How to win BIG in 2025 (my top business lessons of the year)

I've been in business for 10 years and here are 10 lessons that I've learned in this last year that helped me have my best year yet so hopefully by the end of this video you can too the first business lesson is that missed opportunities are not problems we were going to do a book launch for Alex in the very beginning of 2025 and so over this last year we've just had a tremendous amount of opportunity in all divisions of the business and so we're ready to do this launch from a like the product is done

standpoint but from a team bandwidth standpoint there is none and when I looked at the cost the cost of following through with doing that launch is that two other things that are going very well and growing very fast would suffer because they would use the same resources because those resources were planned to handle this I came to him and said I think it's best that we push it because could we do it yes at what cost not one that I'm willing to pay we have a lot of people that are tapped out at this point

I would be toned deaf to put more work on people's plates and so I said this isn't a problem it's a missed opportunity and it's actually a missed opportunity that if we capitalize on makes our real problems worse sometimes things don't go according to plan sometimes things go better than according to plan and then when that happens sometimes it up other plans that you have and the reason for that is because the real problems that I have in my business are things on the back end of my business but sometimes if you capitalize on all

the opportunities you just stoke the fire of the problem that exists and make it worse I said I never want to make the same mistake twice that's one thing that I've like kept myself to in my business career and what I recognize is that I felt very similar to when I had gym launch and Prestige Labs during the conversation I essentially ended up folding and then what happened was what I was afraid of which is it diluted our resources it diluted my attention and it was the business that I was the least proud of building

because it wasn't done well the frame that I always put myself under is under what conditions does it make sense to capitalize on this opportunity it's not about time it's conditions if I can get these 30 people hired then under those conditions it makes sense to do a book launch if those conditions don't exist then this book launch will actually make our problems worse most companies die from the inside out bad internal decisions bad internal hiring and firing bad internal culture the little is what kills a company most companies die by indig gestion not starvation

if you only have one opportunity then all your attention is going to go to that opportunity let's just point to something minute that you would think wouldn't make a lot of money toothpaste everybody uses toothpaste think about billions of dollars have been made off of toothpaste people might be like oh but like we're missing out we should have toothbrushes and we should have floss yes but you could also make a billion dollars off toothpaste and if you're only focused on toothpaste you're probably going to put a lot more effort there and you're probably going to

get there a lot faster and so a lot of people have this imaginary Rush that causes them to cap wise and opportunities that they're not ready for when you try to force things you try to force conditions rather than allow conditions to happen it makes it a lot harder to do and so if you're an entrepreneur and you're looking at like this year I have an opportunity to do something I want you to ask yourself what's the cost of capitalizing that opportunity have I solved my biggest problem before tackling my biggest opportunity if we solve

the problem in our business the opportunity presents itself now here's the last thing I'll say one habit that I have never let myself get into regret of a missed opportunity is worse than failing a missed opportunity regret is truly useless and what you're doing is you're stealing attention from capitalizing on the next opportunity and so if you do say no to an opportunity do it without regret the next business lesson is that there is no one solution about a year ago we started our Workshop Division and it started with an absolute boom and so we'd

been doing this for about 6 or S months and then for a period of like 2 weeks noticed that there weren't as many people referring other people to the workshop and I was like why would our Word of Mouth go down I don't understand like why would it get worse not better I remember sitting there thinking and I was like I think actually what it is is that people habituate to things and when they habituate they start to slip up and so then I sat in for the next three Workshops the greeters that were supposed

to greet people when they walked in they were not on time and in fact we didn't have as many as we had in the past lunchtime some people were taking meetings they were with portfolio companies so so they just decided not to show up for lunch so we had less people socializing at lunch goodbye one thing that I have emphasized is that it's really important to say hello and goodbye to people and people actually were not saying a kind farewell it wasn't any one thing it was a hundred little things and so as I observe

this we have to go full bore into this I to make sure this is a great experience if it's a bad experience I'd rather not do it when people have a problem they're trying to solve when something goes wrong when a metric isn't where we want it to say sales are dipping revenue is dipping people are complaining customers aren't staying whatever it is like what's the one thing and we're searching for some magic answer when it's actually just 100 golden BBS I explained this concept to my team I explained to them this is 100 golden

BBS it's not one silver bullet and here's all the things that I believe have led to people not telling as many people about this so what we did is we made sure the greeters were there on time and there were more greeters we made sure everyone was at lunch we made sure everyone was at the brakes we made sure people said hello goodbye people called people by name what happened we went back to the same stats we had prior within one Workshop it wasn't any one thing it was like I think my list was like

11 things that we did everyone had a different reason as to why something worked or didn't work and you know what that taught me is that every business is built on a thousand details I think in the beginning we feel like we find silver bullets because we don't know how many bullets left there are to make something really work once you really get into business you realize like it is all about the details and it is is everything it's not just marketing and sales it's marketing and sales and Cs and it and operations and HR

the second thing it taught me is that attention to detail is the currency of success in business something I tell my team is we don't teach Excellence we demonstrate it what I mean by that what you say to them doesn't matter how you say it to them matters when someone comes in for a workshop are they going to listen to me talk on stage about business if my team can't even say hi at the door I think not but what I did learn from this last year is the amount of details that go into maintaining

excellence and so if you're looking at your business and you're thinking you know I think I need to change who I serve I think I need to change my product I think I need to completely redo my price I think you know more often the not it's not a strategy question it's an execution problem and as you grow execution only gets harder because what is execution it's not just you doing stuff it's your ability to get tens or hundreds of other people to do stuff for you so if you're trying to figure out what do

I need to do with my business this year and things aren't working like I beg of you try and fix 11 details before you try and to fix one big strategy the next business lesson is that most people won't buy in until they see it work it actually goes with the last lesson I just talked about which is you know we started up this workshops division when I had the idea for doing this I was very certain it would work and I understand what skills are required and I've also myself put on probably 50 workshops

in my career just in a different business and so I'm thinking this is a no-brainer but my team was like this doesn't make sense how are we going to do this I spent so much time trying to get everybody to like my idea and trying to tell me that they think it's a good idea before hitting go and what I realize is that only a few people will believe it before they see it more people will believe it after you really try to convince them but most people will not believe in something and won't buy

into something until see it work and I recognize that this is the case and what I actually don't want is I don't want everyone to agree with me and I don't expect everyone to agree with me I don't expect everyone to say it's going to work instead what you want is you want people to act as though the idea has a fighting chance so that you can find out if it actually does most people doubt something will work until it becomes so obvious that it is impossible to ignore and I was reminded this last year

of the fact that that buy in is impossible to get from 100% of your team people come to me a lot and say like I want my team to buy in what you actually want is you don't need them to believe it will work you need them to act as though it could possibly work because if people act as though it will never work then they will not execute 10 out of 10 and then you don't even know if the idea will work or not you don't need them to believe like you believe that it's

going to happen and you shouldn't expect that only a few people are going to be like that on your team but that shouldn't stop you from taking action this was a really great lesson for me because I had a lot of people on my team coming to me I'm concerned I don't understand I don't think this is going to work I said I don't need you to believe it but I do need you to execute as if it has a fighting chance and that was what I told everyone on my team and ironically after they

saw it work then everybody was very supportive of it they laughed at Galo until they looked through his telescope so it's like people will laugh at you they will mock you they will tell you your idea won't work the people closest to you will do this that's normal and honestly if everybody tell you that your idea is going to work then you're probably being lied to and they're probably scared of you I will never punish somebody or fire somebody for having a different opinion what I won't accept as if somebody doesn't give it a 10

out of 10 shot by not executing because there's many times where you know somebody that reports to me wants to do something a certain way and I'm like I don't think that's going to work that way but I support them as if I think it could and then sometimes I'm proven wrong sometimes I'm proven right either way I don't believe it until I see it the next business lesson is that you want to bet on the job Rocky not on the horse no matter how fast the horse is sometimes we see a business opportunity that's

just so obvious it's so easy that I'm like there's no way this is not going to work you know what that did is it sort of blinded me to the fact that I kind of took the founders at face value I didn't dig very hard to test how much of a Founder fit they were to see that they shared values all these little things that I saw in the beginning but that I didn't push on became big with those Founders lack of discipline lack of self-management actually led to them not being able to grow their

business even though the business opportunity is one that is a clear winning shot the founders inability to manage themselves the founders in ability to discipline themselves got in the way turned what was like the fastest horse into like this horse with like a limp leg like just trying to cross the finish line a great leader a great CEO can make an average idea succeed and a poor leader can make even the best idea fail now if you're looking at hiring people I think this is another area where I've just seen that in the past I've

bet on the horse not the jockey what do I mean by that I actually consider the horse what I'm hiring people to be their experience rather than if they're a fit for the team I've hired people have been like Allstars at you know Microsoft and Google and I brought them in for them just to fall flat because they weren't a culture fit were not a values match but they had this insanely cool experience and so I bet on the experience rather than the person if in your business right now you're looking at how do I

want to set myself up for success in the coming year no matter what I know it is hard because you can't measure what you have to gain you only measure what you have to lose in these situations if you're in that situation you're like well I would lose this all this experience this person is going to bring but you don't know what you have to gain by saying no to this nothing is better than the wrong thing I'm I'm going to bet on the jockey I'm done betting on horses and if I can't find a

jockey that I like no jockey is better than the wrong jockey the next business lesson I learned when incentives are designed poorly they can sabotage even the best of businesses and teams one thing that happened for me in this last year is that I think that I was behind the eightball with a couple of departments in terms of getting incentives in place quickly and so because of that was that when people don't know how to make more money in their role they want another role and so what it incentivizes if you don't have what I

call like a technical track for performance meaning you don't know how to pay an individual contributor more for doing better work then they say well I would like to be a manager most people don't inherently want to be a manager or leader most people just want to make more money or they want to feel like they're improving if people are given a clear path to improve in the role that they have most people opt for actually just staying in that role making more money getting a better title improving there but because I got that behind

the eightball what I realize is that in a couple of the Departments what they're incentivized to do is to try and stop doing the work that they are doing as quickly as possible and start managing people as quickly as possible you create this environment where people feel like the only way that they can grow in your company is if they move up into management and then you also incentivize people to stop doing the work that they might be best in the world at then what it does is it creates this like very contorted culture where

it's like people will essentially sacrifice what they want for what they see is rewarded and so what I saw is that in two departments in my company because people were incentivized to move up in their management roles being a director to a senior director they were just trying to get more people under them so they could move up faster and that's because I failed to show people how they could make more money staying where they were and so what it does if you don't do that is it incentivizes blo in a company it is in

that person's best interest to create a big team because they know if I get these people under me I get to move up into this position that they've expressed they really want but they don't see a way to do that to move up into that position unless these things occur something that's really difficult is to incentivize people immediately in the beginning of a business I just put people on salary for the most part I don't have many incentives as the business within 18 months or 24 months is at a point where it's more mature I

have clear metrics that I know I want to hit and I know the averages for them then I'm going to say okay I want to tie people to these having metrics that incentivize the behavior that you want incentives are B based on having Baseline metrics you cannot incentivize people to do better until you know what average is so one you have to know what you want out of a person or a department two you have to know what average looks like and what below average and above average are when a business is a year or

two years old I have a very hard time setting incentives that are very specific because metrics tend to change so quickly what was a good close percentage when you're at month three is probably pretty shitty at month 8 because you gain so much efficiency so quickly it's like you grow out of a compensation plan very quickly and so how do you stop this you can stop it by showing people how to make more money without moving up and incentivizing performance not just on moving up in a company so what that looks like is you have

two tracks in a company you can have a management track and you can have technical tracks most tracks in a company should be technical tracks meaning people can learn how to make more money in their current role only a few people get put on a management track because it doesn't make sense for a company to have 17 people going on a management track you don't need 17 managers more management is not always better no management is actually not better either what I learned is that I need to pay more attention as the company's growing to

making sure I get these things into place faster that reminds me of this quote by Charlie Munger which says show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome and so if you want the outcome of your business to be one where you have really strong leaders and you've got really strong individual contributors you need to have a technical track and a management track the next business lesson that I learned this year is that you have to prioritizing solving personal constraints before business constraints I had a time about 4 months ago where I had

actually three departments that I thought needed change and there was one that made the most sense to tackle but I was speaking with one of my friends he asked me this question which prompted me to remember this he said yeah but which one is the one keeping you up at night and I was like well it's this department he's like well why I'm like well this person is taking six to seven hours of my week every week because of their emotional needs because of their coaching needs because of like their dependence on me uh and

because of that and then and then underneath that is now the department has these issues and then this person is relying on me to help solve those issues and like but the thing is that that Department's not a constraint this Department's a constraint and he said he was like Leila you won't have the power or attention to solve the real constraint unless you solve your personal constraint and it was just such a good reminder for me because I am really good at putting others and the business ahead of myself because I look at myself as

like I'm a steward of the business I need to do what's best for it because if I do what's best for the business I protect everybody else sometimes it doesn't look good sometimes it's not something people are going to like but I know that the goal is that the business does two things survives and succeeds if it does those two things then I protect my team but the thing that happened is that over time I've gotten more skill and I've gotten more capacity and so my ability to take on more has gone up and what

I recognized this last year is that that's not always a good thing because what I was saying what is the number one problem in the business I I need to focus on solving that one and yes there's these things that are bugging the out of me but I'm not going to solve them because this logically makes the most sense to do to grow the business however if my attention which is arguably the most costly attention in the business if I'm only able to use 60% of it to solve this problem because 40% of it is

taken by this thing that really personally is frustrating me then I can't even solve the problem in front of me to the best of my ability because my attention is being sucked and so what what it does is it gives you more power to solve the business problem once you've solved the problem that you have a personal issue with and so I sharing that with you because if you're going into this next year and saying like what do I need to solve first sometimes you got to handle your personal and it doesn't even need to

be personal it can be the thing that takes the most attention from you you know for me this was quote personal because it took so much of my discretionary time you know and that's because I care for the people in my company I care for the Departments and so if somebody is needing my attention needing my help all the time and there's things going on that maybe aren't aligned with the culture I want to build that takes my attention and these things are happening in the back of my head yet I have a problem in

front of me it's completely unrelated and so for you that could be a business problem it could be a personal problem think about whatever that problem is it's just stealing from you your power to actually tackle the number one thing in your business the reason why I think business is such a great vehicle for personal growth is that if you really want to grow the business you have to tackle the things that constrain you before the business you know what it really reminds me of is this quote which is the bottleneck is at the top

of the bottle and so you have to free yourself first and the business will follow the next business lesson is that momentum makes everything better when I first started in business I just fell into it we had been working really hard for 2 years launching gyms and then suddenly we got product Market fit and things took off there was no like planning on a whiteboard six-year plan like there was nothing and over my business career what I learned is that the ideal is that you create a flywheel a flywheel is a system where all the

parts make the whole better and a flywheel creates momentum in a business so if you improve this piece of the business it makes this piece better as well and for a long time I really wanted to have that in my business and I didn't have it I tried to create it in gym launch and it just didn't really work as well as I wanted to and so when I started acquisition. comom my main goal was like how do we create a flywheel in this company so that we have momentum because if I have different divisions

of a company but they don't make each other better then you get less return on your effort so we have our brand what our brand does is it allows us to get proprietary deal flow meaning we get access to deals that nobody else gets most of the people that come to us and want to partner with us they're not looking to sell to another PE firm they're looking to sell to us and if they cannot sell to us and they don't want to sell so that's proprietary deal flow then getting those companies we share the

stories of those companies we share the wins of those companies and we share all the lessons that we learn through growing those companies which creates more deal flow for us and then that deal flow we say okay well we can't take all of these into the portfolio because that's not our model and they don't qualify and so instead what we're going to do is put them into incubation program which is our workshops division the workshops division creates content it also creates deal flow and so what that looks like is like workshops create deal flow for

portfolios workshops create content for brand brand creates deal flow for portfolio brand creates deal flow for workshops you see it's the self-fulfilling machine and what happens is that if you design your business this way then it is inevitable that you succeed an example of this would be like Fitness think about compound movements so why is it that we want to prioritize like squats you've got bench and you've got deadlift why are those the core Foundation of working out because these create more momentum they don't just isolate one body part they actually make all the body

parts better so if somebody's trying to grow muscle they're going to do compound movements they're going to do a lot of volume on those compound movements because they know that when you do squats you're not just growing your quads you're also growing your glutes and your hamstrings and your calves same with deadlifts and so what that means is that now if I grow my brand I also grow my portfolio and my workshops Division and my Ventures Division I don't just grow one thing this year has proven to me that if you create that flywheel everything

gets easier now what does this mean for your business is that as you say hey maybe I want to add a new product maybe I want to add a new division how does that product or how does that division Vision grow the others this forces us to be actually strategic and it forces us to create a flywheel effect Jim colins said this a flywheel is a self-reinforcing loop once it's in motion it is Unstoppable momentum and so if you want to build momentum in your business if you want to create a flywheel think how can

I be strategic when I add a division or I add a product so that it makes everything better not just one thing the next business lesson is that executives are rarely let go go for performance I had to part ways this year with a couple of Executives in the company and I said why did this not work it wasn't that these people were not performing and it wasn't that they were even misaligned with the values it was that for the most part they were misaligned with the vision or the founders so they were misaligned with

where we were going because values in my opinion are how you get there performance is going to say how fast we're going to get there but where are we going and if somebody on your team wants to end up somewhere that you don't want to it's really hard to work together because they're just opposing your vision at all stock misaligned leaders break companies aligned leaders build legacies and so for me I had a few people that were very close to me that I loved working with that were very high performers that were really competent but

they weren't aligned they were trying to influence me to go to their Vision rather than the one that I've had for 5 years since I started the company and what that does the lack of unity at the top creates chaos at the bottom and so their departments bear the brunt of that as do other people in the company because what they see is that when you're on leadership calls when you're on Executive calls people can tell that there's misalignment and so what I learned is that misaligned leadership is like having a car with its tires

all pointed in a different direction what happens is it goes nowhere and so if all the leaders at the top are not aligned the car will not move sometimes that person never had the same vision to begin with OR that that person thought they could change my vision or that that person developed a different Vision along the way it's kind of like if you're in a relationship ship with somebody and you're both like we want to have a family and a white picket fence and kids and then like 2 years in they're like hey I

actually want to live in the city and I don't think I want kids and you're like wait what do you mean we're going to have this house like that's what we've been talking about you can want that and I can want this but like we can't really be married ultimately misalignment is why it doesn't work with people who are very competent and also culture fits it's like a marriage with one person wanting the house with the white picket fence and one person wanting to live in the City and so something that you can ask yourself

as you go into the new year is my leadership team creating alignment or are they creating disunity do I have leaders or high performers on my team that are culturally aligned but don't want to go the same place I want to go there's nothing wrong with that but it can't work in the company the next business lesson I learned is that businesses grow faster than most people can grow in one situation I had a person who was killing it that role got promoted by the company growing and then that person who was killing it became

actually like the biggest bottleneck in the company and like millions of dollars at stake because of this person's incompetence but what I was really lucky for is that I did not over tile that person too much and so what I was able to do was to bring somebody in above them and then that person was able to take that person who had been a star and then turned into like the biggest struggling person and make them a star again because what they did is they filled in the Gap often times when you over promote somebody

or the business over promotes somebody it's like seven to 10 skills that they're lacking and that could take a year or two years for them to acquire if the business doesn't have time to wait then you need to make sure that you bring somebody in to bridge the gap in the interim there's a principle that really extrapolates this out it's called the Peter Principle and what it states is that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to the level of their incompetence meaning they're promoted based on their ability to do their current job well

not on the potential to do the next job job well so for example say I have somebody who's a controller in my company and then you say you know what you're such a good controller I'm going to promote you to CFO but the skills to be a CFO are not the skills to be a controller and so you can take somebody who is a great controller and then make a terrible CFO and so what happens is that individuals rise to a position where then they're no longer competent and then what that does is it creates

a ceiling of incompetence the business can no longer grow because of the incompetence of the person that you have put in that role and so you've essentially taken someone who's like a superstar and turned them into like the biggest struggling person in the organization and then a business is only as strong as its weakest link so if you have six leaders in the organization but two of them are at their level of incompetence meaning they're not competent for the role they're in those weakest links are the strength of the organization you start to create this

Dynamic too where it's not just you that feels it or the other leaders but it's other people that are their peers that start to say what's going on why aren't they doing a good job why this why that what happened to me this year is that I didn't actually promote anybody but my business promoted them because it grew so fast if a company quadruples or quintuples in a year then the person who was the operations manager at the beginning of the year is not competent to be it at the end of the year and so

that's always why I'm like such a fan of under tiing because then you can bring somebody in above eventually if the business grows too fast and you don't have to worry about demoting people or letting people go and so if your business right now you're looking at you're like we're growing really fast I want you to understand that there's two things that could be occurring either one you promoted People based on the skill that they have in their current role not the skill that they would have to do the next role or your business grew

so fast that your business promoted the people for you and they're no longer competent in that role and so in that case you have decisions to make which is if you promoted them then you can try to offer them a step back down and position in some way as a benefit on the other instance if the business promotes somebody in their world then I think you have a better shot at bringing somebody in a level above them to help bridge the gap because the likelihood is if the business is grown really fast and they're outgrown

for their role you probably do need somebody above them as well over promotion turns Talent into a liability and a bad fit in a good role is actually worse than no fit at all so ask yourself this like is the growth of my business outpacing my team's ability to grow as leaders and if so what can I do to prevent over promoting people past the point of their ability because the leadership team is the most important team to pay attention to because leaders multiply themselves if you have an incompetent leader you will get an incompetent

team the last business lesson is that business is personal what I watched over this last year is one of the founders of one of my companies essentially their personal life was in chaos and they kept telling me that it is not going to affect the business I didn't believe them because essentially everything that was happening on a personal side started to seep into the business side this person formed a lot of bad habits they were hanging out with a lot of people who weren't good influence and so what happened is that we had a business

that was growing year-over-year for 4 years and then cut in half because this person's attention was going towards all this drama and so all these things that were happening outside took away all their attention that they could have for their business you cannot compartmentalize chaos if your personal life is in shambles your business will soon be in shambles as well this is a lesson that I've learned for my s and I feel really fortunate cuz I had a mentor in the beginning and he said your personal life is your business life if you want to

be regimented if you want to be happy in your business life be all of those things in your personal life and so I've always tried to live my life in a way where in order to succeed and achieve my goals in business I have to actually also achieve those things personally in order to show up in a way it doesn't create chaos in my business your attention is like a jar of marbles and so if you're drinking you've got five marbles here if you've got an issue with your mom it's five marbles here if you

have a bad marriage it's 10 marbles here and so everyone looks and they only have five marbles and then they try to grow their business with those five marbles and then they say why can't I grow my business he says well you got to pick up your marbles from all the places that stealing them get them back the first thing I did before I started my first business was I said where am I leaving marbles there were some things that me and Alex hadn't hashed out or agreed upon before we had moved in together and

so we had to have those conversations and so what I did is I picked up all these marbles from all these places I put back to my jar some people say like how did your business grow so fast I had more marbles than you I picked them all up I'm constantly saying what other areas of my life are stealing my marbles it's not that you have to say off to everything else in life it's that you have to say how do I get my marbles back so that they actually give me more marbles rather than

take more marbles if you have a great body in physique you probably feel better when you show up at work if you have a great marriage then you probably feel better when you're going into your business because you feel supported the point is is that you cannot compartmentalize chaos if your personal life is a mess it's stealing from your attention to do business if your personal life is in order that will give you the attention to go into business and just be a Savage the greatest threat to your business is not your competition it's your

unresolved conflict with yourself and other people your personal chaos will always bleed in to professional Clarity you will not be clearing your business if you have personal chaos surrounding you and so the question that you want to ask is are the things going on in my personal life affecting my ability to lead and grow my business and if they are that should be your number one priority right now go figure that out you know a great rule that Alex and I have always had is like we always have to feel really good about our relationship

otherwise we can't show up and like go to war together every day to like grow this business we would take an hour two hours whatever it took before we showed up for everybody else because we knew that unresolved personal conflict leads into business