No BS Business Advice to Get Rich in 2025

I've been in business for 13 years and since 2020 three of the companies I started have reached $100 million plus valuation here's nobas advice to help you crush 2025 my first piece of advice is set fewer goals and do less long-term planning hear me out and so this may sound contradictory to some of my content about being patient and I think long-term goals are very important but the obsession over the minutia of how you're going to get there is I believe an act of mental masturbation you try and create these massive projections that are based

on hundreds of variables that in reality you just don't know what's going to happen and so over time I've consistantly trimmed and trimmed and trimmed our planning processes such that at this point I pretty much only care what we're going to do in the next 12 weeks and beyond that we might have one target or two Targets by the end of the year but we're not going to dedicate a lot of resources to this and this is somebody who's coming who who's a big fan of preparation but I've just found that it ended up being

a huge waste of time mostly because whenever I looked at the plans that I made the year before one year later I was like man half this stuff isn't even relevant anymore because of new changes and conditions and so I will probably continue to lean more in this direction and I think this has become a little bit more popularized by some of the CEOs like Jensen hang who despite having Nvidia over 30 plus years has recently talked about how he basically doesn't do a lot of long-term planning because fundamentally you have things that you can

do today and those are the things you begin to allocate now sometimes do what you need to do today is work for something that's going to happen in the future but you can only control what you do today and so I have shifted more and more in terms of what will this change about our Behavior and the rest of it I more or less toss out so let me give you a couple visuals to make this real and so the first thing is that we think that you're going to have this really neat line of

how the growth is going to happen right but reality is very messy and so what's likely going to happen is that you will Flatline and then figure something out and then you'll Flatline and then figure something out and Flatline to figure something out this is what it looks like if you were to zoom in on this little area here right if you were to zoom in here it actually looks closer to what this is which is you have the stagnation and then you have these improvements that occur and then increase Revenue now one of the

things that's also shifted my perspective on how to plan is let's say that we've got thing a thing B thing C thing D thing e that we need to do well before this I would try and you know divers you know delegate each of these things to person one person two person three person four person five and so on but I would say that that appears to me like I have not done my job because I need to do a better job prioritizing one of these things is the most important and if you can't decide

what that is then you are not doing your job and you certainly can't expect your team to make that decision for you and so I've had to look at this and say if I could only pick one of these things and we only accomplish that thing which of these would get us closer to our vision for what the company should be which ones would move us the furthest forward which of these is the biggest domino and so what I've redone is I say Okay a is actually the priority I don't need to order B through

C here I don't need to worry about what order these are in and then I will take 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 plus 5 and get all of these resources concentrated on solving a and then what I found is that once you solve a with all those resources because everyone's aligned then all of a sudden B happens faster C happens faster D happens faster than trying to do them all at once so let's say that you ran an agency right so you do meta ads for small businesses like a very typical business so

if that was your business you might say okay we need to you know get more leads so that means we're going to increase ads okay that's one of the things we're going to you know increase show rate because our show up rate sucks so we're going to we're going to try and fix that we've got a hire you know a sales manager and whatever else right like you've got you've got you've got your tasks I'll just put dot dot dot dot dot dot now if this was your objective a good strategist says given the resources

I currently have what one thing could I do that would make all of these problems disappear the good strategist would would then say well if I had a brand and I invested in my brand well would that would that accomplish my leads thing yep now I wouldn't have ads but it would accomplish my problem with getting leads now would show up rates be higher if I have a warm audience yes would my close rate be okay because everyone is being warmer probably now you might have to still hire the sales manager you can see how

the entire Dynamic would change if only this were true and so then it follows okay well what are the resources required to make this happen and if I know what those resources are and I have those resources available then it would follow that I should do this one thing and then in so doing accomplish all of these other things as a consequence and this is why to be clear if you're like wait well they're just going to say build a better product because if you have a good product you're not going to lose people you're

going to get word of mouth you're going to have higher LTV or they're just going to say you know Alex is just going to say build a good brand because if you build a good brand then all these other problems go away no that's called Leverage and so you're like no no no I don't want to do the one thing that would solve all my problems I want to try and solve each of my problems individually well that's amazing for you and you should probably get that looked at but the point is is that a

good strategist has to look at all available options given the resources they have and say which one of these gets me the most and fundamentally that is leverage next up is the strongest force in all of business and so I believe in this so thoroughly that there are only two concepts that are embedded within the acquisition. comom logo the first is this cross here which is the supply and demand curve that exists in any Market the second part is why is this a triangle the triangle is there to exist as a full crumb for leverage

and so fundamentally if you can have a supply demand curve that is dramatically in your favor that alone will dictate this if you are the only person who sells this one thing and the entire world wants it you going to make a lot of money money pretty much no matter what doesn't matter how good you are at Market doesn't matter how good you are at sales doesn't matter how good you are at pricing you're going to make a ton of money and so I try to think what are the fewest things that have to be

true in order for me to win and I would rather just get those things right and then everything else can fall away and so think about this in sequence Supply demand is the first and most important thing as long as we have those things then if you had that hypothetical example of the entire world wants something and you're the only one who does it what's the next thing you would need which is Leever you would want to be able to get as much for the effort that you put in because you would get bottlenecked based

on maybe your supply chain you'd have other dependencies that would prevent you from capitalizing on the opportunity that the supply and demand curve has put in front of you and so in a perfect world you have all of that and unlimited leverage and that allows you to maximally capitalize on opportunities and that is why I designed the acquisition. comom logo to exhibit those things now the first piece here is understanding whether your business is Supply or demand constrained and so a supply constrained business for example is one that's like cleaning like cleaners often don't have

a hard time finding other businesses or other homes to do cleaning for a lot of people just don't want to do it the issue they have is finding staff who can do the cleaning with them or for them so that means that your supply side of how you can deliver to the demand is usually the issue and this happens a lot of times with I would consider nuisance services so services that people might know how to do but just don't want to do a different example of this in the professional setting would be like accounting

firms accounting firms a lot of people don't want to hire accountants and for a big period of time in a lot of companies growth in the beginning you don't have in-house accounting and so having an out ofh housee accountant there's plenty of demand for them the issue they have is recruiting really good accountants and so yet again they are a supply constrained business now this works again with legal it works with high-end Consulting like if you're a very good consultant in a niche it's very like easy to get people to want to buy from you

very hard to get other people to do what you can do because you're really good at this thing right and so this is very typical in a lot of businesses especially service and so that would be Supply constrainted businesses and if that is the constraint then what do we do to gain leverage over the constraint and so this is where okay is there a way that we can build a community of accountants that we can then recruit from is there a way that we can create some sort of environment that attracts more cleaners can our

compensation structure can we have a referral system internally for our team or our employees because I know what a cleaner I know what a legal person I know what another consultant is worth to me to my business in total gross profit per year and why would I not be willing to pay 20% of that to somebody now you might do that math and be like holy cow I make 250,000 a year per new lawyer who joins my firm it' probably be a lot more than that honestly in that case then why would I be unwilling

to spend $50,000 to go and not not only that give that $50,000 to someone on my team for bringing another great lawyer in and so this scales all the way up and all the way down based on the revenue that each of these high-end or Supply constrained employees provides the business now those are Supply constraint businesses and if you're in one of those you need to recognize it because the real businesses you're in is attracting hiring training managing and incentivizing these people to perform that's the real business because the demand kind of takes care of

itself of course you have to do the basics but the real issue is going to be on the back end not the front end now let's flip the tables there are some businesses that are demand constrainted now demand constrainted businesses will be typically like e-commerce businesses often times software businesses specifically B2B software businesses can be demand constrained typically iCal consumer products weight loss for example is a very demand constrain business now this m sounds wild to you like wait I think so many people want to lose weight yeah there's just even more people who Supply

it and so many different methods for doing it now again all of these things can shift right supply and demand is a curve like it can move right this is dynamic and this video exists in time and unfortunately the environments change but anybody who's been in Fitness would understand that getting customers is actually typically the hardest part finding train ERS not that hard there's lots of people that like training and they'll even do it for free same thing with musicians like if you teach music classes right one of the difficulties there is attracting people who

want to buy music lessons but there's tons of people who play music and do it for free right and so the idea is which side of this curve are you on and then whatever that side is is asking yourself how can I gain more leverage over this problem so that I can solve it at scale once and for all rather than having to solve it continuously over and over and over again so I'll give you an example I had a a company who came out that we were looking at and they were a little bit

on the smaller side but they were a home services company and so the issue they had is they were struggling to attract plumbers and so one of the things that we put in place for the business was well what does a plumber bring in every year and let's call it $400,000 in gross profit okay so if you have a nut of $400,000 that you know you've got the demand for they're turning away business cuz their phones ringing too much and they can't even take it what are you willing to pay one time to unlock $400,000

every year in gross profit well if you were to think about that like an investment right which would be like okay I've got this stock that yields $400,000 in gross profit per year to me what would I be willing to pay for it and that's every year well shoot I'd be at least willing to pay $400,000 if it was a stock right that's 100% return because next year I'm going to make $400,000 too now there is an element of risk that comes into the equation what if the person leaves what if they get fired they're

not good all of those things so those are for sure there which means that we would then apply some sort of discount to account for that risk but I think that one of the big misconceptions that business owners have is they're not willing to pay enough for talent that is the constraint of their business like right now if you could get 10 more like if you were in a supply coning business if you could get 10 more of not not star just appropriately competent employees who could service the demand that you have would that double

or triple your business if so yes what would you pay in order to double Tri your business probably a lot more than it costs you to attract those people cool then what do we do well the easiest thing is incentivize all the people in your existing Workforce to go do that recruiting for you too many business owners will give like a $1,000 referral bonus on something that makes $400,000 a year in gross profit well that's dumb if if I can give $25,000 away or $50,000 away and I can get it solved in a month then

every month because that $400,000 doesn't happen at once it happens over this period of time and so if I can actually solve the problem two months earlier then that means I get get to collect $35,000 for two more months of gross profit okay so there is a Time component of this so maybe you can get the referral and maybe it does take you 6 months instead of three but you missed out on whatever that is $105,000 in gross profit that you could have had had you just been willing to pay a little bit more but

still less overall and you still get to keep that person for life so you'll notice that I'm talking a lot about who in these examples and you know it's one of those big obvious TR responses that everyone who is a senior entrepreneur or senior investor or Warren Buffett or Steve Jobs they all say the same thing it's just about the people right bet on the jockey not the horse there's tons of isms in this world and everyone nods along but the problem is that people don't have the context to understand the levels of talent that

exist and this is why these mistakes are so hard to Bear because you have to have some sort of pattern recognition of having worked with one terrible people to know how to avoid them and then secondarily what star Talent looks like and sometimes it takes luck in the beginning and then over time you start recognizing what that looks like so that you can do it on purpose rather than on accident and if you think about people as one of the highest leverage things you can do so think about this as hypothetical if your business had

people who could do everything that currently exists and you could simply own it that would mean that you could work zero and make almost the same amount that you do now you'd only have to find someone who could do what you do like literally just think about what you currently make think about what you currently do if you could pay someone less than what you currently make in distributions to do 100% of what you currently do you could feasibly retire at your current income level just with that one Higher the idea of getting really good

people is still undervalued in the marketplace which is why there's always an opportunity for people who know how to attract and retain the best talent there's a reason that the most expensive companies in the world in the stock market are at War for talent I want to say like 18 months ago one of the headlines of I think like the New York Times or something was the talent War and the whole idea was just that it's an onslaught of signing bonuses and Kumbaya and free lunch and all this stuff to try and attract the top

talent because they know that the leverage of having somebody who's a 10x engineer or a 100x marketer for their business is always worth more than what they're going to pay the individual and so they're just doing everything they can to get them and this is me trying to translate that to you in terms of my emphasis over the last year or years that has yielded this outcome if we're thinking about more or less in terms of my focus this is one that I'm doing more of I'm more focused on Talent I'm more focused on better

people fewer better people and incentivizing them and incentivizing other people to bring them in there's some semiconductor companies that are offering 3x salaries their current salary to poach people from one company to another because the cost of switching is obviously high and so if they're making more money than you you should look at what they're doing so next point up for me is of the first 100 days this year I took zero days off and I bring this up because this is a very taboo topic and I want to be clear do whatever you want

I'm just saying that when I see the entrepreneurs who were obsessed with their work they do better than people who aren't and it's basically that their discretionary time that would go to hobbies that would go to other things basically all flows into this one thing and so I'm going to paint a different picture for you if I played video games all day and someone came up to me and said hey why don't you go outside and I say I don't want to go outside I want to keep playing video games the thing is is that

that person's making some moral judgment that I should do something that they have projected onto my life now I'm a big believer in personal freedom which is if you want to play video games every hour every day until the day you die that's your prerogative It's not how I would want to live my life but more power to you if you have an outcome that you're optimizing towards which would be Financial wealth which is kind of the point of my channel the people who work the most tend to make the most money and there's a

number of reasons for that so number one is you make more money when you work more because you have less time to spend it that sounds obvious but I think it's like kind of silly like if you work you make more if you stop working you not only don't make you also spend so it's a it's a it's a negative to positive swing it's actually disproportionate the next thing is that um a friend of mine messaged Elon about vacations he's like hey you should you should go on vacation or we should go here for vacation

and elon's response was I don't do vacation and I was like man I love this guy I bring this up yet again because I feel like the more you get in the game the more addicted to the game you get and I think that addiction is just a term that Society uses for activities that people do that have negative consequences rather than simply things that you do on a regular basis well I'm addicted to food because I do it every day I'm addicted to sleep because I do it every day I'm addicted to talking to

Lila because I do it every day and so it's just that addictions is when they decide that the outcome of that thing is somehow negative but if the outcome of what I do helps more businesses grow and is something that I enjoy why is this wrong and so we did two very bad vacations this year one was in July 4th which I ended up basically just traveling and then working the whole time so I don't know if I would consider that a vacation and then the other one we went to truly do a vacation and

so this one was going to be 2 days and we got there and it was this beautiful luxury resort and there's only 22 Villas it's like three or four people per Villa like very you know ritzy whatever and I look out on the patio of the Villa that we have over the mountains and I'm like man this is beautiful and I don't care and I think it was this realization that even vacations were something that had been passed on to me from someone earlier in my life that I was something that I should do that

I must do this or else I will not gain their approval and I will get judgment from people that I care about but when I think about who do I care about who would care about whether or not I go on vacation there very very few and they certainly don't have the things that I want or have accomplished what I would like to accomplish and so why would I listen to them the big conclusion that I've had from this whole thing was maybe vacations aren't for me or maybe they're not for me right now and

that's totally okay who made the rule that vacations must exist humans existed for a very long time before vacations were a thing and so the idea that this is a requirement for humans is very foreign and feels societally programmed also takes into the assumption that you have the money for the vacations it's basically a privileged thing that you then cast a projection onto somebody else saying they should exercise this privilege because that's what you would do in their position but maybe the reason you would do it in their position is why you're not in their

position and so one of the other things that we did this year is that we traveled significantly less and so this year in total I think we took somewhere in the neighborhood 12 you know 10 to 12 days off in total and I would Define a day off as not working at all that would be a day off and so I would say workday I would Define as more than C four hours of work as a work day so maybe on the days off I would still consider I worked for a few hours but I'll

count that as a day off so big picture The increased focus and decrease in change in variables in my environment allowed me to work more because I had fewer changing variables that I had to accommodate on a regular basis and so Lela and I were looking over our calendars yesterday we did a joint podcast going over each month of the year like what we focused on in that month and what was interesting is that we kept swiping through it it was just just like work work work just like an onslaught of things that we did

over and over and over again and I can tell you this is that the periods where I've had tremendous Financial growth across different companies that I founded have almost always had these very long periods where I just have to do reps and this is like I'm in a rocky cut scene of my own right now and I know that it's likely going to take three-ish years and I'm probably about a year in and I probably have two more years to get to the other side and it's just that I've been on this roller coaster before

and I know how the song goes it's less like weird for me and also I don't have the anxiety of will this be forever I know it's not going to be forever and I know that it's a season and even if it is forever I have found that it's far more productive for me to work seven days a week 8 to 10 hours a day than it is for me to work five and take two people have different preferences but for me it's kind of like the summer Gap in learning so when kids take 3

months off for the summer they have this whole summer catchup that they have to do which takes like another quarter for them to just get back to where they were and so if you think about the 3 months plus the katchup it's like kids are only like net positive for like 6 months of the year and the other 6 months they're not so they're basically learning at half speed from an entrepreneur perspective we're incentivized to get as much quality work done as possible and so for me I work very well on realistically a 10 to

12 hour a day schedule obviously there's probably two or 3 days a week that I'll work 16 to 18 but I would say my my true average is probably 7 days a week of 12 and i' would say weekends are shorter and I probably have two or three days like I said during the week that are probably 18s and so that gets me somewhere in the 90 hours a week range but for me that's actually fairly doable because my wife's here with me I have a gym downstairs I have all the people that I care

about and I I care about them because they support me they take interest in my goals and they want to help me accomplish them they increase the likelihood that those goals occur and so what else could I ask from someone for my life like what I'm I'm very happy with my life and I think that a lot of people take offense to me being happy about my life because they think that I cast judgment on them living differently you can do whatever you want I make this channel because I've been trying to document this since

I had nothing all the way to a billion dollars plus and just say what's worked for me my team asked me to clarify this because they're with me a 100 days straight means no weekends so I just worked the first 100 days of the year so that took me into whatever that is April so a lot of you hear 100 days and think oh my God my friends would throw a fit if I worked 100 days straight well if you want better friends then expect to see them less because better friends are busy friends better

friends are doing things with their lives and I don't know about you but I would rather see someone less frequently who's actually pursuing great things than someone who's always available to see me all the time and has zero material updates because they are in no way growing or getting better because my biggest fear would that they rub off on me and the friends that I have now I can count on one hand and almost all of them are entrepreneur I say almost they're all entrepreneurs and they're all very high level entrepreneurs and we basically stay

in touch via text and none of them live in the same state as me all of my friends treat text like email which is like we text and none of us have an expectation of response it's like oh I can't believe you didn't respond to my text for three days it is super normal for each of my friends to have not responded to me and for me not to respond to them for days at a time and none of us blow up and have a tantrum because we know the other person's busy and they'll get

to it when they get to it so with on on the on the on the back end of that uh serious note fun things did happen this year and so I ended up buying aq.com three-letter domain from Yahoo and so they had owned that since 1998 or9 I can't remember it was 90 it was 96 through 98 so they had owned it for like 26 years something like that and I finally was able to wrestle it from there from their grip and so that was really cool for those of you curious it was $480,000 to

buy the domain I don't buy a lot of crazy and um I'm allowed to spend my money however I want to spend it and I think aq.com is dope and so on the back end of that part of the reason I did that was because we just uh stood up acq Ventures so really proud of that it's primarily focused on uh SAS and Tech enabled Services the reason that we're doing it is basically because our family office which functions like a private Equity but it's a family office in that we don't have uh outside LPS

or limited partners people who give us money so we don't have any people give us money it's all our money which is why it's a family office but in terms of the day-to-day most family offices tend to be passive we are very active in our investments and we take significantly larger positions and so we stood this up because we have a tremendous amount of people who who uh who are entrepreneurs we meet uh through the various things that we do that would like uh investment they would like help but they don't want to necessarily hand

over control or hand over have that level of Engagement and so we we stood up acq Ventures because there's just honestly a ton of demand for a different capital structure uh for our investments we just did our first three Deals in acq Ventures I think should finalize in the next week or two so before the end of the year kind of cool and so that will be a much higher volume deal side for acquisition. comom and that Branch will just be on the Venture side well speaking of big things that I did this year I

worked a crazy amount on the $100 million scaling road map and it's yours for free and I'll tell you how to get it right now I did it across all eight departments so the departments were sales marketing customer service product it HR recruiting and finance and so what problem exists at every level and I broke it into 10 stages and what you need to do to graduate from that level so you can literally just look at your own business and see what things you're missing what things you're lagging on maybe sometimes what things you're ahead

on because it's very neat to put these things into 10 stages but reality is messy and so it's more that you'll be at stage five you'll have some things that you're at stage seven on and some things that you're at stage three on but those stage three things will likely be things that you will need to fix sooner than the things that you're at stage seven on right and so it's very much the constraints concept where you have a weak link and this helps you see where you're the furthest behind so you can kind of

uplevel those things faster and so I just dropped the training it's at acquisition. comom trining and so if you want to write down the link this is it it's acquisition. comom trining and just click the $100 million scaling roadmap and you can go there we also have a little button there that you can get a personalized plan made for you so you just answer some questions and we'll tell you what stage uh you are at and we'll give you the one before and the one after so you know what you should be finished and what

you have a line of sight to uh it's absolutely free uh you can just go there and uh enjoy it's 14 hours you don't need to watch the whole thing just watch the section that's that's specific to your business right now so big thing right now is growth Trends so I think this might be one of the most valuable sections uh of this video for you guys and historically when I would do my podcast recap of the year was always my most popular episode and so now I'm just doing it on YouTube but these were

the things that I would say we learned or that we doubled down on in the portfolio that yielded really good results so number one is we focused a lot on leadership Talent recruiting all right so you call this key player recruiting um and the big thing here is that I kind of switched my perspective on this which is fundamentally if you listen to Steve Jobs you listen to Bezos you listen to Zuckerberg a lot of them take a a hugely active role in bringing in top talent and so my understanding of talent has been probably

the single largest shift that I've had this year in terms of my understanding of business and why I think that we're disproportionately growing across the portfolio the companies that are doing the best are the ones that we've been able to to place key players and part of that is being willing as the CEO as the founder to actively show interest in these types of people and they are the type of people that would not respond to traditional recruiter because they are either so good at what they do and they want to know that their investment

in the compan is going to be valuable these are not the type of people who feel you're giving them an opportunity to work for you these are the types of people that they are giving you the opportunity of helping build your business bringing their entire Rolodex of people they already know teams that sometimes they can they can bring with them and just a huge stack of skills that ideally should disproportionately benefit the business and fundamentally this is one of the highest leverage things that you can do because at the most basic level what you need

to do as a CEO is attract the absolute best people and align incentives ruthlessly for them to work and then get out of their way and so that was probably the the one of the biggest ones number two was was Focus all right now I talk about focus a lot so I'm I'm going to try and say this in a different way than I normally do it's really top down focus and prioritization which is just another word for strategy but just how much more important strategy is for businesses because what happens is when they pursue

too many paths they get they look up a year later and they haven't grown much at all and if if you're a small business like you absolutely can double triple quadruple 5x every year for a few years before sometimes that'll slow down now if you have a compounding mechanism it could even keep going and getting faster at the very least like growing at 10% a year again there's nothing wrong with that but if you're at a million bucks a year or five million bucks a year even $10 million a year like you should be able

to grow a lot faster than that and typically it's because you lack people and because you lack focus and when I say people it means you lack good enough people the people you have you might have a a high headcount but a low Talent account and focus you might have lots of priorities but they're the wrong ones and so fundamentally if you can't focus on one thing one objective that is most important that makes the rest of your objectives less important then you are not doing your job as the CEO to tell the team how

they should be allocating their attention and that and here's the important part is deleting everything that is not this and so a lot of people are like these are our objectives also keep doing everything else it's like you can't do that you can't just add more because now you you've even further diluted what's important now for sure people need to continue transact sales guys still need to sell customer service still needs to service but the discretionary effort that exists in the top talent the leaders of the company who aren't as involved in the day-to-day and

are basically all times they have between aligning teams should be dedicated to a single priority that if accomplished would be an order of magnitude Improvement in the business and so this level of focus is what I continue to drill with the founders and the CEOs of the portfolio companies and it has yielded outsize returns and there's a great razor for this which is when I want to fix a system or when I go into a department the first thing I do is eliminate as much as humanly possible and here's the thing is people are afraid

of eliminating meetings eliminating communication lines eliminating processes but if you eliminate just about everything you'll find out that the vast majority of that stuff was complete waste and complete distraction and here's the cool thing you can always add it back so there's this sphere of loss people literally have fear of loss around processes and meetings which is ridiculous but that's just how we're wired psychologically which is why companies in general as they grow create bloat there's too many people doing too many things that don't matter or not enough stuff to begin with and all of

them together don't know how what they do makes the company money and so one of the easiest tasks that you can do is zoom all the way out and think what is the output of this department what is the output of Finance have you ever thought about like what is the output of Finance the output of Finance is information to make decisions that's it and so if you're getting too much information or you're getting the wrong information or the information that you're getting doesn't change your decisions then the function of Finance is inadequate you're not

getting enough of what you need of output from that department if the function of it is to gather store display and analyze information then are you getting the correct data are you able to analyze it are you able to display it and see in real time um and be able to make decisions off it also another information output Department kind of interesting right so many of these departments really exist just to have information to make decisions and so I bring this up because you have to delete until you have the fewest things that matter it's

like you want to cut to the Bone you don't want to cut to fat or cup muscle you want to go all the way to the Bone and then add the few things that matter most back in and I think that I'm doing this better now because honestly I think I'm just more ruthless and I think I care less about judgments of other people I think I'm honestly I think it's just like I'm more confident what I'm doing now and so it's like I think I conceptually felt the same way I just was like this

feels crazy even though it makes sense to me and so fundamentally first principles thinking operates from this perspective of like okay physics are laws that we have to obey what else do we have to obey the law of the land so we've got government laws that we have to obey besides that tell me a physical law or government law that prevents us from doing this thing in one tenth of the time tell me the law if not then there is a way and here's the thing is that there will simply be resources that are required

and so one of the things that I'm trying to get my team to understand is if I ask to do something and they say we can't do it that's saying it's impossible and it's ridiculous and of course they're wrong so it's a terrible position to take it's also very frustrating instead tell me what it would take tell me the resources that would be required that we'd have to take from something else and then we together can decide whether it's worth the trade so for example if my whole media team I said hey I want to

make AEM motion picture for example right I'm not saying I want to do that let's say that we decided that was a big a big strategic party if we were to get one big motion picture that was as big as Avatar uh then it would be you know maybe it would do things for the business okay then they might say well we can't do that now implicit in that statement is we can't do that and keep making content at the at the level that we're at so then we'd say okay well if we allocated all

the resources and stop making content and we actually were able to get a featurelength film with the existing media team would the benefit of that be worth the the cost and if it is then great we'll do it but a lot of times we get a we get a soft no immediately out the gate rather than a what it would take and this has been one of the biggest shifts that I think has empowered me is asking better questions and so one of the most frequently asked questions that I will probably my question of the

year is what would it take and by doing this the reason I think it's such a powerful question it also works for deals it works for sales it works for anything is that it assumes the result occurs it assumes success and so because it assumes success you work backwards from the reality that you want to create rather than forwards trying to figure it out as you go I'll tell you something funny so we had a company that we were looking at and um in the diligence process I said hey you've got this downsell basically no

one takes it have you considered just giving it away for free to get more leads and they ended up doing it and they tripled their lead flow the next week and so that downsell was worth maybe 5% of Revenue but what's the value of tripling lead flow tripling revenue and probably disproportionately dropping to the bottom line so tripling really would triple lead flow so it would cut CAC by 2/3 but fundamentally it would it would triple the business and so there are so many of these little things that exist inside of companies and just being

focused enough to say no this is our core product this is where we make all of our money anything that's not that distracts us from making this thing better so theme number three was cro and so I'd say this year the companies that made the biggest gains uh had a discipline around conversion rate optimization and so that means that at any given point they're running three to 10 different split tests on the key parts of the pipeline for Revenue generation meaning if you have a landing page where you get a lot of traffic or you

have a homepage that you get a lot of traffic or you have a follow-up sequence that a huge percentage of your customers are in actually testing things out there so one of the companies we had had three cro improvements and this was the largest company we have in the portfolio so we got A plus 20% cro test Improvement which is a mass a monster win especially at the level of optimization that this company's in so we're talking eight figures plus a month in Revenue like it's a big company and So 20% lift is huge but

on top of that we got a 50% lift and then we got a 28% lift so we had three Mega wins now the question is how many split tests did we have to do for that I mean probably 100 but the thing is is that that was basically one guy and a couple devs split basically running these sprints on a regular basis but how valuable is that to the company tremendously valuable because things that are efficiency uh improvements typically are long lasting what's cool about that is that when you have an efficiency Improvement it means

your LTV to CAC ratio expands which allows you to spend more money in advertising more money in Talent acquisition all the way around the business it literally just makes the business stronger and is a competitive mode and so I'll give you a little hack that is worth looking at which is many businesses integrate thirdparty tools into your processes right you've got a 100 different softwares that you probably pay for what none of those softwares typically advertise is what their conversion rate is and so if anything is customer facing that a prospect might interact with I

would look at three or four other tools within the exact same use case and see which one has a higher conversion rate on the ux so the user experience I think you will get disproportionate Returns on that it's typically a heavier lift because splitting between multiple tools is a pain in the ass but I've seen monster lifts there so those are the three probably biggest themes which was people focus and then optimization around the things that worked really well across the portfolio uh in 2025 now the next part is okay well what are the detractors

right these are the things that grew those businesses but what are some of the things that hurt those businesses and so I actually see this as the personal stuff all right so we had a few entrepreneurs that I think took their foot off the gas they started making more money than they'v been accustomed to and we like this is good enough and so this is where having you know some people call it a big reason why you can have whatever you want as long as you change your behavior I don't really care what it's a

big reason why or you just change but either way you have to find something that's going to keep driving you so for me it's the Love of the Game I just enjoy business and so I spend all my time doing business some people don't enjoy business as much and so it either has to be some mission that you have around the problem that you solve like it actually has to light you up otherwise you will make enough money and you'll stop pushing then now again if you accomplish your goals that's amazing that's great again I

make my channel for people who just want to consistently grow consistently grow in personal development and using money is just a stick for seeing how how far how far You' you've stacked your skills right also not saying that money is a a is a virtue or having money is a virtue just saying that in general you step you become more skilled and you can measure how skilled you are in the game of Business by the amount of money you make now here's one that's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people is spouses indoor

partners and so one of the big detractors believe it or not and I've seen this and this is a big Focus that Laya and I have across the team is how much support do the key players on your team and or the entrepreneurs have from their spouses and so you basically have the worst type of spouse which is a spouse who actively decreases the likel to your goals so they are constantly reminding you of the negatives that exist they're trying to constantly distract you say hey stop working stop talking about that let's do this instead

so not only do they try to get you to stop working they try incentivize You by doing something else and so it's reversing a negative and a positive it's like a double whimmy and the thing is is that I want to be clear I don't think there's malicious intention here but the result of what they do still massively damages the business like if you were to think of an enemy what would an enemy do they would try and get you to not think about the business and then do something else that you get addicted to

instead it's almost like going to the to your competitor and be like try some heroin I think you might like it what occurs is more or less the same and again I'm not talking about intention here I'm just talking about what happens and so when we looked back so we did like a retroactive analysis of this of like who were the stars who just crushed and kept growing they were the ones who had absolute spouse support who were like if they need to work late they need to work the weekends I'll pack them with a

lunch I'm you know I'm here at home and this happened for husbands and wives both sides the ones who where you had somebody who came in who presented like a star but then eventually fizzled was typically because and this is where it's so nefarious is that they would get into a relationship ship at some point or they they would upgrade the relationship like they'd move in together right something like that and that person would have a disproportionate effect on the entrepreneur and so what's really interesting is that entrepreneurs are typically we're so concerned with our

surroundings who we want in our space who's who's good who's helping us out and then for some reason the person who has a 71 correlation with your subjective well-being the person who will probably have the largest influence on your behavior in your life you don't hold to the same standard and I find that crazy but it happens all the time and just just because everyone else does it doesn't mean that it makes sense it's also why most people are mediocre I think that one is that if you're looking to bring a highle person onto the

team I would consider talking to their spouse just make just gauge their interest level see if they're supportive like in the middle they're neutral but I think neutral becomes negative over time so you need someone who's active who's who's who when when the employee inevitably has a bad day because everyone does they say hey this is a great job this is great for us as a family like you got this I trust you I believe in you I support you what can I do to help tell me how I can make this easier for you

that is the type of support you want whereas if you have somebody who says let's leave work outside it's home now and I I don't want to hear about that let's do all this other stuff instead that sounds innocent the problem is that it decreases the likelihood they win and again I know this will be controversial so you know take it or leave it again my two cense you can tell me to shove it it's up to you let's talk about the next big one so uh in creating that scaling road map that I was

talking about earlier I wanted to create like a micro cycle that I felt had to exist within every process right and so I'm going to break down two different processes that are different one is scaling the other is optimization all right so I'm going to walk through both so whenever you have a system you'll typically start as the first step so whatever you're doing you want to start out you have to start Number One S then you have C which is compound all right so you have to do more okay great we're doing more the

next is augment so so how do we do better then we have leverage which is how do we make it consistent right how do we automate it and so I'll just I'll I'll make this a little infinite thing and then finally how do we expand again and so this is actually a loop between each of these steps so you start and then you do more and then once you do more you try to get better once you get better and you know what works you try and automate it and make it consistent and have low

volatility and then you expand to the next territory you expand to the next Channel you expand to the next type of content you expand to the next product the same process and it's nice because it has this little uh it's got this nice acronym s c a l e and so it actually fit in there um I was super pumped about that and so now when I think about what someone has to do next within an apartment I have think okay where are they at okay they just started this thing so they just need to

do more oh they've done a lot okay so maybe there's probably a lot of wayte so now we probably should do better how can we augment how can we streamline how can we optimize once they're doing better it's like okay they're doing really well but there's more demand that's coming in how can we make this consistent how can we automate this or portions of this work and then finally once we have this thing airtight we're like cool how can we do this again and we expand if we're thinking about this within the context of content

it's like we start posting on a channel then we say okay well one post a day works can we do three posts a day so we do more then we're like hey some of these posts do better than others how can we make our post better and then we say cool what percentage of these processes can we use AI for what things can we pre-prep we can B basically make better happen more easily and more consistently how can we make it instead of having you know one do 10K views and one have a million views

how can we get all of them over 100k how can we get all of them over 250k and then finally we're like okay I think we've maxed out this specific Channel how do we now go to Tik Tok how do we take this process and go to Snapchat or whatever so it works for anything now the second process so that's about scaling this is about optimization and so this is typically when you come in and fix something that already exists and so I got to have a lot of experience with this this year because I

took over media and conversion within acquisition. comom and I haven't operated day-to-day probably in like 5 years and so it was actually a ton of fun for me because honestly it's just like I've I've developed a lot of skills since the last time I operated and uh it's been great so anyways the first thing is you question the requirements and I got this framework from Elon and it's freaking awesome so question the requirements why are we doing everything that we're doing please explain to me how does this thing relate to this output and this is

why defining what each Department is supposed to create is so valuable you're the content team the goal here is to make as much good content as humanely possible anything that does not facilitate content Creation in terms of volume and quality is waste if you're an engineering team it's like you have code that you must type which then creates software that people can use and we want the quality of that software to be really high and so anything that does not relate to those things are things that are waste so we question why we do everything

the second once you kind of get lay of the land after questioning is you delete and you delete because the next few steps are going to be adding resources to the system and so you delete everything that doesn't matter so the first step that I did when I took over the media team was I deleted all meetings now to be clear it doesn't mean that we're never going to have meetings again it just means that I will find out which meetings matter and then we will add those in proportionally and so I said you can

have ad hoc discussions about clear things but otherwise I'm canceling the recurring meetings and I replaced all team meetings all one-on ones with just a daily huddle that way basically the entire day and these were also deep workers so everyone who's creating content really just wants to get into flow and anything that prevents flow massively impacts their performance and so it's like the solution of just adding more people and adding more meetings just gets more people to not work it's terrible and most people also hate it most people want to work and so once you

delete then you optimize which is saying okay what of the things that we're doing right now get us the most results what is what are these things that get us the least results what are the resourcers required to do them as in like time spent or money spent in order to get it and then we optimize it so we say the things that give us the most for the least we put as the first priority the next thing that gets us you know the most for the most we put as the second priority the things

that get us a very little amount that cost a lot we put at the end and we're just basically going to not do those things and so you reoptimize the actual processes once you've deleted everything else then you pull up timelines you say how can we make this happen faster how can we do this in one/ tenth a time and what's crazy is that you honestly can increase the speed of things by 5x 10x it happens it really it's it's mindblowing when you do it CU you're like I can't believe how much waste we've had

this whole time all you do is when you ask questions you say how many hours do does that take and so then someone's going to respond with how many hours it take so rather than this is the classic instead of doing end of week deadlines you just make it end of day and so if a team is used to delivering something to a team meeting every Monday and you say cool how many hours does that take great let's have it done by the end of the day you 7x the speed of that team 7x and

so some people can't comprehend how one company can grow at so much faster rate than others and it's because of this resource allocation they pull up time good drivers make things happen faster because companies's like if you accomplish a goal in 100 years who cares time is a huge function in business if you don't have a process around pulling up timelines consistently and here's why it's so important because if you have time today like let's say there's more utilization on the team like you can they have bandwidth and you pull stuff up and they're like

hey we don't need that for another week like why are you why are you making me do it by the end of today because we don't know what's going to happen next week and we might have a priority next week that we do need to get end of day and then when that happens we still won't have done this other thing and now we have to do the other one so this other thing's now two weeks and so basically you want to use up all available resources that are renewable on a consistent basis to get

the highest return so I want to make sure like you understand the argument there because you're going to have to tell it to your team the reason I'm going to drive this outcome even though there's no apparent outside urgency is because it assumes that the future is going to be exactly like today and one of the things I can guarantee is that the future won't be and that there will be things that you didn't expect and when that day comes you will want to have all of the things that you've accomplished behind you supporting you

and have as many resources as seemly possible available to you to deploy in that moment because the most adaptable player in the system survives that is what survival of the fittest means within the context of business it's the most adaptable player the most flexible and so the final step here is automate same as before and so this is what you look at when you're trying to fix something or turn something around or make it better all right this is when you're trying to scale something I I could probably come up with something cute around optimized

but I many letters all right and so hopefully those two Frameworks give you two different ways to look at departments when you come in you're like okay is this a scale thing so we need to do more we need to do better we need to make it reliable or automated portion of it or do we need to expand or is this everything screwed up why are we doing what we're doing okay delete all that stuff optimize the things that get us the most outcome pull up time requirements then automate having these types of Frameworks to

solve problems makes life so much easier which is why I share it with you so the next one is about success and failure and knowing why so Professor bergerman from Stanford has this this uh statement where he says it's better to fail and know why you failed than to succeed and not now notwithstanding the outcome itself but he's talking about you as an individual it's better to know why you want why you lost than not know why you won because you can't learn anything from it essentially it means that the success was purely chance right

which means you can't repeat it and so Edison you know had 10,000 ways not to know how to make a light bulb right it's same kind of idea and like if as long as you learn from your failures on a long enough time Horizon and you don't give up you will win period And so an expert you can Define as somebody who's made all the mistakes that you can possibly make in a very narrow field and so fundamentally that's what we want want to be within our businesses and So within that context I have now

spoken to a lot of business owners because we started this Workshop division so we could meet more businesses so we could do acq Ventures and obviously within the main portfolio and that you're noticing I'm lining up a lot of sheets here so there are what I call the six Horsemen of of business stagnation and so if you are stuck this is for you so there are six reasons that I've seen that have been continuous rock and hard plac scenars and the reason that business owners get stuck here is because you have to choose between two

apparently impossible choices one is pain today the other is pain forever and both of them sting and that's why people just Wade water in pain because hurts a little bit less to keep pain forever than have a lot of short-term pain now so these are the big six so number one is being underpriced this is how it presents a business owner is at close to full capacity so like let's say they they provide some services and they're like I can't I can't work any more than I already have or my team can't work anymore than

it already is and and and this is the key point and we're not making money so when that occurs they want to look at all these different things but the problem is you're just mispriced now there's the fear that if I raise my price I will lose my customers and then it will get worse right but the thing is is that I have I have I have shephered so many businesses through price raises that it makes me sick and the process of raising price works like this you get to the price and then you say

a higher number and you keep going up until people stop buying that is how you do it in the back of knacken redneck logic way that I prefer most times if you're in that situation you get to pick do you want to have a few people say no and you make more money or do you want to be barely above water and not be able to expand forever because the reason you can't expand the business is because you don't have cash flow you don't have cash flow because your prices are wrong and so we need

to fix the price once we fix the price we'll free up cash with the freed up cash we can expand a new location we can hire that key person that you need to bring in number one if you are full capacity and you aren't making money you need to raise your price an easy way to do it is every five plus 20 all right so I actually got this from lifting weights it's the reverse of this which is once you increase volume by 20% bump your intensity up by five meaning add five pounds right or

5% right so bump volume by 20 bump intensity by five and then volume will drop again but now you have higher intensity and so it's this kind of B balanced progression process it's just a very simple one but it actually works the same way for price and so it's like you sell five customers if they all say yes to that price or around the same percentage or you net more money overall you bump the price by 20% and do it again and you just keep doing the five five and 20 keep doing 5 and 20

until eventually not enough people are saying yes that you're netting less money now the problem is if you have small sales numbers it's harder to hear no more often because your brain isn't going to calculate the fact that you made 20% more it's going to be binary in its thinking of like it was a yes or a no and the thing is is that if you sell three people at twice the price it's better than selling five people at half the price but you're going to hear no more often and so it's going to hurt

more but it is better for the business for two reasons one you actually make more money secondly and this is the big one people forget you also have fewer people to service so you have less cost and more Revenue which those two things together create a disproportionate increase in profit big thing number one fix your price so the second big problem is overcompensation now what I mean by this is actually paying people not like you're overcompensating for stuff okay this typically happens when you have uh a set of employees especially in service businesses where you

accidentally in the beginning give some sort of Revenue share or something like that so it doesn't matter you can't out earn it right like if you grow the business they just grow their revenue like you you you overcompensate them or you mcomp them and maybe you did that in the beginning because the revenue was really low and you never thought you get to where you're at now and then your big fear right each one of these has a rock and hard play scenario the big fear is if I tell them that they're going that I

have to change the compensation they're going to leave and the answer is maybe but if you don't you'll never grow so what are you going to do right you have to over you have to go through the short-term pain to get the long-term gain and so the process that I'd recommend doing number one is you Shore up the infrastructure which means that you bring someone else in that can do the same thing as that person and do it at the new price that you want to pay them for then you can have the conversation with

them with more leverage and saying hey the market is this I'm paying you this I understand this is what I need to pay you in order for us to accomplish our goals which is what I sold you on is that we want to accomplish this big Vision with the business now I understand that isn't like I'm changing expectations and so go home talk to your wife sleep on it and come back tomorrow if you want to stay here for that compensation I'll give you a delay so this is the key part is you say hey

I'll keep paying you this for the next 2 months or 3 months whatever and after that then you'll go to this new kind of comp compens ation philosophy now if they come back and say no I feel underappreciated blah blah blah then that's fine and the good news is you already have somebody who's right there ready to go that's the second big issue the third big problem and this is a big one is this is really common when you're smaller so I'd say sub three million this is you guys all right serve too many I'll

just say infinite avatars all right meaning you serve too many customers and what happens is all these different people have different demands and so they are telling you all these different things and you can't get your offer right you can't get your advertising right because you're serving too many people now again what's the Rock and hardplay scenario well if I get narrower on my avatar I'm going to sell fewer customers and I'm getting all these other people well to me number one is if you fix your messaging you will attract more of the right people

but you haven't been willing to take that bet the alternative is you can try and be every everything to everyone which you know isn't going to work because it's what you're already doing and you know it's not working and so you have the evidence that your your existing path is going to stagnate you and so again Again The Impossible choice is do you want to keep stagnating forever and maybe you make some money now but it's preventing you from growing or are you willing to and the business is about risk like you have to be

comfortable with risk like this is going to all of these are risks but the alternative is you never risk and you stay exactly where you are and so for me that is a much greater risk it's like when you get into investing anything you invest money into can go down so you incur that risk but if you never invest you absolutely will never get wealthy so what are you going to do right you have to take the small risk so that you avoid the much larger long-term risk and each of these is small short-term risk

to avoid large long-term risk so here you have to Niche down who you're serving which you do by 8020 so that means you look at all of your customers and you say what are the top 20% who are these people what do they do where are they from and you say how do I make this my message and how do I make an offer that's only for them that they would go nuts for and here's the part people miss and price it accordingly so if you have customer that you provide five times the value to

and I'm sure you do have those people well all of a sudden if you were to turn some of these bad ones away then your price could reflect the value that you serve to only that much narrower Avatar and that's okay and that's great so you may yet again and by the way this is the point make more money all of these are counterintuitive which is why people get stuck the next one the next Rock and hardplay scenarios is overextension all right so this one is you know Alex's Alex's favorite this is Alex's greatest hits

of mistakes is me trying to take on too many things I have a plate that's this big and I try and I start putting food on the table because I can't fit it on the plate and typically this is where you get ahead of your skis where you open that second location when the first location isn't really operating as much as well as you think it is and as soon as you go there the revenue from the first one drops and you're like uhoh but a lot of that was my profit and so now you've

got these fixed costs the revenue's down and then you've got this one but this one's new so it's not doing as well as the first one was was and your star person's there but you're not there and so now you're splitting between two locations and you're like oh man now I'm actually making the same amount as I was with one but now I have two twice the risk and you're like oh you know what the solution should be I'll open a third and then between the three now your profit goes down even more and now

you're not making any money but you have three locations and you have TR three times the risk and you're stressed out of your mind so what do you do honestly you have two solutions you either have to hire incredibly impressive people which means that you're going to probably give up your income in order to bring this person on or you have to your losses you have to prune the tree you have to reconcentrate get it right and then scale back out again the right way and so overextension is typically a who problem which is you

don't have enough good people that you left behind who can actually run it without you and so this happens a lot of times in like the1 to3 million range it happens at all ranges but a lot there because when you get there you typically suck yourself out of the day today you're not you're not you're not actually selling people you're not doing customer service and you're not doing delivery but the issue is you think that because you're not involved in the acquisition and delivery that you're not required to run the business but the thing is

is that you work every hour of the day right now and so if you work every hour of the day but you're not selling and you're not delivering then it means you're doing other stuff and that other stuff you're doing is very much operating the business and so a lot of owners will mistakenly think that CEO and owner mean the same thing you happen to be both but they are not the same and so right now is you leave so it's like the CEO leaves the business and all of a sudden the business stops running

as well because the CEO is gone so you have to have somebody who's going to operate behind you you have to basically backfill yourself and in my opinion I like a six-month test at the very least do a one-month test which is go away for a month and you hand your phone you show your phone to your operator and you say hey here's the deal you're going to get this override on the business so a little profit share whatever or some stock and in doing that I'm doing this in exchange for this not ringing that's

the deal and if this rings then that's not the deal and so it's like then you roll play it out so it's like let's say a pipe burst what do you do if it's call you wrong answer CU what do you think I'm going to do I'm going to call a plumber so what are you going to do just call the plumber directly you don't need to call me to call the plumber same idea if it's an emergency call 911 if it's not an emergency don't call me either way don't call me and so this

is the trade so if you're overextended you either got to dip into your own paycheck to bring someone in or you got to prune the tree reconcentrate and then build it back right and the six-month test I was alluding to is the business has to either maintain or grow for six straight months without your direct involvement now that last point is the big one without your direct involvement now some of you are going to run that test still continue to work in the day-to-day for six months and then say oh I think I did it

but you just didn't change what you did at all and the business continue to operate with you as CEO which is not the case so you just delay six months and then you open the next location well which should still make you a little bit better in terms of your cash position but not my recommendation so what's what's what's number five so number five is more than one business so this is also an Alex special I have a lot of specials here four and five are are my my personal favorites uh that I've made the

most often which is you've got two businesses or you've got three businesses because you don't know how to pick and you operate from the fallacy that Zucker bird had a side hustle Zuckerberg was also flipping airbnbs and doing wholesaling on the side right and that's how you build Facebook of course not one of these businesses is the business you should be doing and the thing is is that the opportunity is the problems that you need to solve and aren't it's not in the missed opportunities it's the problems that need to be solved right it's the

hairy work that you're not sure what the answer is but you know you need to fix it that is where the opportunity is because fundamentally If the product were exceptional and everybody loved it you wouldn't have an issue you'd be going all in on that business and so if that's the case then just do it now you're going to have this sunk cost valy of like I already put all this money into this and I already already got it going I already have a partner there yes short-term risk you lose relationship you lose maybe short-term

income from that from that business long-term risk you never grow any of these things to any material size because you're too distracted pick again do whatever you want but I'm just saying these are these are the most common ones and then finally we've got no data Daddy all right no data Papa so with no data daddy the issue is you don't even know what your problem is because you don't collect any data and so it'd be like hey what you know what do we need to grow what's our lead cost no idea what's our close

rate no idea what's our what's our what's our turn no idea well you can't really do much if you have no idea what's going on on and so this then becomes the constraint of the business which is we need to start collecting data now to be clear the first five have what I consider an impossible scenario there's some some cost the cost here is that you give up a business the cost here is that you have to cut you have to prune things or you have to hire someone and hurt your own income here the

issu is that you have to say no to customers that you're currently making money from here the issue is that you have to say no to employees you're currently overcompensating here you have to turn down customers at a lower price and have and hear no more often those are the short-term cost but the one big risk of all is that is that your business isn't going to grow and you've been stuck for long enough to know it's already not happening and there's not going to be a silver bullet you got to confront this the no

data daty issue is just hey silly pants get your data then you'll actually be able to grow now there's no downside to this one the only downside here is that you've got some shiny object that you think is really really sexy and interesting and you don't get to do that because you need to do this so do this first and I'll give you a really useful razor for how to think about what data to collect to collect all right so the easiest test for is this data valuable is when it changes so that's a Delta

so if it goes up or it goes down does it change that's another Delta Behavior so if we track our views on a social media channel if the views go up does it change what we do if the views go down does it change what we do if the answer is no then we don't need to track it because you can track unlimited variables in the world like you can track the temperature of the room when when people are walking in you could track it but will it change your behavior you can also reverse engineer

into what are the behaviors we do what data affects it and those are the only pieces of data that you need to track so my biggest personal growth lesson of the year so I give you all the portfolio growth things but my number one was Rush is imaginary now I just gave you that whole speech on urgency but one of the things that is that I've had to learn is my biggest mistakes have been sh object or woman in the red dress and overextension and so I have these arbitrary goals that I set for myself

that I never say out loud that I think about every day that mean nothing to no one and then I try and force everything to happen on this arbitrary timeline that I made up and then I'm upset when people who don't know my arbitrary timeline fall short of the speed that I wanted to happen even though I made it up to begin with and so Leila gave me this Frame that I alluded to briefly earlier but it's probably been I would say Talent focus and this is a subset of focus but it's missed opportunities is

less than problems so what I mean by that is that the opportunities that you're looking for are in the problems that you need to solve and me understanding this i' I've repeated it because it's it's really been singed into my brain there are for example if you're starting to get low reviews these are things that threaten the livelihood of the business that is a problem if you're not doing email follow follow up that is a missed opportunity and unless your call it payback rate or your LTV or some sort of conversion mechanism is the risk

of the business then that would be a missed opportunity if if the if the number one risk in the business right now is that like you can't make money because you aren't converting a higher percentage of leads then that would shift into a problem it's not that like any specific thing is one or the other it's recognizing contextually within your business is this something that would be nice to do or is this something that we must do in order for us to achieve our ultimate goal we might be able to achieve our ultimate goal without

doing email followup if our product sucks we will never achieve our ultimate goal and so it's understanding the order of magnitude or the importance of the potential tasks that you have the reason that this stressed me out for so long and this is the big one is that problems in your business are actually finite you can list all the number of problems in your business by and large missed opportunities are infinite I would look at the world of all the things that we could do and here's the thing is the better you get at business

the more things you know you should be doing that you aren't and you see this huge unlimited potential options of things and you look at these tiny little resources that you have and then it's like we need to do all of these things and this is where you stress out your team and you stress out yourself for literally no reason it's been difficult for me and it's been a discipline now to ask myself first when I want something to happen is this a missed opportunity or is this a problem and nine times out a 10

it's a missed opportunity and so I've been doubling down on problems and solving those the thing is is that problems are typically not nearly as fun as missed opportunities because missed opportunities have all the new gloss on them they're they're they're still in the wrapping paper you're like oh my God this is going to be amazing but as soon as you get into it you're like ah there's problems here too and then and I've said this before but what ends up happening is when you have this Miss opportunity bug you you start building all of

these half-built Bridges right you never actually get all the way across you've got a dollar here but you're standing on this side of the land right and you need to get this dollar across and you start building and then and then you find out that there's problems and then you're like oh no so you know what I'm going to do I'm going to build a second bridge and then you find out that there's problems and you're like oh no I hate problems I'm going to go find another one that doesn't have problems that immediately just

makes me more money but there's always problems there's always problems and so it's like I have to just use the problems and I've got to stitch this thing together so that I can get the dollar all the way across and then into my very large pocket and so here's the difficult part of this for an entrepreneur is that when you whatever when you quit your job when you started this business you were very reinforced for pursuing a missed opportunity you weren't doing this thing you start this business and you get rewarded for doing it and

the problem is is that you need to unlearn that behavior because it's a behavior that you only want to do once when you start your business and then every time after that you have to confront you have to endure you have to stick through the problem and see it to its natural end you have to get it all the way there so the dollars can make it across the bridge or you'll just have spent all the resources all the distraction to build and reinforce this thing that actually results in nothing and so this has been

probably my my single biggest tier of lesson because this is a subset of focus for me specifically but I ask is this a missed opportunity or is this a problem and if it's a problem then I need to solve it and I just need to confront and a lot of the problems are things that you don't know how to solve yet that's why they're still unsolved and so you have to become comfortable in enduring the the failure of working with limited information or incomplete information because the reality of businesses is that you will almost always

not have enough information to know perfectly whether this is the right call and so you have to be comfortable in ambiguity you have to be comfortable with incomplete data sets and still making the call because when you have a complete data set there's really no stress the answer is obvious because you have the data it's all the times where you're like oh well I wish I had tracked that one thing that I didn't know is going to be important now and I can't go back 6 months to get it that happens all the time and

you just got to be able to make the call because the thing is is that we have this fear that we're leaving money on the table right we feel like this missed opportunity right here we're like man there's so much money on the table but the real money on the table sits in the problems that you know you should be solving but aren't and so once I realize that the problems are the things that I need to be solving then I can deploy all of the resources that I normally would use to distract myself to

reinforce this bridge and reinforce this bridge and reinforce this bridge before I've made a dollar go across and then point all of those resources to one this big dollar sign so I can go put it into my pocket and actually solve it and so the compounding that occurs in business happens from Focus it's from doing one or two things exceptionally well not doing many things mediocre and missed opportunities are the gateway drug to mediocrity and how I how I deal with this emotionally is I have a big list of Alex's big money ideas and I've

done this at very different times in my life life like when I know what we need to do and we just have to keep doing more of it and the thing is is like you probably know this too and yet you have this this this need for novelty right I get it believe me and so what I do is I add this idea to my big money list and then when we do have bandwidth I say what one big thing on this big money list are we going to attack what's crazy is I I'm like

I've got a h 100 ideas on this list and then it's a fun problem for you to be like okay which of these things is the biggest thing that will get us the furthest and what's crazy is and if you actually do this I have found so many times that I'm in love with an idea and then a month later two months later I look at that idea on the list and I'm like I can't even believe I was so into that right and the thing is is that if you don't have that discipline you

don't just write on it you don't let it you don't let it let it marinate for a little bit sometimes you end up deploying all these resources into something that you a month or two later would be like I don't even know why I did that and if you're if this is resonating with you right now then do more of this put more of the ideas on a big idea list and then just let it cook and don't tell anybody cuz you have this need to share you have this need to talk the idea out

loud I get it I do it just write out as much as you need to there and then it's like you get you get it out of your head so you didn't have to you got all the details and all the craziness out and you're like I can shove it I'll deal with it later it's kind of like Abraham Lincoln he used to write these letters when he's really angry at people he'd write these huge letters just scathing letters to these people and then he would seal them and then he'd put them in his desk

and he said he'd sleep on it and the next day if he wanted to send it he could and so his desk after years was just filled with all these letters that he never sent but it allowed him to get through the moment so I want to hit on this Rush piece CU I think this is important all right so I'm I'm going to put these over here to the side for a moment and Rush is imaginary so something that I've been thinking about is like where does this Rush come from so fundamentally if unless

you have a network effect business so you have a winner take all market like you're trying to become the Uber of whatever right there's a network effect that one there's one winner who will win and that's it like if you're you're either going to be apple or going to be Android there's no one else in the market like you've got two spots in the market for phone creators and that's it that's the Monopoly right unless you're in one of those settings which 99% of businesses are not in that situation I have realized that for me

Rush is actually linked to one thing which is my competition reference point which is fundamentally who I choose to compare myself to and so my Rush is entirely arbitrary because I just pick who I'm comparing myself to now here's what's kind of crazy do you compare yourself to a 5-year-old do you look at a five-year and be like what a loser they don't have a business as big as me no of course not right but the thing is is that why wouldn't you compare yourself to a 5-year-old well because they haven't had any time and

because they are not developed yet but the thing is is that they're another human just like you and they will eventually now like let's fast forward 20 years now they're 25 and let's say they're crushing it do you now compare yourself to them why do you compare themselves at 25 and not at 5 no real reason because we think it's acceptable to compete uh against that particular ular person and so for me the realization that Rush is entirely linked to who I choose to compare myself to meant that it's entirely made up in my mind

so I can just change who I compare myself to or I could try to compare myself less much more difficult and so in thinking about this it's more how does this comparison change what I do every day and if it changes my actions that decreases the likelihood that I achieve my long-term goals then these comparisons hurt me and so the question that follows from the comparisons is how does this serve me and if it doesn't then why do it like do you feel guilty in middle school that you aren't the richest person in the world

well then why do you feel guilty at 30 I'm not saying that's my my goal in life it's not but like fundamentally you don't like you don't like flipping roles when you're in Middle School do you feel like a loser because you're not making money maybe a couple people right but y'all are weird right but most people in middle school you're like oh my God I have you know I'm getting chest hair or whatever the hell right you're like I'm navigating life right now like I'm a child look at my limbs they're longer right and

so the thing is is that we just choose to enter this comparison game but we're all going to die and all of our stuff's going to go right back into the middle and other people are going to play with our chips so who cares and if this Rush is is impacting your business then you need to find a way to quell it which is either stop comparing change your compare yourself to now a third door is to compare yourself to Your Heroes at that stage in their lives right which is where was Warren Buffett at

age 35 okay am I on track with him but again you're not going to be Warren Buffett because Warren Buffett lived through the greatest growth in in American history and was B born at the perfect time right and he also bought his first stock when he was seven did you buy your first stock when you were seven no there goes there goes my 5-year-old analogy so if you didn't buy your first stock when you were seven you're not wor buff it now you can model his behavior to have outcomes that will be probably proportionately smaller

than his but that's okay it's only a problem if you think it's a problem so the next big category of kind of growth Trends or Focus for the year of 2025 my big lessons was was branding so I talk about branding a lot and that's because it's really important but I I had a one day where I spent with uh Ben Francis so he came out to Vegas for the Olympia and then we spent the day together came a day early which is great and we just hung out and NL Mack who's his head of

uh brand was there with him and we got to spend a wonderful time talking about Brandon General and they told me this story that has really stuck with me I got to actually connect through them with the CMO of New Balance and so this is the story new balance is CMO they're both had plateaued after a number of years and so they were kind of stagnant and they needed to shake things up so he became the CMO of everything and he went to the CEO and said hey can I just swing really big and the

CEO said sure and so then he said I want to take our spend which right now is 70% bottom of funnel and 30% top of funnel and I want to flip these two things I want to make 30% bottom and 70% top and you like what does that mean this is is brand awareness storytelling associations that you make with different athletes that is all top of funnel like wow new balance is cool right the bottom of funnel stuff is buy shoes right and so after doing this what was crazy is that for the first 18

months they made less money and so the company's return on their advertising budget went down for 18 months but on month 19 it went like this Boop it started going up and then it went up even more and then it went up even more and so they've had this massive rebirth from this shift and strategy and so when I heard that story it was really compelling for a number of reasons for me and it changed my behavior so number one was this is a good ratio to think about in terms of investing in an audience

versus kind of withdrawing from the audience and the reason the 7030 I found interesting is that in the $100 million leads book I talk about this at length but there's been a there's been a a 3:1 ratio that's been studied by television it's been studied by radio which is content right to ads so if you're on your Facebook Newsfeed and you scroll every three posts the fourth post will be an ad all right if you're on YouTube it might be number of minutes now they have ai and all this stuff but for the the typical

one it's a 3:1 ratio now this ratio is what is required to basically keep a brand keep a Channel people keep coming back now if they change this to two to1 all of a sudden people stop watching that channel they stop watch they switch to something else right and so that ratio being reflected here I see as a human thing and so I think to myself okay I need to make sure that I always keep my ratio at least 3 to one in terms of value driven and now you can think about this in terms

of views like Impressions per person cuz that's what would really matter or you can think about this in dollar spend if you want to think about it from a budgeting perspective but for me I think about this at the individual level I want to make sure that someone's getting at least three or four positives from any kind before they have any kind of ask for me to do something now the netn net world is that if your product is exceptional the ask is not an ask because they're excited to buy something else from you and

so this is why brand and product longterm are interwoven together your reputation with somebody will be reinforced or diminished by the quality of the product because you make a promise with your advertisement and you deliver on that promise or overd deliver on their promise with the product and if it's worse now you got to put more in the bucket here to kind of like get them to be willing to take another shot with you again or if you have a really good product the amount that you have to put back in here is actually less

you could sell something else even faster so if Apple came out with the next iPod right people would be really excited about it and if the next day they said hey we also have this other amazing thing that doesn't necessarily compete with the iPod as long as you had the money which is a different question as long as you had the money or financing available you'd be excited to buy the next thing too provided the first thing was awesome and so this is the idea is that products can reinforce brand and should be the thing

that reinforc brand over the long term which is why I want everybody to read my books first because the books have been the the pieces of content that I put more single time in than anything else I put 2,000 plus hours in each of those books like no joke 2,000 plus hours and so they are the single best pieces of content that I will likely ever make and they will outlive me these videos will go away like podcasts will disappear but the books will remain that is why I want everyone to read them which is

why I've made them free like you can listen to them on my podcast for free and if you like hard versions you go on my site or you go on Amazon you can grab them all right uh they have you know 26,000 five stars there's a million copies that have been sold and it's because they're good right it's and and and it's because I put so much time into them and so this lesson first off was important for me because the ratio and it corroborated what we what I kind of already think about in terms

of content in giving to asking the other piece that I thought was really interesting was the time delay which is that he made this shift and then he had to wait a year and a half and that's given the size budget New Balance has which means that if you want to build a brand you've got to expect you got to measure in years you're not going to build a brand in months it's just not going to happen people see my brand now but like my first YouTube videos also started at zero my first Facebook page

started at zero like everyone not my first Instagram started like at zero like everybody else and so it just takes time like my first YouTube videos I think was 2019 right and so like don't expect to have a 10-year outcome in 12 months one of the questions that I ask myself is like okay for Branding for cpg companies so for companies that sell to Consumers dirting consumer The Branding Playbook is very well tested right you go find uh influencers in that world or brands that are similar you do collaborations with them you basically cross over

on values their values become similar to yours you kind of rub off on one another you go find Champions and athletes that are top of their field you make the associations people then want to buy your product because of that associate and the history of positive reinforc they had with that particular athlete okay now I was like how do I do this in a B2B setting right and so I have split this up into basically two major categories if I want to build a brand in a B2B setting right you typically want to educate your

audience because you want to be positioned as an authority so if you're an accountant you're a lawyer whatever it is you want to be known as somebody who knows what they're doing right and so category one is you help them accomplish their goals for free very simple so a lot of this is going to be content right like this is why we brand with content is that if you like what's the most positive Association someone can have they have a goal you help them achieve it okay so they will link their goal achievement to your

help great the next thing is that you help someone like them so it's an approximation which is okay I am a lawyer and I help someone negotiate some deal and that person and I and I have to advertise it I have to let people know about it but me seeing that as a plumber and this lawyer only helps plumbers negotiate these deals I say oh someone just like me got exactly what I want so this is a degree removed the next one is that you do the aspirational outcome yourself now both of these can be

aspirational to be clear and this was actually something that Ben and I talked about a lot Ben Francis which was often times brands are built on the aspirational because it's almost like an extreme version that I translate into decreasing risk of purchase so let me explain so Northface can help people get to Everest and so if it's really cold at the top of Everest if I buy that jacket it will likely keep me warm on the way to work from my car to the door if Range Rover makes an ultimate outdoor vehicle and that they're

the off ultimate off-roader then it'll probably help me if I have to get over a curb right it's these extreme versions that get regressed down to well if it can do that then it'll probably help me with my thing right seum is the best fitness influencer right now in this generation and so if he wears this stuff to compete at the Olympia and train for the Olympia then for me to just trying to be the strongest guy at my gym it'll probably work for me and so the question is what is that aspirational outcome like

Red Bull if I could iy could drink the Red Bull and jump out of space then it'll probably get me a little bit motivated when I have 5 hours of sleep right like you notice the theme here like all of these brands have these big aspirational outcomes there's a reason that my brand grew when I had a $46 million exit because it was an aspirational outcome now what I'm trying to do now and I've been public about that is cross a billion dollars like that's the goal and when that occurs my brand will be reinforced

it'll be strengthened because it'll be an aspirational goal for more people now the good news is a $50 million exit or $46 million exit is a good enough occurrence for many people now a different aspirational thing might be our portfolio performance now we're worth significantly more than when we had that exit but it's less validated it's less thirdparty signed off and when we have that sign off it'll become validated I'll give you a fun story on this the amount of people that gave me kudos for selling gym launch was significantly more than the people who

gave me kudos for owning gym launch but the owning of gym launch I was richer the day before I sold the company than the day after because the equity in the business compounded taxfree and the moment I sold it I had to pay taxes on what I gained and so by definition I had less money after the transaction than before but everyone perceived it because there was the third party edification that occurred because the third party at arms length made the transaction happen and so it was real but as long as you don't live in

the minds of other people's perceptions which to be fair in branding you kind of do you don't want your selfworth to be tied in their perception but your brand ultimately will be and so the idea is the question to answer if you're a B2B business and you're trying which is over half of businesses are B2B fun dead I didn't know I was looking this up for school actually is that these are basically your buckets is how do I help them do what they want how do I help people like them and how can I accomplish

something aspirational in their mind or help other people like them accomplish that aspirational thing and this is where like you can help them accomplish their goals or the aspirational goal it's either of those things but the aspirational one I find incredibly interesting because some people saw the book launch last year uh for the $100 million leads we had a gazillion people there live it was awesome and they were like I would like to do something like that and so that in of itself was a brand reinforcing event and so big picture this is what I

see as the process for building AB Tob brand because it's not like you're going to like think about like this if you're the if you're an attorney you're not going to sign the top attorney you know O.J Simpson's attorney I can't remember it's the Kardashians X I can't remember what Jenner anyways no that's Bruce Jenner forget about it you get the idea is that like if you a business person then it's like elon's not going to endorse you right it's not going to happen and so it's like you have to do the other things that

Cano proximate your proficiency with proof and so the final T tldr of this is you have resources this is what your brand must accomplish this is the timeline that it has to go off of this is the ratio you need to follow and this is how you spend your money in time to make these things happen for the audience and that's how you do it and so this has been my focus uh one of the big kind of like crystallizations of knowledge maybe deepened uh my understanding of branding and how it translates back into forth

between D Toc and B2B shiron Sasa good friend of Leila n currently the the CEO of real also has sillo Capital which is his his uh investment firm he gave me this little quip that I really like and he said Talent only gets better in the future and that has been I mean you'll notice a common theme around people in this and that's because when I look at the things that we did really well with this year is bring good people in get bad people out and the companies that did the best Mor folio like

that that strategy rank fruit like the the the the the highest performing company the portfolio we put in probably like six great leaders and it's just crushing and that that's not an accident right so that's thing number one in terms of talent the second thing is work with the people who move towards you and so I have spent too much time in my life trying to sell people on why they should do things my way or with my values or with my kind of rules which I Define culture as rules of reinforcement in a business

so like these are the rules of the game as I would like to play it and I noticed that if I kind of have this like kind of recurring conflict with a handful of people I was like I don't need to do this like there's another person who is stoked to be here will agree with the path and it'll be so much more efficient because they'll want to talk to me I want to talk to them we agree to the rules of the game the way we both want to play it and so we'll just

play that much better that much longer and so this is more of like a warning shot because I think what happens is you habituate especially if you're an entrepreneur you have a high pain tolerance like you're used to like you're used to suffering suffering is just the the current state and so sometimes someone comes in things are okay sometimes they change sometimes you change whatever but fundamentally conflict emerges and if you cannot resolve the conflict then over time your communication cycle lessens and lessons you start talking less and less frequently and if this person is

close to you or close to your function it becomes very difficult to basically for them to do their job and for you you to get what you need out of the role and so um my my single line of advice is work with the people who move towards you and so a a correlat second point of that that's a different frame to Think Through is if your team doesn't admire some aspects of you you either have to change them or you have to change you like this is a tough one though because you want like

this is my opinion if your team doesn't admire certain things about you then the likely that you have strong influence over their behavior outside of basically punishment is low and it's much better in my opinion to have a team who admire different traits of yours now they don't have to say everything you do is amazing but like there are there skills you have there are behaviors you do that they're like man it'd be really cool if I had that or it's really cool that he has that or she has that and that creates this element

of respect in the relationship that I think is really required for high performance and you have two choices there like either you change or they change or you get someone else so you change the whole thing right I think making sure that you've established rules of the game and just subtly noticing like is there someone who just like disrespects you on a regular basis or they tried or they're the first one to disagree I want to be clear here I'm not saying that you shouldn't have healthy tension and disagreement at the top it's actually very

common like everybody who has like different perspectives to yield the best outcome like that's how you get truth so that's that's good but if you're consistently being blocked on what you consider to be like par for course behaviors that can grade on you and I think that I tolerated that for too long um and I have done that for for in different occasions and I I want to shorten the time that I tolerate those kind of Dynamics so next up is sawdust my favorite businesses in the world are businesses that are started off of waste

from someone else so let me explain so I love the Airbnb and I love Uber the way that like people have excess capacity or sawdust they have something that they're not using that would be valuable for someone else an easy example in a brick and mortar scenario is like I don't use my gym my gym was closed after 8:30 and it was no one used it until 4:30 in the morning and so I'm paying for this rent and I have this space and there's probably some people who would like to have that space but can't

right and I didn't have you know weekend hours ended afternoon right and so there many of us and Airbnb did this on the residential side obviously like you have a spare bedroom you can let someone crash there and you can make money for it but the thing is is that within businesses you also have excess capacity you have sawdust and so the sawdust analogy comes from Lumber Mills when they would they would strip the Trees of bark they would turn them into planks and then you know they Shi the planks out but a smart Foreman

of the factory looked on the ground one day and they had to just keep sweeping up all this dust from the saw and then finally one guy said hey could we just mix this with glue and make Plywood And then of all of a sudden a whole new kind of industry was born from that where you could take the scraps and then turn into something else and in the fur business that I did when I was 16 17 18 in there the owner would have to make these jackets and he would cut off these Snippets

from the Snippets he was able to make earm muffs and then he was able to sell his ear muffs or give the ear muffs away as bonuses and so he was able to make something from nothing and so there are sawdust things that exist in your business and I'll tell you one of the big ones that came from acquisition. comom so our primary business is obviously the portfolio and that's where the majority of our resources are allocated towards and we tried to figure out a way where we could meet more potential portfolio companies so I

tried a few different things to come out well the barrier was too low we got mixy matchy and I was like that's not good so we tried that one and we didn't meet good people and I was like all right that's not good so the next thing I did was like okay what if we raise the qualifications really high and then we like kind of have these dinners so we did we did like four or five dinners where people would fly out we'd meet them the whole idea for me was like I have to eat

either way so I might as well eat with people like again like sawdust like what do I have to I also have to make content so if I go to dinner I make content and I meet people this is all good this helps us generate deals and the reason that I was trying to figure this out was because the best port portfolio companies we have are number one number two number four best performing company were companies that we had worked with for 6 to 12 months prior so we had an existing relationship we had helped

them grow and then we were like okay I think their portfolio ready now then we made our investment and we and we grew them from there and our best performers were like that so I was like how can I how can I have this happen on purpose rather than by accident so I was I was really struggling with this mind you I was also like running the portfolio too so it it's like I wasn't putting full attention towards it and then in January I was like okay well we have this building and we have there's

an open open floor space there were a bunch of desks there but I was like weren't using those desks everybody had offices and because we do a lot of like confidential calls and whatnot we're more of an office closed door setup and so we cleared the desks and we're like okay well let's see if some businesses would want to fly out to our headquarters and have us spend like two days kind of going over how we create value because then that way it's like it will provide value to them and the people who are like

oh this is really cool I would love to potentially like follow up with them over the alol they become they kind of enter a longer term nurture process and we can potentially do deals with those people Etc that's also why we spun up acq Ventures Etc and so that whole division of workshops came out of we have extra space and the portfolio team isn't fully allocated like they work on the portfolio obviously but like they can step down for a day or two uh during the month to meet other companies uh network with them share

how they are turning around different companies in our portfolio specific divisions or departments and that'll be very additive like we can add value to everyone and adds value to us add to them and I get content from it and so that was a big W and the reason I bring this up is there are some things in your business that check more than one box and so it's like I don't want a single box check I want like four boxes checked and so this generates deal flow this generates cash flow this generates content this generates

Talent flow and so all of these things and utiliz as a resource that I already have paid for I already I have to pay I pay this building every month right like this cost exists I pay my team every month no matter what either way and so it used an existing cost basis to create a new opportunity for content and deal flow and so from that it's like if you can just look at the pieces you have on the board and this is actually what I do I I try and write down with as much

detail what are all the things we do on a regular basis like what are the calls we take what are the conferences we attend what are the like every single thing we do and I'm like is there a way I can recombine these things things into something that would be valuable at no cost to me and that's where I've had these really disproportionate gains in profitable divisions or products in our company obviously and then within the portfolio so for example you probably have Sops and checklists within your business right of how you do whatever you

do well if you can take that and then turn those into lead magnets then not only are they valuable for you they also generate demand and so that's just a very micro example of like take something you're already doing and find another use for it that requires no extra work the next one's really big and so this is a little bit looking forward into 2025 and Beyond and so I believe this so this is a bet so ought be clear this is H this is me making a bet and calling a shot so I believe

that IRL and AI exist on polar opposite sze of a Continuum and I think that doubling down on both of these is a good decision and So within our portfolio we are pushing heavily on both sides and so postco I still feel like there's unmet demand for people who want to connect I mean obviously this is why I invested in school like I believe Community is really good and I think it's lacking right now so I think there's huge demand for it and we've never we've we've never been more connected and also feel so apart

and so it's it's almost like we have a lot of false Solutions it's like we're eating fake food that keeps you full but doesn't satisfy you it's kind of like porn to sex like it's not the real thing right and so the idea is like this is the real thing this is efficiency and so it's like how can I how can I get as much efficiency as possible so that I can do as many of the unscalable things that are the real thing and this IRL push that I'm doing I'm doing across all the portfolio

companies because the interesting thing about IRL is customers who have in-person experiences have tremendously different brand Affinity they're more loyal they refer more they rate higher they buy more often and if you have a strong culture within your marketing or your branding you will attract ACT like-minded people and so that allows you to provide them value at no extra cost so think about like this if I assemble a party I'm the host of the party everybody who meets at the party feels like the the party was awesome if everyone else at the party was great

I could not talk to any of the guests and have them think Alex's party was awesome and I will get a disproportionate amount of the reward from the associations and the time they had but that Network allows people who assemble to provide value to each other which is almost like s like you're not you you just organize it and you let them provide the value and so IRL and AI I'm I'm heavily pushing on this this year Sam Alman said that this year is the year AGI will come out 2025 so artificial general intelligence which

basically AI is better than everyone at everything which is frightening but we'll figure it out in the meantime though it'd be great if it could take some sales calls and uh set some appointments uh pretty accurately so uh and maybe help with some content and things like that uh but in the meantime we're staying really AB breasted on this and we're actively kind of like I'm not trying to be the AI company I want to be a company that uses AI well just to be clear about my position on this IRL though is something that

I feel like AI will not disrupt and I think that the demand for inperson experiences uh will continue to rise and I think that it is a good bet to make and so this is what I'm betting on next year and I will mention this because a lot of people don't like IRL because they say it's unscalable right but I care so much more about is it valuable and if it's valuable enough it's worth scaling and so the thing is is that just because it's harder doesn't mean it's not worth doing and the benefit of

scaling something that is harder to scale but also valuable means that once you scale a little bit more you'll have more resources to continue scaling it and so if we can build cities in the middle of the desert or the middle of the ocean we can absolutely scale an in-person experience next fun one is school so what's crazy about this is that this was this year uh which feels like you know an eternity ago but we uh we negotiated the deal in 2023 and then in January we came out publicly with it so this was

the first brand deal that I did this year uh or sorry the first brand I've ever done and the main reason behind doing it was that I believed in the product and I believed in the team and I thought it was the best one and I think it's going to win and so that is why I was willing to make that bet and to be very clear opportunity always looks like Risk today and this this bet has proven out very well the platform continues to grow like crazy we have millions and millions of users which

is awesome and that was kind of the goal and the reason that I I ended up betting on this versus like any other potential thing I could do was it felt very uniquely fit for me so I'll explain what I mean so there's a make money component to school there's a education component to school there's a community component to school which I just see as like Plus for for social right and then all of these together aren't an opportunity vehicle that is high leverage and so for those reasons I was like I feel like I

am uniquely qualified for Education media would be another one here there's definitely a huge media component with the business so it's like education media business societal good operational leverage this was it was like if you could make a business that hit a lot of the things that I'm about and for me it also help people who are going Z to one and I have a huge percentage of the audience that want to start start a business don't have one and didn't know where to go and so I wanted to have something that I could say

if you aren't a business owner yet this is a very easy business to get started it's very low risk there's not many moving Parts you can do it without any employees you don't have to have inventory you literally just need to learn the basic skills and so this is a great vehicle for doing it and so I was super pumped uh when we found out that the average Community made $1,360 per month that's paid communities and I think that's really cool because it's like no this isn't you're not going to be a gazillionaire by doing

this but it can help get you started and that I see this as a great Gateway for getting a notch ownership as a side note for existing businesses I think every existing business should have like every gym owner should have a school Community every every realtor should have a community for their for their customers every HOA should have a community uh a school Community for for their for the the people in the neighborhood like whatever business you have like if you have an e-commerce business there's a ton of e-commerce businesses joining school right now that

realize that the email deliverability like if you can reach 100% of people who bought your product the feedback that you can get on the product the reviews the likely they buy the next thing goes way up and so it's like sure add them to the email list but also add them to a live community and so I see that as again the IRL versus AI like how do we how do we bring people together and so we're also doubling down on that with school because we are not we don't see ourselves I mean obviously it's

a technology business but like it's a community business and so we're also doubling down on how can we facilitate in inperson connections between people of similar interests so I'll I'll give you some specific lessons that I've learned from uh growing School tremendously over the last year so number one is uh cro usually decreases hold on usually your split test will fail and so basically the more optimized something is the more likely a change from optimal results in a decrease and so our first launch of the school games page did so well that we've done like

14 sorry 16 major split tests and only two of them have won and so like anything from the like so basically the control is really really dialed and it typically like if you have monstrous amounts of traffic when you incur the cost of change like it is it is a real cost the second kind of thing that I that I would say that like I've learned uh or rather been reinforced from school is kind of customers above everything which is just always a great reminder Paul Graham has this statement that I probably feel like I've

said a whole bunch of times this year which is you can solve almost every problem in a business business by talking to your customers more like if your marketing isn't working talk to your customers if your sales isn't working talk to your customers if your product isn't working talk to your customers right you you are never too big to not talk to your customers and so that that was a big emphasis the I would say the next one is the the the value of offers it was just you know the school games itself was a

really cool offer that we came up with and then we added in um you can win a cybertruck if you if you win which which made it even crazier and so the the uplift that a business can get from having a superior offer we got to see that you know it's just it's nice to see things proven out so that was a really good one the next big lesson I'll put this one this is really big is the value of deletion and simplicity so I'll explain what I mean here so we have tried to make

it as easy as humanly possible for people to win on the platform and we get better and better every day but a big part of it is is the number one reason people cancel things is overwhelm and so overwhelm translates into zero value because they stop so what happens is people hear overwhelm and then add more stuff and so it's it's rare that addition improves things rather than simply making things better or taking something out and make and replacing it with something better or eliminating it all together like you want it to be as simple

as possible but no simpler right like if you if you take away all the friction that occurs from using a phone what's left is an iPhone right the only next version of that would be you just talk in the air and then like you get connected with people like that would be the next version of that but what Steve Jobs did was inorder of magnitude Improvement off of the existing phones and he just looked at all the things that suck about a phone removed all of them and what was left was the iPhone and so

thinking about product and value this way right so the value equation you've got the outcome you've got the risk right you've got speed and then you've got uh you've got you've got uh effort right so the idea is how do we make it faster and easier faster and easier faster and easier over and over and over again on this value equation and a lot of times what makes things faster and easier is removing things and so I have grown more and more Affinity towards looking at what's there and saying okay we need to maximize value

per second not seconds of value and so this comes from the media side uh in terms of making content but on the product side like every customer will ask you for different things and they will and if you give them every single thing they ask for they will cause their own demise and then leave and so then you get these Frankenstein products that have a gazillion gizmos that no one knows how to use because to fit it all in it's like there's a 100 specific use cases that don't apply to everyone and so product discipline

around keeping Simplicity and speed and and ease as the primary goal is an incredibly difficult thing to focus on and making those strategic bets and so that has been a great Focus uh and kind of uh relearning I would say uh of this year with school and I would say finally having like knowing what your what Your Loop is all right so it's like what's your flywheel so Jim Collins has a short book on this called the flywheel I think or flywheel effect and it's basically like can you draw a circle within your business which

is first we do this which then if we do this this is what must occur when this happens this next thing must occur if this occurs this next must occur right and so I I'll show you what what what I'm talking about so if we make a lot of media right for businesses so we make a lot of Business Media if we do that then we will get business owners who Interest Who who interested in our stuff right and if we get business interested business owners who are interested in our stuff right they will then

do deals if we do deals with them we'll have stuff to make media about and so this is a basic wheel of acquisition. comom we talk about business stuff that gets businesses interested we do deals with those businesses those businesses get outcomes which then we talk about in the media and so round and around we go we want a wheel that feeds itself and so the only thing that's required is to get the wheel moving and So within school we have multiple different Loops that we have that generate the growth that compounds within the business

and these Loops are so important because when you have a linear input output equation in terms of how business grows then it means that you just have to keep adding more on the front end what you want is something that you spark once the engine runs and then all of a sudden it spins spins and goes out of control and it just keeps growing right and so that is the ultimate goal is having multiple of these flywheels so a simple example is like Amazon they create a Marketplace that has the cheap cheapest products that are

the that have the highest Fidelity in terms of um the risk that someone has to make when they purchase because they have the reviews so if they do that then they will get more customers if they have more customers then they will be able to get more suppliers if they have more suppliers they able to get more competition in selection for customers which then brings in more customers right and so round and around we go and so it's businesses often have multiple flywheels like this that exists that self- reinforce and the quality of that flywheel

what you want to figure out is what are the what are the friction points that prevent this wheel from spinning and then smooth it out so it just runs so this is probably I would say uh number five in terms of the things that I I've gotten away from school this year and school is probably one of the best investments I've ever made so this year and somewhat last year we uh we got this great office right and uh part of the reason we did this is because I wanted to have a massive gym I'm

being really honest with you like I wanted to have a really big gym which I have and I wanted to have a place that I could record that wasn't like out of my house or out of a closet as much as it is great to have my team in and out of my personal space um I prefer it in a studio and so uh that was the reason for building this to begin with then we started having a lot of teammates just started like spending more time here and they're like may maybe I'll move here

and so then we started to become more and more in person as a business and so I will remind anyone I started in person exclusively with gyms then we went to gym launch which was entirely a remote business and we were entirely remote before it was cool like we were entirely remote when people were like you can't be a remote business it's not legit for real like we like we would struggle to get like some banking relationship cuz they're like we need to I remember there was some software that we needed that were like we

need to see a picture of your filing cabinet and I was like what year is it but it's like it was Antiquated until Co and then became the norm and so I want to talk about pros and cons to this because some of you guys are business owners and you're trying to make this decision and so number one I think is understanding which roles are remote and which roles are in person so for us because we know how to manage I think remote teaches you how to manage better than in person does because there's so

many ancillary small Communications that occur in person that don't get documented remotely that still have a material impact on the business and so if you're only remote you have to be very structured with communication if you're in person you can get away with a lot less now four roles like fundamentally we say like why does this person need to be here we would only want people to be here who should be here if you know if Finance doesn't really need to be in the office and so that allows us to recruit from a wider net

so we can recruit from all over the United States rather than requiring people to move uh or only picking from call it Las Vegas right and so for us the pros have been training is much better in person culture is much stronger uh I think you have an eye to efficiency which to be fair is somewhat offset with the additional cost of the building I think that you're able to see people in deep work and correct meeting cadences things like that like if you're walking around everyone's on meetings all days you're like who's working right

uh and so this allows you to you get faster feedback loops which I think is important the cons of in person is that harder attract talent because they have to move that's a big one it's probably the biggest one but it's easier to attract other people though so for us what we did to accommodate this is we for some roles depending on the level of the role we will also uh include signing bonuses and things like that so if you're in that position including more incentive for them to move or move their families to your

place of business is a is is a good way to do it I also recommend having them come out for like 30 days and stay at a hotel just so that they don't like you know deant their whole family if for some reason it doesn't work out kind of in the first month you'll know and so um that's that's like a little in between that I think is worth doing that has worked well for us to be to be clear for me I think 30% of our portfolio is in person 70% of remote so I

don't have I I don't care at all about how someone chooses to have you know structure their employee teams I think you should just whatever way it is I just want there to be sound reasoning behind it and so for us obviously we have a lot of media and so having the entire media team here makes sense because I film here I'm here and so they should be here too whereas like I said Finance it doesn't really make sense and so it's just making sure that like you're not being a stickler in either direction for

the sake of it and instead just saying like what problem are we solving and which path increases the likelihood that it gets solved so this year I actually made a lot of personal improvements in terms of my environment and I'll share some of those with you right now and so as I was saying earlier you know I worked a lot more days this year a lot more hours per day than I probably worked in recent history and I needed to optimize more things it's kind of like when a car is driving at 60 miles an

hour it's like it moves a little bit when you're at 200 miles an hour tiny movement makes a huge change was kind of the same thing in terms of me and so with the increase in hours the increase in days I was like I need to get everything else dialed and so one massive one which is going to sound so silly is the big three of sleep so number one is Pitch Black and when I say pitch black I mean pitch black so tape the little lights on all the electronics in the room get blackout

curtains I'm telling you just do it I took way too long to do it just do it just do it please do it number one number two is it's got to be cold like it has to be super cold and if you are in a different temperature than the person you sleep with then get one of those mattress pads that has the temperature control thing it will change your life and it will certainly change your sleep which could very much change your life just do it like it's it's I think they're they're like two grand

and you spend more time in bed than anywhere else like it's the Wellspring of Youth it's everything like worth doing and the third one and this is the most recent one is that I actually added in earplugs so I now sleep with earplugs which you just the simple foam ones like nothing crazy and sleeping with earplugs had a four beats per minute drop to my resting heart rate at the bottom of my sleep and so I bring this up because like it had a material difference in basically how deeply I rest and my deep sleep

is basically very chunky and front loaded rather than like intermittent throughout the evening so it's like basically as soon as I get to bed I have like deep sleep because I hear no it's like I'm in this black float tank essentially this cold dark tank where I can't see anything or hear anything and so you you'll know when it's dark enough if when you open your eyes and when you close your eyes it's the same that's where you want to be and so those are some those are some significant ones the next big one for

me was making sure that my work environment was basically just as tailored and so I've usually been better about this but I always black out my windows because I get distracted with good weather I just want to go outside and so I black all that stuff out I had two desks that I set up one for standing one for sitting because I realized that having a desk that moved I ended up just not moving it cuz I didn't want to like mess the wires up and like all the other stuff so I just set up

two desks and so that was uh helpful the biggest pain relief thing that I did this year because I spent a lot of time on my desk is I got a kneeling chair all right which sounds ridiculous and they look goofy but if you sit in one position all day like I was getting really bad uh neck pain uh like it was very tough for me um and so by switching the kneeling chair originally I thought I was going to do my day in one chair half my day in the other chair but then I

realized that when I was in the kneeling chair I actually have like six different sitting positions that I do in that chair and so by constantly varying my sitting position because as soon as I get a little bit uncomfortable I just I just change it up I was able to basically decrease the resting stress on like my muscles being in this one Frozen position for an extended period and that eliminated my shoulder pain like gone and so I like really really helped me out a lot and so I don't I don't know what you're doing

but like it was probably like a 100 bucks and like such high Roi for me and then the last piece is actually around my fitness so because I was in this very heavy season I decrease my workouts to two a week which is pretty light for me but I just made those the absolutes so I basically did Saturday Sunday as my two workout days and I just go really hard on those days and that's actually kind in a weird way it's been more fun for me than trying to do shorter more frequent workouts and so

it's actually kind of brought some like more life back into my training even though though I'm doing it less frequently I'm like looking forward to it and I realized that for me I love training on one condition that I'm not in a rush like I hate having to like do a workout in 45 minutes because I have a call like it takes all the fun out of it for me and so I do it on Saturdays and Sundays because I can just wake up I will work out as long as I feel like and then

I'll start working and that's been like really really good for me but part of this has also been my transition U at 35 I told myself you know when I was 15 I get 35 I will I will transition to longevity and so I have made that transition now and so I'm like I'm probably the lightest I've been in a long time I'm like 203 is right now which is very light for me for context my heaviest I was 250 so I was very it's all all steak um and so now I'm I'm 203 and

um basically chihuahua live longer than Great Danes uh which is small dogs live longer and so I want to put it you know less less uh stress on my heart and so I'm so for those who are like Alex looks smaller that's true cuz I am I have lost weight I've lost about 10 or 15 pounds and so I'll probably stay around here maybe I'll get in the high 190s but I'll probably I I maintain here pretty easily and so that's my update on that that part and I do think that it's okay to have

seasons like I'm not saying I'm only going to work out twice a week forever I'm saying I'm work out twice a week now like I I worked out three times this week and so it's not like I have these rules it's just that I absolutely committed to Saturdays and Sundays and being a weekend warrior and that has worked well for me to not work basically give myself permission to do that so that I could keep working hard on the stuff that needed to get moved forward so next one is culture so I Define culture as

the rules that govern reinforcement in a business and so that means like the rules of behavior what is what is what is good what is neutral what is bad and typically people have some sort of values that they create that are supposed to embody that culture those values typically are you know either phrases or they're one or two words and you have you know three to 10 of them right and so for us I've always believed in three because I don't think anyone beli like remembers more than three and if they can't remember them there's

no point in having them but those three typically are very bucketed terms that then need to have hundreds of behaviors underneath them that kind of roll into that culture it's not like you only have three rules of Behaving you have three concepts that have many applications across different conditions and so a big one that we've been focusing on Lea and I together has been kind not nice and so I think that in the wake of wokeism if you will there's been a lot of accommodation that has been accepted tolerated within businesses which is like everybody

needs to have these like you know safety zones and everyone everyone everyone has to feel hugged and fluffy and like all this stuff and I believe that this is a pendulum right and I think that the pendulum swung here and I think a lot of Brands Walmart just came out recently rolling back some of its initiatives I know uh Victoria Secret did last year like a lot of them are starting to swing back now I do think that we're going to swing too far the other way to be clear because that's how we do that's

how us humans do things right but I think it's going in the right direction right now which is going back towards the middle and so uh within acquisition. comom we have this big belief that we're very good at training like we're very good at training skills because it's something that Lea and I pride ourselves on and we're in this inperson environment we're good at fast feedback loops we're very good at breaking skills down uh into smaller chunks to make them manageable for somebody who's new the problem is that sometimes that goes into no man left

behind and we are not a government program instead it should be if you can't keep up you can't come and so I think this is a departure from the traditional like all accepting let's all all arms open like if someone you know has like you know they don't like working late it's like well then this isn't for them and they can find another job that's that that will accommodate that but I do not because we were trying to accomplish great things and great things require great sacrifice and it doesn't feel like a sacrifice to the

person who also wants the great thing it only feels like a sacrifice for someone who doesn't and so that price diminishes for someone who's aligned and so kind not nice also brings into into light like being able to have these sincerely canderous conversations of saying like you are not where you need to be and I'm going to give you a really good nug on this is that right now you can pause this video and I need you to show it to your team because what they don't understand is the difference between an insult and you

might not understand it either and this this like changed my life insult and criticism so do you know the difference well I'll explain it so an insult is where basically you slander the other person you assign a word that has a negative connotation so I say something like you are lazy you are uh a piece of you're a dick you whatever whatever insert insert the insult you want a criticism is the gap between desired and actual this is a commentary which is factual which is the expectation is that you show up every day by 9:00

a.m. you've shown up every day at 9:05 therefore there's discrepancy here in order for you to continue maintaining your employment you need to be here before night so this is a criticism it's simply observing reality and if you can do this this will allow you to help people without having the emotional charge now if I say you're 5 minutes late and you're that makes you lazy or that makes you uncommitted or that makes you insert whatever insult it then turns this into an emotionally charged conversation and so what happens is and this is why I

think it's important is that you need to explain to your team criticism is not negative it's an observation of reality an insult is where we attach judgment to that discrepancy like your content sucks that's tough and the the secondary of that is you suck because your content sucks which is even harsher but instead it says our Channel average is 100,000 the content that you make is 75,000 in order for you to keep your employment here you need to be above 100,000 and now let's break down what do we need to do behaviorally that will increase

the likelihood that you meet desired or exceed it and so then this is where you get to teach this is where you get to train if someone's always late to meetings they might not be lazy they just might not have the skill of showing up on time which is a skill and so you then say okay do you set alarms how do you estimate your time of driving do you do it on the fastest time you've ever driven somewhere or the slowest time you've ever driven somewhere right do you do it on the fastest time

you've ever gotten dressed or the slowest time you've ever gotten dressed and so typically when people estimate time they usually just skew to one of these two things there's the people who are always way too early it's because they do worst case on everything and then you've got the people who are they do best case on everything and they're always late right so it's like how do you estimate time and how do you set reminders for yourself to get places by the time you need to and so literally breaking down that skill which seems obvious

and yet there's many young people and to be fair sometimes old people who don't know how to show up on time and so understanding this and saying if we don't share this criticism we are being nice not kind we are not we are seeking we are seeking contentment we are seeking approval from everyone we are seeking consent we're not seeking truth and so we need to be truth seeking as a business and so we must always State the facts and tell the truth and if someone is not up to Snuff we need to communicate that

as fast as possible and give them the steps in order to remedy the situation and so this is the part I think both of these things get missed bosses will say he's a dick he's lazy he's whatever and sometimes we'll say to the person sometimes we say behind their back both of those are bad instead I would encourage you to go criticism and then steps so the way to do this is you say tell them what to do instead so don't just say don't do this say do this instead of this that way you give

them directions because no one can operate on a negative give them what to do and this has dramatically improved my skill as an operator with within the business and hopefully the kind not nice is something that you can give to your team and that you can say is like we are here to be kind I want to help you win but I'm not here to be your friend and I think Reed Hastings has a really wonderful frame around this which is like we are professional sport team trying to win the World Championships we are not

a family cuz you're not going to fire your kids you're not going to fire your spouse you're not going to fire your mother but if you're on a professional sports team it's like we are all here to win and if you don't want to win this is not the team for you there's Triple A there's other teams there's other teams that are Pros that don't want to win and that's fine but that's not what we have here and so the kindest thing that I can do for someone is give them clear feedback and opportunity to

improve and if they don't improve give them the opportunity to work at a place where they will better fit in now that it's been 5 years and I'm back into operating day-to-day on the media and conversion team that we have at acquisition. comom it's been fun to turn things around now I already went through the optimization framework and that's what I executed but the output of that was number one I removed all meetings number two I said you can have ad hoc uh stand-ups between each other when you want to solve a specific problem so

I don't want to I don't want to stop communication I just want to stop regular wasted time blocks that don't increase your output the next thing and to be fair when I did all my one-on-ones uh with every single person in the department to understand and what they were struggling with one of the biggest things that came back was we're in meetings all day we hate being in meetings I just want to work and I was like great let me make it easier for you to work the next thing was uh and this was feedback

that I got from some of the managers when they saw me running this was they saw a framework that I like a lot which is what who when so think about when you have a meeting and you're like hey we got to do this thing right that's the what all right then a lot of times that's it that's the meeting everyone just goes about their step way this the next level of that is okay this is what it is and this is who needs to do it so who's going to own this who's going to

own this one right who's the the chest to chest to poke the throat to choke all right who's the one who's responsible now if you have what and who that's already a better stop but where it gets really nasty is when you put in when and so the question that I like to ask here is how many hours will this take I don't ask how many days I don't ask what day you're going to get it done by I say how many hours will this take and then that person will say it'll probably take because

then you get to hear it so it's like if someone says like 20 hours I'm like 20 hours right but if if you ask them what day they might be like ah today's Tuesday I can get to you by Friday I'm like why is it going to take 3 days right so when you ask hours it's like this will probably take I don't know 90 minutes I'm like Okay cool so you can get this done in the next 90 now they will then say well I have them other things to do I'm like okay what

are those things and then you get to dive in and this is fundamentally I think the job of the boss is to prioritize this is strategy and they're like oh well I have this other thing that's for this massive project and I have to get that done I'm like well how long does that take and they'll say okay this many hours and say okay do that first and then this one you can start on tomorrow morning you'll have it done by lunch so hit me up at noon tomorrow when you have it done now people

get scared about this because they're like why are you driving all these deadlines the more deadlines you have the more opportunities you have to say nice job I would rather tell someone you did a great job seven times in a week than once a week and so I also have found that the best performers want to work and they hate not working and they hate things that get in the way work they hate office politics they hate meetings they hate gossip they just want to work and so I want to create an environment for those

people people and if there are a bunch of people who want to gossip and want to have lots of meetings and want to idate all day amazing just not here with the who when framework this also gets stacked and recapped all right so think about how a meeting runs right so okay first thing we got to do is this okay what is it who's got it when are you going to get done by how long is that going to take can I pull it up can I pull it up can I pull it up yep

that's fine all right great next one what's the next thing great who's going to own it how long's it going to take great you'll do it by this time and then so what we do is is I will recap every one of them every time and so by the time I've done my fourth one they've heard one four times two three times the third one two times and so there's this repetition that's gets built in and then obviously the thing at the very end is also be the freshest so it's like I can repeat the

least the thing that's the most fresh and the thing that I started with which is like way out of their mind at this point has been repeated like seven times and so it makes it more likely that they will actually do it now if you want to go the 2011 version which I had to do for a little bit was repeat it it back to me so I would say okay got it that's what you're going to do say it back to me and I kid you not if you ask him to say it back

this is crazy like one out of three times they'll just completely get get it wrong it's because they weren't listening they weren't paying attention whatever and so I'm like oh my God I can't believe that I was about to leave this meeting and they still they didn't understand what they needed to do and so you can stack the who what win you recap it all the way through and then if you have a team that's not doing as well ask them have them explain it back to you so they know what needs to happen now

once you have this Loop in place what do we do we lubricate it we add money we add incentives so how can we align what they do with the outcome of the business and so back into Ops I looked at everything eliminated all the meetings and then I said okay in this department everything is based on quality and so we just need to make better stuff and so I said if you make better stuff I will pay you more I'd rather have one guy who makes three times the money than three mediocre guys in a

very real way it's easy easier for me to manage one person there's way less communication there's way less overhead way less waste and we'll get better outcomes and so if you're like okay I understand how you did all this but how did you communicate with them if they had no meetings so I just switched to a daily standup which is every day same time uh we all hop on and I run departments like sales teams all right and I think that you can do this with any business and the reason that I like modeling sales

teams for two reasons one I have a lot of experience with them two I believe that the way sales teams are structured and operated have already been optimize for performance because the feedback loops are so tight if you're not managing your sales team well you find out very quickly and as soon as you fix how you operate it you find out very quickly and so I think that sales teams overall are run typically very well now what are the things about sales teams so for new people when they come in what do they do they

listen to a lot of gam tape this works for customer service this works for media this works for sales they watch a lot of the right way to do things then what happens there's a lot of role playing in sales so it's if you could roleplay in customer service you could role playay around what would you look at with this piece of content what would be the moments that you would clip out how would you structure it and you ask them to explain the work that they would do that's when someone new is coming in

and then we say okay we're going to give you a half calendar if you're a sales guy I'm going to give you a half calendar for your customer service I'm going to give you a half calendar for media to make sure you're not posting tons of crap you're just get one post a day and then if you do a good job you meet kpis then you get a full calendar then I can give you an UNCA calendar right so we have these progressions as long as they mean maintain their quality metrics and so like sales

we have a similar onboarding process the Huddle process itself is let's look at the good stuff and let's tear about apart the bad stuff so we' review a call that went well great and the far more valuable let's look at a call that wasn't that didn't go the way it should have and we let the person who did the call correct themselves so it's really tough if you go jump in and like jump down everyone's throat and tell them why they sucked it's much easier for them to say these are the things that I messed

up and then the team gets to say here's all the things you did well that that way they get some praise from everybody else but they still get to have that feedback and then you can prioritize okay this is the thing that's the most important but that still works for customer service it works for product it works for media which is okay why did this clip suck and let's look at it and if you notice a common theme for when Clips suck then you just repeating it and reinforcing it keeps it top of mind we

have switched to that process and it has been very good I also got people off the bus who weren't aligned with it and so if you have a change that you want to do and you foresee that people will not be aligned with that change then I think that you owe it to the high performers to to create an environment that is only other high performance you want to get it to the point where it's so self-managed and self- policed that if someone comes in and isn't holding pulling their weight they just get removed simple

as that and the whole team comes to you like dude I don't think this is the guy right it shouldn't come from you it should come from the culture of the team and that's why you can't have a culture of acceptance where it's no man Left Behind like oh they're not as good as we thought but we're just going to keep training them we're keep deploying these resources is not to say that you can't train someone the question is is it worth it so the next big theme along operations so I'll break this into another

chunk is technical versus management all right and so this is very common in tech companies right you have a an engineer who's exceptionally talented and you want to give them a way to move up in the company but they don't want to manage people and in most companies the only way to move up is to increase the headcount that's underneath of you and so when I saw saw this within our company I was like this feels dumb we should find a way for the best sales guys to keep making more and more money we should

find ways for the best media guys to make more more money the best customer service UPS making more and more money especially in the roles that have high leverage so basically the best content creator has more leverage than the best sales guy best sales guy is closer to the reward though to be fair and so the likelihood that what they do generates revenue is much closer whereas marketing or content could be significantly further away so there's a discount that's applied there right but big picture is is is there a track for both types of people

because there are the people who are experts at something you just want to let them cook and so when I realized that the the the orgs that I basically the divisions that I took over the only way that someone would win was by moving up and when you have a the only reward structure is people underneath of you then what does that incentivize it incentivizes you keeping against to yourself because if someone gets better than you then they move ahead of you in the in the line number one number two is it incentivizes the managers

and the whole team to always ask to hire more people because if you hire more people then it means they by default move up in the organization the third thing is that whoever is in charge of the promotions and the titles becomes Chief person whose ass we must kiss and that means that if you it basically becomes entirely subjective as to who gets promoted so then the next incentive that comes up that's perverse is you want to show how much you're working rather than do work which are different and so this is where people are

like if I said what did you do yesterday and I was like you need to give me a th000 bullets you could probably come up with a th000 bullets you're like I tied my shoes and then I stood up straight and then I put one pan my right pan leg on and I put my left pan leg on and so people make it seem like they're just doing all of this work but they don't tie that work to the output of the division and when that happens is when you have misaligned incentives so every one

of these incentive is perverse in that it doesn't fuel the business but it does fuel costs with this and with the alignance incentives the team post change has more than doubled output more than and so I think the lesson here and I think that we'll probably get to Triple or quadruple like for real maybe I'll do an update later but this has been a recent takeover for me the thing is is that people typically have significantly more output potential if you can tap into what we call discretionary effort which is what is that effort above

and beyond the minimum required to keep their job so everything above you not getting fired is discretional discretionary effort and in most companies there's a massive amount of effort above not getting fired that is unlockable if the incentives are aligned and so many people can in a very real way triple how much they're doing quadruple how much they're doing only if they're incentivized to and so when you have a political hierarchy it just means elbowing no one teaching each other anything saying we always need to hire more people decreasing your output to lowest potential possible

as long as you don't get fired and this when coupled with a management style of never firing is a great way to create waste so in order to facilitate this there typically has to be a change in compensation so I've talked about incentives a couple time through here and so my goal is to try and have everything be pay for performance to the highest degree possible now here's where your operations and your Finance team will push back they'll say This is complicated why can't we just do it the way everybody else does it because just

because it's hard doesn't mean it's worth it so there's a price but there's also a return and so all they are talking about is the price of this thing not what we're going to get from it if I could then go back to that Finance person and say hey and to be fair this isn't me saying anything about my finance I'm saying you might have to deal with this hey if we were able to quadruple our output by creating a more complex incentive structure that might require someone full-time just to manage is the cost of

that one person full-time managing it worth the increased output of 4X across the entire company duh of course it is but it's more complicated and it's also worth it and so I I bring this up because you will probably get push back if you try and incentivize people on performance it takes more math it takes more tracking but I will I will say one key part which is that if people are going to be paid on performance my recommendation is two things one if you make the transition allow them to keep their existing salaries and

then add the performance on top and then for new people bring them in and then just have their performance but this allows complete adoption of the new way rapid reinforcement Loop that that they're like this is way better and then ultimately if you make the jumps in comp proportional to the output that you seek to get then you will still make more than the cost so it's like going it's going to the store buying 3x output at twice the price of your 1X it's still a better deal even though it costs more around this pay

for performance it will also very clearly demonstrate who is really good and who isn't and I haven't really talked about like letting people go who are low performers I'll just only say this one word about it which is bloat is like cancer in a business or it's like weeds in a garden is that bloat naturally occurs people hire more people because the simplest solution is throw money in bodies at stuff and it's often not the right one you have to keep your garden healthy by pruning it by deweeding it you keep a tree healthy by

cutting off the Stray branches that are growing in the wrong direction because it's detracting from the growth of the overall trunk and so this is the part that that is that is probably contrarian for most of you fire when things are good not when they are bad so when things are good is when you have the most bloat and so it is far better to let people go at that point for low performance because it doesn't feel like the company's losing feels like we're being disciplined if you let people go only when the company performance

drops it feels way worse having done both I strongly recommend the other so for example we were very fortunate but during covid prior to co we had been very militant about making sure that we were making sure that everyone was efficient and that the that the headcount made sense based on the demand and so when Co hit we had very minimal amounts that we had to change internally in the business and so because of that um I think it was able to maintain morale relatively well during a time when my industry was getting destroyed and

there's a number of ways you can do pay for performance and you don't need to have as much performance as you might think in order to incentivize action and so if you're like I don't have budget for that that's okay just just make a couple tiers or performance and then you can have flat bonuses by hitting some tiers like you can I mean literally it doesn't have you don't have to think in percentages it can just be flat amounts based on based on tiers and I think it's a very good structure and a good way

to test this out is once you figure out your your compensation thing that you want to do back test it so just look at what it would have been the month before and then see what it is and if that makes sense then it's like cool well I'm going to assume the performance is going to go up if I pay for that added performance and am I okay with this increase and if so which if you align it with the incentives of the business it should more than pay for itself the structures that I'm talking

about with the sales team management functions best in my opinion when you have teams of similar function what that means is like an executive team is going to be very is has many people with very different functions and expertise a customer service team has many people with the same function and expertise and so this style of management of you know reviews uh onboarding huddles what did we what could we do better here those are great when everyone does the same thing if everyone does different things you will have a different structure of it's far more

round table where everyone's more or less updating and then coming with the discussion topics that affect everybody else and problem solving together more than upskilling together so that's really probably the main difference between those is one is like we're really solving problems together for the majority of time not that you don't do it the other way but the majority of time we're solving big problems with disparate teams or different teams diverse teams and then with similar teams homogeneous teams is typically upskilling together and aligning priorities so oh man this is a big one problems and

solutions have delays all right so hear me out on this right now you are living with problems that you created 6 months ago and when you begin to implement Your solution the problem will not immediately go away and so there will be this period of time where you're executing a solution on a problem that you cost 6 months ago and you will still continue to live with the problem because the solution has not borne fruit yet it hasn't latched in yet it hasn't come to fruition and so you have to give Solutions the amount of

time they deserve to work before appraising whether or not they worked to begin with which I recommend doing prior to implementing the solution so basically when you're about to do something to fix some problem say how long do I think this should take before I can say if it worked or not and then stick to that because in the moment you will only incur even more cost which is why it's so painful it's like you have this problem and now you're incurring more cost to try and solving it and and you're still suffering the problem

and the cost of solving it without the benefit and so this is kind of the endurance part of Entrepreneurship is that you have to keep working without seeing the result of your work you don't need to change anything you need to learn to endure because just because it's not working doesn't mean you're not on the right path and so the easiest way to think about this is like if you were to go to the gym and you start working out and you start eating better you're 50 lbs overweight that problem was created years in the

past you now incurring the solution is incurring the problem you're still overweight and the cost of the solution which is now you go to the gym now you're not eating the foods you like whatever but you're still overweight and so after 7 days you might think okay well I should stop doing this because it's obviously not working you have to give time time for the solution proportional to the size problem it's solving and if you don't approach it this way and you ignore your problems when you scale you scale your problems with you which means

that this is why I'm such a believer in solving the problems in order to scale rather than scaling despite my problems because then it just makes my problems bigger hairier and nastier and so if you're living in good times right now you can't rest on The Laurels because it's not from the work you're doing today it's from the work that you did 6 or 12 months ago and this has been a constant reminder for Laya and I when we go through things when things are good we're like what did we do 6 months ago that

is causing this and if things are bad we ask what did we stop doing or what did we add in in the past that created this too often we look at today and think that our bad days is because of what we did yesterday and it often isn't and so properly attributing where the cause of the solution or problem came from can give you the outside return that you're probably looking for and I'll give you this very tactical tip if you see a a decline and performance in a division or a function of the business

you'll it'll typically look like this so let's say let's say that you know you've got this div let's say it's lead flow whatever and then it starts flatten out and then it starts going down right so you notice right so what happens is people wake up here and say we don't have enough leads right and so they say okay well show me the ads this week show me the ads last week so the question is what ha like where do you go do you go here or do you go here go here why did we

stop growing not why did we start shrinking and so you have to look at where the Delta first occurred and then what happened in this what happened leading up to here what did we change often times it's a who and here's a fun one a lot of people think oh we must have lost someone key most of the times you added someone you added someone terrible I'm dead serious we had uh we had an issue where our uh our Ascension rates all of a sudden sudden like I know I was like why are Ascension you

know we started looking at all these different we looked at did all the functions we looked at messaging all this stuff and finally I was like and Lila brought it up she's like let's just look at the month when they stopped going up we looked at that month and we looked at what had happened the only change that had happened was that we had hired a new head we added someone to do the job and by adding this bad person they destroyed the function and like sometimes it's a house sometime sometimes you change your process

and sometimes that's the culprit but a lot of times you added someone who actively is destroying your business so another big lesson of this year was around content and so I made this video called back to business I don't think it was called that was basically we did this experiment for 16 weeks where we made very very wide content so like you know meals and workouts and Vlogs and things like that where we wanted to see okay well if we get more views then maybe a percentage of those people will be business owners and so

we our relative amount will go down that are business owners but our absolute amount will go up and so that's all I care about is the absolute amount and so it turns out that that hypothesis was wrong at least for us and so when we made wider content we had fewer absolute amount of business owners who were opting in who were who were buying the books and so for me Book Sales is actually a very leading indicator for the people who we want coming towards acquisition. comom and so uh and email options on the site

that's a big one by the way if you're not subscribed to mosy uh mosy money minute it's one of the best things that I put out there it takes a minute and I deliver two every week that are extremely tactical things that you can immediately use to make more money like very tactical what of the best things I put out there so I think you go to acis.com newsletter and it's there so you can opt in grab that I I think you will like it it's very good I put a lot of time into it

okay back to business so in finding that out we shifted our content indeed back to business and lo and behold we got more business owners crazy but I think this is important because a lot of us fall into this wide views vanity trap and so being clear about why you're why you're making content to begin with is important if you're a business owner and you're making content because you want to make more money then you need to stay on point serve the Avatar you serve and that has served us very well especially in the longest

forms content I think the shorter stuff you can get away with what I would consider adjacent if you're a salon lady and you sell haircuts I know I'm butchering this but you get the idea then if you talk about beauty in general you will probably attract the type of Avatar who spends money on these types of things and so I see that as okay but if you're going to do a long video probably don't do it on makeup tutorials if you sell haircuts get the drift so another big part of this is that the structure

of the content for entertainment is not the same as uh as education and so with education a lot of the effort is in the pre-production with ENT entainment a lot of the effort goes into post- production there's obviously pre as well but the post production there's just God like think about making the Transformers movie how much post-production is there in that movie a ton right whereas some of the top education videos on the internet are just a dude with a whiteboard which just goes down to the quality and the Simplicity of the content itself and

so you can make something significantly more compelling by making the language more readily accessible to your avatar now two compon to this one is the examples that you use you want it to be as relevant to the Avatar as possible if I'm talking to uh you know a bunch of mechanics then I'll probably make a car analogy if I want to talk to a bunch of ladies I might use a cooking analogy right and that's with traditional gender roles and stereotypes deal with it all right and so the idea here is I will try and

speak in a way that I think has the highest likelihood of being language that will be comprehended by the widest slice of my target audience now if you have an even broader audience then you would limit the amount of analogies to things that everyone understands so probably be human things so I might be talking about just eating in general sleeping in general brushing your teeth in general would be the analogies that I would use and the grade language of my speech would be as low as humanly possible so I looked at this politics thing this

was before this election but they had shown that the politician that spoke at the lowest grade level won every election now I don't know if that's held true since then but I thought it was relatively telling with all of these different marketing strategies the one that mattered most was actually being understood which leads into one of the biggest next things that we did which was I'll put pre versus post here uh which for us because we're education we are focusing more on pre-production this video right now we prepared for hours like what are all the

lessons I have what are the examples I want to talk about like this isn't me just turning on the camera and saying like what's up I actually put a lot into this and because I it was a whole year it was also helpful for me CU I like to crystallize my own knowledge but prsus post and then another one is is clear packaging right is just be very clear about what it is your content is about and what they're going to get from it and so from that we came up with the three PS which

is proof promise plan and so every introduction of every video has to have these three things now it doesn't have to but we found that when we included those things those videos did better and so you notice every video since this back to business theme we have proof promise plant within the first call it 30 seconds and so it's what are you going to get from the video why should you believe me and this is how we're going to do it and so in this video I started with we have these three companies uh you

know three of our companies are over 100 million we sked a lot this year we went from you know 50 million in eida to just under 100 you will learn the lessons from this so you can apply to your business and the plan that we're going to do it is I'm going to walk through them step by step all right there we go right very straightforward and the last piece which was a small one which I actually got pushed back from my team on which is why I'm sharing it with you is introduce yourself right

so a lot of people are like oh we don't want to introduce like my audience knows who we are well good thing you're not just making it for them you're making it for people who don't know who you are yet right and so what we did is that we've actually now Consolidated this to lower third and so at the beginning of this video you should see you know Alex rosi manage your partner acquisition. comom so we actually able to cut that out of me saying it because we wanted to keep the intros really tight but

if no one knows who you are I also have taken out the uh hey if you don't know who I am just say I'm Alex I'm the managing partner of ais.com this is what we do or put it lower third and then just skip forward right you you want to keep it as tight as humanely possible and when we look back at the videos that did exceptionally well these were the things that these were our common themes we put more in Pre we introduced ourselves we made it very clear packaging we had a prooved promise

plan that was laid out we had examples that were clear and relevant to our Avatar which is business owners and so we made content about business and lo and behold it has been good and on a personal note I prefer making business content to not business content I like resented I'll be really real with you I I was so H I was afraid of the results that were going to come in cuz I was like if I'm going to have to make Meal videos I'm going to kill myself I just like I like like then

we'll do our workouts next I'm like no I'll just I'll just be dead it won't matter like it doesn't matter I'll just die and so and so like I'm sure from like the thing is is that I have a relatively High pain Toler so like if it was the way to win I would like if you were like hey if you hit your hand with this Hammer your business will keep growing like my hand my hand would be a pancake right I would just keep going at it but I I would prefer not to do

it that way and I'm very grateful that you guys like business concept better because that's what I like making too so the next one is around platforms and I think this was really interesting so I looked really deeply at the platforms from this last year and so I made a whole tier list video about this so I'm not going to go in super depth on this but I would say that the uh MVP of the year was email or maybe most improved if you want to call it that way I have not traditionally spent a

long time on email which seems ridiculous cuz written word is my best format duh and so I started writing emails and they started doing well duh like maybe I should hate money less I don't know anyways so email was kind of the MVP of the year for me probably the the like the most improved like didn't expect it the feedback I've gotten has been exceptional and I made also a separate video on how I just write my emails and so you can watch that I'm sure it'll be I'm sure you can find it all right

beyond that though Facebook was a uh in terms of like book sales per follower count and per view count was kind of like the highest leverage like we actually got a lot from that so we're investing more in Facebook right now The Perennial Champs were IG and YouTube uh in terms of percentage of traffic that came to acquisition. comom YouTube Instagram were by far the biggest ones the unbeknownst one was books this is one that no one talks about but Amazon is actually responsible for like 15% of my traffic uh which is kind of cool

meaning basically the amount of people who buy books and then read the books and then go to the site a huge percentage of my traffic indirectly comes from Amazon because they because my books do really well and have a lot of reviews and and Amazon wants to have people buy products that they like on Amazon because then they associate the good things from that product with Amazon ha right it's like they have a strategy and I also said in my tier list video that Tik Tok was something that I uh was deprioritizing and I thought

more about that since that video so it's been like seven months I think since I made that video I think that it's not that Tik Tok is not a good platform for business I think that we had a skill Gap around Tik Tok and so I'm actively trying to remedy that right now and bringing in some amazing people I'm from the Tik Tok side it's a platform I don't know very well and so we are going to just bring in great people and in line their incentives and see what happens but fundamentally I know there

are business owners on Tik Tok I just haven't been able to package my content in a way that did well on that platform but if you're curious since we made the incentive change our Tik Tok is up 300% this week so you know incentives work and speaking of those platforms I would recommend checking out my email I did say it earlier uh MIM moneyy minute I put a lot of time into them I think they're really good uh if you like my books you love the emails it's like like super super distilled down that really

proud of them it just it's just worked out really well and so I think um I think you will like them uh it's acis.com newletter and by the way if you haven't read the books for the love of God it's the best stuff I have so like if you like my videos you will like the books more straight up you'll like them more they're better and I feel like I can say that objectively like I work on both of them and I think that and it's just fundamentally it's because I haven't spent 2,000 hours on

a video I have SP $2,000 on a book so $100 million offers $100 million reads check them out if this was valuable for you it would mean the world to me if you shared it with another entrepreneur or people inside of your team it's the only thing that encourages me to keep doing this as I shout into the dark abyss share it on your stories text it to friends it it it would mean a lot I don't have sponsors for this thing and so that is my only ask otherwise stay awesome