I Spent 10 Years Building Businesses (THIS is what really matters)

I achieved $100 million net worth by the age of 28 and I currently run a $500 million portfolio and in this video today I want to share with you a decade of business advice that allowed me to achieve those things hot take if you are catching up Monday morning from the weekend you are already behind the top CEOs prepare before the week if you are trying to prepare when you are in a mode of execution you're already behind the ball how do you expect to make millions of dollars if you haven't mastered using a calendar

the people who get ahead in life They Don't Wait For Life to happen to them they plan for how every moment of every day is going to go because they want to make sure they get the most out of every day because they know how valuable their time is I had a portfolio CEO he came to me and he was like Leila I am drowning I feel like I have fires coming at me every day and I don't know what to do and I said the first thing I need to do if I want to

be able to help you is I got to look at your time where is this person putting their time because where your attention goes is where your business is going to grow he did what I call a Time study basically documents what he does with every hour of his day and when I looked at it I was like no wonder you feel like because you're constantly using Mondays to catch up from the weekend what he was doing was that he had no time spent planning so he was constantly running the company on reactive mode if

you don't know how to manage your time then you can't manage yourself and if you can't manage yourself you certainly can't manage a company I mean it sounds simple enough but like a lot of people don't do it I get this when I first started I remember this distinct moment when I was sitting on my couch and I just had this overwhelming feeling of not wanting to do what was on my calendar what I recognized in that moment was that if I don't have somebody else telling me what to do I need to be able

to rely on myself to tell me what to do and so if you wait until Monday morning what you're doing is two things one you eat into execution time Monday is a day to execute it's not a day to plan Monday is when everything hits your desk it's not a time to sit back and say I need to for what's going to happen for the week the second piece is that you're in reactive mode if you take 2 to 3 hours to plan your week on a Sunday and you plan out every meeting then when

you go into the week what you do is you create all of this buffer time it's all the time that you can use pulling the future into the present to get ahead you have extra time in your days to focus on doing more than you thought you ever could we don't rise to our level of expectations we actually rise to our level of preparation if you don't prepare for your week then you're not going to do the things you expected to do you're going to do the things you prepared to do if you're anything like

me I was not naturally gifted with anything preparation can make even a fool look like a genius some of the most successful people that I've known is that they don't have the advantage of being the smartest person in the room or the most talented person in the room but they do have the advantage of working their ass off leaders who lack certainty create followers who lack commitment when I was running my first business I was so fearful of making making people feel like I was stepping on them that I actually wasn't showing up certain enough

for my team and it actually wasn't apparent to me until a friend of mine who who worked for me who I was actually grooming to be the COO of gym launch gave me some feedback on a one1 I asked do you have any feedback for me and she said sometimes I really just want you to tell me what to do I've tried everything and I've thought everything through and I actually just don't know what to do and so when I'm asking you it's because I want you to tell me what to do and I remember

in that moment I was like I've had so much fear of overstepping that I've actually swung the opposite direction where I have not instilled enough certainty in my team and that's when I realized that there's being stubborn and then there's being insecure and I was leaning to the side of being insecure and so for me that was really learning how to lean more into a more confident and certain version of myself because what I recognize is that When leaders are indecisive or unclear about their Vision it creates this lack of reliability within their teams and

a ripple effect not even from their team but to all the other teams there and I'm not certain and I'm not confident in myself and how I present our business plan and our vision to the team then think of all the cracks that it creates along the way certainty creates Clarity Clarity creates speed speed creates progress progress creates momentum and momentum leads to success and it all starts with showing up certain about the Clear Vision you have when people come in and they feel uncertain always guess what it points back to one person which is

the leader now end of the day that person is me so if I have leaders who show up uncertain for their teams what it tells me is that I'm not showing up certain enough for them now on the other side I've had leaders that I've worked with who sway on the side of stubbornness so actually I had a portfolio company we actually do not have the portfolio anymore the main reason for that was the leader was so stubborn about the vision what happened was that she was very set in her ways of how she wanted

to run the company but she wanted to run it five steps in this direction then five steps in this direction then five steps in this direction I had people from this person's team coming to me constantly they were telling me how stressed they felt and they asked me as somebody who owned part of the company do I need to be looking for another job because yesterday we were going to become this kind of company this week we're becoming this kind of company and it feels like we're changing direction every other week and so it was

two things that compounded upon each other which is being stubborn and not open to feedback and then being so certain when they showed up but certain in a different direction every other day and especially with people who are newer to business this is really common you're constantly looking at a way that somebody's doing business and saying oh my gosh that way would be easier than what I'm doing today if you just committed to what you did now and stuck with it that would be easier than changing the path six times either side of the equation

if you go too far whether you're super insecure or you're super stubborn about your direction the uncertainty that either you create or you exemplify is contagious and so what both of these situations do is they create all these cracks in the confidence that people on your team have about you and about the vision that you have and so what happens is that those people are no longer committed because the moment that they feel like they can't trust the leader and they can't trust the direction of the company they start looking and wondering where else they

can go where they can find that security what usually leads to that is overwhelm overwhelm comes from high demand with low clarity and so if you're giving people a lot of work and they have no idea where that work is going they're going to feel overwhelmed half the time it's not even that there's so much work it's that there's so much work with a lack of vision and the last thing I'll say is this we can show up with certainty without having certainty is you don't create certainty by controlling the world you create certainty by

how you react to what the world does there are so many things that happen in business you can't control but you create certainty by how you react to it and I can tell you the biggest lesson when I learned this for myself was how I reacted to co co was the most uncertain time I've ever had to navigate in business because not only did it change the entire economy but it shut down every business that I worked with and so I had a team of a 100 people look at me and say do I have

a job tomorrow I couldn't tell them that they for sure had a job in 3 months but I could show up with certainty and confidence that I was going to do my damn best best to make sure that they did and I could convey that confidence to them and I could let them borrow my sense of certainty until they had one for themselves this is the best trait that you can have if you're managing people by setting clear expectations and acting consistently leaders can build trust which drives better results the speed at which you make

decisions sets the speed of the business long time ago back in like 2016 I joined all these different business groups when I first showed up at these events I was like oh my gosh my business sucks I bet all these people way smarter than me I feel like I don't even belong in this room when I came back for the second event and I remember watching people who were members of these groups go up and the problems that they shared from a year ago were the same problems that they were sharing now so many people

wouldn't not couldn't wouldn't grow their businesses because they wouldn't make decisions what happens is that if you don't make the hard decisions you get stuck in that phase of business because your business doesn't grow by accident it grows by intentionally seeking out the hard decisions and tackling them headon making decisions creates Clarity but it starts with making decisions because you can't get clear on what path you take until you decide which path it is your business isn't growing because you won't make decisions first time I ever got into business I had a mentor that said

something to me every unmade decision is an attention suck and so if you look at your attention like a jar of marbles you only have so many marbles in the jar and every unmade decision steals your marbles if I have an unmade decision over here an unmade decision over here all of my marbles are not within my jar means I have a lot of attention and then wherever I direct that attention it's going to grow something what that told me was like every time I have a decision to make I need to figure out how

do I get all the information to make the decision how do I get all the perspectives to make the decision and how do I gather all that as quickly as possible because I know that with each decision unlocks a new level of growth for me and for my company there's really two types of people that I see there's people who make decisions by aggression and people who make decisions by Omission if you're watching this and you're like well AA I have this decision I've been avoiding you're not avoiding it you are making it you're just

not actively making it you're waiting until it's made for you and so the decision will be made and it's probably not going to be made in your favor either way a decision will be made and the cost of change and the pain of change will be incurred it's just a matter of is it going to get you the result you want or not in other words you're either uncomfortable remaining the same in the state of decision or you're uncomfortable changing going through the process of pursuing something new and unknown both paths are painful but only

one leads to an outcome that you want is the pain bringing you closer to a life and to a business that you want or further so the way that I've always looked at it is if I do nothing this decision is going to be made for me then I might as well do something and have it work in my favor because I'm either going to feel pain now making the decision by aggression or I'm going to feel pain later waiting for the decision to be made and then feeling pain later when I don't get what

I want stop being scared of making the wrong decision successful people and unsuccessful people make no less wrong decisions they just respond to them differently so rather than putting so much pressure on making the right decision to avoid a mistake put all the effort on if I make a mistake how am I going to handle it like if we're being really honest right now it's just us here like you have something that you've been putting off it's probably either really small or it could be really big but like you can only lie to yourself so

long there is no wrong way to do things there are only trade-offs one of the most frequent questions that I get asked is do I go here or do I go there this all stems from a fallacy that one path is better than the other but the reality is is that they're just different the first time that I had to make a decision like this which was gym launch we had grown it from doing nothing to like 50 million a year in 4 years and we were at this point in the road where we said

how do we expand the business business we talked about building this other arm of the business and I remember speaking with a mentor of mine and she said there's no wrong decisions there's just tradeoffs to the one that you make so if you build a software business that's really different from what you do today it's going to come with a new set of problems which is you're have to learn how to build software now on the other side we talked about what if we took gym launch and we translated it into different languages so she's

like okay well it might not be as valuable as software so in the long run it might to have as much Enterprise Value as software however it is a lot more of doing more of what you're already doing but learning how to do it in a different language and so either path presents challenges which one takes you to where you want to go and which one has problems you wish to deal with a say that I always tell myself which is pick your problems not your Solutions it's not that anyone path is better it's that

they're all different and so instead of pursuing what solution do I want I ask myself what problems do I want to live with every day I saw the gold at the end of the rainbow I was like software for sure that sounds amazing I knew that it was the bilingual would be easier for me it would have more problems that I was more equipped to deal with but I was like oh my gosh but if we did software the business could get valued at like 10 times what it's valued at now and so I said

let's pursue that and what I learned is that if you select for the outcome and not the process you often make the wrong decision and so when you're making these decisions of trade-offs in the business we're constantly blinded by the payoff at the end of the rainbow not buy all the that's going to happen Up Until the End Business is about learning how to stay in the game and so if you have consistent problems that you hate dealing with you are unlikely to even get to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow

and that's what happened to me there is no right or wrong path in general you're trading your current problems for different problems in the future the reason I wasn't willing to stay in the game and I wanted to sell that company was because they weren't problems I wanted to deal with every day I think one of the most common questions I get is I have have a service business and I want to see if I franchise it or do corporate owned and the same frame that I use is the same frame I give people which

is what business do you want to be in what problems do you want to solve on a daily basis say you have a chain of brick and mortar locations and you're saying do I franchise or do I have corporate owned well what's more important to you how much do you care about culture if you're a dieh hard for culture and that is the driving force of your success maybe you want to do corporate don't whereas if you're like it and I just want to go as fast as possible and I'm not big on quality maybe

you want franchise at the end of the day there's nobody that's going to be able to give you the Silver Bullet answer because guess what they probably don't know you better than you know yourself beginners get stuck because they believe that there's a silver bullet answer to all their questions about what to do with their business and the reality is it's like 100 golden BBS and a 100 decisions you have to make to figure out what's right for you beginners are paralyzed to make a decision in the beginning because they assume the real world and

business works like school and only has one right answer and in reality there are so many right answers with only one wrong answer which is do nothing we always are trading what we have for something we believe we want we just have to make sure that once you get what you thought you wanted you don't want back what you gave to haveit end of the day we don't eliminate problems we trade worse ones for better ones small problems unattended to become big problems the first time that this became real for me was back in 2018

we had just built our first business and it had gone from 0 to 17 million in like a year basically our business was built on teaching gym owners how to run their gyms part of that was how to acquire customers and something that we were really good at at that time was how to use social media to acquire customers for gyms it was something that other people had not cracked yet when we first started it was like you could get 50 Cent leads then it went to like a dollar then $2 and what was happening

was like slowly people in our community were starting to get annoyed the thing is is that there's only so much that we could do because the cost of advertising on all platforms always goes one way which is up and what happened was about a year and a half after this problem started I remember I logged into our Facebook group one day and I saw this thread just talking mad about us this small nagging problem and just continued to shove in the back of the closet or like under the rug what happened is it had like

hair had like come and like attached itself to the problem and like mold and like dirt and like all of a sudden this like little Dust Bunny became this like disgusting little raccoon hiding under my couch and the Raccoon came out and it was like I hate you and you suck all these people in our community they were upset they were talking about how they felt like we weren't doing anything about the problem even though the problem was one that I didn't have direct control over what I realized in that moment was that I did

have direct control over communicating about it I could have explained and educated my customers on what was happening and all the things that I knew that made it obvious to me why it was happening that they didn't know they didn't know that across all Industries costs were actually Rising much faster than they were to them and so what happened was I let a small problem get big because I didn't address it any major issue starts as a minor issue so if you don't address the small problems they turn into big ones anytime I feel something's

off I address it right then so something that I ask myself a lot is I say what small nagging issues have I avoided most days but especially by Friday because what I want to do is I want to go into the weekend having cleared my plate of all small problems you know there was a portfolio CEO that had this happen I noticed that he was over sales and marketing and he'd been doing that for about a year at first everything was great but here's the thing about business is that what we did 6 months ago

is what we see the results of today what happened was about 6 months from then all of a sudden sales start dropping all of a sudden leads start dropping why I know exactly what it is is at 6 mon months ago he started paying attention to this new thing and then these small little cracks all these little things that start happening because his attention was split then have mounted into big things and so when we looked the team had been working at like 100% capacity and 6 months later the team was working at like 55%

capacity that means because he put his eye on something else all of a sudden the team felt like well he's not paying attention to us we're not going to pay attention to the job created this big problem we had this huge cultural shift that we needed to make what he learned from that situation ation was that it's much easier to address those things when they're small but it's like it always pays off to solve a problem earlier rather than later so if you're watching this right now ask yourself this question what am I avoiding what

am I ignoring that's getting worse not better the better you get the bigger your customers will demand you become quality creates demand and demand creates growth I did not understand this concept in my first years in business I thought that in order to get bigger you needed to push push push as hard as possible to force yourself into the marketplace but there's a point at which you want people to pull you into the marketplace when we had gym launch and we were first starting off there was about a year and a half where 45% of

our business came from word of mouth and I thought it was like the best thing that could have ever happened at one point in time I remember getting on a meeting and someone pointed out our referrals dropped from 45% of our sales they were about 30% of our sales rather than saying how do we get back to 45% we said great let's run more ads let's start email let's do SEO let's do all these things and what happened was that number went from 45 to 30 to 20 and our satisfaction went from like 90% to

80 to 70 and it also started to drop and then what I was noticing is that all these people coming in who weren't referrals they cost more money to get and they weren't as good and didn't stay as long on the back end about a year into doing this thinking to myself gosh what did I do wrong I then found this quote that really stuck with me which is you have to get better and let your customers demand you get bigger and I looked and I recognized I was like we have not gotten better we

basically band-aided a wound that needed to be sew and shut and what we didn't do was fix the quality and instead we just tried to continue pushing ourselves into the marketplace and the biggest lesson I learned is that if you create something that is good enough people will demand you expand your business and I learned this for acquisition. comom what I wanted is to create a business that was Supply constrained not demand constrained meaning we have so much demand that we can't even fulfill it the constraint is how do I build a business fast enough

to meet the demand of the market doing that is a far easier way to do business than the opposite because if people really they're banging at your doors wanting what you have it makes everything easier and being able to measure that and say great here's what our customer satisfaction scores are here's our NPS scores here's our portfolio performance that is the Northstar metric not how many leads we get not how many sales we convert if you want to get better in order to get bigger look at what you're measuring and that is one of the

foremost things that I have changed is that when I was running my first business I constantly was looking at measuring incoming sales inbound leads sales conversions now my Northstar metric NPS score customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction those are leading indicators of marketing efficiency sales efficiency lead generation demand generation if I build an amazing product and people tell their friends about it and I build an amazing culture and people want to work here all the rest of Things fall into place now how do you know when you are forcing your business to get bigger rather than

letting customers demand it get bigger often times the biggest indicator is this Everything feels hard marketing is hard sales is hard customer success is hard everything is hard because when you are forcing something to grow that is not meant to grow it is that much harder growth can be a double-edged sword because what you're doing is that as you're growing you have to continue expanding the operations of your company to meet the expectations of your customer and if you let one get too far ahead of each other then you're out of lock step that success

comes with the responsibility of maintaining and enhancing the quality of the product or service you offer because if you don't continue to grow in the quality of what you're offering then you cannot keep up with the demand the marketplace puts upon you worry about being better and bigger will take care of itself most teammates are teachable but most leaders are not great teachers want to become a better leader become a great teacher just to clarify yelling at people is not leadership it is what unskilled and lazy people resort to when they don't know what else

to do back when I was 20 years old and I got one of my first jobs out of college at a gym I finally learned what a great leader does I came into an organization it was a big globo gym and I didn't know how to do anything and so when I came in I felt scared but I was also so eager to learn like all I wanted to do is I was like just point me in the right direction and I'll do it and I was really lucky because I got a really fantastic boss

because that person taught me how to sell I'd never sold before and I looked back and I think about that person I think about how great of a leader that person was and one thing that they did consistently was besides all the time they put into training on top of that had an hour every week that that person met with me and they called it mentorship session I got to just ask all the questions that I had in that hour to gain learning and understanding for anything that I didn't know and I look back and

I think about how that was one of the greatest experiences I could have had because what I learned is that being a leader is not about telling people what to do it's about teach teaching them what to do most people come in excited willing and hungry to learn new skills but most leaders and managers are not there able to reciprocate what they want they hire people and think even though they haven't had this job before they should know what to do I shouldn't have to teach them or they think that spending 1 hour is enough

time to teach somebody a brand new skill the same amount of time it takes you to learn something it's going to take your team to learn it so think about how long it's taken you as somebody in business to learn learn how to Market to a customer how to sell a customer how to retain a customer and you're still learning and then think about all the people on your team how much time do they need to learn their craft most leaders miss out on great people because they're not patient enough great teachers sees every opportunity

to teach well once I understood this I look at every meeting every one-on-one every interaction with my team what am I going to teach them right now anytime I see a teammate do something that is not aligned with how I Envision their Department I don't look at it as a chance to scold them or a chance to yell at them but a chance to teach them an example is that the other day I was talking to one of my teammates and he is looking at transitioning one of our teammates into a different role that would

be more fitting for her and so he came to me and he said this is the script I have written so it's positioned in a way that is positive not negative so he said this is the script I've written what do you think about this and as I read the script great job writing the script I actually would do it like this instead and as I told him how I do it then what we did is we wrote the script right there and then on that call he said his biggest takeaway was that I positioned

the change as a positive rather than a negative and so it wasn't that he did something wrong and I needed to yell at him it was that I needed to teach him and so it's making this mental switch of when you see someone make a mistake rather than scolding them rather than putting them on a performance Improvement plan it's like oh now I know where I need to teach you if you learn all these things that I now see are gaps how Unstoppable are you going to be what the best teachers know where the student

wants to go and if I know what they want to be then it also helps me figure out what are the gaps I need to teach them to get there now I can imagine you're watching this and you're like that sounds like a lot of work and I'm like yes this is what we do all day we teach people and we repeat ourselves over and over and over and over again the amount of times that I've had to teach a leader to make change in their team without disrupting the team 75 times if you want

to be a great leader you become a great teacher but to become a great teacher requires patience and the only thing that's different between me and maybe you watching this thinking how the do you do that every day I understand that Mastery comes from doing the same thing day in and day out and finding new ways to do it and not get bored with it Mastery comes from the boring and so if you want to be an amazing leader you have to become an amazing teacher and the only way to get there is through repetition

there's a quote by John Wooden that I think puts it perfectly effective leaders are first and foremost teachers we are in the education business the reason that I like making videos is because guess what I get to do with those videos send them to my team to educate my team