How to get SO rich you question the meaning of making money

You guys want to hear something completely insane? Yes? Okay. You're going to have to hear it anyways. I was able to take home more in a year than the CEOs of McDonald's, Ikea, Ford, Motorola, and Yahoo combined as a kid in his 20s for over half a decade, there you go, which resulted in $200 million in portfolio revenue. As of today, we crossed $100 million at age 33, and to be honest, no one's more surprised than I am about this outcome. And so me expressing this will create envy in some people, it will create anger in others, skepticism in most, confusion in old people, and inspire a select few. And so the select few, you are who I'm making this for. Everyone else, you can chill, but you are the people that I'm making this for. Let's go back. There we go. So who wants to hear about some stuff that can shortcut their path to material success so they can ponder the purpose of achieving it to begin with? All right. So we're going to cover three things today. This is fresh from this morning, right off the press. Number one, how making money really works. Number two, why new stuff is making you poor. Number three, why better is the way? You're like, that doesn't make sense yet. It will. Said simply, who wants to make lots of money? Funny thing, what you're watching right now is not my original presentation. I actually changed it at the very last minute the night before. I went out to get dessert. A bunch of people from the event were in town going to the place that I was by accident. As soon as I left the frozen yogurt lunch, which is where I was, I was like, the presentation I have for tomorrow isn't what these people need. And so I spent that night and all morning making an entirely new presentation, which is what you are watching. Who believes that you have to work hard to make money? Who believes that no one can outwork them? You're going to see where I'm going to go with this. Well, I'm going to attempt to prove you wrong. The reason this is so important is that all of us claim, or I have heard, who here has seen a guru on the internet say, no one can outwork me? Who has heard people say that on podcasts, make Instagram posts about it, whatever? It actually drives me ******* bananas. It drives me bananas because it teaches the wrong lesson. So how can we claim that we work every day and yet we can't even define the word? So how do you define work? The science definition is work equals force times distance. Problem with that is it's not very useful for knowledge workers. Most of us are not actually doing manual labor. Not useful. The second way is that you can think about it in terms of inputs of time, right? Is that how hard you work? No one can outwork me. I work longer hours. Do you think you're the only person who works 16, 18 hours every day? Go to China. I don't even know if anyone in America can say it. I'm being dead serious. So that's why when I see these things, it just drives me ******* nuts. So the problem with that is that many people work all the hours they're awake, and if you suggest working more hours, then you're sleeping less, and I don't think that's a good idea for knowledge workers. So why can no one outwork you again? Right, so everyone's working those hours. So then the next one is like effort. That's how no one can outwork me. No one's going to try harder than me. So you want participation trophies. Is this how you want your employees to think that they're working hard? I mean, not me. I wouldn't want that. So if it's not force times distance to define what work is, and if it's not the amount of time we're putting into the work that we do, and it's not the effort that we are expending or how hard we try, then what's work? We have to get clear on it, because if that's what we have to do to make money, then we got to know what we're actually trying to ******* do. So here's Alex's definition. Work equals outputs. Fancy image. Outputs equal volume times leverage. In plain speak. Number of times you do something times how much you get out of each time you do it. How do we work faster? Work rate equals that same thing divided by time. Plain speak. Output per minute of time. That is how you work faster. Which means that the hardest working man in the world can be objectively measured. That guy is the hardest guy working in the world. In 2022, he added $140 billion in net worth. For context, that's more than Bill Gates did his entire career in one year. Think about that for a second. And then next year, he did the exact same amount again. FYI, that's $2 billion a week. So output divided by time. There's the time. One year. There's the output. He's the hardest working guy. So who's going to be the 2027 champ? Point of me doing this is that I hope it's somebody here. Who would like to be the 2027 champ? All right, let's rock. So if you want to be it, then please pay attention. This will help you. So how can we get more output? Which in the game of business is enterprise value. It's how much ---- is worth. Outputs, right? We have this one and I've got a nice flexi arm. Volume is the number of times we move the lever. I literally made all these images this morning. All right, I'm very, very proud of them. All right? Volume is the number of times you move the lever. The leverage is the length of the lever itself that you're using. The outputs is how much you can lift on the other side. So let's look at a couple examples. You guys can just shout it when I say, just say high or low. So high or low? Low. High or low? High. High or low? Very high. The reason I put this one in here is that at a certain point, it's not about how strong the person is. It all depends on how much leverage you have. That's the point of this slide. Now, high or low? Volume times 1,000, the thing's just as long as the other one. Highest, yes. So now that we understand what work is, you can either do more activity or you can do it with more leverage to get more output. Doing more is capped by time and physical ability. How much you get, a.k.a. leverage, is uncapped, no cap. I learned that. Gen Z, there we go. Now, fun fact, Warren Buffett took home $500 million in dividends last year from Coca-Cola as an owner. The CEO took home $50. He spent less time working on Coca-Cola than the CEO did. So is he working harder by the difference that we did? Yes. More output. We've been playing the game wrong. If you want to outwork your competition, what you really should be doing is outleveraging them. So who gets more done? We got one person who does 100 calls a day, another person who does 100 calls a day. The guy who has more skill. One guy makes 100 calls, another guy makes 100 calls. The guy who's better on the phone gets more output. OK, let's say they're equal skill. They're working eight hours a day, making calls. Oh, I forgot to ask the question. Who gets more work done? There's the answer. The guy that has the automated dialer that keeps his talk time the highest. OK, same skill, same number of hours, and same automated dialer to maximize talk time. Now who gets more work done? The guy who has the best list. OK, they've got the same list. The same skill, same dialer, eight hours a day. The guy who's calling to the right season and the right time of day. Who wants to be calling selling ---- during December if you're selling physical products? Who wants to sell on Brock Friday? Of course, more leverage, same work, more output. OK, let's say all this stuff's equal. Now who's even? All right, we got, I mean, what else do we have? Nice, he actually called it. The guy calling with the better offer. Now we've got the same time of year, same list, same offer, same dialer, equal skill, eight hours a day. Now who's gonna do it? It's gotta be equal now, right? The guy who recorded his pitch and sent it to 10 million people. Now, to push this even further, what if the guy made zero calls and didn't do anything? Who makes more against the best caller on earth? The guy who's got a team. He's got 15 dudes on the phone. OK, how good you are? And if you're like, well, I think I could be 15. It can't be 1500. OK, here you are. Leverage. And that guy made zero calls. I have more people calling for me today while I'm on stage. Leverage. The game is rigged and you've been playing by rules that do not exist. If you want to make more money, you need to get more for your time. You need more leverage. And this should make sense because we all trade time for money. And I can prove this to you. You spend time every second of your life. You receive money over the time that you are alive. So, money divided by time equals rate of output. We are all paid dollars per hour. The reason I'm specifically saying this to this audience is that y'all get fooled all the ******* time by passive income. It's not passive. It's less active. But it is not binary. It is not active or passive. It's how active is it? So if you make one trade in the stock market, all the time it took you to analyze the deal and every other deal you decided not to do, and then execute the trade and then raise the money and do all the other stuff, that is all the time that it took you to do that. Now, after that point, you have increasing returns per unit of time. Is this making sense? The point I'm making here is that time is the thing. We all have the same $24 in our wallet. It's about how we allocate them and what we get back for them, how well we trade. Just said that. There you go. Degrees, all that. So leverage is the difference between what you put in and what you get out. There are fancy definitions for it. This is the best one that I have. And so I said I would cover three things. The first one is how making money really works. The answer to that question is leverage. You make more money by trading your time for more ----, more output. The second is why new stuff is making you poor. And this is especially relevant for everyone here. Part of this, again, was inspired by the conversations I was having last night at Yogurtland. So thank you for everybody who showed up for that. This is also how not to get leverage. And I felt compelled to make this because I hope that some of you identify with this because I would bet that the majority of you are doing this. How not to get leverage. There are five pieces to this that I wanna break down today. Number one, uninformed optimism. Number two is a story I'll tell you about a construction buddy of mine. Number three is something I call the magic wand story. Number four is half bell bridges. Number five is a woman in a red dress. You're like, I have no ******* clue what that means. You will. So let's start with uninformed optimism. Who here has seen this? This is stages of change, stages of transition. Anyone seen this chart before? Okay, cool, not a lot of you, perfect. So there are five steps. And I remember the first time I saw this, it changed my life. Whenever you're analyzing something new, who here has had a buddy tell you about something that they're doing and they're making a lot of money doing it and then you immediately feel shitty about what you're doing and then think, I should get out of my opportunity vehicle, go over here and do what they're doing. Who's felt that? Thank you, everyone has. The reason is because we're at step one, which is uninformed optimism. You don't know enough about what they're saying, they're just giving you the highlights. They're giving you the Instagram reel. They're not giving you the real. Yeah. Once you decide to get out of your little vehicle and then go over there, then you tell your buddy, hey, why am I not making money? He's like, oh, well, there's like 100 other ******* steps that I didn't talk to you about in the beginning. And it's actually nearly impossible and I got really lucky that one time. And now all of a sudden it looks like all the people at your old job are making more money than you. But yeah, let's keep doing it. So you move to stage two, which is informed pessimism. You are now aware of the ---- that is involved to make the money that you want in this new thing. Now you think, okay, this is probably the worst part. But then time elapses and it's still shitty and you still haven't made money yet. It blows more now because you have invested more time and still have zero. So your actual output to time is lowering, which is why it's so painful, which is where people get into the crisis of meaning. Why the **** am I doing this? What does money even matter anyways? You know what, I'd be happier if I just spent more time with my kids. You change your goal because you encounter difficulty. And so what happens most times is that people then crash and burn. I'm gonna skip one forward and then I'm gonna come back because I want the visual to work the way I want. Ah, **** it. Okay, so if you're at the crisis of meaning, this is where most people offshoot. What happens here where that fourth dot there on the bottom, if I were to cross it out and write uninformed optimism again, that's what most of you do. You find about something cool, informed pessimism, it kind of sucks. Oh ----, it's way harder than I thought. Uninformed optimism, I'll try something else. And then you do it again and again and again. And the difference between video games and real life where you face the boss and you can't pass the level until you beat the boss is that when you die in the video game, you restart a few seconds later. In the game of entrepreneurship, you start years later. This is why people don't progress. They keep fighting the same boss that can't learn the same ******* lesson. They keep losing. And I'm saying this because some of you, I heard at Yogaland, and I know that that's representative of other people here, you keep fighting the same boss and the boss is being able to stick with it. Is getting through, in different charts on this, the crisis of meaning is also called the Valley of Despair, is getting through. From there, you get into informed optimism. You figure out that little thing, like ah, I had to do this one thing and then this started working and then you know what, I found out I could clean the list through this tool I found on the internet because I joined this forum and they started doing that and then all of a sudden my pickup rates tripled, right? Or my response rates tripled. Or my throughput on my website went up, whatever it is, right? And so you have to get through that piece. Then you get to informed optimism and the number six you achieve and then all your friends are like, yo, what are you doing? You're like, oh, I got this thing and then all of them come, right? That is where most people start something new, over and over and over again and they don't learn the lesson. And so this is what their life looks like. Over and over and over and over again. Who here has more than one business in the last 24 months, be honest. Thank you for being honest, I appreciate it. First thing, it's normal. I had nine businesses and I was broke. So I say this with the pain of experience. I'm not saying this to be on a pulpit. I'm saying it because the faster you can get through it, the faster you will start making money. You have to beat the boss. Everyone thinks the grass is greener but the other side's still lined with ----. So, like that's why the grass is so green. There's ---- everywhere. I have a CFO who's been with us for a long time. She went through all of our exits last year. She's probably almost 60 and she has to say, she's like, it's all ----. Doesn't matter what business it is, they all got ----. She's Southern. And Suzanne's awesome. But it just always reminds me of this, is that there's always ----. And whenever we're starting something new, we encounter something that we didn't know before and we're like, oh, this makes this shittier. And then we think, well, are we gonna jump out? No. Well, this is new information. Great, we're more informed. Fantastic. So that is the thing number one that is keeping you poor. Uninformed optimism. Number two is a little story I wanna tell you. So I was called up probably two, three years ago by a guy I knew in high school. We hadn't talked in a while. And he said, hey, I've got this roofing business. I wanna scale it, I wanna go big. I was like, that's awesome, man. And so he was telling me about the roofing business, telling me about the roofing business. And then all of a sudden he says, oh yeah, I mean, we also do some general contracting work. I was like, okay. Why don't you grow the roofing business? He's like, well, you know, don't leave money on the table. Okay. And then, this is gonna sink in for some of you guys. And then, and he was like, I was like, so you've got the roofing, you got the GC stuff. He's like, yeah, that's what I'm doing. He's like, he paused for a second. He's like, well, we also kind of flip houses too. So we like fix them and flip them. We also do the contracting work, but we fix the roof so we just get huge cost. We're vertically integrated. I was like, dude, you're making less than three million bucks a year and I'm ******* vertically integrated. You're distracted, right? And he was like, how do I scale? And I was like, just pick one. He's like, what do you mean? I was like, pick one. He's like, why do you think you can't build a billion dollar roofing business just doing roofing and just get better at doing roofing? He's like, well, I don't leave money on the table. Who here said they don't leave money on the table? The money or you were leaving on the table is the focus that you are not giving to the one thing that matters. And so by the way, this is the self-made women list for Forbes. This is Dianne Hendricks. She's the number one wealthiest self-made woman, by the way, and she owns, if you can see it there, ABC Supply, which is roofing, not house helping, not general contracting work, roofing. Why didn't he build that? He's smarter than Dianne Hendricks, that's why. So this is the list, and this is what I want you to notice about this list. This is the Forbes, the top six for women, self-made. Notice the age of the people on there. Age is the left column, 75, 78, 84, 90, 89, 63. On the right, notice the source. Roofing, healthcare software, retail and gas stations, trucking, Little Caesar's Pizza, IT. So sexy. The point of this slide is that if you want to build something epic, you have to be able to do the same thing for an extended period of time without convincing yourself you're smarter than you are. Which means, if you wanted to not make money, this is what you should do. Number one, do lots of different things. Number two, do them for short periods of time. Don't stick with it too long, because you might see success. Number three, do not get help, okay? Number four, make all the mistakes on your own. It's the best way to do it, because otherwise, if you start learning from other people's mistakes, you can move faster, so don't want to do that. When you make a mistake, do it again. Just repeat it. Especially if you're like, I've been here before, do the same thing. Who here knows the definition of learning? I'll tell you. Same condition, different behavior. So if you want to teach someone something, and you present them the same condition, and they have not changed their behavior, they have not learned. If you came to this workshop this weekend with the intention of learning something, can I get everybody to raise their hand if they had the intention of learning something while they were here? If you go back home, and your behavior does not change, you learned nothing. Nothing. Truly took the money, and burned it, along with losing the output that you lost in the time of here plus travel. So if that definition has been singed into my mind, because I want to learn something, and I have the same condition that's been presented, I have to ask myself, if I do the same thing again, it means I have not learned. And I don't want to play this boss again. So if you do want to make money, you can flip it. You do one thing for a very long period of time, you get help from other people, you observe what other people have been doing, you only make the mistake one time, if you are going to make them, and you always grow and challenge the beliefs that you had, and try and answer the question, what do I believe to be true that is not? Because ordinary business is done for extraordinary time, create extraordinary results. Compounding is the thing. Like it has to compound. If the vehicle you are in right now does not compound with time, then change the vehicle. Get into something that if you stick with it for an extended period of time, it would be unreasonable that you will be poor. That was my construction buddy story. So I had a conversation with a different friend, and he had a zillion businesses, like a zillion. I get a spreadsheet for how many businesses he had, and they were all bullshit businesses. They didn't actually make any money, but he had like a logo on a website, and like some VA, you know what I mean? Like, ah, it's a business. And he was believing the fallacy of, I'm just gonna wait to see the thing that takes off, and then go all in on that. Who here has thought this thought? I get it, I'm gonna focus, I'm just gonna wait, I'm gonna be patient, see which one works out, and then, because I'm a good statistics guy, I'm gonna go with the winning horse, right? But the reality is that any of them can take off. You could have a billion dollar roofing business, you could have a billion dollar GC business, you could have a billion dollar house building business, but you can't have them all. So you gotta focus, you gotta pick one. And the nice thing is, it doesn't really matter which one you pick, but you do need to pick one. The picking is the thing that grows it. The ability to say no is the thing that grows it, not the thing you pick. It's who you are as a consequence of the decision that changes the outcome, not the vehicle. Does that make sense? So how arrogant is it to think that we can do multiple things at once and compete with someone who's spending all their time on that one thing? It's ridiculous, and yet we still do it. And so this is, I love this little cartoon. This guy, you know, he's got all his spinning plates. And this is me with the red hair going to this guy, who's hopefully my competitor, and handing him more plates, be like, oh, do you see all that shiny object over there? Here, more plates, go. I'm just gonna do this one thing. It's my favorite thing in the world. Compete against somebody who's doing lots of things. It's very easy to win. You don't have to do much, because you only have to do a 10th of what they do. So this is what focus really looks like. One thing, all in. You can write that down, you can circle it. One thing, all in. So I asked my friend of mine that had the Excel sheet with all these zillions of questions, right? I said, if I had a magic wand, and I ended all your side projects except for one, just one, the one that you think has the most opportunity, the one that's probably making the most money right now that you're not paying attention to, because it's boring, because it's old, because you've been doing it a while. He's like, yeah. I was like, do you know what business it is? He's like, yeah. Like, okay. If you ended everything else, because I have a magic wand, so I get to make the rules. Magic wand. They all disappear. I said, how easy would it be to grow that thing? He just looked at me and he was like, really ******* easy. I was like, hmm, interesting. And so he's like, but that would be so hard because of insert real reason that no one gives a **** about. No one cares. But I have to fire the, uh-huh. But I would have to shut down, uh-huh. But I would have to lay off, uh-huh. All the riches you want are on the other side of a few hard conversations. And most people spend the rest of their lives not having them and being poor and wondering why. It's gonna suck. It's gonna be okay. That was my number three story, magic wand. Number four, my favorite story. Who here has seen The Matrix? Awesome. You need to become the person who can say no to the woman in the red dress. The woman in the red dress is the representation of everything that is shiny, object, and beautiful and wonderful in the world, whatever your flavor of woman in the red dress is. And the thing is, and this is something that I have now learned painstakingly, is that being able to say no to the woman in the red dress changes at levels. You can say no to the woman in the red dress who's a crackhead on the corner, right? 1,000 bucks a month. You're like, I can say no to her, no worries. I got something better, right? But then the $10,000 a month girl, you're like, huh, okay, interesting. And if you're making $10,000 a month, it's hard to say no to that girl. But let's say that you're a hardworking, disciplined ************. You get to $100,000 a month. There's a $100,000 a month girl that's an opportunity that is much bigger than the one that you said no to before. And you have to learn to flex the muscle at every level. This is a lesson that I learned the hard way. I started a supplement company when Gym Launch was doing 26 million a year. And rather than say, oh, why don't I just take Gym Launch to 40 next year, I'll start another thing. Gym Launch stayed the same. And then I added another source of revenue that got us to 37. But it was a mistake strategically. I can tell the story, it sounds great. On paper, we sold the company, lots of money, whatever. But like, it was not the right move. And so I had learned how to say no to a million dollar opportunity, a five million, a 10 million. But I hadn't learned how to say no to a 20 million dollar opportunity when I was making 20 million. And so like, the woman in the red dress becomes more seductive, more attractive, the better you get. The more status you get, the hotter the girl you attract, right? And I'm saying this figuratively for entrepreneurs. Does that make sense for everybody who's not into women with red dresses? Okay. Because this is what the woman in the red dress really looks like. Just ready to smash your ---- and distract you and spread you thin so that you can't keep your eye on the ball. And then eventually, she spreads you so thin that you don't know how to get out. And it feels like quicksand because as soon as you put out fires here, there's fires here, there's fires here, fires here. I need more talent. You take the best person from over here to fix that problem, then this thing goes to ----. How do you get out? You gotta cut ----. You gotta eat your ego. You gotta watch your revenue go down so that you can refocus, reconsolidate, bring the troops in. I'm saying this because someone here needs to do this and I wish I had ******* heard this from somebody else. It would avoid a lot of pain. So how do you become that person who can say no to the woman in the red dress? You do the activities someone with those character traits would do despite not feeling good about it. So I'll tell you a story that'll drive this home. So Layla and I were on this walk not that long ago and I said, you know, I was like, I'm so impatient. I'm so impatient. I need to be more patient, right? And she was like, I don't think you're impatient. I was like, yeah, I am. I ******* hate this. I want this to be faster. I want everything to be bigger, faster, stronger. She's like, yeah, but you're not changing your behavior. Like you feel that way, but you haven't done anything that's not aligned with the long-term strategic vision. I was like, yeah, but I feel ******* terrible. I want to be like Zen about it. She's like, yeah, but that's not how it works. She's like, patience is about the behaviors we do, not how we feel about behaviors. So who here has heard the quote, courage is not the absence of fear, but it's action despite fear, right? Patience is not not feeling impatient and feeling terrible about waiting, about not jumping on these opportunities. It's about not jumping on the opportunities despite feeling like ---- about it and wanting to, right? Loyalty is not necessarily about the fact that your eye doesn't get caught every once in a while, right, or maybe even feel a desire that you wish you didn't feel. It's about whether you act on it. Because who here would rather have somebody, I think you already know where I'm going with this, right? In terms of loyalty, how would you rather, right? You'd rather the person not act on the thought. That is how you gain the trait. And then over time, this is my belief, if you do that enough times, those feelings go away through exposure therapy. Like you get exposed to this condition over and over again, and eventually you know that you don't die because that's what it feels like. And so whether it's a loyalty issue, an integrity issue, a courage issue, a focus issue, which is the point of this message today, to become that person, you just start acting like the person who has those beliefs and you behave in that way, and then it will stink in. Woman in the red dress. So new distractions kill leverage and keep you poor. Focus multiplies it. I said three things. Number one, how making money really works. It all comes down to leverage. Number two, why making new stuff is making you poor, which means you have to focus. And number three is why better is leverage. This is the make money part. Here's the simple approach to growth that we use with our portfolio companies. Better is better than new. Better is leverage. Because remember, leverage is how we get more from what we put in. If you do it better, you get more for what you put in. That is leverage. Examples. If you have call scripts, if you make content, if you have websites that you're building, if you have follow-up sequences, if you have offers, if you do the current thing, you get what you currently have. If you make it better, you will get more from the activities. You can create leverage in your business by being better. And better comes from boring. Most of us solved an emotional need by quitting whatever we were doing to start to become an entrepreneur. And then we had a positive reinforcement from that behavior. And so then we learned that as a way of life. But the problem is that the thing that forced you or gave you that emotional, that decreased your action threshold thus, that you would jump into the next thing is the very thing that will make you jump out of the opportunity that could become your billion dollar thing. Does that make sense? You felt uncomfortable in your job, quit your job, you got rewarded. And so you think, oh, when I quit things, I'll get rewarded. But that's the wrong lesson. It only works once. And then you have to unlearn it. And with each level of entrepreneurship, there are lessons like that, that you have to unlearn the thing that got you there. Better comes from boring. It is not exciting to run your 38th split test on a landing page. It does make you more money. It comes from doing all the ---- that you know you should be doing but aren't. And so right now, this is an activity. So this is an active part. Imagine a list of all the stuff you know you should be doing but aren't doing right now within your existing business. Like right now, like top of your head, you know there's some ---- that you should be doing in your business. I'm gonna give you 15 seconds. The reason that stuff is so important is because you already know what you need to do. And we come here, get raw rod, et cetera. But the ---- is on your desk at home. That is the work that must be done. It needs doing. And most of us know what to do and we don't wanna confront it because we wanna do something more stimulating and exciting that makes us feel alive and your business doesn't give a ****. Better is boring and better gets you more for what you put in. Better is leverage. Now, imagine who here has a few businesses. You're really ******* hard to make that list, wouldn't it? There's too much ----. It's too much. Too much stuff to make the business, which means it becomes impossible, which means that's why you have to pick one because there is so much stuff that has to be done to do one business right. Just do it right. If you do it right, you grow by default. There's a promise. Who here is like, I know I should be doing more email follow-up. I know I should be calling my leads within five minutes. Who here thinks that right now? Okay, let me ask a different question and many of you did raise your hand. Who here calls other leads within five minutes? Okay, like two hands. You will triple your sales. Triple. Who wants to triple their ******* business? Triple. But that sounds boring. Sure is. You gotta implement CRM, you gotta get round robin set up, leads gotta come in, you gotta figure out how call prioritization works between the team. That's boring. Makes you a shitload of money. That's how it works. Who's gonna win? Two different businesses. The guys who got their ---- dialed. Better gets you more for what you put in. And when you do get home, order it from the amount you have to put in to get the thing done that will result in the most output and start ticking them off. And you continue to ignore the new things that sound really exciting. And you become the person who's able to do that by pretending to be the person who's able to do that. Because you already know what to do. So this is a mental model I really like a lot. Who here has ever had a coach or a mentor? Has anyone ever coached or mentored other people? Does anyone feel like they're a better mentor than they are a person who does ----? I do. All the time. And so the thing is, is I asked myself this question, it's actually been one of the most profound, most helpful questions I've had. Which is, if I were coaching me, and the beautiful thing about this is that when you coach you, you have no other agenda. You're just trying to help you. And you also have more information than anyone else has. You've been on every conversation, you've read every email, you've seen every report. So if you were coaching you right now, what would you tell you to do? And what's crazy about this, is that half the ******* time, it's not what I'm doing. Coach me much smarter than me me. Right? Moo moo. Okay. Take your own advice. If you do that, I promise you'll make more money. Be like, ah, I'm a special snowflake. You're just convincing yourself that you're smarter than you are and giving yourself reasons that reality does not apply to you. It does. And this is just a boss level. You might need to keep going against the snowflake until eventually you figure out that you just gotta melt it by being there and hanging in. And so in my entrepreneurial career, there was two periods, very clear definitions of periods of time in my life. The first period was when I was distracted. This is when I did not make money. I had six gyms. I had a launch business where we do gym turnarounds in person. That's where I actually physically was, not at my gyms. I had a dentist, dental agency. I had a chiropractor agency. I think I had something else. Lots of fingers, right? And I was 26-ish. And I would love to tell people, oh, I own nine companies, right? I'm poor. But, but it felt really good, struck my ego, now I'm a bank account. So it was only when Layla, the angel of my life, was like, hey, you know, this one makes us the most money and you spend the least amount of time on it. That gym launch thing actually works. But I have to like, I would have to like sell all those gyms. I'd have to end partnerships. I'd have to let go of people in the agency. And she was like, yeah, or you could just, you know, keep doing what you're doing. I'm just clearly working. Point taken, you know? And so over the next 90 days, I sold five gyms, shut one down, shut down both agencies and got rid of everything. And 12 months later, from that moment, we were doing one and a half million a month. From zero. And so, and 12 months after that, we were at four and a half million a month. One thing. And so this was the second period. Just focus. It's so much easier to stack the deck in your favor if you just do one thing. Because when you focus on one thing, you make it unreasonable to fail. If you do one thing for an extended period of time, it becomes unreasonable to suck. If you do it more than anyone else has done it, you'll be better than them. Just is what it is. People ask me all the time, they're like, hey, how'd you get so good at sales? I was like, 4,000 ******* sales calls. That's how I did it. I didn't even go through a sales training. I had 4,000 ******* conversations. That's how I did it. And so if you wanted to be the best salesman in the world, then have more sales conversations than anyone else has. If you wanna be the best real estate investor, then do more deals than anyone else has. And the subsequent before that is send out more mailers than anyone else has. Have more cold callers than anyone else has. Send more cold DMs than anyone else has. And you'll become the best. And if you put that as the output, the thing that you're looking at, it becomes unreasonable that you would be not the best. Like you're at least gonna be top 10. And if who here would be top 10 in real estate in the US, would you be okay with that? All right, it wouldn't be bad. And the thing is that everyone fails because they wanna move fast. Like this is the number one issue. So they don't have a solid foundation. They draw the dotted line. They think I'm gonna try and shortcut it. I'm not gonna fix my product. I'm not gonna make it really good because I wanna go fast because I wanna show to my friends that I'm growing every month. I wanna show how good I am. The thing is it's a short game. Like how many times it's like, the restaurant example is so simple. So many people start a restaurant, slap two pieces of Wonder Bread together, put a slice of bologna in there and then market it like ******* crazy. And they're like, dude, I don't get why my business isn't growing. I'm like, because everyone who has your food literally tells everyone that it ******* sucks and never come back. So there's this invisible hand that works against people, which is who knows about the power of word of mouth, right? The invisible hand, who here runs ads? Let me ask that question. Who here runs advertisement? Okay. If you run ads and it has become more expensive for you, disproportionate to the increase in CPMs, just cost per impression or eyeballs, in that period of time that you've been in business, then it means that you have negative word of mouth. So if you're like, why don't get that many referrals? Oh, well, you sure do get a whole bunch of people who you get negative referrals, you get negative sales. You have to spend twice as much to acquire a customer because every other customer that you would have acquired was told by someone else not to buy from you. It's the invisible hand. When you shortcut it, promote, promote, promote, promote, and then flatline and then dissolve and then you come up with new ----. Who here has seen the people on the internet doing this game over and over and over again? They don't get the product right. They put two pieces of bologna, you know, of sandwiches together with a bologna slice in the middle and they call it a product and then, we have ham with one slice in the middle and it's still ----. Because they don't want to take the 12 months to actually get the ******* product right. But on the long game, 10 years from now, the guy who takes a first year, takes a break even on that year just to get the product right, makes everything easy. But no one can wait 12 months because they can't see the big picture. They keep trying to string three of these little shortcuts together rather than building the foundation. Better is leverage. Better gets you more for what you put in. This is what small businesses look like. This is what big businesses look like. The amount of activity is actually not that different. It's just aligned. It's just all in the same direction. It's all it is. It's really not, I promise you, I've been in both. It's all it is. There's no magic. It's just aligned. Same input, more output. What boring but better looks like. It means split testing landing pages not once but weekly. Not just one time when you come here, you put the process in place to do it every ******* week. Split testing emails, not once but weekly. Making new ads and creative, not when you have to, but before you need them. Role playing with the sales team, not once but daily. Role playing with customer success. Hey, I want a refund. Hey, I hated this. Hey, it wasn't fast enough. What do they say? Role play. If you have amazing customer success, they role play every day, they'll get ******* good. I promise. How exciting is that? Not at all. But you know what it does? It makes you more money. Taking 10 more interviews for the same role. Sucks. Sucks to talk to 10 more people for no reason. But there is a reason. Because you're trying to find the one person that's gonna give you 10 times the leverage on that time you got back. Think about this. What if you didn't take those interviews? You hire someone, wait six months, and then you have to do the whole thing again, and you lost the six months. That's what Layla was talking about. Take you more time to make your lead magnet better. Make your offer better and better. All these things are boring, but make you more money. And so this is my promise. Is that doing all the unsexy ---- that you aren't doing, but know you should, is the secret to the success. My promise is if you do nothing new, but only what you already know you should be doing, that your self-coach tells you to, you will make more money in the next 12 months than you can imagine. You just gotta do it right. So this is actually a text I got yesterday. Yeah, it was yesterday. This guy had lost everything. And he had set a goal down for himself, and he said, hey, last day of 2021, set a business goal that I thought was quite honestly unrealistic, impossible to hit. Well, I'm gonna surpass it in Q3. And so the only thing that I told him to do was to commit to the activities. I was like, just do the same thing every day, rain or shine. It was prospect. I was like, prospect every day. He's like, and the first few months, he actually had a couple good months, and then he slowed down. He's like, how do I stay committed? I was like, because you felt successful for ******* getting an outcome. It's irrelevant for who you are. Some of you guys have heard this quote, but your work works on you more than you work on it. I was like, you need to become the person who isn't satisfied with whatever that outcome was, but only by the commitment that you made to yourself about the activity that you were going to do. And so whether it was up or it was down, it divorces the actions from the outcome. Not to say that the outcome is not the work, it is. But in terms of who you are, who you are is forged in the repetitive act. Final point, who here knows the difference between a seven out of 10 book and a nine and a half out of 10 book? About 20 times the work, realistically. Who here knows the difference in sales between a seven and a half book and a nine and a half book? About 1,000 times the sales. And so if you do 20 times the work and get 1,000 times the effort, that's a 50x increase per unit of input. It's a lot, it's worth it, but you do have to do 20 times more work. That is leverage. And opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. And so I said I was gonna cover three things and I have a little thing at the end here. It'll take me less than five. You guys cool with that? All right, sweet. So I said I was gonna cover three things. I wanna make sure I filled my promise. Number one is how making money really works, leverage. Everybody feel good with that? That make sense? All right. Number two, why making new ---- is making you poor and why you have to focus. Number three is why better is leverage. Awesome. And so I wanna wrap up my presentation with a quick demonstration of leverage in the real world, getting more out of the same thing. Okay? So we're gonna do an exercise to wrap this up. And I think that it will do more than anything I can say with these slides. This will probably be what you remember, unfortunately, with all my pretty pictures. So I'm gonna take a single action and increase the leverage in real time in front of you. Is that cool? So you'll see a before and after in front of your eyes. It's like a real world money magic trick, okay? So I gave you a lot of examples of things you can improve in a business. Better cause, better content, better sales scripts, better website, better follow-up, better offers, right? So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna highlight just one of these things, all right, for you right now, and show you how many riches lie unlocked within your business today that you already know about. So I'm gonna focus on offers, because it's the easy one I can do in front of everyone. All right? So I'm gonna show you the leverage of a better offer. So I'm gonna sell you a book for $100,000. Just kidding. $1,000. So the point of leverage is a better offer. Sorry, the point is leverage of a better offer. One action, selling. One product, a book. Leverage is how much money it fetches for the same activity. Does that make sense? Our equation, does it make sense? Okay. Here are the directions for this activity. The moment you feel that $1,000 of value has been created, please stand up and stay standing, okay? Does this make sense? This is simple directions. You feel $1,000, then stand and stay standing. All right, I'm repeating it. $100,000, just kidding. Typo. So, let the leverage building begin. I have 10 books with me today. Who wants one for $1,000? Raise your, or stand up. Wow, thank you. Stay standing. Three people who already have $3,000. Isn't this exciting? All right, I didn't even tell you what it was yet. It's a really good book. Probably giving it away. Who now wants it? I said it was a really good book. No more people, okay. It's a bestseller, still three people. Oh, four, there we go. Four people, ha ha. It's my book, right? Now, I got one more, two more, three more. All right, four more. So, we got eight, nine, 10, 11. I've already accounted for my books, but just wait, there's more. So, I said, who wants one of the 10 for $1,000, right? We got all these, cool. There's all the reviews. People say it's good. Very good rating. Please stay standing. It's also number one, number four, and number seven for the last 13 straight months. Pretty cool, right? In marketing and sales. I think it's pretty dope. Please stand up. This guy read the book and quadrupled his monthly revenue just from reading the book. If you quadrupled your revenue, would that be worth it? Ah, we got six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, a lot more. Okay, this is it. Wow, probably have 40 or 50 up. Okay. But wait, there's more. Going to autograph the book. There's only one that I have autographed. Actually, that's not true. I think there's probably like five. Oops, I had to get a really fat marker so you could see it. That's actually my, it's embarrassing. Not yet, not yet, not yet, not yet. Uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh. You gotta stand, you gotta keep standing. Gotta keep standing. One out of 10. I'll put my personal cell phone inside. 1,000 bucks. I'm not gonna show it to you. All right, we got about 2 3rds. Okay. I'm gonna review four of your sales calls, rewrite your script with you, and drill your sales team on how we set everything up. Does that work for 1,000 bucks? Stand if that's worth it for you with the book. Please stand. I'll have my traffic guy, who right now, we get about 20,000 leads a day across our portfolio. He'll do an entire funnel breakdown. It's usually about 11 pages. He'll break down everything that you could do differently within the funnel, different headline split tests, different paragraphs, different copy things, different images, different layouts. Right now we average way more than 2x, but I feel confident saying we could double your traffic. All right, we're close. We're like 90%. I'll also use my network to recruit the one missing star player that you have in your company. So right now, we will look at your company and we will find out what the biggest missing pieces and leverage and put someone in there for you. Stand up if that's worth 1,000 bucks. I'll also spend two hours with you on the offer that you're giving right now so you can get more people to click, more people to sign up for the calls, more people to show, more people to buy, and at higher prices. All right, I think I got like one person still seated. I see you, I see you. I'll see what I got, I'll see what I got, I'll see what I got. I'm also gonna feature you on my channel. So that two hours, we'll televise it and we'll distribute it across all of our channels. So right now, that gets about 10 million impressions. So in real advertising dollars, it's about $100,000 in advertising, just in terms of, that's what people are willing to pay for three 90-second spots, and it's a 30-minute spot. So it would be significantly higher than that. So if that's worth 1,000 bucks, let me know. By standing is how you do that. And if you don't make three times what you pay me for this book, I'll give you all the money back and keep all the work that we did. That work, measured over 12 months, that's the fine print, fair? Please stand if that's still worth 1,000 bucks, I see you. And there's not 10 books, there's only one. Look around, and that's how you increase leverage to sell an offer. Instead of a $25 book, it's for $100,000. So does everyone understand, stay standing. Does everyone understand that you just need to do it better? Output comes from volume times leverage. You must do more and get more from what you do. The way you get more from what you do is you first do everything that you know you should be doing better. The way you do that is to focus on one thing for a long time without distraction. Anything can become big with time. When you align all actions to a single outcome and you keep working at it, your success will look effortless and obvious from the outside, but you will know that it came from years of saying no to everything except that which mattered most. This is how we grow companies at Acquisition.com through leverage. Most entrepreneurs lack the who, the what, and the how to scale. At Acquisition.com, we recruit the who, we give them the what, and we show them the how. And once an entrepreneur has all three, the business scales by default. Layla already showed you these. We've got more free courses at Acquisition.com if you guys like this stuff, if you wanna learn more from us, and that's it. Thank you guys so much, I appreciate you. Thank you.