My 9 Step Blueprint To Making $1M (w/ Simon Squibb) | Ep 785

When we say I want to be successful, success is about sticking with it. And so the only way that you become a failure in businesses by stopping all the games worth playing in life in my opinion are all infinite. It's not about getting married. It's about staying married. It's not about getting in shape. It's about staying in shape. It's not about starting a business. It's about staying in business. And the only thing that gets you out of business is you choosing to stop. And I think that's a very powerful friend 'cause it puts it 100% in your control. And so as long as you keep trying, you're still in business. (upbeat music) Have you heard of this saying B, D, F? You hear of this? I hate it because people are like, you have to become this type of person to do this type of stuff to have this thing. But if the doing creates the having and we don't need to worry about having because doing is the actual thing we control. And if we describe someone only by the behaviors they do, then being also happens as a result of doing. Which means this just do. So Nike's always had it right. (laughing) It's fair though, yeah. So tell us how people figure out who they are. What's the process people need to go through? So I think there's a lot of confusion around identity. I think a lot of it is really like I want to have these traits or like I wish I were born was, I wish I were more charismatic. I wish I were more patient. I don't think people translate them into the behaviors that create the trait. And so the traits themselves are just bundled terms. So let's say someone's charismatic. They're like, I want to be charismatic. All right. Well, if I look at somebody and say, cool, be charismatic. Someone would just stare back like, how? Right? We need to small. It's crazy. No, but that's, and so what's interesting is that you've already went to start translating it. But charisma, patience, a lot of these things are what I call bundle terms. And so there's single words that actually have serious of behaviors underneath of them that when we see them in the wild, we then describe that person as charismatic. So they nod up and down when you talk. They increase the volume of when they talk and they have different tonalities is in like, they go up and then they go down, they speed up, they emphasize words. It's basically looking at all of these micro behaviors. And if you do all of these things, they shake hands firmly. They make eye contact. All of these things, then it's like, oh, so I don't, I don't need to try and be charismatic. I just need to nod when people are talking. I need to repeat back to them what they just said. I need to smile when they walk in the room. I need to be able to non-seat and speak with volume and not just be a monotone. I need to be able to up and down, up and down, and speed up and slow down when it's important. I need to shake people's hands with confidence. I need to make eye contact. If I do those things, other people describe me as charismatic. And so when I look at the version of who I would like to be, I say, what are the traits that I think of? And then what are the behaviors that associate with those traits? And then that way it makes something that seems unattainable. Like, man, I wish I were more ex. So you can be that if you just think what must occur in order for someone to describe someone as this thing? And so that's been, honestly, one of the big things that like, it really changed my life because a lot of these things feel like out of your control, it's like, I wish. But it's just a lot of times we just break skills as the same thing when we're teaching someone, hey, build a company. You can go do that because that would be like a big bundled thing. Can you just go build a company? Sure, I can't. Now, leveled down one. It's like, okay, so do you know how advertised? Do you know how to sell? Do you know how to create a product or a service? Do you know how to hire people? It's like, all of those are bundled skills underneath. And you can basically derive everything all the way down to turn on the computer, turn on internet explorer, type in into website. And so at every level, whenever someone gets confused about what to do, it's like, just break it down. And that's fundamentally how we like to train teams. But also it started with me, which is like, what do I need to do? This is my thing about entrepreneurship that kind of like, anyone could be an entrepreneur. True. And people get really annoyed when I say that. Oh, no, it's tough. You know, you've got to worry about cash flow. Well, if you can't, I get a good accountant. You know, I think this is interesting because people always have a reason why it's such a bloody hard thing to do. And if you break it down like this, it's not this thing of who you are, though. Is it a genetic thing, though, as well? Like maybe some people just can't be charismatic. Maybe they can't smile. I mean, you know what I mean, like, my wife is, and she never listens to this stuff. So I can say, I wouldn't describe I was charismatic. I describe as beautiful and intelligent. Sure. But she doesn't really bother shaking hands, but it's just who she is. Sure, sure. So do you think this is a personality thing? No, I think 100% of people can learn. Yeah. I mean, I have a fundamental belief about the world, which is all things are trainable. It's just that not all things are worth training. You've got to be motivated to be to turn that. I think about it from return of resources. So it's like, even if like, I think is it, I believe someone genuinely with Down syndrome could learn to become, or at least rather, learn to do brain surgery. Would the amount of resources required in order to teach that person be a good use of resources? Probably not. If intelligence is rate of learning, then it's the rate of behavior change. Like, how quickly can we get someone to change behavior? At least for me, that's how I define intelligence. And so if I were to train my team and say, hey, do this thing, and the next time they walk in, they do that new thing under the same conditions, they've learned quickly. They're a more intelligent person. I think it's simply that the rate of learning differs between people, but all people are trainable. That's how we learn everything. So concluding this bit, I mean, who you are is who you are, what you want to be, is it? So that goes back to modeling yourself and perhaps the people you admire or the people you have the life you want and then go learn what they know. And do what they do. I'll actually give a one that I think is helpful for a lot of people. It's like, it's making sure that we're doing the things that they did at that stage. And so, if you want to become a billionaire, it doesn't mean go fly on private jets because billionaires fly on private jets. If you want to become tall, it doesn't mean you go play basketball. And so, it's conflating what was the cause, what was the effect, right? And so, we want to not model where people are today and how they act today, but we want to model the rise. We want to model what they did at the beginning. And so, one of the tough parts about that is, usually when you're in the grind, like one of my biggest regrets in the world is that I have zero sales that I had recorded when I was in person. And I have over 4,000 one of one sales that I had done. And that's all the stuff I learned there. I never had any recordings. And so, it's like, because I didn't think, oh, I'm going to later someday in the future have a YouTube channel. And I'm going to be teaching this stuff. I was just trying to sell memberships, fair. And so, I say that because I try and remember to the best of my ability. And I did that through teaching. Our team did whatnot, like, hey, do this and do this. And so, we do our best to remind everyone who's coming up. This is what I was doing. Don't look at what I'm doing now. Look at what I was doing now. - I think, yeah, doing things so powerful because that's how also you remember. - You can hear someone tell you how to do something. You can listen to this video. But if you don't go out and apply it, you probably won't remember it. - Yeah, well, yeah, nothing will happen. That's a good idea. - So, this is a good place to start. You can be anything, maybe decide what you want to be. I mean, a lot of people in sales, for example, say, oh, you need to be an extrovert to do sales. I'm like, my biggest salesperson in my last company was my accountant. No one more introverted. No, and you know what? 'Cause she was introverted. She was slightly more trusted. - Yeah. - 'Cause she would only say things that people, she'd go to a meeting above a CFOs and talk about how brilliant our company was, those CFOs were also introverted. We'd go back to the office, talk to the CEO, and say, you should get Simon's company. 'Cause they just heard from the CFO what they're doing there. - Yeah. - You know, best sales technique ever. But she, what didn't think she was a salesperson? - Yeah. - If I didn't interview her and say, welcome to the company, you're going to be our number one salesperson. She's like, what have you started? - Yeah. - But yeah. So, it's all about using your personality traits to also be applied. Right? - What next? - So, the second one is like, okay, so you have to acquire enough of these traits, bundle terms, to just take action. So, if I had to do the, what's the TLDR of the last phase, which is do something? That's it. Like, if all of this was around doing, it's do something. Because currently nothing is happening in your life. And so, in order for something to change, you have to do something. Now, once you just say, okay, I'm going to take action, then it's like, okay, who am I selling to? This is one that people get really confused about. And I think people want to start with, what do I sell? Like, two and three, what to sell are very much interrelated, right? Because who you sell to is going to determine what you're going to sell. If I decide that airline pilots are going to be the people that I feel like selling, then I can be like, oh, well, I have this insurance thing that does for houses. It's like, I don't know if that's really the right match for that particular thing. Sometimes you come in with some past experience. And so, I like to, I know I'm going out of order, but I have little work out in the end. But I think there's three piece around what people figure out. And I tend to talk more about services than products. And I do that because at least in the U.S., 78% of businesses are services. >> Yeah. >> Great way to start. Well, service is very easy. >> Right. At the end of the day, you're just doing something that other people don't want to do for money, right? And so, paying profession and then passion. Almost all businesses can get derived from one of these three things, which is like, you had some painful experience you overcame. And so that's, you know, a mom who helps her kids pack lunches who have food allergies. It's like, if you figured out how to overcome that, then you can help other people do it too. If you overcame some sort of depression thing, it's like, you can help other people do that. If you didn't know how to advertise your biggest business, then you figured out how to do Google PaperClick. It's like, that's something, that's, it's a pain, pain is, you know, relative. But saving, if you can cite people with time is a way of translating it. >> Oh, totally. And so the second one is profession. So a lot of people do have jobs, but we want to start a business. And so whatever you do in a company fundamentally is something that other companies probably want. And so you can always fractionalize whatever your professional skill is between multiple companies. And so that's just taking a skill that you already have in the workplace and just selling it to other people. And then passion is like, okay, well, I love, I'm really interested in model cars. Okay, well, can you build a business around model cars? Absolutely. You could build a subscription on building them. You could build the actual products around them. You could make a channel about painting model cars. Like, there's a zillion things that you could do there. But in each of these, it's usually something you overcame, some sort of professional skill that you learned, or some passion. And so that usually goes into what to sell. The most common person to sell to is someone like you. So most, if you look at like more commonator and A-16s, you see some of the best venture startup investors. One of the requirements that they often have is what they call living with the problem. And so they want people who've had a lot of surface area, a lot of exposure, many repetitions over years with many different types of solutions and why they don't work. And so on one hand, sure, you can be like, I'm gonna just, I'm gonna think of this beautiful idea, but most of the times it's like, what do I hate? What bothers me? Because you, because then you don't have to do all this market research to figure out like how do these people talk? Like what are, what are their innate desires? You just said like, well, what do I want? And it's a much faster path, and I think this is where a lot of people end up starting in terms of who to sell to. They sell to people like that. And you don't need much research in the market when you know exactly your own problem. And interestingly, even at the top level, Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook to solve his own awkward problem of being socially awkward. Yeah. He wanted to meet girls, he wanted to be like, he wanted friends, but he found it socially awkward to go out. Yeah. So he built a platform to solve his own problem. Turns out a lot of people have that problem. But I guess passion and purpose do differentiate the two? No. Not to say that it's not true. I usually use those three, please. Because I think people, I believe in sales, it's a, there's three steps, right? Which is like, people do it the wrong way around normally. But the first step is, do you like the person to the person like you, the relationship stuff? I don't know if people spend enough time doing that. Second, it's do people need what you're selling? Sure. A lot of people spend a lot of time selling something they don't need, right? Okay. And then the third step, of course, is pricing and all that sort of stuff. But I think a lot of the time, like, I took nine years to get the Apple was a client. Nine years. Yeah. But it's because I had a passion and a purpose to bait, bait build a company. I wanted to build something that was respect and Apple being a client would, would help my company be, be respected. I mean, that purpose really helps you get through in the end on sales. Yeah. These are, I mean, this is kind of like the, the, the cycle of, of figuring it out. And then when you, once you're like, okay, well, I get it, peeing, profession, passion, but underneath of those things, like what, what really is it? And so typically you're going to have, you can either sell products, so that's physical stuff, right? Tangible things you put in someone's hand. There's services, which is you just do stuff for other people, which is fundamentally services are wrapped time. And there's two types of time. One is the time to learn the skill and the other is the time to do the skill. So underneath it's some sort of information advantage that you have. And then the actual doing and execution. And so those are like services can be as simple as I know how to, how to mo my lawn. I just don't want to do it. On the other hand, it could be, hey, I know how to code. And I can code this, you know, site a certain way. It's like, okay, not only do I not want to take the time to do it, to learn it, I also don't want to take the time to do it. And so when you're thinking about products or services, those are, those are the two, kind of buckets as I think about them. And then you have SaaS or software, you've got software as a service, you've got apps, things like that. You have something that I like to go into, which is just access. You've got risk, got money. And so these are all things that people can buy and sell banks, buy and sell money, insurance, buy and sell risk, access, if you think real estate is physical access, their digital access. SaaS is basically these things just put in a digital format. And so this gives you kind of like a jumpstart of like, well, what do I, how do I take my passion? And it's like, okay, we'll pick one of these ways. It's like you could sell the model cars. You could build the cars for people and then sell them. You could have a SaaS that helps people design their own cars. You could have events where you bring people together and they can show off their cars and race them and whatever, and then you can charge for take, you know, for access to that or media access. Like if you have, like for me, like this would be like education that's still kind of fit inside of here. It's like access to some sort of media. Race you could ensure people's collections around their cars if they have really valuable car collections, you know, model cars. And then money is, hey, maybe people need lending for this stuff. Who knows? Fundamentally, like that's how I think through, what am I going to sell? I think as well. It's very interesting when the service site, because my agency business, for example, I was selling the services, someone else's design ability their time to someone. I wasn't even doing the service, but I helped the person that designers didn't like to sell. They saw, they want to sit at the computer, creating, right? So I did even have the skill to do the design, but I was able to sell the service. I think this list is brilliant. So one way, okay. So people have who to sell to and what you're going to sell is our interlinked. Yeah. So that you've decided what you're going to do here. I'm going to add one thing to this, because I think it's all be helpful for people who are starting out, and so I talk about this a ton in my stuff. In my opinion, one of the things that matters a ton is pricing, right? It's a lot easier to sell 100 people, a $10,000 thing, than it's to sell 10,000 people, $100 thing. There's just so much more distribution that you need to get. For me, I look at, do the people that I want to sell my thing have the money for my thing. And if everybody's broke in this particular market, then I might consider, well, is there anything else I know how to do, or anything else I'm passionate about, or anything else that I have a professional skill around? So the first thing is money. The second thing is how easy are these people to find? Is it really hard to find this particular subset of people? Or can I find them pretty easily, are there directories, or are there associations with them? If so, then it's easy for me to reach out or shut with those conferences, or whatever. The next thing is that I'd rather have the market be growing. If I'm about to pick what business I'm going to get into, I'd rather go into one where there's more demand than there is supply, rather like I'd rather just have the tailwind rather than a headwind, one of my friends had a business that sold to newspapers and brilliant guy. And basically he was trying to transition them from print ads to give them a second ad product that was digital. So he's like, he could convert all of their print ads into digital ads onto their website. And so it makes sense. It's like, you know, it's avant-garde. It's like, hey, you just have another product you can now sell. You don't have to do anything. You just make more money. It's a good offer. The problem is that newspapers, at least in the US, were shrinking by 25% per annum. For a year, compounding the wrong direction, 25% a year. And so no, he had to gain 25% market share every year just to keep his company the same size. Because people were just going out of business. Even in digital space, which is the growing pop, but they didn't have any money to pay for that service. Yeah. And then the final one is if I had to pick between two things, I'd rather have one where people are in pain. And when I say pain, it doesn't necessarily mean like people are like, oh my god, like, you know, I've got cancer, I'm going to die. But just the annoyances of taking out the trash every day, it's like, it's just the problems are things that people would rather not do. Now, when you combine these things together is when you can charge a lot more. Like if it's just like a lot of times when you start out like very, very early days, you probably don't know anything that other people don't know, I'm just being real, right? And so a lot of the earliest businesses you start are what, you know, we probably consider blue collar businesses. So it's like, it's cleaning, it's, it's lawn care, it's painting. These are not, you know, you can learn how to do it in a weekend. But that's okay because business takes a really long time to learn. And so it's like, okay, well, at least let me, I'll just have something simple that I can do here. And then I can learn all the other skills around business by practicing it. These are kind of the four characteristics of, if I'm going to get into a market, I want to make sure that they've got the money, they're easy to find, it's growing and they're in pain. I'll be right in the stomachs. I wish I'd done this when I was younger. I mean, I built a service business that we're talking about of camera and sometimes you, you're selling so hard to a market that doesn't have enough money, but it's so much harder. And so anyone's going to fail at sales. If you put yourself in a place where the people don't have enough pain, they've got too many choices. Yeah. You've got to have that pain to create the closing situation and setting. And this is actually, I think this will be really relevant for your, your history with the creative agency. So there's this story that I really like a lot where a father gives his son an old car. You might have heard of this one. But father gives his son an old car and he says, if you want, you can sell it and then you can take the money and, you know, buy yourself something else. And so he says, why don't you go down to the pawn shop and see what they'll give you. And so you know, kid goes, comes back and he looks a little bit down and he's like, what's up? He's like, oh, they said they'd give me $2,500. He's like, all right, well, go to the dealership. See if you can trade it in there for, you know, for something else. So he goes there, he comes back and says, well, hey, they'll give me $5,000. He's like, okay, that's an improvement. And he says, hey, why don't you go down to the old collectibles auction house. See what they'll do. And so the kid goes there and he comes back and he comes back and he's done for two years. Daddy won't believe it. He won't believe it. He's like, they say this is an old collectible car. It's worth $100,000. And he's like, the biggest lesson here is that sometimes it's the exact same thing, but who you sell to changes everything. And so within the services that you have, if Simon had gone back and sold to really small businesses, the like branding and creative and logo design and things like that, I would bet that the vast majority of those businesses couldn't appreciate what the service was and what the value of even branding is to begin with because they'd be like, yeah, but how's it going to be leads? And only a more advanced business can appreciate the upside of how much return on advertising return on throughput you get by having kind of a brand halo effect, but you have to be of a certain size. And so if you had that skill set and then you were like, hey, Alex Simon, I started my business, but no one wants to buy it. The first question we probably asked is, okay, well, are you good at your thing? And if you check the box, it's like, yeah, I think this guy's good. Well, who are you selling to? It's like, well, I'm just trying to sell to local lawn care services. It's like, well, that's not surprising to me that they wouldn't buy. But in that moment, you might think, oh, I suck at business. You were just selling to the wrong people. And I think that's why this is so important, it's making sure who you sell to is one of the biggest levers that you can have on success. Can I tell you another story? Yeah, go. All right, please. So there is a CRO company that came through here that we were looking at to invest in, and it was great. So this guy was a really good coder, really good, you know, conversion and optimization for websites. He had a really, really cool business. But what was interesting is he and I had this conversation and he's like, oh, yeah, when I work with a million dollar year e-commerce store, and I, you know, raised the throughput by 10 percent, he's like, it only adds $100,000 to the business. He said, but when I go to an e-commerce store, that is 100 million, and I add 10 percent, it's the same amount of work. He's like, I add 10 million to the business. I can charge so much more money for the exact same work because in a very real way, it is more valuable. I did create more value, but it wasn't because of me. It was because of them. And so one of the biggest levers you can have on success is doing the same work for better people. Yeah. I really resonate with me, and again, I wish I'd heard you speak 20 years ago. I remember when I first started the business, we were selling graphic designs. We go to someone, do you want to logo, do you want to brand, and they pay a certain amount, and I managed to get quite good fees out of it because we were good. But then one day, I gave ideas to someone for free, and they said, oh, I would have paid a lot for that. Creative is almost like a commodity. So we started selling the ideas. And that's where we were getting millions of dollars from. And then the execution was like, wow, lots of people could design it now. You just give them the brief. Yeah. Exactly. And that got commodities, which, by the way, is a little bit unfair because the actual creative part is really tough, but people don't value it. Pain is in the idea. So we go to CNN and give them an idea. They're, well, that's that's valuable. But just the execution, it almost is secondary. So you can always take your existing service and just tweak it a bit. And you'll get a lot more out of it if you do that. What's next in this? - So now we gotta get them to buy. So it's like, this is all great. You know, we've got some of these character traits. We decided to start taking action. We figured out who we wanna sell to. We figured out what we wanna sell. So now we gotta get them to buy. I know something, you've got your sales framework. The one that I've been teaching for years is closer. So there are a million sales frameworks out there. This is just the one that's, it's just consistently worked for me teaching, you know, teams of guys out in the road, whatever. And for years, I actually just taught clothes. And it was only probably the last four or five years that I added the R on there. - Have you tried mock this? - Yeah. - I don't know who it is. - I hope everyone just learns how to sell. So the first thing is it's like, basically, okay, now that I'm in front of this who, and I've got the what, how do I get them to give me money? And so this is basically a structure for our conversation. Which is the first thing that we like to do is clarify why they're there. The person, and the nice thing with any sales conversation is that there's always something that someone has done to indicate interest. Like you can't, unless someone is still listening to you, they open the door, they clicked on the email, they responded with a comment, they DMed you, they opted in and decided like, someone has to take some initial move towards you in order to, they indicate interest. And so all you have to do then is just ask them why. So you say, hey, why did you respond to my post? Hey, why did you DM me? Hey, why did you opt on my site? And you're just asking them why? You're clarifying the problem, right? The second step, and this is all listening, right? You're just asking questions. So we're brought to you today. What was the main reason? What are you struggling with right now? And then, and this is just a very small step, but super important. Which is we labeled in with a problem. And she said, okay, I got it, John. So it sounds like you're here, and you want to get here. And this has been the thing in your way. Does that sound about right? And this is also active listening. So for me, from a report building perspective, if you say back to someone, what they just said, they're like, oh, this guy's great. This guy's brilliant. Yeah, he's mathematics. Yeah, exactly. And so we labeled them with a problem and we have, you're here, you want to get here, here's the gap. Okay, so then, and this is just out of just experience, we overview the past experiences that they've had. And I call this the pain cycle. I didn't know why this worked. I just knew that it did work. The key point here is you say, hey, so what have you done so far to try and solve this? What have you done? And then they're going to start listing out. I did this. And then we just ask, okay, well, how'd that work for you? And then, obviously, they're talking to you. So it didn't work. So it's a loaded, you know, like, you're, you're just pushing on this pain. Again, them to realize it. Yeah, basically, yeah. And so I have this fundamental belief that all salespeople are just motivational speakers. Fundamentally, just on a one-on-one basis. And so all we're trying to do is motivate someone to take action. If you know that, at least for me, if I think that's what it is, it just comes down to motivating someone, then what creates motivation? And so I spent a really long time trying to think through this. It's actually the opposite is what creates motivation. Deprivation creates motivation. So if I'm starving, then I'm very motivated to eat. If I'm exhausted and very motivated to slate with that same concept, what we want to do is basically remind them, we want to deprive them, remind them of how deprived they are, of this thing and how much pain they've gone through up to this point. We try and ask them what they did, ask them how that worked, ask them what they liked and what they didn't like about that thing. When they say the things that they liked, you associate that with, oh, I think if you like that, you're gonna love this. And if they hated that, it's like, oh, that's great. And I understand why you struck it with that. Because later we're gonna take notes of that and we're gonna make sure that we don't talk about that stuff if we have anything similar to that in our product. And so after we've gone through this pain cycle, I mean, just keep asking, anything else you've done, anything else you've tried, until eventually like, no, that's about it. They say awesome, John. I think that you're going to love what we've got for you. Can I tell you about it? So this is where we ask for permission to make the sale. I go sell the vacation. So I have this little moniker about selling that a lot of people sell the plane flight and not Maui or Hawaii or whatever your vacation spot is. And so they then go right into, you know, jargon. They're like, oh, we're gonna do these colored tones and we're gonna have this palette for your logo and like, they're like, what is going on? But what people want, it's, you know, people don't want to buy drills, they buy holes, right? The drill is just a vehicle. And so what we want is to talk about the light breeze in their hair, what it's like at sunset, what they're gonna feel like when they've got their feed in the sand and they're drinking the cold, you know, my tie at the beach and they're with their loved ones and making a memory that they'll have for the rest of the lives. - Sell the sizzle nut steak. - Yes. - It's a simple way to do that. - Yeah, exactly. But what we don't want to sell is the TSA, the plane check and take your shoes off. The guy farting next to you. The terrible food of the place. - I don't know if they have sell planes flying in the air. That's not the enjoyable, isn't it? Unless you're in business class, maybe. But I really, it's not enjoyable. Why do they sell that? Every airline needs to change right now. - No, I don't like that. - And so I do something that I call three-pillar pitch. I almost always try and chunk up basically my selling points to three points. Why three, I don't know. But three's just always worked really well. And so the three-pillar pitch, I like to have basically one statement and then a metaphor. And so if there's, and I used to teach this for fitness sales all the time. So it's like there's three things. Fitness nutrition accountability. And with that, it's like you want to have a three-legged stool that if you're missing one of the sides, it's not going to work. It's like if you just work out, then you're not eating long, then it doesn't matter. You're not going to lose weight. If you just eat well, but you're not working out, you're going to lose muscle and you're going to rebound back. Is that right? And because we just knew about their pain cycle, they're like, "Hey, I've had that happen before." I'm like, "No, exactly, so you know that." And if I give you the best fitness and the best training in the world, I say the best fitness and the best nutrition put in the world, but you don't actually do it because no one holds you accountable. It's not going to happen either. And so you've got to have all three. And when you have all three, you can't lose. That's the three pillars. And so when I would create scripts for, I was to like a completely opposite script. It made a script for a B2B mortgage sales company. And so it's like, okay, they were selling leads to realtors. And so it's like, okay, so I spent the whole morning and I was like, what are the three things? It's like, okay, you want leads that are exclusive to you, you want them to be qualified and you want them to be timely. You want them to be like, they just opted in. They've got, they're really interested and no one else is calling them, but me. That's what you want in the leads. And so it's like, these are the three things. And so then for each of those three things, you then just make one analogy, your story that relates it. And so if I wanted to do, you know, explain accountability, I would say, okay, have you ever heard of the amazing race who was the show that happened, even if they had it as a matter? And I'm like, yeah, so there was actually this couple that won so many times they had to change the rules. Do you know what they did differently? They're like, what? You say, so what they did was whenever they'd land and do a new area and they had to find the new location, they would immediately grab a local and say, hey, can you get in the back of the car and just tell us where to go? And by doing that, they always beat everyone else. And so the thing is, is that you want to guide. And so that's exactly what we're going to do with the accountability. And so I have like six different accountability stories, but that's one of them, right? And so it's like, you just want to have one story for each of the pillars. And then you just say, does that make sense? They say, yes, and then you just move on to the next pillar. And you'll notice that, like, at least for me, especially in high volume transactional sales. So obviously, like, B2C sales, consumer sales, where it's, you know, one in done kind of sales. I found that like, when I'm like on fire in terms of selling, the person's walking out the door and they're super excited. And they're like, I don't even know what I just signed up for. Because the thing is, is that like the more in the weeds we get, the more questions they're going to have about it. And as long as you're confident, whatever it is that you sell, just know that you're going to take care of them. Because you explain the macros and the calories and the rep schemes, like, they don't even know what it is anyways. And so they're going to nod along and try and ask questions. They don't even know why they're asking the question. Like, what kind of certifications you have? We just ask, which ones you're looking for? And they're like, right. So you just, they want to seem like they're, like they're asking informed questions, but they just don't know what to do. We do a three-pillar pitch. And then we say, great. So then we transition to the close. So we ask for the sales. That makes sense. Awesome. You want to get started on Monday? Yes or no, whatever. And then you start moving through it. Now, if they say anything, but yes, you want to explain away their concerns. So most concerns, at least as I, I think through them, is you've got timing concerns, which is, I'm really busy right now, preference concerns, which is, I don't like this particular thing about your solution. You've got money, right? You've got money, slash ROI, whatever. You've got stalls, which is, sounds similar to timing, but completely different, which is, can you give me some time to think about it versus I don't have time? They both have the word time in it for sales guys off. Finally, you want to discover past experiences. And so this is where I sign up with a creative agency, just like yours, and they burn me. And so you want to make sure that you have something to overcome that particular thing. Once you understand what the core things that people have, that they present with, that are the reasons why they don't want to do something, you just need to understand the logical arguments for each of these bullets. So with timing, this is all about priorities. So everyone's got the same times. You just say, "Hey, how important is this to you?" Okay, then it means that there's something else in your 24 hours a day that we need to trade. That's less important than this. As long as you explain that to them, then you're good. Preferences is they want your result their way. If you change the variables of the way that I do it, if you just want to do fitness and nutrition and accountability, then you're not going to get the result. So if you change the variables, you change the outcome. And so it's just like always thinking, "They want my results their way." You can't just, I mean, the amount of times I'd have, you know, ladies try to lose weight, be like, "Can I just eat what I'm currently eating "and then do your program?" And I was like, "No, because what you're currently eating "is getting what you're currently getting," right? And so then we have ROI, which we solve with logic, proof, and payment terms. So logic is just understanding, like, if this does this, is it worth it? Okay, so if it is, then the problem is that they don't believe you. And so then it's all around proof. Like, how many of varieties of testimonials can I demonstrate that are as similar to them as possible to get them to believe me? And, you know, we have our little belief-breaking formula, but I wouldn't even get into that. And then you've got payment terms. So it's like, okay, the person logically understands, they believe they could happen, then it just gets into logistics of payment, which is like, okay, can you break this up for me? Can I do half now, half later, whatever? You've got stalls, which is, again, I need to think about it. And here what we do is we walk them through a lot. logical decision. So we say, okay, do you think that you'll be more successful if you do this than if you didn't do it? Yes. Okay. Do you think that if you do it on your own versus doing it with us, you will get close to your goal. Yes. Do you have access or know somebody who has access to the money to get started? Yes. Yes. Yes. Great. Then you made a logical decision. And so a lot of people are just afraid of making mistakes. And so with stalls, we want to figure out what the fear is. And so the number one triage question that we ask is if you have less rapport, we just say what your main concern, if you have a little bit more rapport, I just ask, what are you afraid of having happened? And you can lower your voice a little bit. And they're like, I just don't want my husband to say that I spent money on this thing again. You're like, totally understand what if this is the thing that five years from now, you look back on and you're like, what if I hadn't done that? And you're sitting there completely changed your lifestyle. And you're, you know, your husband and you guys are so much better now. I was like, what if you look back on this one moment, because I think about this with my wife, I'm swiping on my phone. If I had swiped left on the app, and I hadn't met Layla, my life would be completely different than it is right now. I eat nine years later. And so it's like, I just don't want that to happen to you. Okay. And so then I didn't know you man in that. Did you? Yeah. I should give him a cloud. Who was it? It was bumble. Oh, there you go, bumble. Yeah. And so this is, so if someone has a past experience that, hey, I worked with a creative agency before and it didn't work. Therefore, you won't work. I have yet to have an overcome here. There's also decision maker. I just, I use case studies for this one. But this one's killer. So I'll tell you how to do it. So with Bernie twice, you just say, listen, you had something bad that happened the past. And the only thing worse than having a bad investment is letting a bad investment prevent you from making a good move right now. Great. And so then we do a metaphor. So it's like, hey, are you married? A lot of times if you're old, like they're like, you're with somebody. Yes. Okay. Did you ever date anybody before that person? Yeah. You've already like middle school or high school. Yeah. Now imagine after your first middle school boyfriend or girlfriend, you said exactly. So it just means that that person wasn't right for you. It doesn't mean that all people are right for you. Yeah. And so there's a big difference. And so they're, oh, I get it. So you don't want to let that person bring you twice once for when it happened and once when it stops you from having the good thing. And then there's decision maker, which is, I don't have the authority to make the decision. I don't bring that one up because it's one of the hardest ones to overcome. And people have a lot of harsh beliefs in the comments about how I overcome this stuff because they're like, you should always get permission on this path. And it depends. If you're buying a house, yeah, you're going to need permission from the spouse. Kind of. And so obviously you want to bring that person. If you know that whatever you sell requires somebody else, you want to make sure the decision makers are on the call. But there are times when you're in a selling situation where like, you've got one shot for us. I try to overcome decision maker or authority to make the decision by first saying, okay, well, what if they say no? And so if I have a guy, I'll lean into his ego and I'd be like, what if your wife doesn't give you permission? Yeah, but I'll have to forgive this then permission. Oh, I used that at the very end. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, so what if she, what if she doesn't give you permission? Because then it makes them really, and they're like, no, I can, it's like, oh, great, let's get you going. You know what I mean? As soon as they bounce back you're good. But if they say, no, I wouldn't do it, then you say, well, what do you think they'd be against? So now I'm still not on, I'm now isolating towards variables. Like what, like, what are the actual things that they would say? No, it's because I can overcome that, not the decision. And so they're like, oh, they'd be over, you know, it'd be this particular thing. But now I'm off decision. Now, if they're still like, no, it doesn't matter. They're like, okay, well, just do they know that you're here right now? They know that you're struggling with this thing. Yeah, they know that you're struggling. Are they, are they, are they, do they approve of that? Well, they don't, I mean, no, they don't approve of it. They're not happy that I'm, that I'm struggling with this. It's like, oh, they, why would they be against something that they already don't approve of? So they're going to relying on past agreements. So it's like, you already have the permission. They know that you're struggling. Why wouldn't they want you to solve it? And it's like, well, if your wife's anything like my wife's like, we end up making work in the end anyways, right? And then we'll go into, um, I think you, I think you might be asking for permission instead of support. Um, deep psychology. It's time you stood up for yourself. Well, because then you played out and you say, listen, because if you, if you don't do this and you don't do it because of your wife or whatever, because let's say you go home and she says, no, okay, fine. Well, play this for five years. Your business isn't in the place you want it to be. You're not the way you want to be. You have this back pain, whatever the thing that you sell around is. It's like five years from now, who are you going to blame? You can blame her? You can blame you. I don't think it's fair to either of you. Because at the end of the day, it's your life and you got to be able to make these decisions. Now again, I just say, and this is where you go to like, I think you're asking for permission when you really just give me support. By the way, Amazon do a brilliant job of ticking most of these off, but just saying, we'll give you a refund. You can send it back and it won't cost you anything. So my wife gets a package a day and she's like, don't worry. If you don't like it, I can send it back. So like, I don't object. So it's like, okay, fine. I don't see much going back. But the point is you can just give it a bit of money back down and tell you what to do with some comfort. Oh, 100%. Yeah, we're delayed or you can do a delay pay with the payment term. You say, hey, just say yes now, sign the contract. I'll delay the payment till Friday. And between now and then, if you go home and your husband says, no, sweetie, I want you to live 10, 10 years less longer. I want you to be fat. I want you to have generational unhelpfulness. If you really want to die, yeah. Yeah, exactly. He says that. You call me up. First, I'll talk to him. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so I make some jokes about it. And then the final one here is, let's assume you explain a way they're concerned they're like, yeah, I want to do it. And I added this one later, which is you reinforce the decision. And so one of the major things that happens, and I had to add this in because I wanted my sales guys to make sure that they completed the transition or the handoff to customer success in one morning. And until I had this, it was just like, explain it with a concerns, close the deal. And then it was like, I'm done. Yeah. And so it was like, no, we have to bridge this. We have to reinforce. They made a great call. So say, hey, right now I'm going to choose you to Sarah. Sarah's going to get you started. Hey, Sarah, this is John. John's trying to retire. Well, I've John's trying to get in shape for a wedding, whatever it is. Sarah's going to help you take the next steps. Now then Sarah is going to start the onboarding conversation of how do I relate the actions that this person has to take with their ball and say, hey, we're going to help you retire. We're going to help you get look good for that wedding. But these are the first three steps. So that's what you get people to give you money. And England is a new gym that's having up called the third space. And one of the things they've done is they've also limited supply. So they basically went there. It's beautiful gym. It's like a thousand dollars a month for it. And they're like, we don't need these space right now. Yeah, but put you on the way list. Yeah. And then a few days later, they're going to say someone's just left. But do you want it now? Yeah. And that's actually a brilliant, I'm like, yeah, I'll tell you. So limiting supplies and other elements. Oh, yeah, that's great. All right. Next, because that was awesome. So how many times they buy? So now we want to get them to obviously buy again. Because I think Dan Kennedy said this and I just love this quote. He says, you don't get customers to make sales. You make sales to get customers. And so the idea is that once you have a customer, then you want to get them to buy as many times as you may possible. At this point, there's so many things that you can do to make a business make more money. So one is that you can increase the price of whatever you have. I'm just talking about eight different ways that you can make more money to get them just basically make more money from any customer. So one is that you can just charge more. The second is that you decrease the cost of whatever you sell. So if you have a service, you can either pay people less. That's usually not the right idea. But you can improve the service ratio of how many customers to every rep you can add tech in order to make their jobs easier. You can go offshore things like that. The next one is you ask them to buy again. So you just do this times two. You say, hey, you have that thing. Do you want to buy more of that thing? You just buy one of my favorite one of my favorite upsells ever. The next one is that you can get continuity, which is you say bank, which I see this is a quantity. This one as you're they're buying once and then there's a delay and then a day. So this is a quantity that you've got quality, which is do you want to buy a better version of the thing that you have? Then we have a downsell. So it's like, hey, and this one, it's like, wait, how does how is this going to make me more money? So downsells make you more money in that. If you you turn a no into a yes. And so, okay, you don't want to buy the the normal burger. Do you want to buy a junior burger? Do you want to buy a smaller one? Do you want to just buy the burger, not the other stuff? Okay. Then we've got cross sells where you sell something different. So I'll go through this whole example real quick. But with with a burger store because everyone can understand it. So I can take my burger and make it more expensive. I can lower the cost of each burger for myself. I can get them to buy two burgers. I think that get them to come back again to buy another burger or put them on a burger subscription. So this would be through like follow up. The idea for business idea burger subscription business. And now we should do that. Yeah, what are they? Did you did you read it there for that? It's great. Not today. Okay. There's no way too many. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, I don't know what's it. It's not sure. It's obvious me either. You could have you can you can increase the quality of the meat. You say, Oh, this is mystery meat burger. You can have sirloin, you know, burger that's ground up mystery meat. Yeah, we can go lower quantity. So this is making it smaller. You know, it's quantity. And then you can lower the quality. All right. No, I don't like saying lower quality, but it's a more economical. This is a HP strategy for all their printers. They start off as really good printers that never break. Don't get an ink cartridge. And they reduce the quality. So you need ink cartridges and you need the faster one, not the slower one. Make it slower. She won't buy the faster one. And so you get the smaller burgers. You have less or you go from regular meat to just completely questionable. Like what is this thing? Or you say, Okay, what are the cross cells? Well, do you want fries with your burger? Do you want a drink with your burger? And so those are basically the eight ways that you can get a customer to buy more stuff. The whole process though, especially if you're selling doing a cross cell, which is very common in terms of what people are thinking about selling next is that there's a problem solution cycle that exists in business, which is that if you actually solve a problem with whatever you do, you also create another problem. So all problems, all solutions create more problems. All problems create solutions. If you do accurately solve it. So let's say, like, let's say someone has the burgers and all that stuff. Well, once someone's full, then I created a dessert problem, right? Which I can solve, you know, with my milkshake or my ice cream cones or whatever, right? Just to use the very simple example. But if I solve the traffic to someone's site, then the next thing they're going to need help with is sales. The next thing they're going to need help with is delivery. There's always going to be something else that's going to happen. You know, if you if you help someone lose 20 pounds, the next thing they're going to want is they're going to want to tone up or they're going to want new clothes. There's there's a ton of things that happen as a result. But there's another piece that I'll bring up here, which is something that I have learned over and over again, which is that people enter a house. hyper buying cycles. And so let's say that I sign up for a marathon. If I decide I'm going to start a marathon and then I go to the shoe store, the running shoe store and I say, hey, I want some running shoes. If that business owner, it's like, well, they just bought the running shoes. I don't want to scare them away. I don't want to seem too salesy. Well, what are they going to do? They're like, well, I still need the iPod thing for my, for my shoulders so that when I'm running, I need new tank tops, I need running shorts. I got to have, you know, the app that tracks my progress, whatever it is, right? And so, and I've got to have those gels that be, I don't want to run a marathon runner spedied. But the thing is, is that if you don't sell it, they're going to buy it just not from you. And all of this is going to happen in a very short time cycle. They're going to make the decision, I'm now a marathon runner. And so I need to get all the stuff associated with that. You buy a pet, there's a zillion things you buy. You go to a wedding, there's a zillion things you buy. Like whenever someone makes a decision to enter it, like basically have a new identity that then associates with whatever purchases they're going to make, they enter the cycle where they just buy lots of stuff. And you want to be there right at that moment to make that next offer, again and again and again. And offers are only bad if you present it at the wrong time, or it's not a need. And so that's why we don't try and sell them. We make the offer, we present it. If they're not into it, no big deal. And so that's at least how I think through upselling and getting more out of it. - Nikes do this so well. You know, they put the socks on the way out to check out. - Okay, they put the gel rest and all that stuff. And brand, brand plays such an important role in this because once you've got trusted, and then people want to buy from you 'cause they know, you know, your shoes are good quality. Well, your tops are probably good quality. Your socks are probably good quality. Your arm band's gonna be good to keep my iPhone in. And so who helps you, isn't that next? - Yes, who helps you, that's it. By the way, we have a platform that helps people. It's the hardest thing we've noticed for people to actually ask for help. People love giving help, that's the shocking thing. But people don't ask, but what's your take on it? - So who helps you? - So the way that I think about this is you have four ways so you can let other people know about stuff, right? So you've got one on one and then you've got one to many. People who know you and people who don't. And so one on one to people who know you is warm outreach. So you just text your friends, you DM people, you email, you call, whatever. You've got one to many to people who know you, which is posting content. Like you make a post to your Facebook page and you say, "Hey, this is what's going on in my life." One to one to people who don't know you is cold outreach. So that's cold calling, cold emailing, cold whatever. And then you've got one to many to people who don't know you, which is paid ads. And so these are the only four things that any one person can do to let other people know about their stuff. You can talk about events, hate to hate, the stuff and the things put together. - Oh yeah, yeah, totally. Once we know this, this is how we advertised anything to get customers, then it's like, okay, well we do the exact same process to get employees. And so you need a team that's going to help you. And so in the beginning, a lot of times you start by reaching out to people you know and saying, "Hey, friends, family, do you want to help me with my business?" And then you probably make a post and say, "Hey, I'm hiring." You know, anybody who knows anybody, please make the introduction. And then you start running ads on job boards and saying, "Hey, I've got this great thing." Please apply, it's great. And then when you get more advanced, you start head hunting. And you start looking for people who are really good at that thing. And these are typically, in my experience, these are the highest value and the hardest. It's just like the sales that you made with Apple. It's like these people, sometimes it takes two, three years to get that one killer on your team, but that person can just build an entire division or part department and just continue to scale. And so it's basically taking the same concept that you have with advertising and getting customers and applying it to employees. Now I have another framework, if you're good with it. So you've got lead gen, how you get customers, right? And then you've got nurture, and you've got sales, and you've got onboarding, and then you've got pretension, slash ascension, all right? So you retain them and you upsell them. Okay, cool. A lot of people, at least in business, understand this pipeline. But they don't know that they already have all the skills. Just like all the things that you do to currently cut customers, you already have the skills to advertise to get people to help you out. And so then all this is, it's just application generation, which you use the same core four that we just went through. Nurture is the same as that you should be nurturing. So fun facts, a little might have shared it yesterday, but like, A candidate's take on average, eight days to find a job, and B candidate's in below, take 30 days plus. And so if your process of getting someone from the first engagement to getting higher takes longer than that, then you're by definition getting B players in below. Now, I'll say my only exception to that is if you're hiring C level and up, it just takes a very long time. But you want to make sure that the communication is still rapid between those things. That's why I can decision quite quickly. I might have a notice period that's long ago, but they might still make quick decisions. And so the application nurture here is that like, a lot of smaller businesses like they should, they should be honored to work for me. They should be calling me. I better put a hundred steps of friction. It's like, well, okay, you're just going to get fewer applicants. I might say, yeah, I won't get eight players. You won't get eight players. They just don't want to do with it. And so sales, this is the interview. And so if all people are like, well, tell me why you should work for me. That really only works for low level individual people. At a certain level, you're selling them just as much on why they should work for you as they are on them. And that comes with talent because the higher the level of the talent, the more options they have. They don't, I'm not saying, you know, but I'm just saying. - No, it's so, it's, it's so, this thing, I don't, I don't people would miss it because a lot of people don't understand when they're recruiting, they're selling. And I work personally so hard to get good people. Like, it's not, well, hard is job. And people apply sales process to it. - I think it's the most vital. - Sit back and say, well, tell me where you're going to be in five years or why you're good for my company and people just don't give a shit. Good people will be like, well, why should I be here? - Yeah, right. Why should I spend my next five years here? - Totally. - And onboarding is the same. You onboard employees the same way, after someone takes the job, they accept the offer, they sign the paperwork. It's like, great, now we have the onboarding, here's all the passwords. This is what it's going to look like. And typically, people do, I think people do this backwards, which is they basically bring people on and say, good luck. Whereas the basically the more work you do up front, the less work is required over time in order to get someone to be proficient at whatever their work is. - You do a big onboarding? - Yeah, we're super big on them. - Anything particularly on onboarding, you think it's really useful. - Honestly, it's just a lot of touch bases. - Right. - I mean, the first two weeks, like managers usually meet twice a day with new hires, just to say like, okay, what are you going to do today, at the end of the day, it's like how to go, tell me about the conversations you had, and usually, especially it depends on what level of person's coming in, anybody who's maybe directional leveling up, they're going to talk to all the directors across the departments or kind of shadow a lot of people, because we want them to get a very good idea of a holistic understanding of the business, so they can understand where and why their work makes a big impact. And then finally, you have the exact same thing, which is retention and ascension, which is how do I keep a good talent, and then what's my career path for them, so they can see their vision of what it's going to look like in five years. It's like, listen, we're bringing you at a director, but long term, we'd love to have you as a CRO, or VP of this whole division, or something like that. And this is, these are the requirements. This is what you would have to do in order to move up there. And again, we try to, we try to define things by behaviors. So if you're doing all of these activities, then you will, by definition, be this role. And so our way of promoting, at least at Acquisition.com is we want people to just start doing the role, and then the title feels obvious, rather than, hey, I want that title. Okay, here's the plan. I'd rather you just go do the next role, and then everyone's like, well, yeah, he deserves the title. Like, so everybody else is already bought in, 'cause you're already doing the job anyways. And I think it's one of the biggest hacks, at least for those of you who are employees at a company, some of the best ways to move up. - Bailey said yesterday, which I absolutely love was growth. - Yeah. - Give people a chance to grow. 'Cause that will keep them. Everybody I've ever lost in past companies has been because they didn't have a thing they could do next. - Yeah. - So this is brilliant framework. - If we think about the brand as a virtuous cycle, right? We can make whatever, we have those brilliant advertising campaign of all time, the best associations, the best celebrity endorsements. But as soon as people try the food, or they try the product, they wear the shoes, if it's not good, it doesn't matter. Like, it doesn't matter how good all of that stuff is, is that you have to keep the edge. And I think that's where the connection between the brand. So it's like, the brand makes a promise that remains the same more or less. The way to keep the promise changes. And so it's like, we want to be the, so if Apple says we're going to have elegant products that are well designed, blah, blah, blah. Okay, that promise is remained the same for many years. But the way the execute on that promise has to change, right? Because technology changes, there's new advancements in foam, so the shoes become lighter, they become better fitting. From an R&D perspective, what we did was that, we actually had an R&D department at Jim launch, the company that we sold. And what we did was I said, okay, here's your budget. And I want you to spend this money, no matter what, every month. And I just want you to spend it on solving our customer's biggest problem. So every month, you're gonna give me a list of all the problems that they're saying they have. And I want you to try and wait a minute. How big is the problem? And how many of them are suffering from the problem? And so we use a little format, which is basically, with the product is like, how many people are suffering from this thing? How much are they suffering? How likely is this solution going to solve the problem? And then how much does it cost us to do it? And so with that, we can basically create a power ranking of, okay, this thing is impacting a lot of these people. So this is a high-priority issue. But we don't have any solutions that we're actually really confident about. Well, we've got a solution that we're really confident about, but it's really expensive, right? And so this is where you basically factor all four of these things in into your innovation cycle. So you say, okay, this is how we strategically prioritize our resources to get the best returns. If we think about what strategy is, okay, so a lot of people use this word and no one really defines what it means. And so I'm gonna define two words for the audience that I think will make a lot of sense. So strategy is just prioritization of resources. So when people are like, man, I really need a strategy. It just means what are my priorities? That's all it is. And so if we think about the universe as having unlimited things that we could do, but we have limited resources, time, money, energy, effort, then the people who get the furthest in life for the ones for the best at allocating those resources to get the most bang for the buck. And fundamentally that's what the best strategists are, it's just this big and more were the people to find all sorts of ways, but that's all it is. Then it's like, okay, well, if I'm going to prioritize my resources, I want to prioritize my resources in a way that provides the most value. And so for customers, I see value as this value equation, which I taught in the $100,000 offers book, which is I see there's four variables to value. You've got the dream outcome, like is the thing the thing they want, the neat thing that you were referencing earlier. We've got perceived likelihood of achievement, which is if I buy this thing, how likely is it that I'm actually going to get what I want? And this is actually the last one that I added to this, because I was like, there's another thing that felt like it was missing. You've got time delay, which is how long is it going to take between when I buy and when I get? And then I've got sacrifice and effort. So they're two sides of the same coin. Effort is, what are the things that I have to start doing as a result of this purchase that I don't want to do? And what are the sacrifices? What are the things I'm going to have to stop doing that I wish I could keep doing? And so fundamentally, the goal here is you want to increase the dream outcome as much as seemingly possible and increase their perceived likelihood. And you want to decrease the time delay and decrease the effort and sacrifice. And so in a perfect world, you'd have something that they click a button, they get their dream outcome absolutely guaranteed immediately by doing nothing. And if you have that, you'd have an infinitely valuable product. If you think about like, hey, buy a six pack. If someone's just simply click a button and then all of a sudden they could pull their shirt up and they would have to press that button by name. Of course. So many people would. And then because of that, we'd be able to charge a tremendous amount of money. And so by thinking through this, these things, in my opinion, will never change. People will always want things to be faster. People always want to do less for them. They will always want to have less risk or higher perceived likelihood achievement. And they want to make sure the thing is actually what they want. I obviously, you know, I use fitness examples a lot because a lot of people understand it. But it's like, okay, let's say that someone wants to lose weight. Okay, that's the dream outcome. Then why is it that a PDF is $5 about how to lose weight and liposuction is 50 grand? Well, the other three variables. So if I think about the PDF, if I buy a $5 PDF, when I make the purchase, do I really believe that I'm immediately going to lose weight? Probably not. And so there's a huge discount that I'm going to put on the value of the PDF because I don't think I'm really going to do anything with it. Whereas liposuction, if I pay it, they're going to put me to sleep, they're going to rip this fat out. Like, so the perceived likelihood achievement significantly higher on the liposuction. For a time delay, it's like, okay, this one, I might have to work out for a year in order to see the results. The liposuction, I go to sleep, I wake up, I'm thin. Much faster. And then effort and sacrifice, well, I'm going to have to sacrifice, you know, Taco Tuesdays, nights out with the girls, I'm going to have to sacrifice, sleeping in. I can't do that anymore, sacrifice my weekends. And the effort is I now have to wake up early. I have to eat food that I don't like. I'm going to have to be sore. I'm going to have to feel stupid because I don't know how to exercise. It's like, there's a lot of costs with that compared to you just wake up and you didn't do anything. And so for that reason, one thing's $5.00, the other thing's $50.00 grand. And so if we think through that, like, there's many different things that solve losing weight, making more money, you know, getting more leads, there's a ton of different things. But if you want to make sure that you're things more valuable, you want to decrease the risk, which is increased specifically. You want to make it faster, decrease the time, like, and you want to make it easier. This framework works, so a case study like blockbusters, you know, it didn't keep their advantage. Yeah. Because people wanted it quicker. Because it's going to Netflix. Originally, it was even posted to them, blockbusters didn't think people wouldn't post it. They thought it was more convenient for people to go to a store and buy it. And so it was a less time delay. There's no less sacrifice. Just press a button at home that people don't keep their advantage. They die like blockbusters do. So you've got to keep thinking about how you can make this, this is a brilliant equation, right? I'm glad you went a bit deep on it, because I think a lot of people just talk about this top line, as you say, they don't think about the time delay and they don't think about the sacrifice out of me. It's so funny you say that because the first, the first half of my career, all I thought about was, was this. So all I did was I had bigger promises, more proof, bigger promises, more proof. But if I look at the, the biggest companies in the world, all they focus on is this. Amazon's like, how do I make it easier? How do I make it faster? How do I make it? How do I make it less effort for the person? And this part is usually where all of the operational effort goes in. This is all the marketing and sales only plus this promise, if you make it too big, you damage your brand. Oh, totally. This is why this all links together. Yeah. Because if you're not careful, you, you want to get that big sale and your sales summit, you haven't actually got. Yeah. And then you're in real trouble. Right. Next. Stick with it. Stick with it. Right. The difference between number two in the world and number one practically for running is a tenth of a second. But the difference between being number one in the world and number two is everything. And so all of the best gains come at the very end of the compounding. It comes from the very deep knowledge that only comes from repeating many failures in a very narrow field. And so it's actually one of my favorite definitions for an expert, somebody who's, who's made more mistakes than anyone else in a very narrow field. So how do people stick with it, though, because I mean, social media is a great example. First three years I did social media, I mean, no money, it probably cost me a million pounds. Yeah. So it's only the last you and half. I've actually started, we have to make money and be able to pay the team and all the rest of it. Yeah. That's a purpose thing, right? I'm trying to fix the education system. It's broken. It should be teaching the skills that we are not trying to keep up with free. What do you think is the form of that? So I'm going to, I'm going to go back to someone that's hit at the very beginning. So if motivation is equal to deprivation, you need to feel deprived of, of something. In the examples I gave, say, you know, if you're starving, you're hungry. If you're sleepy, you, you're, if you're, if you're exhausted, your motivate is sleep. But money doesn't work the same way. Because if you take that, that logical extreme and say, okay, well, then all poor people should be more motivated, make money than anything. And the reality is they're not. So why is that? Because all the ones that I first said are all physiological needs. The other one is completely made up, money is only a new, I mean, in terms of humanity, it's a very new thing, right? And so it's a psychological construct. The idea is that the deprivation actually is completely made in our own minds. You know, Harvard at least did this, did this study, which is they talk about your reference group, which is the biggest predictor of people's long term financial wellbeing is their reference group. And this is important is that it's the five people you compare yourself to, not the five policemen the most time with. And I think that's a huge, a huge difference. You want to take advice, not from the people who are close to you, but the people who are closest to your goals, take advice from them. And people are like, oh yeah, I'll take advice from them. But when you're about to make a big life changing decision, who do you talk to? If you're talking to the people closest to you, none of them have relevant experience. And if you don't want their lives, then definitely don't listen to what they say, right? And it's very hard because that's what makes it feel so lonely, I think in the beginning because you have no one to talk to. And so that's why I'm such a big believer in heroes, heroes and mentors, some mentors people who actually interact with you. But heroes are just like, who would warn about the dip? You know, some people are religious. What would Jesus do? Whatever your thing is, right? Like, who's that idea? And sometimes, you know, one of my friends is like, what is the ideal version of me do? What's the person I want to become do? And all of this again around doing, because if I do those things, like, I might not be a patient person. But if I pretend to be patient for five years, people start calling me patient. I might actually be patient because all I did was patient things, even though I don't feel patient. Right? And so it's like, we can change basically how we feel and what we do don't need to be connected at all. So you can feel horrible and still do things and be kind and people, like, you can feel like a very nasty person because of the things that you think and the things that you want to do. But as long as you don't do them, then the only thing the world I ever judge you on, at least the only thing that I would ever judge you on is what you do. And so it's like, okay, motivation deprivation, it's a back to this. In my opinion, I've always struggled with this question the most because it's never been an issue for me, and I think, and that's, and that's why it's one of the hardest things that I have to translate to somebody else. So everything that I have is more around how do I translate, how I see it more than this was the series of steps I followed to become motivated. I was so afraid of failing. I was so deprived of respect, at least how I perceived it, not continuing was just never a choice. And I used to think when I was like, the earliest days of the gym was really tough for me. I'll sleep on the floor and all the whole, the whole, the whole story, right? And it sounds, it sounds cool in retrospect, but when it's like, you're sleeping on the floor of a gym because you can't afford two places. And you know, if you've got kids at the same age as you who are partying on the roof top of your gym because it was a below parking garage where my gym was, so this is a bar garage to be with like, these cars were driving with the tops like, and it was, it was concrete and metal. So it just, it sounded like a gunshot and it would have it all night long, so I couldn't sleep. But I'd have to wake up at four to teach the 430 class and I'd tell all the classes, so I'd take eight classes a day. But then I also ran the whole business. I had zero employees. So I did all the billing, I cleaned it, I fixed the equipment, I'd marketed it and got leads, I did everything. I didn't know the employees were a thing, it's why I have as one of the steps, I had no idea. Whenever it would be really hard for me, I would, I would always think to myself, as long as I don't quit, I would. If I just keep going, I just have to survive, just kind of approaching it from that perspective because the more painful thing was the idea of going home a failure, and I just couldn't do it. I was like, I would rather die. And I think thinking through like past human experiences, which is, okay, across all the globe, slavery has happened everywhere. And slaves for their entire lives, for thousands of years, had to work all day, every day, and they had no opportunity. They had to work all day, every day, but there was no upside, they just had to work all day, every day, or they'd die or get killed or whatever. And so I was like, if they can do it, with no upside, I can absolutely do it with the chance that I can win. And I think seeing business as an infinite game is what was a huge perspective shift for me, which was, there is no number one in business. And this was something that was really, for anybody who's listening to this, I think it's powerful to understand, is that if I were to say, hey, who is the richest man in the world 30 years ago? There's a couple Japanese guys, because the Japanese economy was booming at that time. Now, no one even knows who they are. And that was just 30 years, forget 500 years. And so the thing is, is the number one guy in the world at business, if you want to measure it by net worth, which whatever. But even if you did, it's like, that guy just touches the top for a decade, and then someone else touches the top. And so when we say, I want to be successful, success is about sticking with it. And so the only way that you become a failure in business is by stopping. And so all the infinite games, like all the games worth playing in life on my pin-in are all infinite. So it's not about, it's not about getting married, it's about staying married, it's not about getting in shape, it's about staying in shape. It's not about starting a business, it's about staying in business. And I think that's a very powerful friend, because it puts it 100% in your control. And I think a lot of people give up so much, they give up just on the idea of a negative comment or some Snyder mark from a friend of theirs or, you know, their dad or their brothers, you know, make some trying to feel stupid for, for taking a risk that they were unwilling to take. And I think that's bullshit. A lot of times there's a lot of social media stuff. I don't think there's anything wrong with it that talks about like, find your passion, find your purpose, find the thing that you love. And I think that's great. But when I started, you know, my first business, I wasn't doing it because it was something I was passionate about. It was not this like sunshine and rainbows. It was miserable. I had a lot of shame, not a lot of anger. And so I didn't feel any of the butterflies, but that's what I had. And so it's like, I think you just use what you got. And if you need shame to get you going, if you need anger to get you going, then you can, that fuel can change over time. But wishing you had a different fuel, I think, is what gets people in trouble. I think that's what, that's what stops a lot of people. Like I should feel, it's like you should nothing. It should just shouldn't exist. It's just what do you have, then what are you gonna do? I'll say the last piece is, they're trade-offs. And I think being able to name the price of the things that you want is super valuable. Which is like, you know, the cost of fame, for example, is privacy. You don't get that anymore. And the cost of you starting a business is for, you know, for me, it was like, I stopped being able to follow the football team that I used to follow. I stopped being in fantasy leagues with my friends. I stopped being able to go out to the bar and drink and things like that. So there was a cost. And so the thing was just like, am I willing to pay that or trade that for this thing that I want most? And I think for some people, maybe you don't want that. And I think the thing is, is like, and that's okay. But I think the problem is where you want, you want to have your kick and eat it too. I want to have the six back, but I also want to have kick. I want to, you know, I want to, I want to, we have to set a new goal of six times. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Look, you want to play the game. - But it's, it's that it's, it's people aren't willing to make the trade. And I think that just comes down to the very bottom of everything, like when I wanted to, you know, there was a period where I wanted to get into Harvard's business school when I had, I'd done two years of consulting and that was what I thought was going to be my path. But I'm always very grateful for them because on one of the application questions they had was, how will Harvard MBA help you shorten long-term goals? And I thought about it for like three days. And I realized that while I wanted to start a business, and so me start doing another two years of school, I could just start a business like that was the goal. And so I'm grateful that they asked me that question. But before I ended up getting to the application, I spent four months taking, I basically did 10 phone books of problems because I read this research study on, on standardized testing, which said, basically it was just a direct correlation between the number of problems that you did before taking the test, was directly correlated with your score. And as soon as I saw that, I was like, oh, I'll just do all of the problems. And so I did 16, like it was, it was, it was huge. It was like, it was, it was standing on the floor, books are probably like the really thin bible paper, like the thin paper. And so I did four hours a day of problems for four months. It's all I did, I just did problems. And so I got above Harvard's mid score. For me, it was like, this is the only thing that I have to do. And this is what I care about most. They were like, how do you stay motivated? It was like, I don't know, I just didn't have any other choice. Because the alternative was just something I wasn't willing to do. And I think a lot of people aren't willing to cut things. Like I've been, I'd say one of the things that's been blessed with if you want to say that, is I'm very willing to cut people and things out of my life. Very quickly, I think it's healthy to do that. First of all, I feel a little bit emotional hearing you talk about that. I don't know why that's triggering something in me. Do you know what point it is? Because I have the same problem. Do you want to help people have a better life? They kind of got to help themselves. What do you think of this? You know, I think it's Pablo's cave where people get bought a fish in a cave every day. And it's easier, right? They don't ever leave the cave. Because it's less what a salary kind of is. The food comes to you every day. And people have forgotten how fucking amazing it is to go out in the rain with your mates and hunt. Or go together and make the food. And men and women made food. Men and women went out hunting in the old days. But like, you know, like there was no fridge. Yeah. There was no get up and eat shit. It was get up and go out and make shit happen. And you know what it is. I think that, and it's absolutely fine if people don't want to do it. But I don't want people to say they can't be an entrepreneur or they can't sell. I want to be honest, they can't be bothered. Yeah. And I think the key is, and you describe your story, I have a similar story. I love the hunger I have from the deprivation that I had. The Vikings used to land places and burn the boats that got them there. Then they got no fucking choice. Yeah. And I think that's what we need to do. They really want to do it. They need to burn the boats that got them. They can't go back to the cushy job that middle-class life. That's it. You're in or you're out. Yeah. And then like you say, you've got to like, figure out what you're going to cut out. It's going to give you the goal you want. So especially in the beginning, you have limited resources, right? You have limited time because you have no leverage. You have no one helping you. And you probably don't have that much money. And so time is the only thing that you have that you really have to be really careful with. And so what are the activities? Does this activity, like drinking, for example, does this increase the likelihood of hemigolds? That's it. Does it increase the likelihood of hemigolds? Does having these friends in my life increase the likelihood of hemigolds? And the answer is usually pretty obvious. It doesn't. And then the thing is, is that most people are again, just cowards, is that they're not willing to just make the cut. But I'm pretty sure you live the same framework that you did when you were younger. I act like I've got no money. The motivation thing really gets me, because sticking with it, which is the theme around this, is all to down to perhaps limiting your choices, not increasing them. So people don't have too many choices, you know, like die on the heel. You know, like go for it, and people don't do it. So okay, getting better. This is the one step before we get a million dollars. So I'm looking forward to the million dollars in cash. All right, getting better. 'Cause I've done all these things. So I hopefully a big suitcase of money has come in my way. Get better. So I'll describe a process that I do, and it's all based on action. So I define work as volume times leverage, which is how much you do, and how much you get for each time you do it. Because that equals output, which if you're looking at this, transit property, work equals output. So it's not about how hard you try. It's about what you get done. And if you have more leverage, you get more done. Now if you do a lot of work, so I'll give you a simple example. So if you were learning sales, right? So if I start cold calling, and I do 100 calls a day, and I have low scale, then I will have low leverage. I'm gonna get fewer appointments than somebody who makes the same amount of calls as me. And it has high scale. They'll book five times the appointments as I will. So did they work more? In my world, yes, they had higher output. And so a lot of times it's like, you have to learn how to work. But the thing is is that how did that guy who is good, get good, he did volume, he did a lot. And so then it's like, okay, if this is our equation for output in terms of getting better, the getting better part is gonna be leverage. This is a constant, you have to do work, you have to do volume. Okay, so we start with the doing, which is the volume. Cool, so we have that first. And so whatever it is, so let's say it's, I wanna start making Instagram Reels. Fine, I wanna get good Instagram Reels. So it's like great, so I'm gonna make 100 Instagram Reels. And this is the part that people, well, people don't even do this, but let's assume that you did this, okay? So you do the 100 Instagram Reels. People then say, well, I did 100, and nothing happened. It's like, okay, so then what we do is we look at our 100. Let's say this is the 100 Reels that we did. We say, what's different about these, about these top ones? And what's different about these? Singers do this all the time, definitely. They put a music hell all the time. 60% of a Dale's songs never went in the top 10 or something. All right. So yeah, they also do it. And so then once we figure out, and this is where you have to, this is where you have to be as detailed as possible. And a lot of times you'll start having almost superstitions. It's like, okay, I coughed at the beginning of this call. Well, that was different. Well, did all of your top 10 calls, did you cough? Well, no, okay, the disregard that. She runs something called a common factors analysis, which is just saying, what do all these ones have in common? What do these ones all have in common with each other? But it's different than all of these ones. And so once we do that, we say, okay, so my next 100 that I do, I want them to look like this. And then all of a sudden, it's like, huh, I got 30% better on my total views by just doing more of the stuff that worked. Yep. And so this process, you just do for like 10 years. (laughing) And you just keep doing it over and over again. I mean, like the first YouTube video that I did, I think probably had like 100 views or whatever it was. And for anybody who's listening to this, so I haven't had a big business, but I'm assuming that when you started, you had zero subscribers when you started your account. And so did I across all platforms. And so people have this idea that like, everyone starts at zero. And I'll also give you this other kind of word of encouragement, which is there's a huge media narrative around the idea that like, millionaires and billionaires are evil. I don't know why, but there is. What's interesting about that, at least in the US, the districts are the overwhelming majority of millionaires and billionaires are self-made, not inherited. And so it's like, okay, wait, if the majority of them are self-made, then that means they all started at zero. And so they had the same thing, so let's say they didn't have a lot of money. Actually, being having zero, starting at zero is a competitive advantage. Oh, yeah, we have nothing to lose. Yeah, exactly. Anyone with zero, you think you don't realize that you've gone advantage. You have no money, and all you have is time. And that means that you're in the exact same position as every self-made millionaire and billionaire. When they started. And the only difference is that right now, you're a self-made poor person. It's just that no one likes to claim it. By the way, self-bate doesn't exist because everyone had help. Oh, for sure, you know. But your concept terms are starting here. Yeah, no, you can have nothing and still make it. Yeah. Do you know what's really interesting about this for people listening as well? Like, I've invested in 78 companies. I know you've invested a lot of businesses as well. Sometimes too much money can destroy business. I think we work, for example, the biggest problem was they never thought about actually making money. Their business was raising money, right? So I think that's another thing. People don't really quite grasp. But getting better, I mean, do you think there's a mental framework to help people get better? Because I mean, even myself, right? I'm pretty good at business. I've had to get better to compete. But is there a framework for getting better as a human, like do you think? Is a human being known as a business person? You don't think they're linked, [BLANK_AUDIO] - Well, I mean, I have really a hundred percent live on the common factors analysis thing. So if I look at, so I'll tell you how I lived my whole life. So like, the thing that started this was I was 21, 21 or 22, and this is my first job out of college. And I remember I had a really good weekend. I was just like, in a good mood, came in on Monday, and my boss was like, "Hey, what's going on?" I was like, "I just, you know, said a good weekend." She said to me this line that I just didn't like, hit me. She said, "I'm pretty sure stringing as many days in a row "like that as you can is the secret to live on." And what it did though was it took this whole like, this amorphous idea of like joy, contentment, purpose, and just made it really tactical. It was like, "Okay, how do I live as many days in a row "as I can of days that I like?" So I looked back at like last year and I said, "Okay, what were the days that I liked the most? "What were my top 10 percent days?" Well, the things that I had in common as I worked out. Okay, cool, I did that. I ate with people I like, ate with friends, and then I worked until I had nothing left. If I do that on all my days, then more of my days will look like that. And so the majority of my days now feel like what used to be top 10 percent days. And so obviously these are different from other than might be play music, it might be. Whatever, you know, whatever your thing is. But that common factor's analysis. And it's like, okay, what are the top 10, you know, Laila and I've gone on 100 dates. Okay, the top 10 dates, what do they have in common? Okay, well, Alex-- - Have you done that? If you've done that, I think of all of this. - Yeah, how do my things but is brilliant? - I've got flowers, right? He got flowers. He had a gift. - Is this coming from his eye? - Yeah, it was for you plan, no. - He had a free plan. He had pre-planned something. - Right. - She's told you her list. - That's brilliant. - I wrote some sort of note, right? And so, and we dress up. And so those are the things. So like this is my recipe for making good dates. And so it's like a lot of times, it's like, no one just takes the look back. It says, okay, what? But it's because they don't start the, I did stuff. That's the first step. Like you gotta do the 100 reps. You gotta do it make the 100 posts. You gotta make the 100, you gotta make the 100 cold calls. You gotta make the 100 sales. And you gotta record them. And that's the other piece. Like you have to go record it. Whatever, whatever, the greatest degree possible, you have to recall what were the details. And so then you look, you see the common factors. It's like, all right, well, I'm gonna only do those five next time. And by randomness, because life happens in, there's variables that are out of our control. Again, there's gonna be another top 10% in the next 100 dates. And we're like, okay, so in those days, not only did I do these five things, but we had a driver, was a big difference. And there was this prize element for some of these. And at a certain point, the thing is, the improvement is gonna go like this, right? Just like that, just like that sales thing. You know, the first time you do this, your dates are gonna get way better, right? And then after that though, the dates are gonna get incrementally better. But all that happens is like, man, people are gonna be like, how do you have such a healthy relationship? You're like, you know, all I did was I just looked at the stuff that worked and I just stopped doing the stuff that didn't. And I just did it over and over and over again. Amazing Alex, honestly, you're amazing human beings. I love this. I hope you guys enjoyed it. We're off to have some chicken now, we'll see you later. (gentle music)