How They Keep You POOR Forever

there's tons of other businesses that you can absolutely demolish who are making lots of money just by doing the basics and if you execute on that for 10 years your business Grows by default because your competitors won't do that growing businesses is hard because it's different than people expect it to be the singularity of focus is so important we get presented opportunities every single day that could distract us and the thing is the bigger you get the bigger the opportunities that get presented to you so the harder it is to say no I want to

tell a quick story about the woman in the red dress and I'm going to relate it to business in The Matrix one of my favorite movies there's the woman in the red dress and so it's one of the training programs that Morpheus takes Neo on uh the main character to teach him one simple lesson and so they're walking through a crowd it's normal New York lots of people everyone looks different and then there's this woman in this red dress and Neo's head turns and morphis is still talking to him trying to teach him a lesson

right and then he looks back and more if he's like re-listing and he was like what he's like were you looking at the one in the red dress and he says look again he looks back at the woman and it's agent Smith pointing his gun to his head the thing is is I see distractions and New Opportunities shiny object as the woman in the red dress and at every level of business the woman in the red dress becomes more and more attractive because at first you have to say no to thousand opportunities then ten thousand

then a hundred thousand and you have to learn how to say no again at every level because I thought that once I learned how to say no to the one in the red dress I'd be done forever but that's not true she comes back every level she just gets hotter and hotter and hotter I used to think that like Innovation was everything and I think Innovation is important a very very small degree but the vast majority of the business success is actually doing all the stuff that you know you should be doing but you aren't

A friend of mine has a wife who's really popular and they have literally 60 businesses he has an Excel sheet to keep track of all the businesses he has and I think they make about total between everything maybe eight figures a year and to some people like oh that's amazing but hear me out so we're having this long conversation and I just said you know if there were a magic wand and you could snap your fingers and eliminate all businesses but one how easy do you think it'd be to grow that business he was like

oh my God it would be so easy to grow that to like 30 or 50 million I was like then why don't you do that and he said that that question has messed with him for an entire year and he has since that conversation shut down business after business after best business after business so that he could focus on the one that he thought was the biggest opportunity Mark Zuckerberg didn't have side hustles if you do one thing and you do it right you do it all the way you can get as big as you

want you can have a long way business that cover the entire United States you could do that you could have a Cosmetics business that covers the entire United States you could have whatever type of business you want that covers everyone if you waited for a long enough for your time and didn't get distracted it's one of my favorite poses by Neil Strauss he said success comes down to doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time without convincing yourself you're smarter than you are it's the details that pay the dividends the depth and

the Nuance of understanding how to do something and so for example right now obviously lots of opportunities that we have I still don't feel like we're doing the basics if we're not on every platform why are we thinking about starting a new business if we're not hardcore email marketing regularly and providing value why are we going to start another business if we're not even building the SEO out on our site why are we doing something else if we haven't completely built out the sales training for our sales team to keep their execution High why are

we thinking about doing other things and so so many entrepreneurs that I see who are we're talking about how they want to grow their business and do this next new thing or this exciting add-on aren't even doing the basics and the thing and I've said this before but being Advanced means that you never don't do the basics and if you're like well Alex that's going to take so much time for me to do each of those things welcome to building a big business because big businesses do the same things little businesses do but they do

them better and they fill the holes in the bucket and so if you were to think about a business as a bucket and you've got water pulling in the top which is the traffic or the eyeballs or whatever and then the bucket is what you're keeping right so the first thing that you're going to do if you want to grow the amount of water you have in the bucket is you don't have multiple buckets what you're going to do is probably fix the holes in the bucket you got number one fix the bucket number two

once you fix the bucket increase the flow to the bucket once you've done that and you've completely maximized that then you add new flows but most people have never done that and so the moniker that I remember about this is better more new and so whenever I'm thinking about our business or our businesses in the portfolio I think have we maxed out better yet if we we have not maxed better yet there's no point in incurring the risk of more renew because more is riskier than better better is the lowest risk opportunity that everyone has

do what you're currently doing do it better follow it faster follow up more make better copy make better creative optimize your site hire better people train them better have better Management Systems better incentive systems but you're like but Alex that sounds so boring welcome to Growing big it's how you do it you literally fill all the holes in the bucket that you know you should be doing but aren't if you were to make a list of the top 25 things that you could do in your business that you are not doing the obvious things that

you know would make you more money if I emailed more admit more if I did more reach out to make more money if I made more content I make more money if I train my sales team or if I did more call reviews I'd make more money if I did reorganize our customer onboarding process if I created a better Cadence or training for our customer support team or customer success team we need to make more money put out every single one of the obvious bullets that you had that you know would grow your business instead

of doing the new thing do those first and once you finish that list what you will see happen and this is why it's spiritually difficult as an Entre because we stopped doing the old thing we started the new thing and we got reinforcing that behavior and so we learned the wrong lesson we learned that when we start new things good things happen and so we think we should start new things this is where it's difficult and we have to learn at each level you started the new thing and you got rewarded but now if you

start another thing you will get punished and some people never unlearn that first lesson and so you have to switch from new to better because the Innovation already happened when you got the product Market fit as soon as people started buying the thing you're selling that's when the new needs to end for a while because now you just need to do better and more so you fill the holes in the bucket with all the better and then you do more then you go from one piece of content a day to five pieces of content a

day from one sales guy to five sales guys from one video editor to five video editors it's about doing more once you fix the first one and make it better businesses will grow by default and they will beat their competition if they do everything their competition does but better because what happens is most entrepreneurs will divert resources from their core thick think about the two paths boring entrepreneur number one who finally finds product Market that people like the stuff that they're are selling and then they say I'm not going to do anything new for the

next five years all I'm going to do is do this better and do more of it that's all I'm going to do and then you think about the other guy who says oh we got some product Market fit fantastic now I'm gonna sell something else and I get to get my rock sock get my jollies off over here thinking about all this new stuff all this new marketing all this new product while the other business starts to wither away a little bit because atrophy starts happening because the things that were there when you're overseeing it

aren't happening anymore anyways and not only that it's never improving and cost of media goes up cost of talent goes up and the business is literally getting worse relative to the market over time if you're not improving it and so you got these two entrepreneurs and this guy is diverting resources that would have been allocated back to the same bucket to fill the holes as instead taking some of that and trying to build another Bucket over here meanwhile the holes are getting bigger in the first bucket because it's getting worse and worse and worse and

so then they find themselves with five buckets that are all tons of holes in them they don't have the bandwidth to actually go to the one bucket and fix it and that's when I asked the magic wand question so right now if you have multiple things going on how easy would it be to grow your business if I could wave a magic wand snap my fingers and everything ended except for one pretty easy right so why not stack the chips in your favor the thing that makes it hard is the discipline you have to have

not the concept strategy is easy execution is hard it's the execution risk that is the much bigger risk for most businesses if you deliver dry cleaning that is always clean always and always on time you'll have an exceptional business the strategy isn't complicated it's the execution is where everyone fails but this is the thing is that the strategy is the new and exciting thing people allocate tons of attention tons of time two new strategies new ideas rather than making the obvious truth of if I deliver everyone their clothes on time and they are always perfectly

clean this business will work one of the things that we do when we're growing the business after understanding better more new when we think about anything that we're growing is what are the need to believe what do we need to believe for this to grow we need to believe that people will always want things fast do is that something I want to bet on yes people always want a good product so that we clean their clothes perfectly every time do I believe that that's something that people want in the future as much they want to

date or more yes people will always want good service do I believe that that's something we're on the future or in the day yes it's one of the Beautiful Things is that when you enter a Marketplace something as boring as dry cleaner boring as Lawn Care boring is whatever is that oftentimes you're actually not competing it's the smartest people in the world because smartest people in the world are on Silicon Valley all are trying to make the next platform but there's tons of other businesses that you can absolutely demolish who are making lots of money

just by doing the basics and what makes them Basics is how hard they are to understand but what makes you Advanced is how well you execute them like it's not hard to conceptualize that you take 10 guys and each guy makes 200 calls a day it's 2 000 calls a day it's not hard to conceptualize that how well did you train them how well did you recruit them what is their incentive structure do you listen to calls on a regular basis is there a leaderboard because you're thinking yourself when you have that big list ah

we need to do competitions for the sales thing oh I need to get that leaderboard set up oh yeah I need to be doing more call reviews that is the stuff that grows the business it's not the big idea people always want leads promise you you know how to get leads you know how to get them better you will make tons of money people always need a place to live you have better buildings that are cleaner and things run right and you treat your residence well you have successful buildings if you have uh lawn care

where everyone communicates well and is cost effective and the the grass always looks great and the hedges are clean lines at the Cadence that's perfect for most people you will have a good business you might be competing against people who are not who don't even think that way and so you can absolutely take their lunch money but you have to not get fancy so when I was going through the sale process for two of our companies Bankers introduced me to a couple of other CEOs that they had done deals with because I I wanted to

know what it was like after things like that like oh we can just connect with these guys so I talked to one of them and the conversation changed my life he was a mercenary CEO so he was a third time CEO that private Equity buy company Place him in he'd grow it and then they'd sell it and he had done that three times already so super seasoned guy he was a long island guy really thick accent he said you know everybody wants the super fancy trick plays you know it's like okay hike and then I

you know fix to the left and then we go right and then it's actually going to be reverse you know whatever and then and then we toss it and then what do you know what happens he uh he catches it and then fumbles it and the other team takes it down for a touchdown he's like no we're doing Simple backyard football he's like two fat guys in the middle run to the right consistent yardage he's like don't be cute and he said that and it really changed the way I saw business you don't need to

have any fancy play to be successful you just have to be willing to get the consistent yardage people want clean clothes people want them fast people want good service and if you execute on that for 10 years and you fill every hole in the bucket your business Grows by default because your competitors won't do that this is where I say like business is not hard in that it is not complicated it is hard because people cannot stay focused on the same thing for a long period of time it's also because once people make a certain

amount of money if they only did it for the income they're trying to find the next thing that's going to make more income rather than the mission of the business because if you believe in the mission of the business you will be willing to do it for an extraordinary long period of time and I can tell you right now from all the friends that I have that make shitloads of money they've all been doing the same thing for a long period of time so as much as the world wants to tell you you should have

17 majors in college and you should taste everything and I think there's value to that it will not fight against the reality Ben Francis started gymshark when he was whatever 17 and now he's 28 or 29 he's got a billion dollar thing could he have tasted more stuff sure he tasted from like 14 to 17 right but then when he started that he's been doing it for 10 or 11 years now now he's a billion dollar thing the work needs doing and you just need to decide when you want to start the compounding clock in

your favor which means how long can I commit to this thing and so I would say once you've had a little bit of your entrepreneurial licks as fast as you can to learn those lessons you have to think what need to believe is there that I do not think will change over an extended time Horizon and then serve that every day all you do is you look at how to do better and how to do more of it and it's going to kill you inside because you like doing new and that's what was positively reinforced

your entire life as an entrepreneur in the beginning and then you have to unlearn that lesson because that's what it takes to get big is you do the same thing and you just do it that much better than everyone else and that takes time it is arrogant to believe that you are going to out compete other people who are fully focused on one thing when you're split on five like think about how arrogant it is to think that and the thing is plenty of people arrogant so many of you will still do this but you'll

also still be poor so whatever some dude is he's got a lawn care business and all he does is longer all day every day that's all he does is molons and he believes that everybody deserves an amazing long because he's got a story when he's a kid and that was the only thing that his parents could do was cut the lawn to even though they were poor it was like something that gave them status neighborhood and he'd remember his dad crying because somebody give him a compliment on and he hadn't gotten a Coughlin forever whatever

that reason is he's driven to make that company and he got the other guy who's like oh yeah I'm doing Drop Shipping I'm doing some Lawn Care stuff and I'm doing some Consulting gigs on the side for marketing and I'm you know I'm doing nfts whatever right he's got all these things going on who is going to win at lawn care it's obvious and yet we still live like this other guy and so my hope is that you recognize that if that's you stop and I'm only saying this from a place of love because I

had nine businesses before Jim launch took off before you think oh well what I'm gonna do because I hear this all the time I'm gonna do them all and see which one takes off none of them will take off because any of them could take off if you just focus on one of them thinking that the outside Market is somehow gonna make you successful like you're gonna pick the right bet when you can force any of them to be successful right provider you're not selling newspapers and acquaintance Amaya from high school and he said hey

I've got a roofing business you know it's awesome I said oh that's great and he said oh yeah we also uh do real estate flipping it was like okay all right he's like oh and we also do uh General Contracting okay he's like oh we do window stuff too that's actually glass and windows we do that stuff too because it's like you want to be vertically integrated for Real Estate I was like dude you're doing like four million bucks a year like you're not vertically integrated you're just distracted if you look at the biggest roofing

companies in the world they're billion dollar companies billion multi-billion dollar companies you can do one thing to scale and make all the money you want and you will only get there with the scale from the details from the depth that's how you get these compounding returns from doing the same thing over and over again because you get better about a better at it the other guy who's got four things he's never gonna get good at any of them he's just gonna be barely good enough and he's going to make barely good enough money if you're

not making money in any of the things is because you don't understand any of them well enough because if you can see anybody in your industry who's doing the thing that you're doing and making a hundred times more money than you it's because they know it better than you so how quickly you're going to pay down the ignorance you're going to try and divide it by four you're gonna try and pay down the ignorance instead of one of them as fast as you can so you can start the compound