This Idea Will Make Your Business Unstoppable

today's topic is going to be preparation within the context of work and so what I want to do today is actually reset your bar for what preparation looks like for the highest achieving people that I know within different context so whether that's sales whe that's marketing content whatever customer success all of these contexts have different types of prep there's two different ways to prep that I'll talk about and give you some tactics that you can use and maybe send to your team as well because hey if they prep more you'll make more I'll give you

uh an example of like a resetting that just recently happened for me so I'm obviously very big on uh the amount of reps that it takes like volume negates luck is uh is the is the number one uh quote that we have in the sales team wall so that the guys understand like it's just about the Reps and we just say it all the time it's repeated over and over again because we also believe uh repetition of the same beliefs is something that will drive them to remember this thing because we need to be reminded

more than we need to be taught but recently even getting into this content game this is about a year ago um I was talking to arak and so arak's a um a content creator who has I don't know 10 15 million subscribers something like that on YouTube and we were saying I was like hey what can we do to make our you know make our YouTube YouTube videos better and so he said oh just send me over your your your prep case for the videos and I was like um what do you mean I was

like you mean like the notes on my phone he was like uh no and I was like can you send me one of yours so I know what you're talking about and so he sends me his most recent crap for one of his videos and it was like 22 Pages for like a 15minute video and I was like oh okay so my understanding of how much work it takes to do something at this level is wildly under what the reality of it is at at that level and so I attended something he invited me to

like a little Creator meet up with some of the the biggest guys on YouTube I'll just I'll just say it this way you would know everybody in the room um and when we were there they were all discussing how much time it took them to prep for videos and a lot of these guys were spending two three four straight weeks of 12 hours a day to make one video per month and I will tell you this is that it was in no way surprising to me after going there for two days what it took and

why those guys were the number one in that industry for making content that was exceptional and so it completely reset my standard reset my bar for how much preparation was required to be exceptional and it was because and this is why it's so silly for me cuz I feel like I keep learning and relearning the same lessons but just in new domains is that the people who are doing way better than you are just working so much harder and the thing is that people think that someone's working like two times as hard or three times

as hard because we tend to think in increments we're like okay well I work I work this much someone must be doing twice as much work but it's not even close to that these guys are doing like literally a hundred times the work and it's not only that they have a team of 10 people spending four weeks to prepare one 15minute video like the order of magnitude in terms of effort there you multiply by 10 times times 12 hours a daytimes 4 weeks all of a sudden you really are at a thousand times the work

1,500 times the work to create to be fair an outcome that is 1,500 or 10,000 times better than the average YouTube video or whatever it is that you're making and obviously I'm just using this as a Content example but it applies to anything applies to sales meetings it applies to how you prep for a date applies to how you meet the parents or the in-laws and so I'll tell you a second story so I um I used to do uh some consulting stuff um and I had a guy who uh was uh a friend or

was you know business acquaintance who said hey man I would love it if we could spend a day together and I was like I really do that and he's like just name her price and I said fine um actually total fun side note story with this um I was like fine I'll do it for 50 grand um this was ages ago and he said uh he said uh how about how about 35 and I said how about 75 and he was like all right 50 is cool and I was like all right and so just

a a side note when someone says hey can you do it for Less you can always say hey I can do it for more and every single time I've used that overcome it has worked so right now it's like 100% overcome for using that highly recommend using it in a sales uh situation because people were like okay I got it understood like I'll that's your price so that was first half of Story number two with the Consulting day so when I when I did that day um what I did was I started that morning I

think that we were going to start meeting at at uh 9:00 and so I woke up at 5: and I spent 4 hours reviewing his business right cuz I figured my day was going to be shot this is going to be my day like I'm not going to try to do anything else and so I spent the four hours prepping um and I I came in to the day with I think four or five pages of notes of like okay here are things we could do here that would be better here's things on your follow-up

sequence here's things on the on on your on your on your landing pages here things that you can do from a Content here's how I think your CT could be better all of this stuff right and so I came in with it and the next like 4 hours I just spent showing him what I had spent the morning going over and at the end of the day he was like I have genuinely never had anyone come this prepared to something and to me I was like it was 4 hours of prep it wasn't like a

crazy you know I me to me 4 hours perhaps nothing you know what I mean in terms of work but it was really confirming because this guy obviously had the money to to spend 50 grand for a day or whatever and um that he had not had that type I was like it still bewilders me and I see that more so that it is remarkable how low the bar is to beat everyone else and so that's what I take that my takeaway from that um like on one hand you've got aak and some of these

super creators who are spending thousands of hours on a one single piece of content but I think if you like do consulting or you do some sort of work where you do the same thing over and over again like you can have like a 4:1 ratio if I go into a meeting and it's a 60-minute meeting you can take 15 minutes before you get into the meeting and I think like a 4 to1 ratio is really are 1 to four ratio like if it's a 8 hour day spending 2 hours if it's a 60-minute meeting

spending 15 minutes if a 20-minute meeting spending 5 minutes before you get on um will'll make the 20 minutes two three times more effective by just having that little bit of block to say who's on this meeting what's the background of this what's the agenda what problem are we trying to solve it just it just absolutely focuses you and makes you a driver in the meeting I can just absolutely like promise you that now um third one when we have Founders who come into the portfolio so when we invest in a company one of the

things that happens most commonly is a lot of them are running paid ads or they start running paid ads so it's either way so either they're running ads and they hit some sort of plateau or they want to get into running ads and so I'll tell you the story that I explained to almost all of them which is I say all right how many uh you know what do you what do you guys spend in a day and they're like all right we're spending 5,000 a day okay fine so how many new ads are you

making per week and a lot of time they're like oh record ads once a month and I'm like okay well how many ads do you make they're like usually five or seven ads and I'm like okay so let me give you some context we make uh about 30 ads a week new and that's new unique video now that's not repurposing of that that's 30 core pieces which then get zillion out in terms of like let's take the hook for number one and put as number three and then redo the same video those would be permutations

that go from 30 to like 100 pieces of creative and as soon as I explain that they're like oh and I was like so you're doing 5 to seven and you're complaining that you can't scale but the reality is that you just can't scale given this level of creative like if your creative is a 5 out of 10 you can get to 5,000 a day profitably but you're not going to get to 50,000 a day profitably because you're not getting that one out of a hundred ad that can scale to colder audiences or newer people

and so it's just the like if you have a mediocre ad like many of you guys who start running ads are like oh I get it to $100 a day but I can't get it to be profitable at $500 a day it's like yeah because your ad is so bad it can only go to the absolute hottest audience and then as soon as it goes outside of that very hot audience that kind of knows you a little bit it stops working right and so if you had if you went from a five out of 10

ad to a seven out of 10 ad then all of a sudden it's like oh I can get to $500 a day and if you get to an eight out of a 10 ad you can go to a $5,000 a day right but the nine out of 10 and the 10 out of 10 ads like that's what converts the world but in order to get that 10 out of 10 ad you have to do so much more preparation before you do the ads and total volume of work of doing the ads itself and so I

share this stuff because my entire goal of this right now is to reset your expectations of the amount of preparation that it takes to be good because it's so easy it's like mediocrity is the is is so easy to do because you just do something and hey anything's better than nothing so if you're doing nothing then absolutely start but what happens is people are like why isn't it working for me and it's not working for you because you're not working nearly as much as you as what is requ required to get that level of output

right so let me tell you a different story so I had um a uh a buddy of mine's a a billionaire and he's he wants to start making content which is I I'm I'm a huge proponent of this because he actually has stuff to say um and but he's still learning the content game right and so he's like hey man can you look at my Instagram and tell me or sorry can you look at my he said can you look at my social media and tell me what I'm what what I'm doing wrong or what

I should be doing better and so before I pulled up his thing I was like well how many posts are you making a day across all platforms and he was like one I'm doing one a day right now um and he said it like that kind of like he was like yes I'm doing one a day right now and I was like all right man um we make at the time we were we were making 50 a day we make more than that now and he just looked at me and he was like you don't

need to say anymore he's like I got it like he understood in that moment the same thing I did when I when AR act told showed me his prep case for his YouTube videos I was like I get it like I'm I'm I'm he said Thank you for resetting my my uh my measuring stick that's what he said he was like my you reset my bar reset my expectations of how much how much work it takes to get to that level that I want to get to hey if you want to get around people who

are actually winning who look like you who smell like you who talk like you and are doing what you want to do I'd like to invite you to the the school games community at school.com games I take calls in there I put content that's like this and more personalized inside of that community and I drop a huge amount once a month in eight hour training on how to actually take this stuff and win anyways and so if that's interesting school.com forgames see you in there I share this stuff because I think one of the biggest

Gifts of surrounding yourself in a championship team so there's a book by um Angela Duckworth called grit um which is a good book um but one of the things that uh they talk about in the book is that one of the best ways to develop grit is to surround yourself with people who have grit so one of the for sure ways to get better at a skill is surround yourself with people who already have that skill who are ahead of you and so that's why joining a championship team is one of the be best things

you can do to understand what is required to win and so when you're the the story that she tells in the book is uh swimmers who want to get better at swimming if you can make the the State team or whatever of like a championship team all of a sudden there's standards of work that you didn't understand is what everyone's doing so you go from like oh well I'm swimming twice a week and that's what you can do to be best in your high school or whatever I'm making up the the number but when you

go to the championship team you realize that they do three hours a day twice a day and all of a sudden you're like oh and it's that same moment I had with era I was like oh in the same moment my friend had one when we talked about the social media was like oh it's just this massive bar reset of like oh this isn't like a two times as as much thing this is like a 50 100 times as much and so it's just when you realize how much work it takes to get good you

realize how few things you can get good at and that's where the focus becomes so important because the only way to get that good is to do a few things and so that's where the strategy of picking or prioritizing the things that you want to get good at becomes more important because you just can't do a hundred times the work on a hundred different things and so making sure that you're allocating your resources to the one thing that matters most which then forces you to prioritize what you're spending your time on which by the way

I think is a really good activity if you can spend a day or a week saying okay if I could only have one thing be true about our business if I could have like if we have more traffic than anyone else we will win based on this model or whatever it is that we have if we have more referrals than anyone else then we will win no matter what if we have the best advertising in terms of paid ads if we just had that one thing we will win if you can be very clear about

that one point of Leverage then you attack it with absolute onslaught of hours of work and repetition and preparation for those repetitions that then yield you even more and so it's like I'll give you the ad example I was saying earlier if I if I'm doing 100 ads a week and my competitor's doing seven ads a month I'm doing 400 to his seven all right so I'm doing I don't know what the math is there but a lot let's it's at Le 50 times 60 times more right um than he is in terms of volume

but not only that but when I go into that advertising day what am I doing beforehand I'm prepping all the I want to prep all the hooks ahead of time I want to do research of of past ads that have done really well I want to take different ad styles that I've seen across social media in general that I liked I'm like I wonder if we can make a version of this for how we're going to advertise our thing and by the way I love taking from other spaces like seeing a hotel ad or an

Airbnb ad and be like o that would work really well in this software company that we have oh we've got this you know we've got this dry cleaning business that would work really well this ad for a gym or whatever right and I have this little swipe file on my phone where whenever I see an ad I like I I save it and then I also screenshot it so that when I get into my prep sessions I already have my stuff that I want to use to prep in front of me and so one of

the one of the big other things besides resetting your bar of expectation of how much prep it takes to win is that the more you prepare for Stuff the more frequently you do it the better you will get it preparing so preparing in of itself is a skill right and so like the first time you prep for making ads the per time you prep for making content you it's going to take you longer and you're going to be less efficient at it but if you know for example this is your 100th time preparing for making

a podcast or whatever like this is my prep for the this little this little podcast here I wrote this out ahead of time I was like these are all the things I wanted to hit on because I think they were important right and so I think in terms of resetting the bar start thinking in hundreds rather than ones and twos so it's not that somebody's doing twice as much work or three times as much work they're doing a hundred times the work and in the example I gave earlier sometimes way more than 100 times the

work two more quick things on this and then I'll I'll let you go about your day so you can start preparing so Elon Musk recently talked about something uh well not recently but I've heard I heard an article or an interview from him that he said um he referenced Parkinson's law so Parkinson law for those of you guys who don't know is that work expands to the time allotted right and so I think what you don't want to do is over prepare for the wrong thing and let me let me put my caveat there is

that I actually think there's tremendous Roi to cramming meaning he uses Parkinson's law in Reverse which is that it also if if work expands the time a lotted it can also shrink to the time that you shrink to and there's a reason that kids cram it's because it's really high Roi on their time right if they if they pref for weeks and weeks and then they they take the week before the exam off and don't look at anything sometimes they do worse than just cramming right before the test and so people aren't idiots like we

know that cramming Works which is why we do it but I think I'd highly encourage thinking about prepping is cramming I actually think it works amazingly well in a business context but people somehow somehow have said it's like a bad thing because I don't even know why teachers say it's a bad thing at the end of the day like you either AC the test or you didn't and so whatever now in terms of longterm like I think you know not sleeping the night before probably impacts your if you like probably impacts your uh performance more

but if you just study the day before and you study the morning of I'll promise you that the studying the morning of will get you more than what you did the night before in terms of immediate result on the test more than long-term retention which is different just to be clear but the thing is is if you're doing a meeting you're going to take notes and then you're going to delegate stuff and so you being able to run that meeting effectively based on you cramming for that meeting super high Roi on your time and so

I absolutely love the concept of cramming within within the world of business because a lot of times you do have something you just need to do once and you need to impress the client you need to impress the boss you need to you need to just come prepared for a company uh presentation that you're doing in front of a whole team or the a department or the whole the whole company entirely going back to the two types of work there are is that or two types of preparation you have you have preparation for things you're

going to do that you do many many many times which you get better and better at preparing for it which means you can actually shrink the amount of time you need to prepare and I think the closer you do the preparation to the event itself the more valuable it is and so that is why take the 5 minutes literally actually take the five minutes before the meeting to say okay this is John let me look at his profile real quick okay John's uh he's out of Milwaukee okay the Bucks are doing well let me see

if he if he follows the Bucs okay he taged something there and um and his wife's name is Joyce okay got it so you get on the meeting you're like dude John how's it going dude the Bucks are killing it oh that's fantastic how's Joyce doing she's good great and uh I saw um do is this Mike is this he's your uh he's your VP of customer success hey Mike nice to meet you man um I was just looking you guys up before before I got on uh um really cool stuff that you guys are

doing to XYZ Corp right as soon as I say that they're like immediately in 60 seconds they're like this guy prepared and that's what it communicates and the thing is is that the idea that someone knows that you prepare literally separates you from so many other people who just show up and they're like oh what are we going to do today right and so sure you should absolutely have be prepared in terms of the agenda in terms of your scripting for how you run these meetings but you get so much return on demonstrating that you

prepared like people know if you prepared it just it completely blows them away and I still to this day I get people are so they're like dude thank you so much for taking the time like you I feel like you knew our our company I feel like you knew our business like even better than people that I've spent you know I've had all you know had vendors who did all this stuff and I was like yeah I mean I'm not going to walk into a meeting not knowing who I'm talking to like what are we

going to do spend the whole the whole time fact finding before I can actually make a recommendation around something well that's such a waste of time for you and me because I know what I'm looking for and it's going to be really inefficient for you to exchange it via VIA verbal and I can just click around and find out what I need to do especially if you're looking at it from an external way in to like okay why are prospects not converting well I don't need to talk to you I should look at what somebody

who doesn't talk to you would see so that I can make the recomendations or conclusions and sometimes that kind of is more valuable because they're not going to color they're not going to give me the wise and the why it's difficult because I don't care I'm a prospect right at least I'm going to put those glasses on and so back to the the The onetime Thing versus the many time thing if you do it a lot of times you're going to get better better at prepping and I would say prep as as as close to

the event as you can and I think a 4:1 ratio in the beginning is good 15 minutes to 60 1 hour to four hours in terms of prep to how much work you're going to do for whatever the thing is and over time it can shrink a little bit so you can be like one to 10 so it's 5 minutes for a 60-minute meeting um but for the things that you're going to do one time that you have never done before that's where it actually expands the other way it goes like 10 20 hours of

prep for one hour of presenting and so the to determining how much you're willing to prepare for something that you're only going to do once rather than something that you do all the time in my opinion comes up to the stakes and the returns and so if you're going to go do a speech in front of a thousand people and you've never spoken before and it's a ideally hopefully it's a topic that you do understand but you just haven't spoken in that environment before then I want to control for every other variable that can approximate

me speaking in front so one I want to know I want to master the material for sure if you're getting up there and you don't know what you're what you're talking about or like the things you're going to talk about well dear God you know like no wonder that you suck at talking right now beyond that it's how many ways can I approximate this like for example going live on social media can help you approximate a live audience in person is it perfect no but is it better than just talking to the mirror probably now

if you aren't going to now this is a real one this is actually from the Fitness World if you get used to squatting for example I'll I'll bring it home if you squat in the mirror every day and you can see yourself and you're squatting if you go to a competition this actually happened to me in my first competition I I worked out at a gym that had a mirror in front of the squat rack and so I just I just always squatted there I didn't think about it when I got to a competition I

had the squat rack and when I looked out there was no mirror it was just a crowd of people watching me Squat and I was like oh oh this is weird cuz I didn't even realize but I I it was actually so different from how I trained and so from that point going forward I turned around in the rack so that I would be facing the gym at least so that I wasn't looking at the mirror so that it was closer approximation to competition and so as many of those variables as you can control for

you want to have in the prep so that the prep as closely as possible approximates the performance and so there's cramming for for like you having information that'll better arm you for Consulting sales customer success whatever which by the way if you're in customer success like spending 5 minutes before you get on the call with a customer like reviewing the call notes reviewing the the notes from the sales team looking the person's profile before you get on dear God will they think it's absolutely amazing and it takes this much work like you'll you'll like they

will think you're three times cooler with 5 minutes of work for a 60-minute call like I almost think that you saying hey give me five minutes at the beginning of the call and starting 5 minutes late will still even though I hate starting late would still yield you a better outcome at the end of the 60 minutes than starting on time and not being prepared it comes down to the return on effort and return on time and so if you're going to talk to a thousand people and this and these are let's say your ideal

customers well if I was going to have a, 101 meetings how much would I prepare for each of those one-one meetings that was 60 minutes I might prepare 10 minutes right well if I have 10 minutes times a thousand that's like I don't know 167 hours right something like that and so if 167 hours of prep for that one thing now realistically that might not make sense because you do have diminishing returns and so that's why speaking one to many is higher return but just to give yourself a context is like when we did the

the book launch I was like dear God how much do I prep for a thousand person audience and I'm going to have half a million people there I'm going 500,000 have 500 times well I better not waste anyone's time while I'm there and make sure that every second the value per second is super high and so I think again we have to reset our expectations of how much work it takes to prepare for the one-time performances based on what you expect to get from it so if it's if if you're going to do a one

time performance to 10 people then maybe maybe you prepare for 4 hours right but if you're going to talk to a th000 people then maybe you prepare for 40 hours and if you're going to talk to 10,000 people then maybe you do prepare for 400 hours or it does have a diminishing term so maybe it's 200 hours right but I think what most people miss out on is they get up and they say their talk once and they do it once to their wife and once to their dog and they're like you know I'm super

nervous and so I'll leave you with this you are not nervous you're underprepared it's not that you have anxiety it's that you didn't do the work that you know you should have done and so if I have anxiety about something that's coming up that has become my Telltale sign that I am underprepared that I didn't do the work that I know I should have done and that's when you get nervous when you can get up on stage and you can do or whatever whatever your your your version of the performance is and have absolutely zero

anxiety it's because you absolutely habituated to the stressor and so for example if you want to get someone to stop being afraid of spiders the fastest way to do that is get them into a room with spiders and let them sit there have a panic attack pass out wake up again pass out wake up again until eventually they habituate they just realize that they don't die and they're still there and there are spiders and they keep living and then the phobia is gone they habituate and so what you want to do or at least I

like to do it is I want to habituate to the stressor which is if I'm stressed about this thing then it means I haven't prepared enough and so it's it's it's not impostor syndrome you're just inexperienced you're just not good enough yet and so I want to make sure that I can control for all the controllables first and then leave room for the uncontrollables but have all of my bandwidth available so that when the mic cuts out or the the presentation isn't working or my clicker runs out of battery all of these things have happened

that I still I'm still prepared enough that people then are like damn he handled that really well it's because this wasn't my first time and that's the difference is that like when you you don't want people to think it's your first rodeo and so many of you are going into every meeting every call every appointment like it's your first rodeo and they can tell everyone can tell and the people who can tell the most are the people who you want to impress the most like it's very easy to impress poor people because they don't know

any better much more difficult to impress a wealthy person because they know how the game works and so I see this with the uh like the the Rolex Flex or the I rented the lambo for the day and look at my Instagram picture anybody who's really in the game is like dude my jet cost 500 Lamborghinis like I could give a what you drive right like the way you impress them is you outwork them so to impress poor people you outspend them to impress wealthy people you outwork them that's the difference so if I see

a kid who's not flexing any of that stuff but I see how hard this kid's working that's what impresses me if I if anything I see a younger guy who's like blowing cash to like Flex I'm I'm not even neutral I'm less impressed I'm like dude what are you play like who immediately I'm like who you trying to impress and then whatever they say I'm like it's the wrong person man cuz the right girl also is impressed by how hard you work because they know what that leads because people take wealth as an approximation for

character and that's not true they say I have this Lamborghini therefore I work hard but if you just Way Beyond your means which is what I see it as especially if you're younger I just see that as irresponsible and insecure and so it's making sure that you're putting the right bait out and the best bait for getting the right people is the effort that they know you put in when they weren't looking and you only do that by when you show up the first time it looks like it's your 100th time and they know it's

the only meaning you have with them and that you took 20 hours to prep for it they're like all right this kid's got it or this guy's got it this gal's got it she gets it like that's all I look I'm like immediately it's just like I had that conversation with my billionaire buddy he was like you don't need to say anymore I get it and I feel that way with vendors so if I get on the phone with someone and they have clearly 10 hours of preparation 20 hours of preparation for that call they

don't need to sell me that hard I'm like I get it you've demonstrated in advance the value that you want to provide before started working together like I get it like whatever the bill is send the invoice team will take care of it let's start working together when someone spends all their time trying to sell me and I'm like what did you do to prepare and they're trying to overcome with their words you already lost and so so many of you guys are losing before you step into the arena you're trying to ride a bull

for the first time on your first rodeo and then thinking that you need to have some special talent or some natural whatever that's going to make it make it work like why why so so is different or better it's because that guy has spent 3 hours a day morning and afternoon every day for the last 2 years riding bulls and so he doesn't have to think about that his only thing that he's thinking about when he's on the ring is the uncontrollable so that he can use 100% of his bandwidth for oh I had the

meeting and then he brought two people I didn't expect well tell me more about that oh that would work well with page two if you turn to page two in the in the in the prep file I have I think this will be really applicable for you and when we get there I'll I'll definitely need your Insight oh wow he included the but if I didn't have that prep ahead of time I'd be like oh wow I had a game plan and now it's totally screwed because there's two other people who are stakeholders so tldr

you're underprepared most of the time most of you and I'm saying this because I talk to you guys a lot five minutes of prep for a 60-minute meeting will do more than trying to razzled Dazzle your way through with your words once you're on I think Sun Su said every battle is won before the battle begins