200 people we've hit in the like you you mean you've only really talked to 200 in terms of like reach outs and and or you have 200 who signed up as Affiliates kind of thing I don't know the number off the top of my head but it's in it's in the hundreds less than a thousand of B2B uh PT chiropractors orthopedic surgeons we've done that in the Twin C and the super small people that have given us has been some give four five and six

some give zero yeah do you have an active affiliate manager who's like regularly reminding them yeah so with so the way that I think about Affiliates is um it's basically a second tier of customer and so you need to have somebody who's regularly kind of like stoking the affiliate fire to keep them activated and continue to get them to continue to refer business so I'll give you example so there was a a roofing company for it was a Restoration company um they had one star star salesman and all he did was he'd go around to

other Tradesmen and get them to refer them business and so they would get a th000 bucks to refer the restoration business business but the sales guy got 500 for every time they referred and so that guy all day long was knocking on doors walking in the front door with donuts asking them how they're doing bringing coffee to the guys and then reminding them that they existed and that's all he did and so I think you were getting you're getting you're you're doing the hardest part which is getting them to uh refer you just didn't have

the the consistent referrals because if you had 200 active Affiliates who were consistently referring your business and most of these Physicians you know especially like GPS things like that like I mean they see thousands of patients and many of them could probably benefit from the services you have and so the activation is both getting them to refer consistently but also uh percentage of customers that they see that they refer to you so it's kind of both sides of it and so I think that the missing link with what you were already doing was just that

the you didn't have basically the continuous affiliate marketing strategy to get them to keep sending you business so that's probably like right now today I would fix that first because you already have the acquisition system you already have the network and so for me like reactivating that affiliate base would be the first thing that I did so this gentleman is using B2B Outreach to get uh Physicians and therapists to refer him business now the part of what he was missing is if you go to 240 in the leads book uh which is the Affiliates chapter

um I talk about the launch and integrate model and so basically uh right now he actually was missing both of those so launch is like you want to do some sort of big promotion with them so that you get to all their customers now they were giving him like a trial customer and he was basically not getting any customers beyond that and so if he's acquired 200 Affiliates and each one of them is send him one customer it's cuz he's he's basically not following up with the test that they're making like imagine if you you

know if you have a business and you you have customers and someone's taking you from your business you might be like I'll send you one and I'll see what they say right but it's a trial and so basically we have to think about getting these Affiliates on board is like a trial but to convert the affiliate into an activated affiliate right and so a launch is step one which is that okay maybe you succeed with the trial and then you propose hey let's do some big campaign to send a lot of your customers over uh

and then you can make money we can make money everybody's happy but the long-term goal is full integration right which is at what point in your process can we uh integrate our business so that what you sell is merged with what we sell uh so that we don't have to do any extra work or remind you you just do it on your own the second thing maybe because you might just reactivate the base and all of a sudden you're like I got 200 guys for refering business holy we're at 10 million um but uh the

second thing I would consider probably I would still probably Focus most of my time on the B2B because you already have it um but for this business I think that it lend itself for what's the price point $6,000 a treatment per treatment okay wait so so uh the average doctor will send you one $6,000 patient per year when he said it cost you 500 they'll send you one patient M interesting so do you have a process for once the patient gets the thing calling the physician up sorry say that so like I'm Dr Smith I

send you Sandy Sandy goes and gets the well you come to Sandy and Sandy gets the treatment is there a cycle where you call back me Dr Smith and say hey we just dealt with Sandy here's some of her stuff uh not in a medical term like we're not putting notes back in because it is private for sure yeah yeah but we do we ask for more referrals there's a circle back that way there's not a a a patient loop back okay that's not true sometimes that does happen excuse me it does that's not systematized

though yeah I would systematize the hell out of that because it's like hey you just sent me this person like let me close that Loop for you she's awesome we did this thing she loved it by the way and then we have the you know the opening to the to the other like what customers or customers sorry what patients did you see this week uh who you think it would be a good fit right and rather than saying you have any it's which ones would be is the question small training stuff but it matters um

so I feel like there's so much on the B2B side that honestly that's probably where I'd be ripping so you would not go after a b Toc approach like advertising online going uh pushing in on a strategy on that it's not that I wouldn't it's that when I think about so this the difference in like theoretical and actual like I would given given the fact that you like you're already running good margins on this thing basically doing it and take this the way I mean it completely unoptimized like right now right and I again I'm

not this is not a a slight um then I'm like there's so much juice left in this thing I don't want to now start something new it's like I barely got this one going I want to like crush this and when I when I'm like no we've like we follow up with every single person I've got a full-time affiliate manager who steps by our Affiliates I'm calling them Affiliates but doc you know drops by the docs once a week just to remind us say nice things hey by the way like that is happening all the

time and we've already covered like literally Lally every single physician in the Twin Cities and I'm like okay let's go B to C but if we haven't completely squeezed the hell out of this thing and it's already working at the level it is right now with like zero like you're only getting one patient per Doc it's like so yeah so you getting B to B customer is the same as getting one B Toc customer I understand why you'd be frustrated because you'd be like well it I'll just I could sell One customer on my own

without having to deal with the dock but the whole point is that like I want them to be sending 20 50 a month and they can because they have the volume and I think that first one has to be like a beautifully choreographed experience because that first patient's the test run for them for you right they'll refer you one and we'll see what happens right and so one it's like sy's got to be blown away right she's got to come back and be like oh my God that place was amazing and then you also have

to go back to the dock and be like we blew Sandy Away by the way um and so I think you have to tackle it from both sides okay that's what I would do getting into the ad side you absolutely could do it and I'm could walk through some you know whole strategy there but I I if if we swap places that's where I would be focusing if you were G to try to expand into other major metros in the next 18 months yeah would you would you have the BTC sorted out before you went

to the next Market or would you honestly no if I Crush my B2B play then I just run my BW playbook in B2B playbook in the new market like once I find something that works I just want to just do more yeah pillage right on thank you yeah no you bet now if you if there's no way to do that integration which there always is but if for some reason you're have limited beliefs throughout the world what you can do is basically you have to pay affiliate managers to consistently kind of they're kind of like

account reps and so they manage the relationship with the Affiliates to remind them that you exist and remind them to promote your stuff and so if you have a handful of good Affiliates that can be worth their weight in gold because each of these business owners is is advertising on your behalf and so if he has 200 businesses which is what he said imagine harnessing the horsepower of 200 businesses of advertising and forcing it through one well if you have that he's easily going to hit his $25 million in sales he just needs to activate

and better use the resources that he has at his supposal right now and on top of that he's already really profitable we still know the model works we just have to do more of it I'm a father single father I got two boys here and um oh my name is DJ kristoferson there we go I sell People to People I'm restarting my virtual Staffing Company cool and we're currently at zero Revenue it's just a matter of getting started okay and so we're really confident in that my question is on a more of a personal one

so I'm a single father um in a serious relationship and she's not a business person at all very sweet and supporting but what would you say would be some things to prepare her for when it comes to so your spouse or not spouse your partner is stopping my my partner I mean she doesn't live at the house yet she's it's long distance but it's coming together but it's getting really serious okay preparing her for being married to a um type A I think you should give her a try before you buy yeah seriously how do

you mean so fly out out spend two weeks with me I'm not going to cater to you I'm going to live my life if the way that I live my life the way this works this is how it's going to be if you like that let's rock and roll if you don't I don't want to change yeah that's true that's perfect no I love it that's that's great thank you crushed it I see the most important relationship that you have as you with your goals because your goals are really just a reflection of yourself and

so I don't want to especially if I were single I wouldn't want to sacrifice my relationship with myself essentially for someone else the recommendation that I gave was what I would give myself which is be you and if the way that you want to live to maximize the likel that you do what you want to do with your life is this way then rather than try and compromise where both people don't get what they want try and see if there's somebody who actually just like really loves the way you live that felt like the easiest

first step is like just have her come out and just don't accommodate like live the way you'd want to live and if she's thrilled about living that way then you have a very high high chance of this thing working out because you have little effort you're not pretending to be someone you're not you're not putting on a show you're just being you and if being you is enough that she stoked then you probably have a good life ahead of you now if she comes out and it's not the case then at least you didn't have

to wait two years to find out after you both stopped acting that this is how you really are and so I see the goal as how do I get as far forward in the relationship as possible possible of what would it look like if neither of us acted and then let's just behave that way and if it still works that feels pretty good