Discover the 4 essential steps to build a profitable online business and make $10,000 per month! Whether you're a beginner or looking to scale, these actionable tips will guide you through creating sustainable income.
#online business
#make money online
#passive income
#business growth
#$10k month
#entrepreneurship
#digital marketing
#work from home
#business tips
#financial freedom
Must Watch if you want to boost your earnings and work smarter!
Don't forget to Like, Follow & Share for more business growth strategies
#online business
#make money online
#passive income
#business growth
#$10k month
#entrepreneurship
#digital marketing
#work from home
#business tips
#financial freedom
Must Watch if you want to boost your earnings and work smarter!
Don't forget to Like, Follow & Share for more business growth strategies
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LearningTranscript
00:00There are four things you need to know to build a 10 million dollar a year business. I should know
00:04because now I own half of this business which does 30 million dollars a year and a portfolio
00:08that does nine figures a year. I am going to break down live for a couple hundred of our
00:14franchisees exactly how you can use four quadrants to increase the amount of money you make,
00:22decrease the effort that it takes, and speed up the return of money to you in your business.
00:27And also secret, it actually works to help get friends, relationships, and just about anything
00:33else that you want. We have lessons from billionaires, we have lessons from hundred
00:37millionaires, and we have a bunch of frameworks that are going to make your life easier, your
00:40dollar return faster, and a little bit less miserably. I'm calling this the four things you need to build
00:46a 10 million dollar a year business. And the reason why I say 10 million dollar a year is because this
00:51is wild. You all right now are already the top seven percent. Only seven percent of Americans
00:57actually own a business. Only 10 percent of businesses in existence will ever get to one
01:02million dollars in sales. And only 0.4 percent of all businesses will ever get to ten million dollars
01:09in sales. So you're already breathing rare air, but it's actually incredibly difficult to get to that
01:14$10 million mark. Now the first rule is a pretty simple rule, except very rarely executed on. And
01:23it is speed. It is this very uncomfortable statement that your bank account is actually a reflection of
01:28your speed. The faster you are, the more money that you'll make. And I think about this in a few
01:33different ways. I was going to draw it up on the screen, but I'll just show it here. You know, the life
01:37that I have today is actually a result of not what I did this year, last year, or the year prior.
01:42It's a result of what I did like 10 years ago. And the things that you do today are going to determine
01:46the life that you have 10 years from now. Waiting is actually really expensive. And look at this
01:51monetarily. Every month you wait to take action on whatever you think or really know you need to take
01:58action on your business costs you thousands of dollars. So when I look at my net worth, if I would
02:04have started buying businesses, for instance, five or 10 years prior, my net worth would have hit a
02:11peak and started to compound to a level that now will be hard for me to make up in 20 years because
02:18of how fast compounding works. So every month you wait actually costs you a lot of money. And this
02:24solidified from me from reading this book, which is called Made in America by Sam Walton. You guys can
02:29read along with us. My whole company is reading this book right now. And it's a story of a man who
02:35created arguably one of the most successful retail franchises in the world. What's interesting
02:41about Sam is he actually started as a franchisee to a company called Ben Franklin, if you guys didn't
02:46know. And when I looked at why Sam was successful, I found something really interesting and relevant for
02:53all of us. It was the same thing that my mentor, Bill Perkins, told me. So Bill, who's damn near close
02:59to a billionaire? When I asked him why he's so successful, why he's gotten rich in so many ways,
03:04he basically said this. He said, I move faster than everybody else. By the time most people have
03:10gone to their investment committee, their board, their employees, pondered it, done a pie chart on
03:16it, I've already started, made three mistakes and found a better way. But I realized that Bill Perkins
03:21isn't alone in this because Sam Walton has the same idea. He calls his a strong bias towards action.
03:26And what's fascinating is then when somebody says something to me like a strong bias towards action,
03:31I go, what exactly does that mean? And you got to read this because it's so good.
03:35Sam basically says, talking about his committee meetings at his company,
03:39we get into some of the doggondest knockdown drag outs you have ever seen, but we have a rule.
03:43We never leave an item hanging. We'll make a discussion and a decision in that meeting,
03:48even if it's wrong. And sometimes it is, but this part's fascinating to me. But then once we make
03:54that decision on Friday, we expect it to be acted on in all the stores on Saturday. We guard against
04:01people saying, let's think about it. We make a decision and then we act on it. This is incredibly
04:07rare, not that complicated, but incredibly rare. So we started something at my company called the
04:1224 hour rule, which means typically in companies, you have the seven day rule. You know how you guys
04:16probably have with some of your employees. At this moment you go, yeah, I'll get back to you on that
04:21next week, right? I'll get back to you on that next week. That is a very normal American response.
04:25And yet that response is where your competition eats your lunch. I mean, you don't have to be
04:31better. You don't have to be richer. You don't have to be smarter. You can just be faster. And if you
04:35think this is something that was just Sam Walton many years ago, or, you know, Bill Perkins in a hedge
04:41fund, look at what Jeff Bezos says. He says he stole Sam's homework. He understood that overthinking
04:47things can lead to missed opportunities. So instead he encouraged experimentation and quick
04:52decision-making, even if it meant making mistakes along the way. And I want to push this upon you
04:57guys, but there's usually a thought here. It's, we have a saying at contrarian thinking, we try to
05:02collapse decades into days. So instead of trying to think about, hey, how could I achieve my goal in 10
05:08years or three years? What would it look like if I only had six months to achieve my goal? And can you
05:13get your management team to think that same way? If you can, you are going to ultimately either right
05:19now, you might be thinking this, go, excuse me, but, or your management team is going to go, excuse
05:24me, but. And at that point, the next comment's going to go something like this. What if I make a decision
05:29that I can't reverse, right? Yeah, I'm fast, but I made a bunch of fast, dumb decisions, which is why I
05:35use something called the speed reversibility matrix. Basically left-hand side, you have how risky is it,
05:42low to high, whatever bet or decision you're trying to make. And how reversible is it? Yes,
05:47it's reversible to know it's not reversible. And to really simplify this, what you're basically
05:52looking for is all the things in front of you. I mean, how many of you guys feel like, yeah,
05:56I don't have enough to do. I could finish my entire to-do list. There's no problem. Prioritization
06:00isn't an issue. I've never met somebody who runs a business that feels that way. And so you've
06:04actually got to figure out what are your quick wins? What are your big, but probably really
06:10worthwhile projects? What are tasks that you should probably never even touch? And then what
06:15are long slogs? Those projects that you have to do over time, but you know that they're going to be
06:21hard and they're not going to be reversible. And I want to walk through a few of these today. Now,
06:27if I'm looking at a virtual assistant from this model, what am I thinking? Well, is this a reversible
06:31decision? Yes, very much so. Is this a really risky decision? Now, I don't know, 900 bucks a month,
06:38you guys could probably afford that. So what does that mean? That means that I have a decision that
06:43is easily reversible, that is also potentially low risk, and which could have a high impact. I should
06:49probably make that decision. And the problem with most of our decisions in life is we think that
06:53there's only one way to have fast impact and also to have high impact. And that's often not the case.
07:01If you, like me, want a $10 million a year business, every time your management team comes to you,
07:07and every time you want to do a decision, I want you to plot it. And I want the plot to go very
07:12simply something like this. You're going to say, okay, right now, I and my business need to make
07:20a new hire, right? I need to make a new VA hire. Well, is that hire going to be really risky?
07:28Is that hire going to be reversible? Well, no, it's not risky. And yes, it's reversible.
07:36Great. How about is this hire also high potential impact? Yes, it is. Well, that means we should
07:43definitely take this action. And every time you have one of your management team come to you or
07:48one of your employees come to you and ask you if you should make a decision, I want you to ask them
07:52the same thing. Is it reversible? Is it risky? And is it high impact? And depending on their output,
08:02that's when you determine if you should make the decision or not. Most of the things in life we do
08:06are really a series of finding the two to three decisions every single year that if we make them,
08:11our entire life gets easier. A lot of people confuse speed with forward momentum. Well, you could really
08:18quickly move into a circle if you don't actually prioritize what your decision making is. And so
08:23maybe this framework will be useful for you guys like it is for me. The truth of the fact is in
08:29business, more money, more problems is just a Jay-Z song. That's not a reality. At first, I think you
08:36have to chase your $10 million in sales relentlessly. That is where you guys should be pushing to. At about
08:42that $10 million in sales mark, life gets a little bit easier. At $100,000 in sales, you got a job. At
08:49a million dollars in sales, you have profitability one month and a loss the next month. At $10 million
08:56sales, you've hit that top 1% of businesses. And usually you have enough margin in a business to
09:02ensure some sort of survivability. Your survivability rate at 10 million is 60% more than your survivability
09:08rate at $1 million. Now, I have one more hot take for you on this first one. So my hot take here is
09:14just this. If you don't have an assistant, you are one. All right, number two. So first, we've got
09:20speed. Faster you move, the bigger your bank account. Second, we've got delegate or what I call how to win
09:26by getting other people to do things for you. Now, this one's really, really important. And right about
09:31now is usually when really brilliant minds say something like Warren Buffett, which is if we all hire
09:36people that are smaller than we are, we become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hire people
09:41who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants. There's two problems with that
09:47idea. Who goes, yeah, I want to hire a bunch of people dumber and less experienced and not as good
09:52as I am. Nobody. Of course not. It's already miserable enough running a business. You want to
09:56hire people that are better than you. But the first problem becomes how do you know when to hire somebody
10:00in your business, especially at a lot of the revenue levels you guys are at? I think that not
10:05enough companies use this model, which is called the revenue per employee ratio. So how many of you
10:11all actually know what your revenue per employee is in either your business before the franchise or in
10:17this franchise? If you don't, it's super easy to calculate. What is your total revenue divided by
10:22number of employees? Now, what's interesting about this is there's lots of ways to slice and dice it by
10:27industry. But at a $10 million a year business with 15 to 30 employees, you're looking at about
10:32$300,000 to $600,000 in revenue per employee. This is extremely healthy. Most businesses need
10:38somewhere between upwards of $50,000 per employee for the business to be profitable. At a million
10:45dollar business, you need five or 10 employees. Typically, these are cross-industry standards,
10:50which means that those employees are doing about $100K to $200K in revenue. The other cool thing about
10:55when you start measuring your business like this is you know per employee then what their output is and if
11:02it's worth it. And I usually don't use contractors on this. I usually only use full-time employees so
11:07your outsourced VA won't count. Now, the interesting part about this, you need a lot less employees than
11:14you probably think. So what happens in big business kind of like government is the people underneath you
11:20start to think that the more power they have is not revenue. It's actually number of direct reports or
11:28budget. Since you guys are just starting out, I really want you to think about it differently.
11:32As other people come into your team functions, you should consider that the more power they have
11:37is because of the revenue that they drive. Who cares how your team size is? In fact, if your team size
11:43is smaller, maybe I want to pay you guys more because the real power is how much money do you not
11:48only bring in overall, but how much money do you bring in and keep, aka profit. One of my lines at my
11:54company that we say a lot is every problem you have is a who, not a how problem. You guys have
11:58probably heard this before. Who, not how, also incredible book. Could have been a one-liner.
12:03But the idea is really, hey, okay, instead of thinking, how do I do this task? How do I go market
12:10my Pink's location or my window cleaning location better? Instead of trying to tackle that problem
12:16yourself, what would be a better way to do it? I don't know, probably do something nice for one of
12:20the other franchisees who's crushing it in their location and ask them how they do it, right?
12:25But the problem with this idea of every problem you have is a who, not a how problem is that people
12:30usually think every problem is a who to employ, not a how to do it problem. And if you think that
12:36way, you'll have a hundred person business for a 10 person problem. And how we actually want to
12:40structure our business, especially this early on, which is really interesting for you guys to think
12:45about this when you start, is that every single employee that you add, adds a complexity layer,
12:51something like this. Right now we got you. The more people that you add in your business,
12:57the more complex this business gets. And in fact, in most instances, people don't realize that every
13:04single hire does not make your life easier. It does quite the opposite. Every single hire that you
13:11have adds a layer of complexity, which eventually has cost, decrease of profit, and also more work
13:19inside of a business. So we want to think like Craigslist, which Craigslist revenue is $694 million.
13:26And I think this was like 2022 numbers, but they have 50 employees. The revenue per employee is $13.8
13:33million. So with every new action that you have in your business, how can you get those employees
13:40to be worth more to you? When you have a painter that is going to paint a house, how can you incentivize
13:46them properly? So instead of needing a painter to paint and also one to go canvas the neighborhood,
13:50they do two and one at the same time. They just take 20 minutes to go do the other. How can you start
13:56thinking about maximizing revenue per individual? Whether you like Elon Musk or not, the guy fired 80%
14:03of Twitter, 6,000 people, and the company's still running today. Now, the revenue is down. You could
14:10say that's because of his firing changes, or you could say that's because of what's happening in
14:14media and advertising today. But it's not down 80%, which means that businesses, if we allow them
14:20continue to spiral out of control with employees, can become a problem. Now, so if you're with me and
14:25you're like, okay, I know that I need great people, but I want to make sure I have great people who have
14:30the right revenue per individual, how do we find great people, right? I have two hiring playbooks
14:38that I thought I'd share with you. First, pretty easy. Create a list of the companies that you admire
14:43most in your space. So let's say companies that you just think, hey, my competitor is amazing because
14:49he's got way more Google reviews than I do, and he's been in business for 15 years. So let's see what
14:54they're doing. Or maybe you're like, gosh, this company looks like they're doing 10 or 20 million in
14:59revenue. I'm at three to five million dollars in revenue. I want to figure out how to copy their
15:03homework. And instead of going after the top guy at that company, which is often what people do,
15:09well, let's go steal the president, you know, let's go steal the head of the company. I like to go right
15:14below that. See if you can find a solid number two, give them a trial and help them and have them
15:20become your operator for your business. Now, that's a lot more work. If you want the fast button,
15:25it's find recruiters that are specialists in your area local to you. You will spend a decent amount
15:32of time trying to find recruiters who are the best in sales, which you guys probably need somebody in,
15:37that are the best in operating in your individual areas. But if you find a great recruiter and you get
15:42to know them, they will serve you over the long term. They won't have to sit on your balance sheet,
15:47meaning you won't have to pay them a salary every single month. They're expensive up front,
15:51but they also have a recapture feature, usually, if they don't actually supply somebody for you.
15:57So for instance, we have recruiters in every single industry that we run operators for. So if I'm going
16:03to go get an operator for a tech company, I got a guy. That tech company recruiter is going to go
16:08out and find me that tech CEO, no matter where they're located across the country. If I need a general
16:14manager for a trade services business inside of Texas, specifically Austin, I got another guy.
16:19And I make sure that the way that I pay them is based off of a success fee, and they really get
16:23their nut of it, the main portion, six months after their person has still stayed on job.
16:28Now, a lot of times, you guys are going from the star player somewhere you are,
16:34you're playing the whole basketball game, to a player coach, right? To the scale up timeline in
16:41your business, where not only are you the one actually operating the business, but you're learning how to
16:46run entire teams. Or maybe like me, you're continuing to scale up. You're going from one
16:50franchise to three franchises to a hundred of them, right? The problem is that the best people,
16:59they only want to work for the best. And so I can get you the best recruiters in the world.
17:04You can have the best recruiters in the world. But if you can't find enough good people,
17:10you got to look here first. And this is a little bit of tough love. You got to ask yourself,
17:14am I the type of person that top talent wants to work for? Because let me tell you something,
17:20mathematically, how many people can be top 10%? Well, only 10% of the people. If you do not sell
17:26people a dream that is bigger than theirs, if you do not give them an umbrella so wide that they can
17:32see themselves fitting underneath it, despite any storm, you're never going to attract good talent.
17:37And so I think it's really important that you guys are watching stuff like this,
17:40because what does that tell me? It tells me that every single day you're standing in front of that
17:44mirror and you're getting a little bit better. Most people will not do this. Most people think
17:48they've got it all figured out. And when something goes wrong in business, most people say it's their
17:53fault. It's their fault. It's their fault. Here's the truth of the matter. It's always your fault.
17:58It's your business. It's your cash. It's always going to be your fault. So if we believe the best
18:04people will decide if you win or lose, first, we got to determine what the best is. So we kind of
18:10know how to find people now. We've determined that we want to have the right type of people there.
18:16But how do we determine what best is? Well, at our business, we call this a cheater or a house cat
18:21model. The two are not the same. Both a cat, but big difference. The problem with most companies are
18:28they don't know the difference between the two. And so you have to define this. At Contrarian
18:33Thinking, in our port codes, we say winners have spots, not stripes. Here's what a winner looks
18:37like. We have a definition of what a winner looks like at Contrarian Thinking. I highly recommend you
18:42guys have this too. So when you go out and hire your first salesperson and somebody else on your
18:47team interviews them, you better be able to say, oh, hey, do they have spots or stripes? And your team
18:52better know what that looks like. And they better say, oh, yeah, they have spots. Why? Well, they're
18:56already employed by our top competitor. You know, they wanted that top competitor because they took it
19:01from a 5% market share to a 40% market share. They already did the job that we're hiring for
19:06right now. And they want to bring a bunch of other people with them. This guy says he's got a few other
19:11salespeople. He wants to bring them on board with us. And in fact, we probably won't have to do any
19:15more recruiting if we do this one hire right. Now, I take it a step farther and use something called
19:21a hiring strategy matrix. You guys don't have to use the same one at all, but this is how I think
19:26about it. First, I want to go with known talent. So let's just say that you're hiring for a head of
19:32marketing. And that head of marketing, I know them personally from another company. That's a check
19:37one. If instead Samuel, who works for me, knows them, that's not going to be green. That's going
19:42to be orange. And if nobody knows them, that's red. Then we've got proven talent. And proven talent
19:48is essentially like, hey, they've already done this job before. It might be like, hey, they did a job
19:53kind of similar to this before. And then we go through these additional levers all the way down
19:59to is the company size the same? And is the problem set the same? So the proven problem set would be
20:05something like, hey, I need a head of marketing. The reason I need a head of marketing is because
20:10I need to increase my localized ad sales. So this other person didn't do an incredible PR strategy
20:17at the last firm in order to get a bunch of awareness. That would be nice, but that's not what we need.
20:21They just did a great ad strategy. And you replicate the same thing by hiring somebody who's
20:27already done the job. Now, the third thing that we need after we're fast and we think about how to
20:34get the right type of people here or delegation, I want to talk about now how do we find those right
20:40people and how do we move things off of our plate? And for this, I use something called the
20:451-3-1 rule. So the 1-3-1 rule I stole from a friend of mine, Dan Martell. And Dan Martell
20:52explains it like this. At every single company, you, the leader, are at the top of that bottle
20:57right there. You guys have heard the term bottleneck, right? There's a bottleneck on top.
21:02Well, actually, that's your fault. If things aren't getting done because you don't have enough time and
21:07everybody's coming to you, which happens to me often, we got to shoot the top of that bottle off
21:13and get to a portion where we are no longer limited by the senior leaders because of our
21:19inability to inspire, to properly delegate, and to oversee the people that come underneath us.
21:27So how do we do this? Well, let me tell you a story really quickly. So we had a member of our team
21:31and the member of the team basically had an issue in one part of the business. In this particular
21:37instance, that part of the business was hiring. They couldn't find top talent, which is usually
21:43the problem in most businesses. And so this senior executive came to me. Let's call her Carol.
21:49Carol came to me and basically said, I can't find anybody for these roles. It's super hard. The
21:54market's super difficult right now. We're not paying enough money. Nobody's answering our ads
22:01on Indeed or our ads on LinkedIn. And I have no idea how to hire. And what is your original gut reaction
22:08as a leader? You go, well, okay, how can I help? And you start immediately coming up with ideas,
22:14right? Of course. But using the 131, you instead say this, hmm, I have no idea. How do you think we
22:23should solve it? And then they go, well, I don't know, because that's why I came to you, because I'm
22:26not sure what the answer is. And I don't know what to do next. And you say, okay. So I said to Carol,
22:31I'm like, come back to me with the 131. At which point your leadership or members of your team are
22:35probably going to say something like this. I don't have time. I don't have time to do a 131.
22:39I just need help right now. This is a serious issue. If I had time to strategize, I wouldn't
22:43be here. And you say, that's, I don't take problems unless you 131 them. Because what are
22:48you doing? You're training your people not to allow you to become a bottleneck. And you're showing
22:53them that you have enough respect and that you have enough belief in them for them to figure it out.
22:59So Carol comes back. And the next day, instead of even giving the 131, what happens?
23:05This happens nine times out of 10. They just go, okay, nevermind. I'm good. I figured it out.
23:10And you go, great. Because most people do not have their own decision-making frameworks. You have
23:15to give them to them. Now, 131 means this. One, I have a specific problem. I can't hire for this head
23:21of marketing role. It's not working. Nobody's responding. Okay. That's a specific problem. As
23:27opposed to, I can't hire for this role. I don't have time to do onboarding. This other person is having
23:33this issue. You get one problem. Then I want three viable options. So Carol might say something like,
23:39all right, I want to hire this recruiter. They cost $25,000. I was thinking that we could put
23:4550 or 100 bucks in ad spend behind this role on Indeed and see if it works. And I was also thinking
23:51I could attend this marketing conference. I bet there'll be a ton ahead of marketing there.
23:55Then with each of those three viable options, I have them give me a budget, a timeline. And then
24:01lastly, I have them give me their recommendation. Which one do you like? Now, the origination of this
24:07is actually a more complex formula, but it was used by presidents. So during the presidential briefing,
24:11they would say, give me a problem. Give me options, pros, cons, plus your recommendation.
24:18That's what you're going to have your people do. And then I also learned from Dan something called
24:22the 5,500, 50,000, which is for frontline employees, if you ever have an issue in front
24:28of you and you can solve it with 50 bucks, solve it. Don't talk to me. Don't talk to any other
24:33managers. Just solve it. And then within a week of doing that, make sure you let your manager know
24:39that you solved something for 50 bucks and what it was. What does that allow you to do? That allows
24:44you as manager or the manager underneath you to say, oh, you were hungry. So you bought something for
24:5050 bucks. That's probably not the best decision making. Let's tweak that. And then for managers,
24:53there was another level, which is, hey, if you can sit for 500 bucks, don't talk to me.
24:57And then for leaders, $50,000. Now, this could be $5, 50 bucks, 500 bucks. This could be 10,
25:05100 bucks, and 1,000 bucks. But the point of it is, you are allowing your team to start making
25:11decisions on their own, which is what gets rid of the bottleneck. The biggest reasons that companies
25:15don't grow is because the skill set of the manager is not sufficient enough for the company to grow.
25:21Every time my companies hit some sort of baseline and we can't seem to punch through, that's a me
25:28problem. I use two terms when I think about employees. This is probably not very PC. But
25:33what do you think is easier to find? A donkey or a unicorn? I'm going to go with a donkey, right?
25:39There's donkeys all around. The thing is, we are all told, you got to hire great people,
25:43right? You don't want to hire small people or you have a company of midgets. The truth of the
25:47matter is, unicorns are hard to find and donkeys are super easy to find. We are in trade services
25:55and small businesses. We are not Apple and Amazon and Google who can have foosball tables for every
26:00single person, who can pay them top dollar for everything that they do, who hire from Harvard
26:04and Stanford, and who got so much VC capital that they just burn it whenever they feel like it.
26:09Not us. Be a nice problem to have. Not a problem. The cool thing about donkeys, though, they're
26:15sturdy, they're reliable, they're easier to find, they can go a long distance, they can
26:19carry a heavy burden. And so you got to have processes so good, even donkeys can win races
26:26versus unicorns. And there's a couple really easy ways to do that, that you're already getting
26:31because you're part of a group like this, which is, first of all, what gets tracked grows,
26:35right? And so Peter Druckerism is what gets measured gets managed. When I have the people
26:42that I'm hiring, my revenue per employee, I take revenue per employee to a degree that is
26:47almost irrational. And this is similar to what Sam Walton does, which is I take it down to the
26:52individual employee level. How much revenue do I think they drive individually as much KPI and direct
26:59report interference as I can determine? Because the problem is my buddy Eamon gave me this graph.
27:06And this is what most CEOs life feels like. Monday, I'm supposed to be closing deals. But Tuesday,
27:13there's a giant fire drill. So I don't really know what I'm going to be doing on Tuesday. Wednesday,
27:17writing copies, sending emails. Thursday, customer support, but giant fire drill. Friday, I'm supposed
27:22to be sourcing deals, but giant fire drill. And so because we've created this crazy bottleneck,
27:27we have no ability to support a big enough funnel to come in, and we have fire drills everywhere we
27:33go. But that gets streamlined by making sure that you have a bunch of processes for the right amount
27:40of people, and then you automate as much of your business as you humanly can. Most people talk about
27:46building businesses based off A players. And I think that's lovely. I would love every single one
27:51of my business to be A players. The problem is it's really expensive and it's hard to do in the
27:56beginning. So instead of A players, we want A roles. And how Eamon talks about this is when you
28:02hire somebody in a role in your business, I want you to ask them two questions. The first question
28:07is, is this person like kind of God given in their ability to execute on this role? Let me give you
28:15an example. There's somebody on my team named Lindsay. Lindsay is what is categorized in personality
28:21tests as a cheerleader. She is very happy. She's got always got a smile on her face. She's always
28:27laughing. Lindsay would make an exceptional greeter or customer service rep. If I met her and I was
28:34hiring for that specific role, I'd be like, oh my God, Lindsay was made for that. Lindsay is also
28:38incredibly logistically focused and organized. And so she heads production for us. Can you imagine what
28:44it's like managing production for a media team with a bunch of millennials and Zoomers who are creatives
28:51and so don't like deadlines and also don't like people to tell them what to do and also go into
28:56holes editing stuff and writing stuff forever? Lindsay's job is basically donkey herder for myself
29:04included. And in order for that job to actually work, that means that she has to be nice. She has to be
29:09kind of funny and she's got to be on top of them. Now, Lindsay is an A player in this role, but
29:14technically if we just have the right role, you don't have to be an A player if we pick the perfect
29:20role for you. And I think about this like airlines, for instance. Sam Walton talks about this too, but
29:27essentially the difference in the number one performing baggage handler, right? The people who load up and
29:35down your bags and the mid baggage handler is like what? 20% difference? Like your most premium baggage
29:42handler cannot really markedly make much of a difference on your company. Pilot, even your best
29:49commercial pilot, like your top, top 1% commercial pilot versus an average but good commercial pilot,
29:56not really that much different. But your top engineer at a tech company could be 2,000% better
30:02than the mid-performer. Your top salesperson at your company could be 200% better than your mid-sales
30:09company. So we need to understand in what roles do we really need A players versus not. I'd hazard a
30:16guess that your number one top performing painter or window cleaner cannot be 200% better than your
30:23mid-performing one. And so we pay accordingly to make sure that we have not A players but A roles.
30:29That's really, really important. Now the fourth thing I want to talk about today is what I call
30:34trigger or in particular my nail and foot framework. What does this mean? It means that I don't actually
30:41believe in demographics when we're going after who we sell things to. I believe in finding pain points
30:47and let me explain to you what that means. This is how we've built most of our businesses
30:51to seven, eight, and nine figures. So when you step on a nail, what happens? Well, massive pain, right?
31:01You have a massive pain or trigger point in your foot. See, there was an instance in one of my
31:07businesses where we almost ran out of cash. So the head operator of that business missed some
31:12financial calculations, misaccounted for what was in the bank account, and also didn't realize that he
31:19had debt. And so because he had some debt, he had to keep some capital on the balance sheet.
31:24All of this culminated into me finding out we were three weeks away from being out of cash.
31:28And I only found it out because I found this inside of the business. This business probably
31:33would have gone out of business if I hadn't found it. Now what's interesting is when this happened in
31:36my business, and you guys all know cash flow is king, so it'll happen. I called my dad and he said
31:41the best line about entrepreneurship. He said, when you step on a nail, you don't stop to ask,
31:46who put it in there? Ponder why. Write an SOP. You pull the f**k out. Then you pull some alcohol on
31:53it, stitch it up. When you're in pain, you deal with it, and you deal with it right now and in
31:58that moment. Now there's two lessons in business for this. One is sometimes you just have to do the
32:03hard thing right now immediately. And this will become really important to you guys up until you
32:08get to that $10 million mark. And probably even after that, there will be multiple moments,
32:12Stephen's had them too, where you're like, oh man, we're going to run out of business. We're going to
32:17run out of business tonight. We're going to run out of money. Everybody's going to realize I'm a
32:21failure. This is going to be an absolute nightmare. And in that moment, what most people do in today's
32:26day and age is they go, let me think about this. Let me take a minute, you know, maybe do some self
32:31care in the words of Zoomers and Millennials. What I would say is the opposite of that. We want to pull
32:35the nail out of our foot. It sucks. You're in pain, but you signed up for this. Now the flip side of
32:42that is most marketing is done wrong. If you want to know why our companies are so successful, typically
32:48it's this one thing. We actually believe in moments, like the moment you move, as opposed to
32:56demographics. Most people target clients like this. They say, my average client here at, you know,
33:03that one painter in Odessa is 30 to 37 years old. They live in the Austin metro area. Well,
33:09that wouldn't make sense. They live in the Odessa metro area. They're employed. They're about 70%
33:14female, 30% male. At which point my favorite thing to do to my portfolio companies is go,
33:19I have actually never met a 30 to 37 year old who's 70% female and 30% male. Is this a real thing?
33:25I mean, maybe these days it could be, but the moral of the story is this doesn't actually exist.
33:30You know, what's way better to target your clients is to figure out when is the nail in the foot so
33:37painful that they need your services. You don't need to sell them. They're already looking for the
33:43thing that you have and want to buy it from you. It's not the type of foot. Nobody cares what type
33:50of foot it's in. It's where the nail is. And so let's think about it for some of your businesses.
33:55Let's say you are a window cleaning company. Well, I did some initial research and found there are
34:00three main times when people use window cleaning companies, when they move or decorate their house,
34:09when the changing of the seasons happens, and also when they have parties or special events.
34:16Now, I haven't done enough research on this and run enough people through this model to know,
34:20but if this is my first thesis, then what I'm going to do is every time I have a client,
34:25I'm going to figure out not how they found us. That's typically what people do, right? They go,
34:28do you find us on the Facebook ads? Did you find us by texting a friend? Okay, that's fine. But one
34:33step further, why did you need us today? Why did you need us? Is it because your friends are coming
34:40over and you kind of want to, you want to show them how lovely your place is? Like this is a little
34:45bit of a neighborly ego boost. Is it because we just had a massive amount of snow over the winter and
34:53your windows get a little bit sooty because you've got your fireplace on all winter and so
34:58you can't really clean it because it was cold all winter. But now that the, you know, freeze has
35:03passed, it's window cleaning time. Or is it, oh man, we tend to get these transactional one-off
35:08customers every time they move. Most companies do not find the trigger point. They try to find this
35:14amorphous, half-aged, half-sexed thing that is no real type of human. So here's how this works.
35:20If you want to hit $10 million in sales, you've got to do four things. You've got to move way faster
35:25probably than you are today and than you are comfortable with if you want to achieve eight
35:29digits. You've got to have leverage, which means humans inside of your business that want to be
35:36under that umbrella so big that your dream is bigger than theirs. And you've got to have a delegation
35:40that works in order to drive those humans to the highest revenue level possible for you and the
35:45business. And then finally, you've got to do more in sales by finding people when they need the
35:50thing that you are selling, not trying to convince them that they need the thing that you are selling.
35:55And if you do those four things, this is how you go from thinking that running an empire looks like
36:02this, which is like, great, I got my franchise, I got my business, I'm kicking up, I'm flying private,
36:08to realizing that it actually feels something like this, which is, you know, what I call an Indian
36:12private jet. And then finally, to operating more like this, which is an automated facility,
36:21a factory that has very few humans in it, because you have leveraged speed and delegation so well
36:29that all you are doing is kind of walking around and you're seeing if there's dust anywhere in the
36:34business, which means checking in. One of the best ways that we oversee our employees, and I also learned
36:41this from my friend Damon, is we basically do a weekly, and in the beginning, you guys will have
36:46to do this probably daily, if not multiple times a day, spot checklist. Goes on the calendar, it's 10
36:51minutes, and you're going and you're spot checking in your factory or in your business, what is
36:55everybody doing? 10 minutes a day. You don't tell people that you're doing this 10 minutes a day,
36:59but what this does is it gives this omnipresence feeling to your team, like, oh, Cody's going to find
37:06that. She's going to find it. She's going to find the dust, so I'm going to find it first. And if you
37:11do all of those things, your path to 10 million will be faster than mine was. I didn't figure those
37:18things out as I talked to you guys about until I started buying businesses. And so if you compare
37:23the fact that you've already bought a set toolbox from a bunch of other people who have done this for
37:2810,000 hours and bled for it, and then you layer the top four on top of it, I think you get to eight
37:34figures probably a lot faster than I did.
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