The 4 Steps You Need To Build a $10k/ Month Business

There are four things you need to know to build a $10 million a year business. I should know because now I own half of this business, which does $30 million a year, and a portfolio that does nine figures a year. I am going to break down live for a couple hundred of our franchisees exactly how you can use four quadrants to increase the amount of money you make, decrease the effort that it takes, and speed up the return of money to you in your business. And also secret, it actually works to help get friends, relationships, and just about anything else that you want. We have lessons from billionaires, we have lessons from hundred millionaires, and we have a bunch of frameworks that are gonna make your life easier, your dollar return faster, and a little bit less miserably. I'm calling this the four things you need to build a $10 million a year business. And the reason why I say $10 million a year is because this is wild. You all right now are already the top 7%. Only 7% of Americans actually own a business. Only 10% of businesses in existence will ever get to $1 million in sales. And only 0.4% of all businesses will ever get to $10 million in sales. So you're already breathing rare air, but it's actually incredibly difficult to get to that $10 million mark. Now the first rule is a pretty simple rule, except very rarely executed on. And it is speed. It is this very uncomfortable statement that your bank account is actually a reflection of your speed. The faster you are, the more money that you'll make. And I think about this in a few different ways. I was gonna draw it up on the screen, but I'll just show it here. You know, the life that I have today is actually a result of not what I did this year, last year, or the year prior, it's a result of what I did like 10 years ago. And the things that you do today are gonna determine the life that you have 10 years from now. Waiting's actually really expensive. And look at this monetarily. Every month you wait to take action on whatever you think or really know you need to take action on your business costs you thousands of dollars. So when I look at my net worth, if I would have started buying businesses, for instance, five or 10 years prior, my net worth would have hit a peak and started to compound to a level that now will be hard for me to make up in 20 years because of how fast compounding works. So every month you wait actually costs you a lot of money. And this solidified for me from reading this book, which is called Made in America by Sam Walton. You guys can read along with us. My whole company is reading this book right now. And it's a story of a man who created arguably one of the most successful retail franchises in the world. What's interesting about Sam is he actually started as a franchisee to a company called Ben Franklin, if you guys didn't know. And when I looked at why Sam was successful, I found something really interesting and relevant for all of us. It was the same thing that my mentor Bill Perkins told me. So Bill, who's damn near close to a billionaire, when I asked him why he's so successful, why he's gotten rich in so many ways, he basically said this. He said, I move faster than everybody else. By the time most people have gone to their investment committee, their board, their employees, pondered it, done a pie chart on it, I've already started, made three mistakes, and found a better way. But I realized that Bill Perkins isn't alone in this because Sam Walton has this same idea. He calls his a strong bias towards action. And what's fascinating is then when somebody says something to me like a strong bias towards action, I go, what exactly does that mean? And you gotta read this because it's so good. Sam basically says, talking about his committee meetings at his company, We get into some of the doggone-est, knock-down, drag-outs you have ever seen. But we have a rule, we never leave an item hanging. We'll make a discussion and a decision in that meeting, even if it's wrong, and sometimes it is. But this part's fascinating to me. But then, once we make that decision on Friday, we expect it to be acted on in all the stores on Saturday. We guard against people saying, let's think about it. We make a decision, and then we act on it. This is incredibly rare, not that complicated, but incredibly rare. So we started something at my company called the 24-hour rule, which means typically in companies, you have the seven-day rule. You know how you guys probably have with some of your employees. At this moment, you go, yeah, I'll get back to you on that next week, right? I'll get back to you on that next week. That is a very normal American response. And yet, that response is where your competition eats your lunch. I mean, you don't have to be better. You don't have to be richer. You don't have to be smarter. You can just be faster. And if you think this is something that was just Sam Walton many years ago, or Bill Perkins in a hedge fund, look at what Jeff Bezos says. He says he stole Sam's homework. He understood that overthinking things can lead to missed opportunities. So instead, he encouraged experimentation and quick decision-making, even if it meant making mistakes along the way. And I want to push this upon you guys, but there's usually a thought here. It's, we have a saying at Contrarian Thinking, we try to collapse decades into days. So instead of trying to think about, hey, how could I achieve my goal in 10 years or three years, what would it look like if I only had six months to achieve my goal? And can you get your management team to think that same way? If you can, you are gonna ultimately either, right now, you might be thinking this, go, excuse me, but, or your management team's gonna go, excuse me, but, and at that point, the next comment's gonna go something like this. What if I make a decision that I can't reverse, right? Yeah, I'm fast, but I made a bunch of fast, dumb decisions, which is why I use something called the speed reversibility matrix. Basically, left-hand side, you have how risky is it, low to high, whatever bet or decision you're trying to make, and how reversible is it? Yes, it's reversible to no, it's not reversible. And to really simplify this, what you're basically looking for is in all the things in front of you, I mean, how many of you guys feel like, yeah, I don't have enough to do, I could finish my entire to-do list, there's no problem, prioritization isn't an issue. I've never met somebody who owns a business that feels that way. And so you've actually gotta figure out what are your quick wins, what are your big, but probably really worthwhile projects, what are tasks that you should probably never even touch, and then what are long slogs, those projects that you have to do over time, but you know that they're going to be hard and they're not gonna be reversible. And I wanna walk through a few of these today. Now, if I'm looking at a virtual assistant from this model, well, is this a reversible decision? Yes, very much so. Is this a really risky decision? Now, I don't know, 900 bucks a month, you guys could probably afford that. So what does that mean? That means that I have a decision that is easily reversible, that is also potentially low risk, and which could have a high impact. I should probably make that decision. And the problem with most of our decisions in life is we think that there's only one way to have fast impact and also to have high impact. And that's often not the case. If you, like me, want a $10 million a year business, every time your management team comes to you, and every time you want to do a decision, I want you to plot it. And I want the plot to go very simply something like this. You're gonna say, okay, right now, I and my business need to make a new hire, right? I need to make a new VA hire. Well, is that hire going to be really risky? Is that hire going to be reversible? Well, no, it's not risky, and yes, it's reversible. Great, how about is this hire also high potential impact? Yes, it is. Well, that means we should definitely take this action. And every time you have one of your management team come to you or one of your employees come to you and ask you if you should make a decision, I want you to ask them the same thing. Is it reversible? Is it risky? And is it high impact? And depending on their output, that's when you determine if you should make the decision or not. Most of the things in life we do are really a series of finding the two to three decisions every single year, that if we make them, our entire life gets easier. A lot of people confuse speed with forward momentum. Well, you could really quickly move into a circle if you don't actually prioritize what your decision making is. And so maybe this framework will be useful for you guys like it is for me. The truth of the fact is, in business, more money, more problems, is just a Jay-Z song. That's not a reality. At first, I think you have to chase your $10 million in sales relentlessly. That is where you guys should be pushing to. At about that $10 million in sales mark, life gets a little bit easier. At $100,000 in sales, you got a job. At a million dollars in sales, you have profitability one month and a loss the next month. At $10 million in sales, you've hit that top 1% of businesses. And usually you have enough margin in a business to ensure some sort of survivability. Your survivability rate at 10 million is 60% more than your survivability rate at $1 million. Now, I have one more hot take for you on this first one. So my hot take here is just this. If you don't have an assistant, you are one. All right, number two. So first, we've got speed. The faster you move, the bigger your bank account. Second, we've got delegate, or what I call how to win by getting other people to do things for you. Now, this one's really, really important. And right about now is usually when really brilliant minds say something like Warren Buffett, which is if we all hire people that are smaller than we are, we become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hire people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants. There's two problems with that idea. Who goes, yeah, I wanna hire a bunch of people who are a little dumber and less experienced and not as good as I am. Nobody, of course not. It's already miserable enough running a business. You wanna hire people that are better than you. But the first problem becomes, how do you know when to hire somebody in your business, especially at a lot of the revenue levels you guys are at? I think that not enough companies use this model, which is called the revenue per employee ratio. So how many of you all actually know what your revenue per employee is in either your business before the franchise or in this franchise? If you don't, it's super easy to calculate. What is your total revenue divided by number of employees? Now what's interesting about this is there's lots of ways to slice and dice it by industry. But at a $10 million a year business with 15 to 30 employees, you're looking at about 300,000 to 600,000 in revenue per employee. This is extremely healthy. Most businesses need somewhere between upwards of $50,000 per employee for the business to be profitable. At a million dollar business, you need five or 10 employees typically. These are cross-industry standards, which means that those employees are doing about 100K to 200K in revenue. The other cool thing about when you start measuring your business like this is you know per employee then what their output is and if it's worth it. And I usually don't use contractors on this. I usually only use full-time employees so your outsourced VA won't count. Now the interesting part about this, you need a lot less employees than you probably think. So what happens in big business kind of like government is the people underneath you start to think that the more power they have is not revenue, it's actually number of direct reports or budget. Since you guys are just starting out, I really want you to think about it differently. As other people come into your team functions, you should consider that the more power they have is because of the revenue that they drive. Who cares how your team size is? In fact, if your team size is smaller, maybe I want to pay you guys more because the real power is how much money do you not only bring in overall but how much money do you bring in and keep, aka profit. One of my lines at my company that we say a lot is every problem you have is a who, not a how problem. You guys have probably heard this before. Who, not how, also incredible book, could have been a one-liner, but the idea is really, hey, okay, instead of thinking how do I do this task? How do I go market my pinks location or my window cleaning location better? Instead of trying to tackle that problem yourself, what would be a better way to do it? I don't know, probably do something nice for one of the other franchisees who's crushing it in their location and ask them how they do it, right? But the problem with this idea of every problem you have is a who, not a how problem is that people usually think every problem is a who to employ, not a how to do it problem. And if you think that way, you'll have 100-person business or a 10-person problem. And how we actually want to structure our business, especially this early on, which is really interesting for you guys to think about this when you start, is that every single employee that you add adds a complexity layer, something like this. Right now we got you. The more people that you add in your business, the more complex this business gets. And in fact, in most instances, people don't realize that every single hire does not make your life easier, it does quite the opposite. Every single hire that you have adds a layer of complexity, which eventually has cost, decrease of profit, and also more work inside of a business. So we want to think like Craigslist, which Craigslist revenue is $694 million. And I think this was like 2022 numbers, but they have 50 employees. The revenue per employee is $13.8 million. So with every new action that you have in your business, how can you get those employees to be worth more to you? When you have a painter that is going to paint a house, how can you incentivize them properly so instead of needing a painter to paint and also one to go canvas the neighborhood, they do two and one at the same time. They just take 20 minutes to go do the other. How can you start thinking about maximizing revenue per individual? Whether you like Elon Musk or not, the guy fired 80% of Twitter, 6,000 people, and the company's still running today. Now, the revenue is down. You could say that's because of his firing changes, or you could say that's because of what's happening in media and advertising today. But it's not down 80%, which means that businesses, if we allow them to continue to spiral out of control with employees, can become a problem. Now, so if you're with me and you're like, okay, I know that I need great people, but I want to make sure I have great people who have the right revenue per individual. How do we find great people, right? I have two hiring playbooks that I thought I'd share with you. First, pretty easy. Create a list of the companies that you admire most in your space. So let's say companies that you just think, hey, my competitor's amazing because he's got way more Google reviews than I do, and he's been in business for 15 years, so let's see what they're doing. Or maybe you're like, gosh, this company looks like they're doing 10 or 20 million in revenue, I'm at three to five million dollars in revenue, I want to figure out how to copy their homework. And instead of going after the top guy at that company, which is often what people do, well, let's go steal the president, let's go steal the head of the company, I like to go right below that. See if you can find a solid number two, give them a trial, and help them, and have them become your operator for your business. Now, that's a lot more work. If you want the fast button, it's find recruiters that are specialists in your area, local to you. You will spend a decent amount of time trying to find recruiters who are the best in sales, which you guys probably need somebody in, that are the best in operating in your individual areas, but if you find a great recruiter and you get to know them, they will serve you over the long term, they won't have to sit on your balance sheet, meaning you won't have to pay them a salary every single month, they're expensive up front, but they also have a recapture feature, usually, if they don't actually supply somebody for you. So, for instance, we have recruiters in every single industry that we run operators for. So, if I'm gonna go get an operator for a tech company, I got a guy. That tech company recruiter is gonna go out and find me that tech CEO, no matter where they're located across the country. If I need a general manager for a trade services business inside of Texas, specifically Austin, I got another guy. And I make sure that the way that I pay them is based off of a success fee, and they really get their nut of it, the main portion six months after their person has still stayed on job. Now, a lot of times, you guys are going from the star player, somewhere you are, you're playing the whole basketball game, to a player coach, right? To the scale up timeline in your business, where not only are you the one actually operating the business, but you're learning how to run entire teams. Or, maybe like me, you're continuing to scale up. You're going from one franchise to three franchises to 100 of them, right? The problem is that the best people, they only wanna work for the best. And so, I can get you the best recruiters in the world, you can have the best recruiters in the world, but if you can't find enough good people, you gotta look here first, and this is a little bit of tough love. You gotta ask yourself, am I the type of person that top talent wants to work for? Because let me tell you something, mathematically, how many people can be top 10%? Well, only 10% of the people. If you do not sell people a dream that is bigger than theirs, if you do not give them an umbrella so wide that they can see themselves fitting underneath it despite any storm, you're never gonna attract good talent. And so, I think it's really important that you guys are watching stuff like this, because what does that tell me? It tells me that every single day, you're standing in front of that mirror, and you're getting a little bit better. Most people will not do this, most people think they've got it all figured out, and when something goes wrong in business, most people say, it's their fault, it's their fault, it's their fault. Here's the truth of the matter, it's always your fault. It's your business, it's your cash, it's always going to be your fault. So, if we believe the best people will decide if you win or lose, first we gotta determine what the best is. So we kinda know how to find people now. We've determined that we wanna have the right type of people there, but how do we determine what best is? Well, at our business, we call this a cheetah or a house cat model. The two are not the same. Both a cat, but big difference. The problem with most companies are, they don't know the difference between the two. And so you have to define this. At Contrarian Thinking, in our report codes, we say winners have spots, not stripes. Here's what a winner looks like. We have a definition of what a winner looks like at Contrarian Thinking. I highly recommend you guys have this too. So when you go out and hire your first salesperson, and somebody else on your team interviews them, you better be able to say, oh hey, do they have spots or stripes? And your team better know what that looks like. And they better say, oh yeah, they have spots. Why? Well, they're already employed by our top competitor. You know, they wanted that top competitor because they took it from a 5% market share to a 40% market share. They already did the job that we're hiring for right now. And they wanna bring a bunch of other people with them. This guy says he's got a few other salespeople. He wants to bring them on board with us. And in fact, we probably won't have to do any more recruiting if we do this one hire right. Now I take it a step farther and use something called a hiring strategy matrix. You guys don't have to use the same one at all, but this is how I think about it. First, I wanna go with known talent. So let's just say that you're hiring for a head of marketing. And that head of marketing, I know them personally from another company. That's a check one. If instead Samuel, who works for me, knows them, that's not gonna be green, that's gonna be orange. And if nobody knows them, that's red. Then we've got proven talent. And proven talent is essentially like, hey, they've already done this job before. It might be like, hey, they did a job kinda similar to this before. And then we go through these additional levers all the way down to, is the company size the same? And is the problem set the same? So the proven problem set would be something like, hey, I need a head of marketing. The reason I need a head of marketing is because I need to increase my localized ad sales. So this other person didn't do an incredible PR strategy at the last firm in order to get a bunch of awareness. That would be nice, but that's not what we need. They just did a great ad strategy. And you replicate the same thing by hiring somebody who's already done the job. Now, the third thing that we need after we're fast and we think about how to get the right type of people here for delegation. I wanna talk about now, how do we find those right people and how do we move things off of our plate? And for this, I use something called the 1-3-1 rule. So the 1-3-1 rule I stole from a friend of mine, Dan Martell. And Dan Martell explains it like this. At every single company, you, the leader, are the top of that bottle right there. You guys have heard the term bottleneck, right? The bottleneck on top. Well, actually that's your fault. If things aren't getting done because you don't have enough time and everybody's coming to you, which happens to me often, we gotta shoot the top of that bottle off and get to a portion where we are no longer limited by the senior leaders because of our inability to inspire, to properly delegate, and to oversee the people that come underneath us. So how do we do this? Well, let me tell you a story really quickly. So we had a member of our team and the member of the team basically had an issue in one part of the business. In this particular instance, that part of the business was hiring. They couldn't find top talent, which is usually the problem in most businesses. And so this senior executive came to me, let's call her Carol. Carol came to me and basically said, I can't find anybody for these roles. It's super hard, the market's super difficult right now. We're not paying enough money. You know, nobody's answering our ads on Indeed or our ads on LinkedIn. And I have no idea how to hire. And what is your original gut reaction as a leader? You go, well, okay, how can I help? And you start immediately coming up with ideas, right? Of course, but using the one, three, one, you instead say this, hmm, I have no idea. How do you think we should solve it? And then they go, well, I don't know because that's why I came to you because I'm not sure what the answer is and I don't know what to do next. And you would say, okay. So I said to Carol, I'm like, come back to me with the one, three, one. At which point your leadership or members of your team are probably gonna say something like this. I don't have time. I don't have time to do a one, three, one. I just need help right now. This is a serious issue. If I had time to strategize, I wouldn't be here. And you say that's, I don't take problems unless you one, three, one them. Because what are you doing? You're training your people not to allow you to become a bottleneck and you're showing them that you have enough respect and that you have enough belief in them for them to figure it out. So Carol comes back. And the next day, instead of even giving the one, three, one what happens? This happens nine times out of 10. They just go, okay, nevermind, I'm good. I figured it out. And you go, great. Because most people do not have their own decision-making frameworks. You have to give them to them. Now, one, three, one means this. One, I have a specific problem. I can't hire for this head of marketing role. It's not working. Nobody's responding. Okay, that's a specific problem. As opposed to, I can't hire for this role. I don't have time to do onboarding. This other person is having this issue. You get one problem. Then I want three viable options. So Carol might say something like, all right, I want to hire this recruiter. They cost $25,000. I was thinking that we could put 50 or 100 bucks in ad spend behind this role on Indeed and see if it works. And I was also thinking I could attend this marketing conference. I bet there'll be a ton of head of marketing there. Then with each of those three viable options, I have them give me a budget, a timeline, and then lastly, I have them give me their recommendation. Which one do you like? Now, the origination of this is actually a more complex formula, but it was used by presidents. So during the presidential briefing, they would say, give me a problem, give me options, pros, cons, plus your recommendation. That's what you're gonna have your people do. And then I also learned from Dan something called the 5,550,000, which is for frontline employees, if you ever have an issue in front of you and you can solve it with 50 bucks, solve it. Don't talk to me, don't talk to any other managers, just solve it. And then within a week of doing that, make sure you let your manager know that you solved something for 50 bucks and what it was. What does that allow you to do? That allows you as manager or the manager underneath you to say, ooh, you were hungry, so you bought something for 50 bucks. That's probably not the best decision making. Let's tweak that. And then for managers, there was another level, which is, hey, if you can fix it for 500 bucks, don't talk to me. And then for leaders, $50,000. Now, this could be $5, 50 bucks, 500 bucks. This could be 10, 100 bucks and 1,000 bucks. But the point of it is you are allowing your team to start making decisions on their own, which is what gets rid of the bottleneck. The biggest reasons that companies don't grow is because the skillset of the manager is not sufficient enough for the company to grow. Every time my companies hit some sort of baseline and we can't seem to punch through, that's a me problem. I use two terms when I think about employees. This is probably not very PC. But what do you think is easier to find? A donkey or a unicorn? I'm gonna go with the donkey, right? There's donkeys all around. The thing is, we are all told, you gotta hire great people, right? You don't wanna hire small people or you have a company of midgets. The truth of the matter is, unicorns are hard to find and donkeys are super easy to find. We're in trade services and small businesses. We are not Apple and Amazon and Google who can have foosball tables for every single person, who can pay them top dollar for everything that they do, who hire from Harvard and Stanford and who got so much VC capital that they just burn it whenever they feel like it. Not us. Be a nice problem to have, not a problem. The cool thing about donkeys though, they're sturdy, they're reliable, they're easier to find, they can go a long distance, they can carry a heavy burden. And so, you gotta have processes so good, even donkeys can win races versus unicorns. And there's a couple really easy ways to do that that you're already getting because you're part of a group like this, which is, first of all, what gets tracked grows, right? And so Peter Druckerism is what gets measured gets managed. When I have the people that I'm hiring, my revenue per employee, I take revenue per employee to a degree that is almost irrational. And this is similar to what Sam Walton does, which is I take it down to the individual employee level. How much revenue do I think they drive? Individually, as much KPI and direct report interference as I can determine. Because the problem is, my buddy Eamon gave me this graph, and this is what most CEOs' life feels like. Monday, I'm supposed to be closing deals, but Tuesday, there's a giant fire drill. So I don't really know what I'm gonna be doing on Tuesday. Wednesday, writing copies, sending emails. Thursday, customer support, but giant fire drill. Friday, I'm supposed to be sourcing deals, but giant fire drill. And so because we've created this crazy bottleneck, we have no ability to support a big enough funnel to come in, and we got fire drills everywhere we go. But that gets streamlined by making sure that you have a bunch of processes for the right amount of people, and then you automate as much of your business as you humanly can. Most people talk about building businesses based off A players, and I think that's lovely. I would love every single one of my business to be A players. The problem is, it's really expensive, and it's hard to do in the beginning. So instead of A players, we want A roles. And how Eamon talks about this is, when you hire somebody in a role in your business, I want you to ask them two questions. The first question is, is this person kind of God-given in their ability to execute on this role? Let me give you an example. There's somebody on my team named Lindsey. Lindsey is what is categorized in personality tests as a cheerleader. She is very happy. She's always got a smile on her face. She's always laughing. Lindsey would make an exceptional greeter or customer service rep. If I met her and I was hiring for that specific role, I'd be like, oh my God, Lindsey was made for that. Lindsey is also incredibly logistically focused and organized. And so she heads production for us. Can you imagine what it's like managing production for a media team with a bunch of millennials and Zoomers who are creatives and so don't like deadlines and also don't like people to tell them what to do and also go into holes editing stuff and writing stuff forever? Lindsey's job is basically donkey herder, for myself included. And in order for that job to actually work, that means that she has to be nice. She has to be kind of funny. She's got to be on top of them. Now, Lindsey is an A player in this role, but technically if we just have the right role, you don't have to be an A player if we pick the perfect role for you. And I think about this like airlines, for instance. Sam Walton talks about this too, but essentially the difference in the number one performing baggage handler, right? The people who load up and down your bags. And the mid baggage handler is like what? 20% difference? Like your most premium baggage handler cannot really marketly make much of a difference on your company. Pilot, even your best commercial pilot, like your top, top 1% commercial pilot versus an average but good commercial pilot, not really that much different. But your top engineer at a tech company could be 2,000% better than the mid performer. Your top salesperson at your company could be 200% better than your mid sales company. So we need to understand in what roles do we really need A, A players versus not. I'd hazard a guess that your number one top performing painter or window cleaner cannot be 200% better than your mid performing one. And so we pay accordingly to make sure that we have not A players, but A roles. Really, really important. Now the fourth thing I want to talk about today is what I call trigger. Or in particular, my nail and foot framework. What does this mean? It means that I don't actually believe in demographics when we're going after who we sell things to. I believe in finding pain points. And let me explain to you what that means. This is how we've built most of our businesses to seven, eight, and nine figures. So when you step on a nail, what happens? Well, massive pain, right? You have a massive pain or trigger point in your foot. See, there was an instance in one of my businesses where we almost ran out of cash. So the head operator of that business missed some financial calculations, misaccounted for what was in the bank account, and also didn't realize that he had debt. And so because he had some debt, he had to keep some capital on the balance sheet. All of this culminated into me finding out we were three weeks away from being out of cash. And I only found it out because I found this inside of the business. This business probably would have gone out of business if I hadn't found it. Now, what's interesting is when this happened in my business, and you guys all know cashflow is king, so it'll happen, I called my dad and he said the best line about entrepreneurship. He said, when you step on a nail, you don't stop to ask, who put it in there? Ponder why. Write an SOP. You pull the out. Then you pull some alcohol on it, stitch it up. When you're in pain, you deal with it and you deal with it right now and in that moment. Now, there's two lessons in business for this. One is sometimes you just have to do the hard thing right now, immediately. And this will become really important to you guys up until you get to that $10 million mark. And probably even after that, there will be multiple moments, Stephen's had them too, where you're like, oh man, we're gonna run out of business. We're gonna run out of business tonight. We're gonna run out of money. Everybody's gonna realize I'm a failure. This is going to be an absolute nightmare. And in that moment, what most people do in today's day and age is they go, let me think about this. Let me take a minute, maybe do some self-care in the words of Zoomers and millennials. But I would say it's the opposite of that. We wanna pull the nail out of our foot. It sucks, you're in pain, but you signed up for this. Now, the flip side of that is most marketing is done wrong. Do you wanna know why our companies are so successful typically? It's this one thing. We actually believe in moments, like the moment you move, as opposed to demographics. Most people target clients like this. They say, my average client here at that one painter in Odessa is 30 to 37 years old. They live in the Austin metro area. Well, that wouldn't make sense. They live in the Odessa metro area. They're employed. They're about 70% female, 30% male, at which point my favorite thing to do to my portfolio companies is go, I have actually never met a 30 to 37 year old who's 70% female and 30% male. Is this a real thing? I mean, maybe these days it could be. But the moral of the story is this doesn't actually exist. You know what's way better to target your clients is to figure out when is the nail in the foot so painful that they need your services. You don't need to sell them. They're already looking for the thing that you have and want to buy it from you. It's not the type of foot. Nobody cares what type of foot it's in. It's where the nail is. And so let's think about it for some of your businesses. Let's say you are a window cleaning company. Well, I did some initial research and found there are three main times when people use window cleaning companies. When they move or decorate their house, when the changing of the seasons happens, and also when they have parties or special events. Now, I haven't done enough research on this and run enough people through this model to know, but if this is my first thesis, then what I'm going to do is every time I have a client, I'm going to figure out not how they found us. That's typically what people do, right? They go, do you find us on the Facebook ads? Did you find us by texting a friend? Okay, that's fine. But one step further, why did you need us today? Why did you need us? Is it because your friends are coming over and you kind of want to show them how lovely your place is? Like this is a little bit of a neighborly ego boost. Is it because we just had a massive amount of snow over the winter and your windows get a little bit sooty because you've got your fireplace on all winter and so you can't really clean it because it was cold all winter. But now that the freeze has passed, it's window cleaning time. Or is it, oh man, we tend to get these transactional one-off customers every time they move. Most companies do not find the trigger point. They try to find this amorphous, half-aged, half-sexed thing that is no real type of human. So here's how this works. If you want to hit $10 million in sales, you got to do four things. You got to move way faster, probably than you are today and than you are comfortable with if you want to achieve eight digits. You've got to have leverage, which means humans inside of your business that want to be under that umbrella so big that your dream is bigger than theirs. And you've got to have a delegation that works in order to drive those humans to the highest revenue level possible for you and the business. And then finally, you got to do more in sales by finding people when they need the thing that you are selling, not trying to convince them that they need the thing that you are selling. And if you do those four things, this is how you go from thinking that running an empire looks like this, which is like, great, I got my franchise, I got my business, I'm kicking up, I'm flying private, to realizing that it actually feels something like this, which is what I call an Indian private jet. And then finally, to operating more like this, which is an automated facility, a factory that has very few humans in it because you have leveraged speed and delegation so well that all you are doing is kind of walking around and you're seeing if there's dust anywhere in the business, which means checking in. One of the best ways that we oversee our employees, and I also learned this from my friend Damon, is we basically do a weekly, and in the beginning, you guys will have to do this probably daily, if not multiple times a day, spot checklist. Goes on the calendar, it's 10 minutes, and you're going in, you're spot checking in your factory or in your business, what is everybody doing? 10 minutes a day. You don't tell people that you're doing this 10 minutes a day, but what this does is it gives this omnipresence feeling to your team, like, oh, Cody's gonna find that, she's gonna find it, she's gonna find the dust, so I'm gonna find it first. And if you do all of those things, your path to 10 million will be faster than mine was. I didn't figure those things out as I talked to you guys about until I started buying businesses. And so if you compare the fact that you've already bought a set toolbox from a bunch of other people who have done this for 10,000 hours and bled for it, and then you layer the top four on top of it, I think you get to eight figures probably a lot faster than I did.