Stop Being Broke. Get Busy.

what I'm going to talk about in this video is not fun but it's going to make you a ton of money and I'm going to explain why so many of you are leaving massive amounts of money on the table right now and not using your single largest competitive advantage and these lessons have come hard-earned from years in business I've founded and exited nine businesses my last one at 46. 2 million bucks our current portfolio is over $200 million a year and I make these videos so that you can make money and the big concept I want to talk to you about is scaling the unscalable and I'm going to give you some big tactics at the end of this video after I explain why it's so important why everyone gets it wrong and so just because in the beginning you can't see how it's going to scale doesn't mean it's impossible to scale I had this girl come up to me at an event ages ago and she was in the Fitness World obviously because that's where I was and she said I do outbound for my my business and we do $30,000 a month um but I want to have a more scalable acquisition system and I was like why can't you scale outbound and she was like well I mean it requires people and I was like welcome to business baby like how how do you think you're going to scale the deliverable if you had Fitness coaching I was like people is Fitness coaching unscalable no you hire and train people welcome to the service business which is culture and training that's service that's how it works and the fact that you don't know how to do it is what makes it unscalable not that physics disproves the ability to scale onboard boing or scale handwritten cards like unless you can prove physically that it's impossible that gravity exists differently in your [ __ ] world then it's not unscalable you have a skill deficiency it's unskill that's what it is it's not unscalable you are unskilled enough to scale it I remember when I was in weight loss I would have a lady who would walk in and uh and she would say something like hey uh I don't want to lose too much weight right or I'd have a guy and this is probably the more common one they'd say well I don't want to get I want to look like you like and I'm like don't worry you never will but the point is is they would look at me and say I don't want to get bulky like you you have too much muscle I don't think that looks good and I'm like you know you're not going to wake up tomorrow and just be jacked as [ __ ] and have trained for 20 years right it's not going to happen there's going to be a million days in between and at any point you can say I'm just going to stop here I'm going to try and maintain but the thing is is that people try and say that they don't want the extreme version of a solution so they're not willing to do take a step in that direction and so the same thing happens from a deliverability perspective they say hey you know what if I do it this way I'm not going to be able to hit $100 million a year this isn't scalable but the thing is is that you're not even making money right now and you're talking about scale you're talking about how you're not going to be able to fit in your clothes and you haven't even lost weight you're talking about how you're don't want to look too bulky but no one even knows you work out right now because of how you look and so the same thing in business is that like sure you think and here's the here's the real real is that when you start you don't have context and you don't have resources so with your current set of resources the unscalable thing looks unscalable because you have no help and you have no money and you have no leverage but good friend of mine Andy forella he has first form they do hundreds of millions of dollars a year in Revenue when he started the business he started writing handwritten cards to every single person who bought their products now in the beginning you'd be like you're the owner how could you write handwritten cards to every single person that buys the product that's not scalable Alex but guess what he still does it today and they get a zillion orders a minute at this point but what did he do well in the beginning he was writing the handwritten cards and over time he just signed the handwritten cards and then finally other people were writing the handwritten cards and the gesture still held and so the thing is there's a there's a 2. 0 3.

0 version that can still check 80% of the boxes that you learn from the unscalable solution I got on the phone this last week with a recent founder who exited exited a fintech company for $2. 5 billion some of you guys who saw my story um I've been trying to talk to people in that space so if you don't do know somebody in Neo banking uh payer processing uh who had a big exit uh please hit me up I'm trying to learn some stuff uh for one of our portfolio companies but anyways he was saying hey it's all about the unscalable and he and I had this great chule about this that so many business owners are unwilling to do the heavy hard work the one1 calls the talking to customers in the beginning because they say it's not scalable but there's always a version that presents itself two three steps down the road because you have the money and the skill to be able to say hey what are the key components of this of this thing that can make it scalable and so I would encourage you if you're starting the business and let's say you're selling because I'm obviously in the school Community right and so I see people who are trying to sell a a $20 a month community and they're like well I don't want to hop on the phone for a $20 month sale also first off guess what genius I was in the the large Fitness World brick and mortar what do you think gym memberships sell at do you think they have a person selling it at the front desk sure as [ __ ] they do guess who it isn't the owner and they can still scale that process and so again the idea that things aren't scalable is ridiculous now sure you're not going to be able to take 20 calls a day in the be you know at scale but you're currently making zero so what the [ __ ] are you doing all day you can't be busy and broke pick one right you're either busy and you're making money because you're doing the right stuff or you're broke but you got plenty of time like you can't have both problems and so if you're broke get busy and do some of the unscalable stuff and that means hopping on the calls with customers that are below your ticket price but guess what that happens is that you're learning more from them then you are earning from them and that's okay because you're going to learn the pain points they're suffering from you're going to learn the the hooks in the messaging that matter most to them you're going to learn how to alter your product and your offer in a way that makes it convert at a higher percentage you're going to learn The Things They Don't Care by the way you want have two magic questions here's some Pro tips for you the first thing you ask a customer is you say hey if I were to eliminate all of the things that I have in my feature set except for one what would it be and they'll tell you and if you ask 100 people you'll get by far a power ranking for what matters most in terms of value for the core deliverables you have now you can also ask the second the inverted version of that question which is hey if I were to eliminate one thing from my entire feature set and it changed nothing about your life which one would it be and you also get the least valuable thing and between both those elements and if you do this on a regular basis you continue to cut and trim and distill down the value they provide to the most amount of people by simply asking them and so I think Paul Graham said this and I believe this and I keep repeating it because I think it's so important is that you can solve every question and every problem in business by talking to your customer more you have a marketing problem talk to your customer you have a product problem talk to your customer like they know what they want and they will tell you how to address them and how to advertise to them and so getting on the phone and doing the quote unscalable writing the handwritten card onboarding every customer even though it's $10 a month that they're paying guess what happens when you on board those customers I'll bet you they're going to stay longer I'll bet you they refer more people and you're going to be able to make the product better and the marketing better and so even if you do that now let's say okay Alex oh my God I followed your advice and now I'm taking 20 calls a day well guess what now you're making money and I don't give a [ __ ] but if you're still like hey I want to make more money fine I'll give you the next step so when you go from 101 you go to semi-private you do one on six right you can still deliver a close to that experience but you 6X your output so instead of talking to 20 people a day you talk to 120 people a day now if you're like wow 20 people a day that sounds like a lot guess how Alex learned sales I did 4,101 closes not consults closes over a multi-year period for my gyms why because I had appointments back to back to back to back to back and I had two to three people that were scheduled for every 30 minutes and so that accounted for show rate so that no matter what I always had one to three people who were showing up every 30 minutes that I pitched the exact same thing to and guess what happened I got pretty good at sales the amount of people who asked me hey what sales training did you go to I didn't I went through the unscalable sales training of actually just selling a lot of people and so the idea is that you are going to learn more then you are going to earn in the beginning and that is okay because as long as you see entrepreneurship as a continual journey of educating educating yourself on your customer the problems that you're trying to solve for them why would you not want to FastTrack that and jam as much of that as you possibly could from the best possible teacher that is in the marketplace which is the market itself and so I get passionate about this because I see so many poor people trying to think that they're thinking like rich people when they're really thinking like poor people CU they're trying to be broke and not busy so get busy talk to the customers even if they pay you 10 bucks a month you'll learn more and then guess what happens after you do one on six you do group onboarding you do one on 20 you do one on 30 and guess what you can do from there we have a company right now that still does that did group onboarding and scale to 100 million plus a year all right and we still did it because we knew the onboarding was such an important Pro part of the process for sitting expectations telling them what was going to happen next keep setting promises and keeping promises over and over and over again and so if you have one on 30 fine guess what you can still do six those do 180 people a day with just one person and if you train somebody and what happens like let's really think through this in the beginning you do the one-on ones okay now in the beginning you're just answering questions over time you say Okay most people have these same six questions and so then I'm going to create a little presentation around these six questions and so then you start using the presentation in the one ones and you're like you know what I think I can do this a little bit faster and so you get the one-on six there and you have the presentation and you're still seeing the same output with the one on6 as you were with the one-on-one fantastic now what do you do you see can I get to 30 and you do 30 and then you 5x again your 6X output and again now you're like huh I wonder if I can teach somebody else to go through the same deck as me and you know what you do and just like that you scaled the [ __ ] unscalable real quick if you're tired of being broke and would rather be busy join me at the school game so school.