Transcription
That was featured in an Acquisition.com ad that was seen by millions of people about their workshop. And I know that because I get asked a lot about, uh, whether I like the workshop or not. So it's been seen by millions of people, and I do; I get this question very frequently. And it's like, "Hey, what do you really think?" And what I'm going to do is just record a quick video and break down what my experience was because I want just to share, like, what I what I really think about it. And then also, there's a couple key lessons in here that were really impactful for me that I'll pass on as well.
Hey, what's up? I'm Ray Green, founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we help IT companies scale sales. And this is an unscripted video; it's it's really just my honest take on the workshop that I attended a few months ago in Vegas with Acquisition.com, where you get some, you know, access to, you know, Alex, uh, for questions and Horoi and and Leila Horoi and the team. And they've, you know, got a a pretty good structured curriculum that you walk through to evaluate your business and to answer some some some tough questions that you may be working through. And I think there's a threshold, you know, so you're sitting at a room typically of, I think there's there's probably a cut-off of like, you know, businesses that are half a million, you know, a year in revenue on up to 20-30 million, right? And the they actually showed some pie charts on on average attendance. So you're sitting in the room with with real entrepreneurs, and they're they're not all internet bros; they're not all, you know, school candidates. Like, they a lot of these are, you know, $10 million businesses that are, you know, product businesses, roofing businesses, various services. The diversity was actually really interesting, um, and I I met some some pretty cool people here.
So the question is, like, did I think it was worth it? What I will say is like, there's there's this is probably bad for YouTube; yes, like absolutely it was it was it was it was definitely worth it, but I'm going to tell you why. One really valuable thing was this was about business fundamentals. Like, there was zero rah-rah; there weren't guest speakers; there weren't like motivational things. Like, it was not a place to go like feel good. In fact, I actually at one point was like, "Man, this this kind of sucks," cuz there's a process that you go through and you start break down when you evaluate your business like an investor would, right? And you start looking at it, and you get down to a point you're like, "It's not really an asset to sell." Like, of course it's valuable to me, and it's putting food on the table, and it's doing all these things, but, uh, like an objective look at this, and you go, "I've been working on this thing for a while, and it's it's not yet an asset." So in a lot of ways it's like the opposite of motivation.
Now I don't want that to to to sway you from from going; like, that's the objective truth, right? Like that's the reality. And if you you show up to a business workshop and your goal is to really say like, "Hey, I want to understand what I need to do to scale this into an asset that I can sell later," and what you get is a bunch of motivational speakers, and what you get are these platitudes, and what you get are, you know, things that at the moment might make you feel like rah-rah, like, "Okay, good, go go charge," and then, you know, two three days or two three weeks after that event that dissipates, then like, have you really moved the business forward? Like, often times what you need is a candid discussion about what the reality is, right? Because you're not going to change the reality unless you acknowledge it.
So I think one thing that made this immensely valuable for me was that it was not a an event in the sense that it was it was intended to have you walk out with a feeling; it was an event that was designed to have you walk out with fundamentals and some strategic, you know, decisions to make and like an honest look at at the business, right? So that for me was was immensely valuable. And I say this as as an MBA, right? Like, I went to business school, and I I was, you know, in in one of the top, you know, Executive MBA programs. I was, you know, honors Beta Gamma Sigma, like top 5% of students, top 20% of school, something like that. Like, it was like, so I've I mean I've done the business fundamentals; I understand EV; I've been part of, you know, been an operator for private equity, and I've I've been a hired gun to to turn sales around, uh, you know, I've worked with with investors. So I conceptually I get all of it, but it's really interesting when you start building your own business; the objectivity just completely changes cuz you drop me into somebody else's business, and it's just far easier; there's no it's far easier to see the truth, right? Cuz I'm not tied emotionally to any of these things. I get dropped in, and I go, "All right, like let me let me figure out what I need to do to get from here to here." When you have your own business, it's really easy to just fall into these biases and these beliefs and these things that you didn't realize you were attached to, and like an objective kick in the ass helps.
So again, that's why I think that's that's really valuable. Now the second thing for me was I walked out with an insane amount of focus. I cannot tell tell you like before I had even left the workshop—I think it's a two-day workshop—before I even left the workshop, I had paid for the workshop by killing off—I think I don't know what they're charging, but I think I paid like five grand to to go to this workshop—by the time I left, I had so much focus on where I was going to be investing my time and my attention and my resources, leaving that thing that I just said, "You know what? I've been holding on to all these other things too long. I've been holding on to these various forms of other businesses and incomes and things, and that's what's kind of pulling me away from giving this my my all." I'm just turning them off, boom boom boom boom boom, and I paid for the workshop before I left the workshop. That's cool, like from an ROI standpoint, but more importantly, that focus is a superpower, right? Like, as entrepreneurs, we are almost always overshooting, right? Like, we are overshooting based on the capacity that we have; we are more ambitious than reality is going to let us be, right? Like, we only have so many resources, and so we've got like I've got this big idea and this big idea, and I want to go overdo this project; I want to do this, and I like I talked; I work with entrepreneurs all the time, and so many of us have the same issue. And the thing is, there are always going to be more good ideas than there are resources to effectively implement those ideas. So new ideas is not the problem; in fact, new ideas kind of is the problem; it's that you've got to like hone in; you've got to get laser-focused on what is the goal and what is the constraint; what am I trying to do, and what is blocking me today, and zeroing out everything else. And that's hard to do on your own; it's hard to do unless you kind of go to a different environment, you get some different advice, and you get somebody that will really tell you the truth, but also somebody that knows the truth. I've had plenty of coaches; I've had different advisors, but, you know, they all bring their own form of bias in, and they never know as much about the business as you do, right? So they give you some advice, but it's kind of based on their experience, and it's not fully complete, and you consciously or unconsciously kind of know that. So you take the advice, but you never go all in, and you just end up spread too thin.
I left this workshop, and I was I was laser-focused. In fact, I didn't record this video for months because I wanted to see like, "Hey, is this is this a couple-week thing, right? Am I am I in three weeks am I going to be back to having 17 things that I'm trying to chase?" The answer is no. Like, I can tell you definitively months afterwards, I have changed my entire team; I have changed where I'm allocating my time; I'm changing how I allocate my time; I'm changing what I've been measuring. I've gone from spinning so many plates on so many different initiatives to getting hyper-focused on one initiative and understanding all the various plates that need to be spun there, which is actually an advantage, right? Because that's just like more granular, more detail, more likelihood of success, so higher probability of success on this initiative, and speed to result is going to be better on that initiative because I'm focused on it. So that focus for me was a superpower, and more interestingly, it's stayed, right? Like, that has not veered. And since this time that I've I've done this workshop, I have officially launched the one business that we are scaling; I have officially started building the team to scale that business in particular, and I've eliminated a ton of distractions, including some sources of revenue that were keeping me spread too thin to do anything really effectively.
Now the third thing that I got a ton of value from, and that was actually very very pivotal for me, I would say I'm happy about the conversation, but I also it puts context of a couple years that I've been probably doing the wrong thing, and you go, "God damn it," but it's like it's it's tuition; it's the name of the game. So that conversation was between sessions, um, with with Alex's chief strategy officer, and I we were having a discussion, and he said, "So like, tell me tell me about your business." I said, "Well, here's the thing; I I was doing a lot of fractional work, like, you know, sales work, and, you know, I had great clients, you know, people like Robin Robbins, people like Dan Martell, and going and building sales teams. I was getting paid really well; I was doing, you know, 40-50,000 a month. The problem was it wasn't scalable; like, doing fractional work wasn't scalable. So I had all these people that were asking, 'Hey, how'd you do that?' right? Like, you're remote, beach in Mexico, and you're raising a family, and you're doing it remotely, and, you know, left corporate, blah blah blah." And I said, "You know what? What I could do, you know, there's all these scalable types of products and services; what I can do is migrate from doing this work to teaching people how to do this work." And so I started down that path, and I said, "Because that that's more scalable, right?" And so I created a course; I created a coaching program, um, which did well, by the way; like, I mean I've sold 4,000 courses; I have sold seven figures and in coaching, like, so it's not it's not that it hasn't done well, but there were a few challenges. And one is when you're selling to individuals, the the price point is always going to be lower, right? So I can solve the same problem for a $15 million business or a one-person business, and if you just look at the value equation based on that, you're going to say, "If I help a $10 million business who's doing, you know, hundreds of sales per month increase their close rate from 26 to 44%, which I've done, then we're unlocking millions of dollars in value. If I help a one-person business change their close rate from 26 to 44%, then we have unlocked six figures of value theoretically, right, on an annual basis." And here it's like six figures a month; how much can I charge for that? So there's a there's a huge difference in terms of the the clientele, the price points that you can sell at; there's all these other variables I get factored in, like, you know, the one-person business; there's there's like mindset stuff that you got to look at; there's product-market fit; there's do you even have the work ethic; do you have the resilience? You know, meanwhile, you drop into an eight-figure business, and you say, "All right, I've got systems to work with; I've got some data; I've got, you know, maybe assemblance of a of a process; I've got people; I've got sources of leverage, right, that I can use," and so it's just a completely different game. In one, I'm actually applying 15-20 years of experience; like, this is what I do; this is what I'm good at; like, this is my specialty; this is how I got to be a teach, right? Like, it was I'm good at that thing, and teaching people to do that thing, I think I'm pretty good at it, but this is my superpower. Where do I think I'm going to get paid the most? Where do I think I'm going to make the most money? Well, it's clearly going to be here.
Now, back to the conversation, so I'm explaining this to his to a strategy guy, and he says, "Well, you solved the wrong problem." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, a couple years ago when you when you said, 'I'm making a lot of money, but I need to go; it's not scalable, so I need to go find something that is scalable,' he said, 'You solved the wrong problem. And if you had spent two years saying, "You know what? I'm going to figure out how to scale this," instead of two years saying, "I'm going to go into a completely different market, and I'm going to go into a place that I think is more scalable," you you probably would have figured it out.'" He said, "But the thing is, you got to look at it; you got to say, you had people that had money paying you a lot of money to solve a valuable problem, and the challenge was you didn't know how to scale it; that means that was the problem to solve. I've got to figure out how to scale this, and it might it might have taken been a process, you know, like I I like to say even when I'm teaching; it's like a Russian doll, right? Like, okay, let's let's see if we can get it kind of scalable, and then like break it down into processes. Well, had I just focused on that for two years, chances are it would have figured that problem out, and the end of that process would have been a more valuable problem to solve. Reason being, nobody else is going to do it because first of all, having the expertise to do what I was doing, the number of people that have that is is small; then the number of people that are going to turn it into a business even smaller; then the number of people that are going to figure out how to scale that thing even smaller, which means by definition you basically have a moat, right? It's a more valuable problem to solve." Now the other thing he said was, "We don't use the word scalable around here." And I said, "Aren't I at a scale workshop?" He said, "No, no, like we don't use scalable; you've got to figure out how to scale the unscalable; like that's where the the money is; like that is where the magic is; like that's where it happens. When you have something that seems unscalable and you invest the time to make it scalable, you're in a market of one, and so that's the direction to go." And I thought, "Son of a," you know, I thought, "Damn, two years ago if I had this conversation and somebody said, 'No, no, no, no, Ray, here's what's going to happen: You're going to go into this scalable space, and by the way, it's more crowded; it's harder to differentiate; it's uh, you've got skeptical buyers; you've got like a market that's just like the supply of people doing this, um, or even pretending to do it increasing, you know, like it's everybody's side hustle at this point.'" So had I not gone into that and instead said, "Let me stay the course on this thing," now that's really what led me to say, "That's right; I've got to get back to my core."
Now that kind of leads me to the to the fourth thing. I'm doing some just back-of-the-napkin math, and I'm looking at; I'm saying, "You know what's interesting; 80% of my profit basically comes from; it's a it was a perfect Pareto principle; like, 80% of my profit comes from 20% of my time, and 20% of my profit comes from where 80% of my time and resources are going." And it went back to the scalable thing; it went back to, you know, the one thing that you're doing really well and making a lot of money at; it's basically just subsidizing all of this other, like, so the thing that was scalable that I was I was working on, yeah, I mean it it had a lot of sales, but, you know, I had to employ a salesperson; I had to have a community manager; I had to have so I I stacked up; at the end of the day, I still made more money from my consulting in one day than I would from a week of everything else. And if I look at where my time goes, like the the number of conversations, the content, the like just the the overhead, right? Like just the the tax, the mental tax, it was almost all oriented at this thing that's scalable, and I'm paying for all of this with with basically a sliver of my time on consulting because I can command that much more money from those rates, and you just go, "Holy," you do the you do the analysis, right? Back to being objective about; you do the analysis; you go, "Well, all right, like that makes it fairly simple." Now that wasn't like a specific exercise we did while we were there; it was as we're going through these things; I started doing some stuff on the side; I started pulling up some numbers; I started looking at this, and I was like, "All right, well, I guess that's going to change things." And I left that that workshop, and I changed things, right? Like, no looking back; I made I made decisions; we've taken action, and I can tell you that that workshop was a pivotal point. Now was it entirely 100% responsible for all of those decisions? No, no, like there was there was a lot leading up to it, right? And I was obviously there for a reason; like, if I was absolutely certain in my strategy, if I knew exactly what I needed to do, I wouldn't have been there, right? So I was there because I had questions, and I was there because I had uncertainty, and I have I was there because I wasn't sure about these forks in the road, but I left with clarity; I left with definitive answers and direction and have since that time made insane amounts of progress on the one thing that we're doing, which is the MSP Sales Partners. We are going to scale this business; it is focused on helping IT companies scale their sales, fix their sales processes, understand what they need to do to to build better demand gen, better client acquisition systems, sales training. So it's a business where we help install what we do best, which is sales, into a business that they do best, which is IT, and it plays into my superpower; it plays into solving, you know, the the hard problems; it plays into solving complex and valuable problems for clients. Like, all of these things, like these lessons kind of culminated in this, and also it's a a business that I have an advantage in because I'm I'm already have contacts and network and know the space, and they know me.
So that's the gist of it, right? Like, I I walked out of it and said, "All right, like I this is this is the next season; this is where we're going to go, and we're just going to chalk up some of these learnings." Absolutely can tell you I got a ton of value from the conference; in fact, um, you know, full closure, like I hired them, uh, Acquisition.com team to help me with this business right after the fact. I said, "All right, like this is where I'm going to go; I feel like they helped with this, so you know what? I think that they can help with the next thing," and I will I will be, if I go go straight through the ascension process, to have them invest. Cool, like that's that's what I want; that's somebody that knows business, right? Like, I've I've done business school, like I said; I've turned around businesses; I've worked with private equity; I I ran the US Chamber of Commerce and entire national, you know, uh, sales team and, you know, the whole national business unit around, you know, small and midsize business, and I've worked with hundreds of companies; I know these things. But if if you've gone through this, you know that when you have your own business, it's it's you're you're clouded for some reason, and getting that objectivity is really important; getting the focus is really important; and coming to the conclusions I think on your own is even more important, perhaps the most important piece, than there was nobody specifically there that said, "Oh, well, clearly, Ray, you should do X," right? Because, you know, they don't know the business as well, but the process that you go through, uh, enables you to kind of come to that conclusion on your own if you're at the point that I was. Now I can't speak for everyone; I don't know what stage they're at; I don't know what questions they wanted to answer, um, but I know I went with some specific questions that got answered; I left with that clarity and that focus, and I asked them for for help, uh, going forward. So this is the video that I now can share every time I get asked about my experience there. So I hope the info is helpful; I hope some of the lessons are helpful, and um, thanks for tuning in. Adios. [Music]