Alex Hormozi Mastermind March (1-Day Recordings)

Rock and roll, everyone. Awesome. Well, welcome to the second ever school one-day event. SL recordings and everyone watching, welcome.

Um, we have a very fancy and incredibly regimented uh introduction process that we're going to run you guys through. It's on this board here. And so the first part of the introduction is you say your name. The second part is what your business does or is about. And the third is three things that you want from today. And so this is a very important process that we're going to lead you through. But um, that way we can kick it off, know who each other are, have a little bit more context. Um, and then we'll dive in.

Anybody watch the recordings from last time? Oh, great. Well, then uh, you will have some things to that'll be more or less the format. We'll keep it flexible. We'll make it focused on whatever you guys want. Um, and ideally, we'll just build off of that one because there's some things that are answered questions there and you guys have new questions and we'll just keep kind of building the library of knowledge.

>> So yeah, >> let's do it. >> Awesome. Rock and roll.

Um, so who we are is Hakee and Lawrence. Uh, we are business partners and uh, our business is Barber Accelerator. Uh, three things that we want to learn from today is not only just short-term growth and just short-term questions but long-term like action little steps that we can take to separate ourselves from the competition because we know that you know uh being the top allows you to take 99% of the whole market. So that's one thing. The next thing is content, simply just content. How can we make our system so efficient that uh, we just press record and it gets automated? So it's a constant systems and the third thing you can connect.

Um, the third thing is just expanding on the first point a little bit more. So that would be so I saw your video Mosy about how you're talking about how online education is going to take over the traditional system and how we're all like we're so early to the space. So how we can all like position ourselves to take over the whole niche including the traditional system. So for in our case, traditional barbering schools.

>> Yeah. How can we really take over like >> transition from barber institutes and barbering like um like certifications because everyone here in here didn't really like go through our university majority like to get where we are today. We got there through experience. So that's how like how do we make a program off the books to to to to make that the mainstream?

>> Yep. That'll be fun. >> Sweet. Love it. >> Yeah. People are still learning about Facebook ads now. So like just for context, like there's a very long adoption cycle for stuff. Like we're just we feel like we're behind, but everyone always feels like they're behind when you find something cool. Sorry. Go ahead.

>> Okay. Uh Noel, viral coach. Today, I would like to get out of this convention is uh, figure out how everyone is adding value to their communities and how uh, you guys are utilizing the new conversions API, the musical pixel and um, go ahead.

Yeah, Daniel, Viral Coach. Uh, we help build brands on social media with organic content. Uh, three things. First, I'd love to know like what uh, the fulfillment looks like uh, for client side on a monthly recurring business that's at about like 500,000 a month to a million a month. Um, next, we we have a high ticket program. That's our a business. The school thing is a a pretty small percentage of our revenue. Um, but it's a pretty big percentage of our um, like client complaints. So like how do you deal with cheap clients that need the most handholding uh, with the fewest amount of resources you have to deal with those? Um, and then on our like the lowest end of our high ticket, about a 10k product. Um, how do you, how do you so complex question, but basically like low high ticket, how do you do more than just break even uh, and and have it like as training material for the for the team, whereas the the high ticket program is like the the high high ticket program is the actual one that makes you money, I guess. Like should you should you even go mid ticket if like 10 is mid ticket or should you just go high and low? It's like how do you break even with low ticket? So then you're leveraging your high ticket like crazy, basically, right?

>> More so like with 10K that demographic and the deliverables that you can have with there is it's really hard uh for us to scale whereas like our six-figure program, super easy.

>> Gotcha. >> Yeah. Gotcha. Because the margins are better, you have more resources to deal with.

>> Those clients are generally more compliant versus like a 10K, it's hard to get people to do stuff.

>> Yeah. Because they're not they're not like primed already. They don't they don't have the paradigm ready to go.

>> Yeah. Gotcha. >> And then at like the $200 a month school thing, like most people don't do anything with it.

>> Makes sense. We have a really low success rate with those clients.

>> Gotcha. >> Awesome.

>> Okay. My name is Rashidita Robinson. Amazing to meet you. Um, the business I'm in. So we teach financial literacy. I focused on how to help people invest in commercial real estate even if they have issues with credit, even if they have issues with getting some type of business funding.

So, three things I would love to get from today. Number one, how to retain customers? So, it's one thing to grow the school community, but how do you keep them in the community? Number two, um, what are some what are some obstacles that you face growing or scaling your business from six to seven figures or even seven to eight figures? What do some of those obstacles look like? And then lastly, so free webinars, that's one of the main things that we do to grow our community. So what are some things that we can do to stand out? Or um, maybe this is a two-part question, like other than free webinars, what are um, some strategies to grow the community? Okay, so I'll just go back to the original. What are some things that you could stand out with um, doing a free webinar that you could stand out from everybody else to make it like an experience versus just selling?

>> Are you sold are you sold on webinars or just like how do I stand out from everyone else?

>> Um >> how do I stand out?

>> Okay. >> Go ahead.

Me. Uh, I'm Sean Hammond from the PMU Society. I'm a business strategy consultant. I've worked with

>> Can everyone remember these?

>> Because I'm going to turn the page.

>> All right. Take a picture if you need.

>> Go ahead.

>> Sean Haven, PU Society, but I'm a business strategy consultant. Um, I use school as a model to take my agency and streamline it and then have absolutely nothing that I really need to do within the business model itself. They do everything themselves. So what I want to get is kind of a different angle from everyone else. It's actually taking businesses and how we can use the subscription model itself to turn any company into a subscription-based business so they get perks from being part of that community. Um, reduce their attention, increase their LTV. So um, I want to know the best method to actually get businesses and agencies onto the platform and

>> agencies into your school.

>> Uh, no, for their own schools. So, I want to take a business, say you need to set up a school with with your client base.

>> Okay, cool. That'll be interesting.

>> Why do you want to do that?

>> Uh, I think it's just such a big opportunity in the world that you can take any company. I know loads of companies I've worked with that are already interested in actually doing it. So, you have professional-based businesses that need education for their clients, how to use their products. So, if you get them over to a subscription-based platform, they're paying monthly, maybe for a discount or they offer free training on their services, they can get educated in their actual business and they'll stay there for longer. It's what I had with my agency that the the top problem that we had is that no matter what you give them, they don't know how to use it. They don't know how to run a business. They don't actually know what to do. So, when we gave them education how to actually do it, they have insane results. Everyone posts their results and everyone now is staying like I mean maybe it's and we've scaled pretty quickly. Used to take me a week to onboard a client. Now it takes me about an hour. Um, and they do it all themselves.

Uh, so the next one is how to create uh, inbound systems. It's something it's the last thing that I feel like I have no idea about. I did I did watch like the last one there and you guys did talk about inbound but I need a bit more detail from starting from scratch where most people here are starting with like an audience. Um, and then the next one is how to utilize my time with building either middle of the funnel community to get people to build trust with me or do I go straight for my outbound just with the little experience that I have in building companies? Like, do I need to build the trust first is what I'm saying. It's probably more of a question for you, Alex, like how do I get companies to trust me to also take a rev share model in the community? Uh, I have no idea where to start with that assessment sign I've done before.

>> Very niche.

>> I have thoughts.

>> Okay.

>> Okay.

>> Yeah. I think the most important thing for me is how to actually get that rev share model because one thing that I know is that when you work with companies, you can make them so much but then as soon as you stop working with them, they keep making hundreds of thousands or millions and you just sit there with nothing. Like I want to I want to be a part of that. Who's this?

>> I have lots of things to say.

>> I'm Scott with the Energetics program and I'd like to get clear on like a scaling plan. So from the one days we have ads and social but how like what would that look like to scale it to a large following, a large ad spend, like what is that what is that model?

>> Scaling scaling ads and organic or?

>> Yeah, both.

>> Okay.

>> And then kind of like questions within each. So for the ads right now, we've tested a bit to the about page. Okay.

>> For our low ticket $50 per month, we've gotten about $170 cost per purchase.

>> Okay.

>> So like what what to do to optimize it to get to the cost so we can scale? Like what does that look like?

>> That's a bad idea.

>> Like where where I'm at now? Like how do you prioritize both the scaling and the retention because they're two big projects? So should it be at the same time? Should I scale first then do retention, retention first? Like what would be the order of priority? Because I know priority was a big one for the last one day. So I want to make sure I'm

>> Yeah.

>> prioritizing the right thing.

>> Yeah. I can tell you right now, you already you you prioritize retention first because what's the point of scaling it if everyone falls out the back? Fix the bucket then add the water. [Laughter]

>> Hi, my name is Alex. I'm the crypto guy. I teach people how to invest in crypto. Um, three things, ad buyer, paid ads in general. Haven't started that yet and I want to like just, you know, obviously do it the best of my ability. Uh, the most important to me for by far is recruiting, um, talent acquisition, like hiring. Um, by far that's what I'm like probably lacking the most. Uh, how do I make a system to predictably find extremely high-quality people and uh, you know, get them to stay? And then the last one is uh, content, organic content. Like what's the workflow? How do we increase the ideas, increase the quality? Like just in general, how to be become better at that.

>> What was the last one? Sorry. Recruiting and then

>> Uh, organic content, like the whole flow.

>> All right.

>> What's up, guys? I'm Richie. Um, we're Dial University. This is Carson. This is Shod. Uh, thank you for having us. Um, we teach people how to achieve a balanced lifestyle between health and wellness. And three questions that I have are how do we integrate a higher ticket offer and how do you quantify the price of that higher ticket offer relative to the value provided since we are not teaching a high income skill?

>> Are you launching one? Is that why you're asking?

>> Yeah, we're planning on doing one.

>> Okay. So, how to how to quantify a higher ticket offer from your initial offer?

>> Um, relative to the value you're going to

>> You guess and then you keep going.

>> Okay.

>> The second

>> I'll tell you some other stuff, but more or less it's just a guess.

>> The second one is um, how do you balance content that isn't meant to funnel new customers like CTA content, um, organic videos versus videos that

>> Y

>> are meant to bring in more traffic?

>> Yep. And thirdly is how are people in here managing churn? Do you have retention strategies? Um, are you doing more one-on-one contact with your members?

>> Question.

>> Cool. This is pretty chill. Okay. So I want to do something. So, what I want to do is actually tear these off and then that way we can kind of like see them because we don't have nearly as many. They've kind of grouped a little bit better, I think, than last time we had

>> Because you want to reuse you want to I'm crossing one of these out.

>> You're good. I'm just

>> I know we haven't touched upon this as much, but like when you've gotten to such a high level, it's a lot of identity from what I can see is like you just you became that version. So, is there anything that helped you do that? Because it's like that wall that you, you know, tend to want to get over. So, if there's anything like that.

>> Yeah, sure.

>> So, first off, I'll open up to you guys. What's been working well for you right now? Um, in terms of getting members of school off organic?

>> Manny chat.

>> What was it?

>> Manny chat.

>> So running. So you post and then have a Manny chat link and then

>> Yeah, just have them comment and then a Manny chat will automatically DM them the link to join.

>> So comment CTA.

>> Is this on Instagram?

>> Instagram.

>> Yeah, I've heard many people using this successfully. Yeah.

>> We actually have a funnel built out. Instead of sending them straight to school, cuz some people can't really articulate it if they just see so to a funnel.

>> Yeah, it just warms them up. You can send them like a lead magnet, like something free. For example, I've made this free guide for you uh, as well. While they see the free value, they at the bottom there'll be like the VSSL there um, the the sales letter there. Then they're like, "Oh, wow. He really helped me. So, I'll I'll join the thing." So, it warms them up for the school.

>> Hey, maybe we should really cuz I know this is works well. Maybe we should really flesh this out.

>> It does really work.

>> So, first of all, you got to have an Instagram page with a following, right? And then you post, you do a post. What do you say in your What does this post look like?

>> So, we do we do direct DM um CTAs like send us a keyword. You can also do a comment. And I haven't done the comment before, but it's been the most effective strategy cuz you can pre-automate voice messages and and then at the end bring in the virtual sales letter, which is the offer. And so,

>> But what is the actual post?

>> So, basically, it's like it's like you giving free value at the start. Here's how to lose weight in three different ways. And then you say the free value. After that, you be like, I've actually made a full guide if you want more on this. So because you've already given them value, you say, "DM me uh uh fat loss." Um, Manny Chat will see that and they will send that over to their DM. So when something's sent over to DM, it's more warm because it seems like we sent it. So when you do that, they're like, "Wow, this guy messaged me." They'll click it and they'll consume the free guide, allowing them to be more warm to get into your program. So, you use the comment trigger.

>> So, we I do if if I'm on live and they comment certain my live, they'll get sent a DM. If they comment a certain word on my post, even if they can spell it, we'll

>> Oh, so you get on the live too.

>> Get a ton of I'll bet you get a ton during the live.

>> Yeah, during the live. And then also if they send me a DM, um, they'll get it. So, one of the I just had one of my first posts that just went viral. Um, I actually learned this from Jose where I'll start the post off with a hook. So, the first thing I said was, um, this is what I would do if I had less than $100 in my name and I wanted to make 10 or $20,000. And so, that right there just grabbed people's attention. And then just throughout the post, it was like maybe a one-minute or less post. I just gave a free like game on step-by-step, do this, that, and the third, made it real simple. You want more information about this, comment the word deals under this post, and I'm going to DM you a link to my community. And then they'll get sent to our funnel. We get their um, phone number, we get their email address, we get their name. So even if they don't sign up for the school community, you have their contact information. So now they're getting text messages, they're getting emails. So we're just constantly marketing to them.

>> So you leave capture and then it's a school on the thank you page like a school like redirects after you after they opt in.

>> Exactly. They'll opt in and then it'll take them to a second page and then they just it'll collect their payment and then that'll send over to the school.

>> Okay. Got it. Understood.

>> Yeah. To add on to what Rashidita said with the like Instagram lives and TikTok lives, what you can do is you can automate the live as well. So what we did to actually really get ourselves in this position is to go live literally twice to three times a day and yeah, and what we did was um, we've give out profile reviews. So we're basically help people grow their social media. So we sent we told them comment down um in the live um guide and they will like get sent the school. So we did profile like reviews. So we're like holding their profile up and reviewing it, giving them like personalized value and people would be like, "Wow, I want that." And said, "If you want a full review, hop over to my school. We have group calls like this every single week. Imagine if I gave you this every single week, right? And you can run that automation through through live as well."

>> I like that a lot. So either comments CTA which you can do on lives, I feel I mean me just shooting from the hip here, if you're live with a lot of people and you're saying comment this if you want it, you're going to get a ton of comments, right? And then all of them get shot over to to Manny Chat and then they get either the lead magnet, which was your method, or for your method, you just send them straight to the funnel to opt in and then go to the school community after they collect you collect a payment.

>> The cool one about the comment is it probably boosts the reach of the post.

>> Because as soon as they comment,

>> then it'll automatically have me send a comment comment under their post saying, "Check your DM." And it's a lower friction thing than sending a DM, I think.

>> Yeah. Yeah.

>> Have you tested the comment one?

>> We haven't done the comment one yet.

>> That would be interesting.

>> Yeah, the follow-up comment's a nice little nugget, too, because then you get you get double the comment.

>> What's the follow-up comment? I missed that.

>> So, yeah, go ahead.

>> It'll just So, they'll comment will wear heels and then it'll leave a follow-up comment saying, "I just sent you a DM or check DMG."

>> Yeah. Like in like you can say like in five minutes, like if they've seen it in like 10 minutes, they'll follow up. Hey bro, how'd you go with the link? Or, hey bro, how'd you go with this? Yeah. So then it like allows them to follow up.

>> Yeah. So check your DM comment. You send the DM and then if they haven't responded yet, five minutes later it's like, "Hey, did you like it?" Or

>> Exactly. Exactly.

>> Yeah. Yeah.

>> Yeah. And you just set like a a string like a t like a board and it just goes. Yeah. It's quite seamless.

>> Anyone else have any other strategies they did organic? Yeah, go for it.

>> Yeah. So, me just pulling out my camera and just recording like just very non-edited raw content for some I don't understand it. It's working very well. Two shorts a day. Um, I used to do long videos. That's how I started. And this is doing better. And just posting those same reels on every single social media is it's just doing everything. I don't know why.

>> I believe it. I posted a raw uncut one the other day and it's done very, very well. I know. Yeah. Raw and uncut. It's just bare. Anyways.

>> So, the main way we grow, are we just talking about social media? Because we do have another or the the main way we grow our community is through free webinars.

>> Yeah.

>> So, we do weekly webinars every week. You

>> Email your list.

>> Say it again.

>> Do you email your list? How do you get people to the webinar?

>> Yeah, free. We'll send out emails, send out text messages, promote it on social media. My business partner has a huge following. Um, so we'll do weekly webinars and then at the end of the webinar we offer them a bonus if they join our community. So at the end of the webinar we're upselling them to a three to five day boot camp. Usually those boot camps are a few hundred dollars but now we're telling them if you buy a ticket to enter into our school community, you'll get you'll get a free ticket to the uh, the boot camp. And so that's the biggest way of you can that's been the most successful. So, the bonus is the free ticket bonus for joining school.

>> Joining school, and then you get a free ticket to the five-day boot camp. And the five-day boot camp is really selling upselling them to a high ticket mentorship. But for those who aren't in position for the high ticket, we can still keep them in the low ticket in the school and we're just nurturing them so they're ready for the high ticket.

>> So, free virtual event, which is the webinar, and then from there, join my school. And if you do that, you can attend this other event that normally you'd have to pay for, but is also free. Is that one virtual, too?

>> Yeah, it's virtual. So, um, the webinar is we're selling the boot camp. Okay.

>> So, yeah, we're selling a boot camp and then, okay, you get free access if you join the school community.

>> So, you do the whole pitch of selling the boot camp and say you could pay for it or just join it.

>> Cost $300.

>> One of my favorite pitch strategies.

>> Yeah. So, that's that's been a success.

>> Love that strategy. So, did you already have that boot camp established before you launched your school?

>> We did, but surprisingly a lot of people haven't been really don't know about it. The boot camp is valuable like we just give them so we pack so much information in those five days.

>> So that they don't want to miss that boot camp. We just make sure that we make sure.

>> Yes, it's a five.

>> So, so do you pay for their like do you pay for the like like the place where they stay or?

>> It's virtual.

>> It's a five-day virtual boot camp.

>> Oh, gotcha.

>> How's it How's it built out on your school? Is it just like a couple different sections of the module saying boot camp part one, boot camp part two or?

>> Um, we just put the link on a calendar. We just have the put the zoom links on the calendar. So, you have to be in the school community to access the boot camp.

>> Oh, so it's interruption and co?

>> Or pay $10,000 which they

>> And that everybody that's already in the school community have access to every boot camp, every month because yeah, we're trying to upsell them to the high ticket. So you you hold one five-day boot camp every month.

>> Three to five days. Yeah.

>> And so that's a huge part of the delivery from the school perspective is that they get do they only get one or they just get that free boot camp every time?

>> As long as they're in the community, they can attend every.

>> Interesting.

>> I don't know if this counts as organic, but what we did on our sales calls that went from 58% close rate to 88% close rate through those 60 days was that we would always get up the school community itself. We we'd find someone nearest to the demographic of the person on the call and then we would showcase their wins. So

>> Yeah, so we would normally just go through the actual community, show them the classroom, show them what they learned, give them like a taster of everything and they'd be like, "Oh, there's another 30-year-old woman from the small village that has now made 15 grand a month and she'd posted it here. Do you recognize that?" But no, yeah, we it was it was a big thing, you know, really helps us.

>> You know what's funny? I heard I was chatting at the dinner at the last event. Um, one of the guys was doing a live webinar and people were in the chat and then they were buying school and you know that cash register sound and that notification. Oh, it's

>> It wasn't even done on purpose, but because he was sharing the school community, you the person would ask the question.

>> Like it would be like Andrew Kirby asked this.

>> He would answer it. Ching ching, Andrew Kirby.

>> And then he went and then it just started going crazy apparently.

>> Realized he's like, "Oh, if I answer someone's one question, like they buy."

>> Yeah. But the other people listening saw that proof and they were all that's an accident. Like we didn't design it for that purpose. But and he didn't know that that was going to work that way. But he said that was responsible for his surge in the last day.

>> Oh, no.

>> Because he came out of nowhere. This is that guy.

>> Is it?

>> No, no, no, no. Um, Avocado.

>> Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like Yeah.

>> Yes. Yeah.

>> All right. I didn't know that. That's great. Yeah. SL. So, someone like you is you just uh so like great in uh in the agency world. Uh, like the way that people would do this is like, hey, so what I want to do is like this is more effective. The old version of this was we're on the call and they say, hey, I'm going to play you a live call from one of the leads that we're going to generate for a chiropractor just like you. Hit play and it's obviously a qualified lead. It's like we can send you like 50 of these a month. Can you handle that? And people are like, holy [ __ ] Yeah, that's exactly what. So, it's basically the closer you get to demonstrating like what like rather than saying I'm going to get you leads, it's like this is what happens when someone calls your, you know, practice, they're like, "Oh, man." Like the idea of the word lead versus like hearing someone on the like it just takes that much step closer. So, I think it's awesome. So, yeah, sharing the screen is very good. And you were doing this one-on-one.

>> Yeah, we do all our sales calls.

>> Yeah,

>> Because it's a Yeah. 997 we do.

>> Yeah. So thinking about that, like the one to many version is what Avocado did. They just, you know, he went live and just basically showed individual people just like it's like, "Okay, here's Kirby. Here's how old are you, Kirby?" "Okay, you know, I don't know how old I was be like 17." Anyway, how old are you? Okay, I'm 25, whatever. And so he finds another 25-year-old from the UK and he's like, "Oh, he was actually in the same position as you and this is what he did." And then it's like cha-ching. And then the other Kirby 25-year-old sign on or you know buy in at the same. I think that's really powerful. We talked about that with the VSSL in terms of like the video for the about page is like just show people what's inside of the.

>> And another another cool thing that we got from the school was that like most companies or well most agencies like they wouldn't even have two of their same the two of the clients in the same room together whereas we can go like we are so successful our business is so successful we put all our clients together and they're all getting results and you can showcase the results in that community and get 88% closer.

>> Yeah, really love that. Really, really love that. And you can use that with your webinar strategy, too. Like when you go live again next time, just tie that in. You can show them here's the school community. Here's people like you can see the Q&As's and just start bringing it up.

>> Yeah.

>> Kind of sweet.

>> The sequel back.

>> Yeah. What may be interesting is looking at the conversion rate between the two because if you look at like this is something I would test is you do the webinar and then you actually pull up the sales the the school about page and then you go into the community and I wonder if you just because there's multiple steps that you're having you know to do there to get people into the school community if you'd convert a higher percentage showing the community and then it just it's very clear what they have to do in terms of next steps. I would test it once. Do you know what I'm saying? Now, you lose follow-up. That would be part of, you know, that would be the cost there. But removing the step and then showing more closely what they're actually going to get might

>> We do that towards the end of the webinar. Okay.

>> At the end of the webinar once we tell them to get a free ticket to the school, then we'll show them like we'll share screen and show them what's going on in the school community, all of the classes that you can get, some of the posts of the people that are having some success in there.

>> Super cool. So, you've got the comment CTA version to lead magnet, which is what you guys do via Manny Chat. You send them straight to the funnel via Manny Chat when they uh when they comment. And you do do you both did it via lives. Did you do a lot of lives?

>> No, lives um posts and then DM people.

>> What what what webinar app did you like platform did you use for your webinar?

>> Um, so we do Zoom or if it's a lot of people, we'll do uh I forget. I got to act with the other ones. Um, but we mainly do Zoom.

>> Yeah, we'll stay in contact. We'll stay in contact.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> Maybe we should exhaust Instagram first.

>> Yeah.

>> Because these are some great Instagram tactics.

>> And maybe get a sense of like

>> volume. I'm curious cuz you said you're doing three lives a day.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> Are you doing posts and stories as well?

>> Yeah. Every day.

>> So, what is your people that are using Instagram, what does your volume and schedule look like?

>> Yeah. Um, so our schedule, we have a content system built on Notion and we've we've consistently tried to like optimize it like where the holes. So basically what we do is we try to have a day of recording and then we will we have four editors and because like editors like we're trying to keep the quality high. So, we have like so like a lot of producers and we don't care about how much we spend on quality because we know that like if we put it out, it's going to like it's going to have a high leverage. So, we schedule content um and at least post once a day. Um, and then we're trying to get YouTube up.

>> So, yeah.

>> Were you asking about the live schedule as well?

>> No. Like what is a typical day of Instagram content look like? Like you said three lives.

>> Yep. Oh, so in the morning we'll attack like the US market. Uh, like each time zone we're attacking different types of uh time zones. So for example, UK uh would be

>> 8:00 a.m. in Melbourne time for us. Y

>> And then 12:30 we'd do AB tests for the US, see when they're most active. But I think around 12:30 to 1:00 p.m. would be around like the evening for the US.

>> And then we'd do around 6:00 p.m.

>> Um, for Australia.

>> Yeah. We found out that like after like a certain time like we actually got no sales. So we were like doom zone.

>> Yeah. We call it the doom zone cuz we'll get on live for an hour and we got no sales and we're like racking our brains like but then some days we we one our highest day we got 22 23 sales.

>> 25.

>> Yeah. 25. Yeah.

>> What US time works best for you guys?

>> We have a whole uh

>> have a spreadsheet that.

>> Is it morning or afternoon Pacific?

>> Morning. Morning.

>> Morning Pacific.

>> Yeah. The earlier the better. Yeah, cuz you know we see our peak users on school

>> in between 9 and 11 a.m. Pacific.

>> Yep.

>> So you always want to go like hard, by the way. Like

>> we never ship anything around that time because it's so intense. Yeah.

>> PST?

>> Pacific. Yeah.

>> Cuz that's when both coasts are awake.

>> Yeah, I did my book launch at 9

>> Pacific last time. Yeah, that was that was the thinking. So that means we'll go live at 3:00 a.m.

>> You got to do what you got to do.

>> That's why I left New Zealand.

>> Yeah. I wasn't do I was just sick of doing [ __ ] at 3:00 a.m.

>> Oh, wow.

>> That's why I left.

>> We stayed up till like the AM's just in the school game month. We like had no life it.

>> Yeah.

>> Is most of your money coming from America?

>> We we have a good percentage. It's like 40% Australia and then 60% across the world. Interesting.

>> That's so interesting because we our audience as well as Australia and UK is like crazy versus like

>> They seem to be the most interested. Uh

>> It's cuz you have the Aussie aesthetic.

>> Yeah.

>> No, for real.

>> No, I've seen your content. It's actually just really like attractive. Like it's just like you just have long session times watching your content.

>> But it's also like I said to you before, it's also cuz you're so different. Like if you're sitting in like some gray town in the UK and they come on you like who's this random American dude? No, but it's it's real though that these these other markets are coming online now like in this industry like Europe and Australia and the UK for sure that we see that on school too. They're big markets now.

>> Yeah. Europe's Europe's increasing significantly right now at least from what we see at acquisition in terms of deal flow.

>> What we found with Europe is that their mindset is quite different in terms of growth though. Like they they like no offense, I feel I feel like they have a a limited they have a ceiling on their what they can do.

>> I think Germany's um getting on it though.

>> Yeah, it depends what part of Europe right?

>> If you're in like Hungary, like yes, you know, if you can consider that East Europe, but yeah.

>> The amount of times you have to use PayPal cuz like Germans don't have access to credit card.

>> That's that's actually one thing we wanted to bring up on the list before is that we actually want to give some feedback on school like what you can improve improve on. Um, because like there's a lot of like no offense, there's a lot of voids that we see that could make schools so much better.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. A lot of that's like e-commerce though. All like early mailouts, Germany, Europe, but that's all e-commerce. It's the same.

>> All what? Sorry.

>> So that's how e-commerce markets work. I see a fashion brand. So we sold US.

>> Yeah. No, they're just the large like Germany is the largest economy in Europe.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. So it's just to do with actual size. So we would to sell to Australia as well, UK and then America. Exact. And we would always time it for the morning because morning is when people react to their their emails. So it's weird that school matches up pretty much exactly the same.

>> That's super interesting. Yeah.

>> Um, but we didn't really finish the.

>> Yeah. So you're I was like, so you're posting, you know, 816ish.

>> AEDT.

>> That's UK, right? I saw Australia.

>> Yeah. Melbourne times.

>> Yeah. We'll have to translate that into.

>> But it pretty much translates to the morning in every time zone.

>> Cuz 8 a.m. your time zone, right? This is you guys.

>> Some of it's at night.

>> I think it's we mainly targeted the evening, but we actually found that one of our like most consistent times were when we no life at 11:00 p.m. for us and then we got like a bunch of sales when we were trying to win the school game.

>> So 11 p.m. for you guys is what time Pacific? Uh

>> Because I'm I'm kind of I think I'm in the same boat as Sam is right now. It's like, okay, there's three major markets. What's what's morning for each of them kind of? And then just reverse engineering that for whatever your time zone is.

>> Says 5 a.m.

>> Okay. Little.

>> That's your best time for America.

>> What the [ __ ]

>> Pacific.

>> It's 5 Pacific, but it's 8 Eastern.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. But even that's early as hell. Like we didn't fully keep track of where they came from. Maybe it was like Australians that were just in bed at night.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Worth looking at.

>> Yeah. Maybe you should you should test it a bit later because

>> that doesn't make sense.

>> But okay, so you guys posted three times a day. What was what was your or what was your posting schedule?

>> Um, we really don't have a schedule. We just go for it and see what works. But lately what we've been doing is making post like late at night like 12 like those people who are just up. So I've heard this before from somebody else that I know actually in your space.

>> I think probably my one of my mentors.

>> Okay.

>> What's your niche again?

>> So my financial literacy but I specifically are employees.

>> Say it again.

>> These are 9 to 5 employees mostly.

>> That's who we pretty much.

>> Yeah. So that I think the evenings for them is is when they're like

>> I all the infomercials are at like super they can't sleep and then they they have no decision-making power so they buy.

>> Yeah. So we think a bullet with you up right now. thinking about making some money coming out of here and we set up straight to the funnel.

>> So that's like consumer market versus like b business market the morning I've noticed but like consumer market evening makes a lot of sense because you got to think about their lifestyle, right?

>> Yeah.

>> I've noticed that with just content analytics as well. People are just so brain dead at like 10 p.m. that they're just like commenting and liking and they'll just their watch time is higher at night time as well. And that's like the emotion.

>> I think that's why we worked at night because like our audience is actually a lot younger, like 25 to like 14 year olds. So I think it goes depending on what your audience is. That's the time you should post it.

>> And are these all guys who want to get it to become a barber so they can make money.

>> So but they currently don't basically they currently don't make money.

>> Yeah.

>> Got it. Okay. Interesting.

>> Consumer market again.

>> Yeah. It's consumer. Yeah. Yeah. Really interesting. Okay.

>> Huh. Yeah. The 5 a.m. still doesn't make sense, but um in either of these scenarios.

>> Um, okay. Who else is do it? You you post it twice a day, right?

>> Yeah, I usually post around like 8 9:00 a.m. and then like 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Eastern.

>> And what type of post are we talking about? Like an image?

>> No, real. Just a real.

>> Yeah, just short form.

>> Are you talking about reals, too?

>> We do reals, we do carousels. Those are the ones where it's like you swipe left, see more posts.

>> And you guys do lives.

>> Lives.

>> We post our goal is to post at least three times a day. We don't really have like a schedule of what time and we might post at least three times a day and then we started doing that late night post rate.

>> What do you do?

>> Yeah, this is why I asked the initial question on how to balance organic versus CTA content. I pushed the community seven times on reals um in the one month period which I repurposed on TikTok as well and then a couple story posts. And so for me like my struggle is like I don't want to make all my content um, you know, funneled content um, because one I'm passionate about just making normal videos.

>> Sure.

>> Um, so

>> Yeah, I guess that's that's a balance question. We're talking about total volume.

>> I know the more traffic I push the more people will come in. But

>> So I can I can talk to you about this because we've so I have a video coming out this week that so we did 35,000 posts over the last three years.

>> It's a lot. Um, and right now we we we hover at like 450 posts a week. It's a lot. Um, a lot of content. And so

>> All on one page.

>> No, across just across all platforms. Yeah.

>> Do you shoot those all? Do you you shoot those on like a in a bulk period? I feel like you go in for like a week straight or

>> I used to when I start when I started making content, I recorded one day every 90 days and I would do a hundred shorts in one sitting. And so if you got like the hormon like when it was like hormoni style content whatever like that was just that like I yeah it was just I would just sit there and I would drink all of the caffeine that I could consume and then just rip. Um, anyways, so that's that's what I did to start and that's what got our you know got our posting cadence because um that was good. So anyways, that was like level one version and then uh I wanted to push more into it. So then we went to uh one day every other week of recording, still a full day.

And um, now we do two days a week in terms of recording stuff. But I mean, to be fair, like I got past 2, 3 million across all platforms just doing one day every 90 days. Um, but so anyways, we reviewed 35,000 posts to see like what, what got us what we wanted, which is business owners. So like, I have zero desire to become famous for the sake of being famous, like none. There's actually just a lot of costs with that. What I wanted was business owners. And so we tested out actually the last 90 days lead, so leading up to two weeks ago, I made almost exclusively very wide content. So it was like relationship stuff, we made uh fitness stuff, like food, you know, food video, we made um, like, you know, advice to my younger self, like things like that. And so we got more overall views, but in terms of throughput from those views to high quality like applications into the business or just even book sales, which I use as like, kind of a a looser metric for quality of of eyeballs, went way down. And so we have completely like, so one of the big shifts I'm doing is I'm basically making almost exclusively business content now.

So, I mean, like I have no marriage to anything. Like if relationship videos is what generated the most business owners, because there's this theory in the in the content world that like, so there's there's two theories that I, I at least the data that we looked at just completely didn't agree with, which was one is that shorts viewers become longs viewers, and I just haven't seen that. Like, I hear it all the time, but when I looked at it, that just wasn't the case. People who watch longs want more longs, people who watch shorts watch more shorts. Caveat: If you find me in shorts on one platform, but you're a YouTube's longs viewer, then you might watch my YouTube long view, like uh content. And so, but it's like, if you only watch YouTube shorts, you're not going to become a longs viewer. You will just keep watching whatever you normally consume. So, people have consumption preferences by platform. And so, I kind of see them as they're like in separate tracks in terms of bringing people in.

For the CTA, like the give to ask ratio, right? Um, as soon as you start running ads, in my opinion, everything becomes gives, and then the ads do all the asking for you, which will help you out as a content creator because then it's like, I'm just trying to push as much value as I possibly can. In shorts, I do zero CTAs. Stories, um, I do think is appropriate for CTAs. I don't think it hurts your reach. And so, if you do like one, one or two of those a week, I don't think that's going to hurt anything. Um, longs I see as somewhat different in that it depends on the CTA. And so if I was like, like I see me providing free stuff as also gives. And so me having a CTA for free stuff, I don't see as a take from the audience. And so the reason that I have the like the books, for example, that are free on the site and free on my podcast and whatnot is so that it's like it's free. You can have it if you want to. And if there's an alternative formats where they can do it like for a fee, then that's because of their consumption preference. But if you're broke, then use use whatever. And so the the TLDDR of this is that I think you can absolutely have CTAs and content um that drive to stuff that's as long as it's relevant in how you integrate it, I think it actually works fine. So like my number one YouTube video across my whole channel has a 14-minute CTA at the end.

>> Number one video.

>> What, what, what do you define as your CTA though? Because I think CTA, some people have this perception that it's like, go do this now, click my link. But what is, what does a CTA mean for you?

>> So I say, if you're a business owner who's trying to scale, I've got books and courses that you can check out acquisition.com. If you're someone who's, you know, trying to start a business or get started, I put all these resources together for you and you can start, you know, you can start on school. And so I just do that.

>> So you just point them towards your free stuff, not even just to buy.

>> Yeah. Just for my organic. Now ads then turn around and just scoop. So like by they're, I mean, all ads are CTAs. So like that's that's so I basically you you chunk up a level and then you think about the give ask ratio across everything people see. And so ads now take up a percentage of what people are going to see in the marketplace. And so I have to compensate for that ask with give. Does that make sense? Now the gives that I have, I still have CTAs for free stuff. So they can still, you know, join the email list and they still might buy books or whatever it is. But that's that that's been the evolution of now that we run ads with school. I was like, "Okay, I have to I have to compensate for that."

>> You've seen almost these ads, right?

>> You want to win $1,000?

>> I'm giving it to you for free.

>> I want $1,000.

>> Well, that that's how they scoop up. Yeah.

>> Right. Like you you've engaged with something of Formosi, so the ads follow.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. So I see the purpose of organic as getting free free free facial recognition and ideally like at the coldest edges of this, it's how many people recognize my face. That in and of itself is going to create higher CTR, at higher conversion rates, and at higher prices. One level underneath of that is people who recognize my face and have gotten some sort of positive experience with the content that I had. Even if it was just one video, they're like, you know, I did like that video that guy made. Cool. Like the next level is like, they also know my name. You know what I And then beneath that is like, oh, I watch a lot of his stuff like all the time and I'm a regular viewer. Right? So there's there's these circles of awareness. And so the purpose of content as I see it is like shorts absolutely have ROI, just way more with ads than they do with like trying to take a short and then like provide value and have CTA. Really tough.

>> Yeah. Really, really tough. And so I don't even do it.

>> Because I throw in, you can't, I don't even mention the community in my in my shorts. I'll just like talk about a relevant um subject that's involved in the community. Then it'll be like, like a meals video. I do a grocery haul. If you want recipes for these meals, and like the last 3 seconds, it's only 5% of the people who watch the video all the way through get to there. But the conversion is still pretty good.

>> I mean, personally, just because like this is how I think, I put it in the description and I put it as like first comment, and I and I have it in profile. And so I kind of see it as like, if someone wants to take the next step, they'll they'll immediately be able to do that. And that way like I might get 10 times the views by not having three or four more seconds where people want to dip. Does that make sense?

>> Yeah.

>> So, that's that's the trade that I make in terms of short content. Um, in terms of what we do on Instagram, we just do reels right now. Um, for the most part because they just get the most views in terms of new audience. I do see like a picture on Instagram as like an email now. So, if you've ever seen that, like you'll get way more likes and way more like and you'll almost like, I at least for me, I get like guaranteed reach, but it goes to no one new. And so it's like, if you there's a picture of me or doing something, whatever, or a carousel, I'll I I basically almost like guarantee way higher reach just within people who know who I am. And so I think those are like, you market with the reels and what the platform is saying, like, this is what we're going to show to new people right now. But then I make, you could make your kind of like CTAs with the um, with the images. Does that make sense? So it's like nurturing through the like pictures more nurture your audience rather than.

>> Is that why you do your um, your tweets as reels?

>> Like, yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> They bang too. They're really good.

>> Yeah. They crush.

>> Yeah.

>> Super high leverage for.

>> What one thing we've seen a lot of success with on um organic CTAs, like if you have to do organic, if you can't run paid ads, but you also need CTAs to make money, is instead of offering more like instead of here's this one recipe. If you want more, go to my school group, offer custom. So like, I can make custom recipes based on your macros.

>> Because like if you're on organic, there's an infinite amount of more content, like they just keep scrolling.

>> But to get custom, they have to go through your thing. And if you offer like one-on-one coaching or like group coaching or whatever, like that's their option to get co at school.

>> Because you over, more is overused. Like everyone says you can get more.

>> Yeah.

>> Really good.

>> So how do you give something custom to each member? Or if you really want to scale, like thousand plus members?

>> Group calls, small groups is good.

>> Just split that up.

>> Custom's good.

>> How, how close does your content need to actually be to the people that you're trying to find? So, if you're trying to find business owners and now you're going broad, and you guys all talk about going like, you're doing loads of different things, but if you're just trying to find like.

>> Oh, I stopped. That's the point of me doing that 90-day test is I'm not doing that anymore.

>> Yeah. So, if if now you you now know what you know, if you had to go back in time to find businesses, only businesses, to get them onto school to build a platform in school, how would you do that?

>> You make business content and business adjacent content. So I see like, I see personal development as like one step below, but still adjacent. Like, rel like productivity stuff, I see as adjacent to business. I see like time, well, time management is kind of like productivity, like things like that. I see as both wide but still semi-relevant to the audience. Um, but the idea that like I do a relationship video and then business owners also have relation, like, it's it's too many steps to get the right people because it's really just people who consume relationship stuff just want more relationship stuff, which I have no desire to make.

>> The the thing is, what I struggle with the most, and obviously everyone here probably doesn't because you've gone through it, is like that that first kind of step to start when you like, who am I? Who's this guy? Like, why is he talking to me? Like, so when you click on a profile that has zero followers and zero views, like, is it just the content that you're saying? The words need to carry your profile, and that's the only thing that's going to build that trust with you and the client to get them over to fill out a form. It's just evidence. It's just.

>> So, how would you use, sorry, how would you use someone that has business experience and background with results, um, to then showcase that to get them back?

>> You use that in the profile to edify who you are. It doesn't come across that arrogant. And like, >> so there's, I mean, there's different. Like, one of our big marketing laws, my team can tell you, is state the facts and tell the truth. Just like, it's just like that's the big bold thing. And underneath of that, it's say what no one else can say and show what no one else can show. From a marketing perspective, and I do that in ads, I do that in content. It's like.

>> One more time.

>> State the facts and tell the truth. Say what no one else can say. Show what no one else can show. Because there's always things that you have unique to your brand that only you can show. A lot of people just don't show it. And there's things that you can say that no one else is saying.

>> So your unique, your unique selling proposition.

>> No, not even. This is just for just for proving who I am, right? So it's like, even even when I had like, like to your point, like how does it, like you see me now, but like when I started in the gym space, I was a very, very small fish. And there was like, very established players who were like gym gurus who were all older than me, who all like were just older than me. I'll just put it that way, right? They're all way older. And so I just had to overcompensate by just being so much better than they were in terms of the content that I was putting out. And I was like, this is a model that everyone's teaching. Here's my model. Mine makes more money.

>> I was like, it doesn't matter if he's been here forever. I was like, these gyms out compete these gyms.

>> And so I feel like the only thing that I've, I feel like this platform like just has this massive like opportunity for businesses, agencies, like what I've done for me, but I feel like no one else is doing that. So now I finally have something I feel I could bring to social media to showcase to people. Look, I did this for myself with no following. You can too. Bring that forward.

>> Yeah. I mean, you put the proof. So as far as I'm concerned, the content serves the audience as the give. If they're curious for more, they will then click your profile, which is what most people do. If you see something new, you click over. Like at least for me, that's almost always what I'll do if I see something interesting. And then the profile will tell me in one snippet who this person is and why I should listen to them. And then you have your your link or your DM or your you know, whatever your CTA is that's in their profile. And again, you can put that as the first comment. You can put it in the description. Like you have three different places you can put the CTA outside of the actual content itself that I think will carry the content a lot further in my opinion.

>> I think I think one thing as well that you mentioned where it's like, say what no one else is saying. I feel like that for me, at first, was something that was very overwhelming because like, I'm talking about wellness and and eating healthy and fitness, which is the most saturated information on the internet. And so in my head, I was like, "Okay, it's going to be kind of hard to not say what everyone else is saying, but how can I say it differently, right?" And so I think with whatever you're doing, is like you want to be able to explain things in the most digestible form possible. Um, that that at least is something that's helped me a lot. So I speak faster than normal just to like, uh, you know, keep people engaged and stuff like that. And I really try and dumb things down.

>> Did you just find ways to like distinguish or like how did you, you know, create that separation between that saturation?

>> Um, so before I was making finance content, I had like, this one day I just had an epiphany. I was like, "Dude, like, how can you turn people's heads? Like these like, you need to like, I mean, unless you're like extremely professional, know what you're talking about, like, you need to be able to turn people's heads and make them listen to you." And so I was just like, "Dude, I'm going to start speaking faster." Like, really bringing enthusiasm and passion. And big shift is how to, how I say this a lot, but people still don't do it.

>> Like, if you say like, how to three ways to blah, blah, blah, kind of sucks. Like everyone says it. Like the amount of people's profiles that I see that have like five followers that are like, six neat tricks that just like, no one gives a [ __ ] right? It's six ways I helped this person do something or six ways I because the thing is is like, how is it unique? Well, there's only one of you, and you have the clients that you've worked with. Like my case study stuff or videos that I make. I'm like, no one else can make this content.

>> Yeah, I've noticed that too. I noticed it in in the school games. It's like opinion pieces versus like a story about something that happened, >> right? >> Like the worst thing I hate it when I see someone do a post and it's like how to be successful, six things. I look at their profile, they've got one member in their group, which is them.

>> Yeah.

>> And they haven't even commented on anyone's stuff. So I'm like,

>> Shut up. Basically, like in my mind. Um, but then you see Evelyn, for example, say, "I over the last 30 days, I spent this much money on ads and here's what I found."

>> And she just lays out the facts.

>> That's the difference, right? It's >> state the facts and tell the truth, >> because no one's doing anything. Everyone's just talking [ __ ] on the internet.

>> So, so if you don't have evidence, so this is for everybody who's listening who's back home. So the best version of this is like, you know, I I helped all these people just like you do this thing. One degree below that is like, I did this thing that you also want to do, and you just are like me, and so you want the same thing. A version before that is I did this work that you're not willing to do, and so I will show you the result of that work. And so I could just as easily have a title for the YouTube video that I have for the the six big shifts that we're making our content as like, I got 8 million people across these platforms like over the last three years. This is what I learned. If I didn't have the proof from the 8 million, I could just say I made 35,000 posts. This is what like I'd be like, well [ __ ] I mean, he probably learned something. You know what I mean? And so like that is the edification. And so like the action creates the proof.

>> For the people at home that don't want to do the actual hard thing, like they're not the expert, they don't want to do the actual hard thing, you can make an observation of like how someone else did the hard thing and like back into their process, and then it's even more believable because like ideally you're doing it about a big person who's like really successful, and the metrics are easy to to prove, and you're just like connecting the dots for the audience.

>> Yeah. When I started my channel, I had no credibility. So I talked about Stoicism and what Marcus Aurelius said. It's like, no one cares what I say, but people care what he said because he has the credibility.

>> Super strong.

>> Yeah. With education content, everyone wants a deal on time. So if you think about fundamental, what education is, it's like, I spent all this time learning math, and I'm going to teach it to you in less time than it took me to learn it. And so people are like, "Wow, I don't want to do all those 10,000 problems. Show me the three-step way that you do it from this big thing you did." And so I mean, I think this is how civilization moves forward is that like, it takes us all this time to learn this thing. We then distill it down. Someone starts one step further, and then like, that's how you put a brick in the wall. And so like, if we are quote educators, which almost everybody here is, I think. Is anyone here an entertainer? No. Okay. So if everybody here is an educator, then all we want to demonstrate is huge ROI on time for them. And so the more time you can show, the more cost you can show. So Evelyn did both. She's like, I spent all this time making these ads, and I spent all this money doing it. And it's like, well, wow, I don't have to spend that time or that money, and I can get the same lesson. This is a good deal. And then they they listen, they buy, and then they they follow her or whatever.

>> That that was definitely one of my biggest takeaways in the last three years of making content. In the beginning, um, cherry-picking facts and not wasting a damn second of anyone's time and just delivering the value as quick as possible is the only way is the fastest way to build that initial audience because once people know who you are, then you can kind of fluff it up a little bit more because they're going to listen unconsciously. But I mean, like you were saying before, in the beginning, that portfolio, that garden of content that you're building, in the beginning, it's just straight delivery, cherry-picking.

>> And in my theory is that you keep doing that and actually don't get fluffy.

>> Well, I like this is what we saw in our stuff.

>> You can because you have a hu because you have an audience, right? And so the idea there is if I like, if by percent I I grew the most when I treated everyone like they didn't know who I was and I had to earn every single second. It's continuing like the guy who dates his wife like it's at the first date on the on their 10 years keeps the wife, right? The one who keeps the audience is the one who treats them like they don't know who he is and he has to keep earning it every day. And so like one of the six shifts that we have from the 35,000 piece of content we put out is that we are no longer doing basically what I would consider branded content. Meaning the basically like Alex Ramosy's diet, Alex Ramosy's version of branding. Because if you don't know who I am, who gives a [ __ ] And if the point of me making content is to get more people to find out about me, then I have to not say who I am. I have to say what I've done. >> And then that becomes the reference point for the content. Just as something I mean, do whatever you want, but that's what I'm doing. One of the things that Daddy Wellness, I'm sorry, I forgot. One of the things you do super well is within your organic content, like you have a marketing funnel. Like you've got top of funnel, which is like just value for people who've never seen you before, seeing you for the first time. You've got middle of funnel, which like establishes you as an expert, gets people like more introduced to what you do, and then you've got bottom of funnel, which like actually converts to it. So like, it's just a marketing funnel on organic, and you need all three steps to like make money and convert people. So like, you'd want to start probably top of funnel so that people actually see your page, follow you, know who you are. But then the middle of funnel is like that. Uh social proof, like showing what your clients have done. And then the bottom follows the conversions. So you can't just start with the conversions. You can't just start from the bottom. You kind of like need all of it to to work as a business.

>> That's kind of what my next thought thing I say is like, is that middle of the funnel necessary? Like my whole, the way I build businesses is either on ads, outreach, just really profitable systems. So if I was to go to a business, I would just do outreach. I just like send a video of myself pitching for whatever I can do for them. But now with this like and actually achieving something like this, like there's not many things people achieve in business, and this is one of them. That do I now start getting organic people in and do I build the middle of the funnel? How important is that that stage?

>> Do you?

>> I don't know. Not for my me. I do nothing. I I don't even have Instagram.

>> Uh for my current business, no. We don't even do VSSL. We literally go from email to a sales call.

>> So you build trust in the email sales call.

>> Yeah. We do like a like an automated video pitch and then we just get them on a sales call. This is just a this business. Um, I've r I've made sales in the past for other companies. So we have done that. But um, again, if I was to go for me, I'll probably go from straight again, just as most profitable as possible, like get big contracts by going outbound client, get I get on a call and I convince them to partner up. That's what I would do. So this is something like just building me, I guess. So that's why I want to know how important is the middle of the funnel like when you're just starting out.

>> Like you don't just skip like top of funnel straight to bottom of funnel with a sale. Like you build trust in the middle, like with the sales process, and with the emails, like they don't buy someone they don't trust.

>> Yeah. Yeah. So.

>> Yeah. All my trust I get right now, all on the call. It's literally just.

>> Yeah. So that's there.

>> Yeah. It's it's middle of funnel to like establish rapport, ask questions, and then you pitch them. That's the that's the bottom of the bubble.

>> Yeah. Yeah. So, you just got to do the same thing, like build trust on organic before you before you sell.

>> You have it already. It's just.

>> Is it like right now I'm think like, do I do a school group? Basically teaching people how to do exactly what I've done. Turn a business into a school group. Turn an agency into a school group. Build out a platform. That's super easy. Just like plug and play. They literally go in, do the thing, follow advice. People who are successful. Um, then I get in and I go, "Do you want to partner up? I can invest in you and we can build this together." And then I take basically equity in the company. And then I think like, that's my long-term goal. So I need to build the trust with offering them as much as I possibly can and like giving them as much information, make them as successful as possible so then they trust me. That's my plan now. But then I'm thinking that middle of the funnel things, I have no idea about.

>> Just because I won't be able to stop myself. Um, the the whole advice for equity thing, that model sucks.

>> It does. It. What do like, even like a revenue share in the something like community?

>> So hear me out. Believe me. Believe me. I I pictured this like, I would have their team and I can help manage their team. Doesn't work like that.

>> Is it the operational or the accounting?

>> No, it's none of that. You set up a business that creates resentment.

>> Yeah.

>> Well, like, because I'm taking a cut for everything that they do. So either you write a check.

>> Or you do something ongoing. Because if you want ongoing payments, like every like everybody wants recurring revenue, but no one wants recurring work. And so you either have to make an investment that is tangible, which is cost, right? No one values your time. Doesn't matter. They won't value it in a year. That's my point. Because if you want this to be five years from now, it's like, well, dude, you wouldn't have this. No one gives a [ __ ]

>> It's what have you done for me lately. And so if you have money that you put into a business, they're like, I I put money into the business. That's how it works. Or I do this thing on an ongoing basis.

>> So you're suggesting buy equity. Buy like buy into the company if you want to do this thing.

>> Or ongoing management.

>> Yeah.

>> Or it's ongoing work. It's recurring work, right? Like.

>> Think of it as a band manager or something like signing with a label, right? What?

>> I I I was thinking maybe building actually a team that the team would go and help their community. They don't even have to really think about their community, and we run it for them, and we just take.

>> That's ongoing work, and that's fine.

>> There's a huge need for that, by the way.

>> Enormous.

>> I know.

>> Huge celebrities reach out to me and Hoi and they're like, I want to make a school group and they need exactly what.

>> Dude, I could just send them to you. Like I have UFC, like just a lot.

>> I do want to be the go-to guy that they want to build their community and I I fun it. But um, another thing is like companies, if you think influencers that you guys obviously have massive reach, companies have millions of people. Imagine getting one like Coca-Cola to make a group and all of a sudden you become a Coca-Cola fan at them.

>> Yeah. But who would want to join a Coca-Cola?

>> It's a bad example. It's a terrible example.

>> But I just wouldn't do the adv I wouldn't do the like, I'm the special consultant that has all this magic. Because even if you do, you install the magic, and then they get the value, and then they're like, what magic have you given me lately? And so the way people perceive value has a very short time horizon. Which is why churn, the the more frequently you build, the higher churn is in general, because the shorter the time period that they measure when they got value from. And so like humans have a really tough time. Like, so let's say I like month one, I do something like, just for example, let's say I charge $1,000 a month for something. If month one, I make you 20 grand, you're like, this guy's awesome. But at month three, you're like, and I do nothing. Month three, I would then be like, dude, I paid for myself for the year. But people don't think that way. They're like, I already got that, and it was a great deal, and I'm very happy that I paid a,000 for 20. But I paid a,000 for nothing this month.

>> And I don't like that. And so when you do the, I have a big bag of tricks because I'm a consultant and I understand stuff. I'm just telling you from experience, it does not work in the long term.

>> So you're saying that we should maybe take all the operational drag away from them, put it on us, build the team around taking that drag off them. They just get a check, or they just get the school fees going into their bank account, and they give us.

>> You do a you do a true partnership. You do this, I do that.

>> Yeah.

>> Add how you manage resentment at acquisition.com to the list.

>> I write checks.

>> But there's no resentment ever.

>> I write checks.

>> Like I write checks.

>> Is it for, is it like constant? Is that why.

>> That I write checks constantly?

>> Yeah.

>> No. Like I write checks once, and then like that's.

>> After like a year, they don't come back like, well, he only invested 10, and now we're worth like 20.

>> A little more than that, but yeah.

>> Million.

>> Yeah. Whatever. Like I I write real checks to real businesses, to real entrepreneurs.

>> Yeah.

>> And so like, if you write shitty checks to shitty businesses, to shitty entrepreneurs, that's what you get.

>> Yes. 100%. So the entire space, and this is why I hate this. I'm just is like, there's there's this, you guys see the ads like, don't start a business, buy a business. And you can do it for $0 down. Like, it's like, you don't get good businesses for that. You get [ __ ] businesses for that. And the reason that the guys who teach that don't do that, it's because it sucks. Just being really real here. And so it just it doesn't, it sucks. It sucks. It doesn't work. So like, either you you develop a system that you do ongoing. Like, if you said, I'm going to run the marketing. I'm going to do the creative. I'm going to run the ads. I'm going to I'm going to script everything out. Like, I will I will I will do this function of a business for good, and this is the negotiated amount that we have, and we're basically partners in this. That is different than I'm going to sit here on this throne and I'm going to tell you what to do, and then you're going to do all the work with my advice, which definitely has lots of, you know, magic sprinkles on it. But the thing is that if you succeed in teaching someone how to do something, the value of that information that you gave them before is now zero.

>> And I was worried that they would just leave and start another community based on what we've given to them or they built themselves. And.

>> Right. And so this this also builds in retention because they're like, I don't want to deal with that. The Yeah. With all of the big influencers we speak to, right?

>> Yeah.

>> The the thing that they've got is influence, which is very valuable, right? And big audience, like hundreds of thousands, millions of followers, right?

>> The thing they want the most every time is money.

>> They want money.

>> That's for sure. The thing they hate the most is operational work.

>> They don't really want to start a business. They don't want to do any management, or they don't want to do any work basically, because being them and being famous is already a full-time job, right? And so someone who figures out how to like put in managers, operators, or whatever, that'll be a killer business. Um.

>> And for your for your perspective, so think about this from uh, you know, you know what Congo Brands is? So, Congo Brands runs Prime, which is Logan Paul's business. Alani, which was Katie Hearn's business. They do 700 million a year. Uh, and, uh, 3D, they just started with um, shoot, what's the.

>> Yeah, all three of them are drinks.

>> Yeah, thank you. Guzman. And so, you've got they go to the biggest absolute influencers possible, and they have the system, the connections, the distribution, the manufacturing to make drinks. And so they say, "You be the face, you do the marketing, we will do all the stuff that you don't know how to do or don't want to do." And so Congo, no one knows, but everyone knows Prime, they know Alani, they know 3D. And so they do billions, billions a year in sales. And they own 50% 51% of all those brands. And so now, mind you, that is more operationally complex than school from what you have to do, but like doesn't necessarily matter in terms of what like what you make and what or what they make. But I I feel I'm more comfortable like in what I know is working with businesses rather than I have worked with influencers in the past, like my clothing brand, but um, taking a business and it almost like just turning them into a subscription-based model, adding a subscription-based model onto that business is such a hard thing to say no to. You know, I can add a 100k a month for your business. Like, yeah, your clients over like, but we would run it. Would you say that's pretty much the exact same thing, but just with the business? So my TLDDR for you is if I bought 100% of you today or your skill set and I was like, what's our plan? I don't think I would actually start the content route. I would just do what you know how to do well, which is like, you know how to do outbound well, which is great. I'm a big outbound fan. Get those people on the phone. They already have the distribution base. Like you just need a market to get them, which when you do high value stuff, outreach is but in my opinion by far the best method if you just want whales. Like you just go get your whales and go get them, right? And then you spend a lot of time prep. You know how this works, right? Um, and then because you only need like two, three, five, 10 of them to make a very valuable business. And so I would do that.

>> I don't need the middle of the funnel.

>> I you already have an acquisition process that works. It's not middle. Like just ignore middle. Like just you have a way that you get customers, do that way that you already know. And if you have a way that adds value, do that way that you already know. And just focus on the biggest whales you can. That's it. And then just make sure that the value prop is I give you money, you do nothing, we're all happy. Yeah. Sorry, I was just like, I couldn't take the rev share thing anymore. Yeah. Good. Okay. Okay. So, from a from organic content perspective, um, obviously it seems like the lives and many times a day seems to work really well. CTA towards um comment and then the follow-up comment, which I think is really good from many chat perspective to boost it even more. You either go uh many chat to the to the link straight to funnel or you do to the lead magnet. Either of those work in terms of the strategies and then you do additional webinars uh for the school community to then in excuse me, in the school community to upsell higher stuff. Um, and I think all that stuff sounds great from the webinar little conversion tactic, adding in that demonstration of like, let me show you someone just like you and try and pull out different avatars that you can pull in real time, which just like real-time social proof rather than like, oh yeah, this was from six months ago. It's like, this is yesterday. This guy just made 10 10 grand or whatever. I think those things all add a lot. I love the CTA of custom rather than more. And someone asked, uh, how do you make, how do you do custom at scale? Um, you do that with templates. And so like I had a white label nutrition system that I licensed to all the gyms that we had. So 5,000 plus gyms, and they followed all the same nutrition system that I created. And so all it was was just like a very simple color-based system for food. And I just taught them in 10 minutes how they could just personalize nutrition. So they were allowed to sell personalized nutrition, but they didn't have to spend, you know, 90 minutes hearing someone's life story about how they're, you know, struggled with food and blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, it's you just, you templatize a system, and the personalization comes with like, literally like three or four numbers on the top, and it's like, great, there you go. I personalized it. It took two seconds. And so it's more like systematizing how you do personalization at scale. And if you like literally have tens of thousands of people in a community, for example, then you just walk them through how they would personalize the templated plan. Does that make sense? Okay. Uh, and then we know mornings 9 to 11, at least for the US market.

>> How do you get 450 posts out in two days worth of effort? Like what's your process?

>> Where's my guys? Work. Um, a lot of work. I mean.

>> Because like writing to like then shooting or.

>> The big the biggest secret weapon that I have is Twitter or X, whatever. Um, that's actually like, no one no one knows that, but like everything is so I just, I tweet all day long on X. And then the stuff that does well, we then use the crap out of. So that then obviously gets me people on X. I take that, that turns into Instagram reels. From there, I will read the Instagram reels that I already know perform into a camera, and then those become clips that also crush. Literally different format for the same thing. And then I'll take 20 of those and string them together and make them a YouTube video. And then when we caption all of the posts that we do, we use other high-performing tweets to caption the other tweets. Like my captions are just two tweets. It's tweet one, which is the real. Tweet two, which is the caption, is just another tweet because I So if you ever see anything written from acquisition.com or me, I wrote it. Everything. It's just all on my Twitter. And so they'll search like friendship, loyalty, sales, whatever, and there's, you know, 50 tweets about it, and they'll just grab one that goes, you know, is closest with the tweet that they made for the real, and that becomes that.

>> So you just like inspired like every day.

>> Yeah.

>> And then you just take the best one.

>> Yeah. I wouldn't even say inspired. There's just like stuff happens and I'd be like, don't do rev shares for equity. Like, don't do advice for equity. It does not work unless you're doing minuscule amounts, and even then people hate you.

>> That's super interesting. So you use Twitter as the platform, smallest friction, just proof of concept, whatever tweets do the best, you use those to create reels, generate a question from that, and then you bulk those for the bigger, higher value YouTube videos.

>> And there's zero penalty for tweeting a lot. The platform's built for it.

>> So so what so if you had, let's say you were to start your Twitter account from zero. Like how would.

>> I did start from zero. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, let's say right now you basically had zero followers, zero. No one knows that your power towards your value towards scripting. How would you start a Twitter account? And would you even start a Twitter account if you already have Instagram?

>> 100%. I would. It's literally the core of everything I do. So yes, I'm a So which So I'm a writer first. People don't know this. Like the reason the books do well is like I write them. Like no one else writes. I'm a ghostwriter. I write them. That's why they're good. Um, so, well, I'll say this. The reason they still sell two years later is because they're good. Like, if I had a ghostwriter, I could sell a million copies on one day because people will buy something that's associated with me, but not necessarily they won't tell their friends about it. And that's what I I want the long tail. Um, so from uh, if I decided to start over from Twitter, I would have two proof points that I try. So, one is going to be in the description, which is like, who I am. What have I done? Now, if you've done nothing, then everything has to be around documenting stuff that you've that you're actively working on. Like the the person who's like, "Here's how to like get yourself to be motivated." It's like, "Dude, you have three or like, I hate this." Like, "I help people grow their their Instagram followings and they have like 79 followers." I'm like, "What are you doing? Like, just stop." Like, it's just [ __ ] Like, you you don't pass the first check of proof. It's just like, duh. You have a Vegas sign that just says like [ __ ] And so, it's just [ __ ] Anyways, so description and then because the way Twitter works, you can pin one tweet and so that tweet, what I would have is a long tweet that's like, here's who I am, by the way. And then the tweets, everything after that is going to be consumed within that context.

>> Do you guys database your tweets in any way for Rafson or you literally just search?

>> You can search. I mean, it's searchable already as is.

>> There's a Chrome extension called Tweet Hunter.

>> Yeah.

>> All this Twitter advanced stuff.

>> It is all that stuff. I don't even use any. I literally like, I only have one thing that I use that just allows me to schedule tweets out because sometimes I'll think of like three or four and I'll just like, oh, well, I'm not going to do.

them in a row, so I'll just space them out a couple hours.

That's how I do it. And the clips. Where do you post the clips?

The like, you said you do the reels and then you just reshoot a clip. So we do, we do different. So our content is different across YouTube Shorts. You don't need to do this. We do this. It's different on all platforms. And so YouTube Shorts, Instagram Shorts, uh, Reels, uh, TikTok are the three short-form platforms that we're on right now. And so that's what we do. And then we have a couple, uh, longs per week that go out on YouTube. Uh, I do podcasts as well, which a lot of the audio from YouTube turns into podcasts. Um, and yeah, that's like, that's the content system. We just do like five or seven YouTube Shorts a day. I do, I tweet like five to seven times a day. We post, just this is just my account. We do two or three, um, Instagram Reels a day. I think we do like four TikToks a day, and then we have whatever one I'm missing. That one has it too. And then I have Leila. So times two.

What's the, why do you guys have a different strategy for what you post on Instagram and what you post on TikTok?

Because Instagram penalizes you. You can't. It doesn't. Like, if I posted 11 times, we wouldn't get the same. We, we, we, I mean, I'm happy to do volume. Um, but no, we saw two, two to three was where we kind of max out.

That's what most people don't realize, like you can't, can't span Instagram.

Cannot.

Yeah. It still functions more like an, um, like an email list still compared to like Twitter and TikTok, which are. TikTok's actually moved more in the Instagram direction, but, um, where your stuff gets shown to followers even if it's not as good of content. Um, but the original TikTok was like, anyone could go viral because they just prioritized the quality of the content. And, and basically followers had zero influence on who saw your stuff. And I think, I think just based on what I'm saying, it's, it's shifting a little bit more towards like some f, like they will put your stuff towards some followers.

Do you ever, I mean, I'm sure you do, do you AB test? Let's say one tweet does well, um, you should, you say it one certain way for Reels and then a different way for YouTube Shorts?

100%. We remix and repurpose as much as we can. So, same topic, different, different structure.

If we see, if we see that a tweet does really well, then I know that that topic is interesting to people or at least that phrasing is interesting people. And so, I'll say direct to camera. It'll go into an email. It'll be a caption on a different platform. Like, we use the crap out of it. Like, tweets are my, my home base. That's where that's, that's the actual only direct content that I make. Everything else is multiplied from there.

Do you have a plan to repost the same exact content over a long enough time horizon or do you?

Yeah, like greatest hits. Greatest hits. Yeah, I'm fine with greatest hits. We actually, I think we do a bad job of doing it right now. I would like, like something I was like, "Hey, we should, you know, maybe post this stuff again." Um, but yeah, that's, that's actually something that we're working on. But up to this point, it's been almost entirely denovo.

It killed it, Ramsey.

Yeah. Yeah. He's got so much content from, he could make nothing forever. But yeah, so recycling like your top 10% of content and then just sprinkling that back out even once or twice a week, your greatest hits from a year ago because you have new followers. To them, it's not, it's new.

How, how long in advance would you post it? For example, I made a piece of content that banged.

Um, depends on the platform. So I can take something that was a tweet from six months ago and I could do it again today and it'll crush. The same if I think, I think basically the more, so like Instagram, I think has the longest, the longest memory and the least amount that you can post per day. Um, like YouTube, you just can't do it at all. Like you can't repost a video because the videos kind of live forever. So like, I guess YouTube would be the extreme on this on this side and then Twitter is probably the shortest, shortest memory, most forgiving, um, in terms of volume and reuse.

TikTok, you kind of repost.

I'd say TikTok's like here.

Yeah, exactly. So the amount of time that you, that elapses between reusing the same thing. I think it also depends on how fast you're growing.

I think your definition of repurposing is like, like sometimes re-shooting as well, right? And not, and not just reposting.

Yeah. So do you just have two, or do you have more forms of reposting? Uh, sorry, repurposing?

Those are the, I mean, cross-platform, different format, and then literally just redoing the same thing and just posting an old clip again. It's like four different ways you can remix the same thing.

YouTube's content ID system was really, really good because they check for copyright and they've got those processes built out. You can't repost, like, doesn't work.

How long did you go from just you independently doing your content before you brought in the whole team and stuff? Is I like my screen time is just outrageous. Like between shooting on for Reels, TikToks, YouTube Shorts, and long form YouTube. I thought about adding Twitter last week, but like at this point, it's like I need to out.

How many hours?

How many hours are you getting? I'm curious.

Like nine.

Nine every day.

And I was in school, so it was like all day. It's just like stimulation and it's like.

Yeah.

[ __ ]

No, I, uh, I immed. So if you've read the Leads book, I talk about agencies. There's a chapter on agencies. I, that's the strategy I use. So day one, I had agencies for everything for content creation. And then I told them day one, like, my goal is to bring this in-house over time. And so I'm going to learn whatever I can. And a lot of those guys, like, they don't know as much as I know now, but they knew more than I did then. And so I just learned what I could way faster and just like tried, I avoid like a lot of newbie mistakes. And then I just make intermediary mistakes and just had to learn how to like, not make those. You know what I mean? Um, but yeah, and a lot of, for me though, like capital wasn't an issue. And so it was just like, I'm willing to pay to just almost like be accountable to making three YouTube videos a week or whatever it was. Yeah. And then they would like trim them, cut them, put a pack, you know, put the, the headline and the thumbnail on it, which I hated half the time. And I was just like, whatever, we'll deal with it later.

I know along that same line, do you ever, do you ever get tired? Like, I mean, like.

Never. I haven't slept since the 90s. Is so much value for so long, consistent. Like, do you ever feel like?

I think it's, as long as you talk about stuff that you like. And so my team knows this and that, like, there's sometime and they're really good about it. And I think setting that precedent with the team is like, hey, I need you to come with like, 10 cool video ideas. And like, honestly, half the time I'm like, cool, I don't want to do any of those. Uh, I want to talk about this because it's top of mind. And so I, I talk about the stuff that I want to talk about. And I think so that also just kind of gives natural, like, kind of variety to the content in general because I'll be like, really focused on LTV stuff for a while. Um, and I'll be like, you know what, like, I'll get into like, there's a sales issue for one of the companies and like, I'll just kind of like re-wash myself into sales stuff and I get in sales mode and I talk about sales and all my content for a little bit. And so I just kind of let that happen naturally rather than if you're like, I have to do one thing on family. I have to do one thing like, I have, we have never had content buckets ever. If content buckets happen, it's because they have occurred more than because we planned them. Um, which you had the observation point. This is a total side note. The amount of like Alex Ramosi breakdowns that are just completely false, I find hilarious. I'm like, "Oh, is that my four pillars of?" Like, I don't do any of that. Um, and so no, it's way more. I talk about stuff that I enjoy talking about. And from a content strategy perspective, I had this roommate, brilliant, one of the two smartest people I've ever met in my life. Um, and he had this, he read this book and it was called Too Good to Fail. And I was like, "What's your marketing strategy?" He was like, "That." He's like, "If I just make the stuff that I have so [ __ ] good, like, if I just make it so that even if one person sees it, they will share it, then eventually I'll win." And he now runs a hundred million dollar company. And so, like, and we were roommates back then. And so, I, I, I very much have taken that perspective. Like, if you're brand new, it's you just need to make the stuff as good as humanly possible. And the reality is that it will still suck, but you still have to have that bar because you'll look at what you did two years ago, be like, "Oh my god, that was dog shit." Right? But just like holding nothing back. Like, and the reason I, I talk about that a lot is because somebody who's new, holding nothing back is still like barely valuable, right? And so like, people still will consume the stuff, see that you're really good, and then still pay you for help. They will, like, they will pay you for implementation. So just give away the secrets. It does not matter.

Are you, are you happy that you're as famous as you are now?

It's, it has pros and cons. Honestly, it has pros and cons.

What's, what's one, what's one biggest con and what's one biggest pro?

Biggest pro is that we can recruit anyone from anywhere.

That's what I want, but I don't want any attention.

Privacy is the cost of fame. Like, it's a price. Um, the con is privacy. It just doesn't exist. So like, every single time I go out to eat with Ila, I'll have three or four people interrupt us because it's the one time they're going to see me and they want to take a picture. Or they want to tell me about their business. And, and like, the first two times it's awesome, you know, and then like, the hundredth time it's like, you know, you still want to be really excited about it because the thing is, is like, I also don't want the reputation of like, yeah, I met him in person. He's a dick. And it's just because like, it's my 10,000th of this and it's the first time and the last time this will ever happen for you. And just trying to, and so I think on some level, it actually changes your behavior because if you basically realize that everyone is recording you at all times, like mentally or literally recording you, um, you just, you're like, okay, I just can't have bad days.

So do, do you guys get that? Because like, you're obviously there, like, you guys are big, but like, do you get recognized, interrupted, [ __ ] stuff like, I choose to live in Alaska this.

I mean, for me, it's just been, I mean, it's been 10 months since I started and it's definitely like, it's like surreal at this point. Like, now, just like, I'm in college, so if I go to, like, I went to a college bar and I was just like, what the [ __ ]. Um, walking around, like, yeah, it's, it's weird.

But I feel like it's that trade-off you have to kind of accept, especially if you, I mean, in my head, it's just like, I want to continue to grow on social media and then leverage that to grow my business. And like, if I want to do that, that's just.

Yeah, it was a choice. I did, did it on purpose. And like, it took me a long time to get there cuz I was like, I really don't know if I want to do this. But it was a choice. And the one thing about it is that it is like a tattoo, is like having a kid. It is irreversible, which is why I took a really long time to like, think about whether I wanted to do it or not. So like, if you have a skill and you don't really particularly care for it, then I would say don't worry about it. Just go get the businesses the way you know how to get them and then just let them funnel the people into it and do the work that you know how to do. Okay. So, we covered, I think we covered organic stuff. Let me see if there's any other, um.

If you had to assign a value, like a net worth to your social presence, what's, what valuation would you give that brand?

It's probably worth about a billion dollars right now, honestly.

Like, that's not me exaggerating. That's, um, just from the amount, like, if I were to just quantify what we, like, the amount of media that we get and the conversion value of that media. So like, if, if like, if I had an elegant, like the most elegant conversion system would be like, we go public and I said, "Hey, do you guys want to invest in this? I've taken this thing from here to 250 million a year." I think a lot of my audience would be like, "Yeah, I'm in." And then that would immediately acquisition.com would be a multi-billion dollar company.

But you've done it because it's easier to grow to a billion. That's why you've done what you've done wrong. So.

Yeah, it's faster. So, but you're saying I shouldn't do it because.

Because you don't want to.

Maybe.

I mean, it was a, it was a choice.

Like, if you like.

It was a choice.

You probably would have made some content by now, if you cared for it at all.

Yeah. Well, this school thing was the first time I've actually got up in front of a camera to make this course. Basically.

It's different though. This isn't social media. You're like catering to a community. I like that.

But I don't like the.

Yelling into the void part.

Yeah.

That's true.

I can't talk to a camera. I can talk to a person.

That's the difference with me.

Yeah.

It is a skill though. You do learn.

I've been like, I mean, even before this, cuz I thought maybe I come in here, obviously this is my takeaway. So I've got a whole page of notes. I've even started just talking to the camera because I'm trying to practice that thing. Maybe subconsciously I, I do want to make that that switch. And maybe.

I don't even get into subconscious. Like, whatever. Like, who cares? Like, it is a trainable skill. I believe everything's teachable. And so like, you just have proclivities in the past that make you more or less teachable in terms of how fast you'll learn. Like, I think you could teach someone who has like mental disabilities to become a neurosurgeon. It would just take way too long. It would cost too many resources and isn't worth it.

You're saying undoubtedly though, but it will get me there faster or anyone faster. Like social media will, will get you there. I mean, big brands like Neil Patel is a friend of mine and so he has a personal brand for, uh, agencies and marketing stuff. And so he makes purposely very, very deep content that doesn't get nearly as many views, but his inbound quality is absurd. He only sells to like Fortune 100. And so the contracts they sign are like, 5 million a year minimums, you know what I mean? To like, 20, 30 million a year. And so he just does it from that perspective. And so like, if you want to, like, there's a guy on Twitter that I follow that just does like CRO stuff. So conversion rate optimization. And all he posts is like, he runs an agency for CRO. And he's like, "Here's the roundup of split tests we did for the week." And he just posts all of them. And the amount, and he, I, um, he came to, it was a company we're looking at investing in. His entire lead gen was just, he had a Calendly link in his Twitter.

That was it. That was his entirely, his entire lead gen. One platform, him just posting the results that he had with clients and just showing value. And then he was like, "I get eight to 15 calls a week that are booked." And everybody's like, "Yeah, I just want that. Please sign me up." And they're all.

I bet no one comes up to him at restaurants.

Sure. Exactly. So there, like B2B, like I'm purposely, I want ROI. Like, I'm not here to get famous. I want to, I want to generate the most amount of high quality people possible. And that's, that's what I want. Okay. So we did the, we did the social thing. I see if I missed anything else. Um.

Is anyone else doing an organic strategy that's working well? Yeah.

We covered Instagram pretty good.

Mhm.

Is anyone sending emails? Does anyone here do that?

Emails still.

Like to your list.

Email.

Yeah, I did that too.

How many a week?

Uh, one to two. Just value.

Value. What's the call to action?

Uh, usually at the bottom I'll say like, if you want to, if you want to take this further, or if I just like.

Get this party going.

If you like, you want to be like these client results, like go ahead and let's work together.

It seems like you guys are mostly Instagram people. Is that right?

I use YouTube, but it's, I just started, so I haven't, have haven't been able to generate leads or traffic.

Are you mostly Instagram?

Mostly Instagram, but my business partner, they have me. So they just started doing it too. So they did a call to action there.

Are your partners influencers, and then you kind of have the, the relationship that like, you're, you're the back end?

So I'm, my partner, they have the following. Yeah.

They have the ads then.

Sure.

And I'm the one that's the face of the community.

Does that make an answer?

Kind of.

So you interface with the customers.

So I created the community. It was, I was the one who had the idea. I wanted to create the community just to help people on more of a consistent basis. I see my.

Business partners, they have, I have a huge problem that I'm working my way up to that. So my business partner, they saw what I was doing in the community and he said he wanted to start. It's all community.

So you're doing the thing.

Yeah. We.

That's why I was.

Yeah.

Yeah. Partnerships.

Well, I can tell you everyone wants what you're doing.

Yeah. You have the model that like, I've been, like, we've been trying to talk more about it because I think like, I made a long article inside of the school community about your model, which is the fastest way to go from zero to 100 grand a month or 50 grand a month or whatever is, go find someone who spent five years building the audience and then just say, "I'll do all the [ __ ] you don't want to do."

That's exactly what I do. And exactly.

It's a great model. I love it.

So is that like the model of like, uh, you, you seen last month, like, uh, how they have growth operator, like Brady and Eddie, like basically their, uh, their model of, bring in an influencer and selling.

100%. They have free traffic and influence, and they will just send it to you. They're a forever media asset. If CAC is zero, it's hard to lose money.

And it's like what we're doing, by the way.

That's exactly.

Yeah. We both believe in the model.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We, we're with them and, and, and we have another like ally as well.

Oh, you guys growth operators, are you?

Are you the operator?

I am. Interesting.

Yeah. And he's my operator.

Sweet.

Oh, you're the operator.

It's pretty interest. I mean, I think it's fantastic. What we've done is great, but the, there's so many, like, the outreach from operators is out of control.

Interesting.

Insane.

Yeah.

I know you're a big fan of Sing as well, or not. I don't know if you're a big fan, but, uh, I can't imagine how many operators are hitting him up on a, I would say maybe a thousand a day. He's probably again, the swarm of operators to bigger creators. Like, at least for me, like I noticed a difference from like December to now.

Me too. Me too.

I get like 20 a day.

For school.

Yes. For school.

Yeah. I've heard about this, by the way.

Few benchmarks.

That makes me super, that they're following the script. That makes me happy. Um.

But it's a second order effect, by the way. Like the amount of cold outreach that's happening for school that we're not doing.

Is big. Yeah.

Is big. Yeah.

Which is great.

There's a big uptick for sure.

Yeah. The, the thing that's stopping them all is they don't want to do the work. They like want to do it, but they're like, do the work for me.

It's just that the influencers, they, they have a trust like issue. Like.

Totally. So like, how this random guy, you know, young, helped me that has no experience or doesn't have a following or doesn't really have any type of social proof or reputation, take my thing on school. I have a, I have a 50-minute webinar that's coming out this week on the model for doing the growth operator thing.

Well, perhaps it would be useful too, if they.

Good luck, everybody. It's like, it's a really good presentation.

You should throw in there that to make sure they follow the creator because so many of them.

It's in there. Oh, it's in there. I have it all. It's all in there. It's the, the, the piece though, that is that everyone messes up is that they go cheap, right? Is like, you want to go like, one, go after some, like, I basically draw, draw these circles where it's like, okay, [ __ ] it, I'll just show you because someone else watching this too. So there's like, like people that you directly know, you know, th that's like the, the, then people are like, well, I don't know any influencers.

Okay, well, it's also like, what size? Like, everybody is an influencer to a degree. It's just like, what size influencer. So there's people you know, and then the people your friends know, which then multiply. Like, everybody here has 150-ish acquaintances, let's say, like 10 people who you could actually make an ask for. Well, that 10x is the reach of maybe they know somebody, and that's kind of the second circle. After you have your friends, then you go to people that you follow, which at this point, you should, you'll probably be able to f, like, it's like, "Hey, I've been following your stuff for two years. I'm a huge fan." Like, if somebody starts with that, like, I still see my, my message requests, and one of the tips that I have in the, in the thing is, um, mention in story. So for me, I basically skip most asks, but if I see a mention in story, then it means that they're actually doing a little bit of work for me because they made some content, which I can then post to my story. So it's like, I don't have to make the story. It's like, great. So they actually are providing me value by making a little bit of content and tagging me in it, because then I can just make content for free. And so I'm willing to look at those. Like, that's one of the tips I have for like, if you have, it's like, if you're like, "I love this dude, like this shit's awesome," and then you do the mention in story, a lot of times they will share it. And I also know that if, if I've seen somebody who's done like four, five, six, seven, eight mentions before, because I have a lot of message requests. Um, and then I go in, I'm like, "Oh, this guy's like shared a bunch of my stuff. Like that was cool of him." And he says, "Hey, longtime fan, been following, like first-time message, like I'm actually like in your neighborhood like a few times a year and I'm coming out, you know, in a few weeks. I'd be happy to stop by and walk you through kind of what I have in mind." And this is where like the description in bio. If you're like, if you're, if you're trying to be a growth operator, then say your [ __ ] growth operator in the bio. Be like, "I have a very, you know, I have two, two brands that I, I work behind the, you know, behind the scenes with." Don't lie. So, say zero if you like, well, don't say zero. Just say this is what I do. Um, and then because when I look over, I'm going to be like, "Oh, okay. Well, this is what this guy at least does for a living." And if I am feeling generous, well, whatever. If you are feeling generous and they're flying to you and they come with like a full presentation, like the amount of work they do beforehand is going to dictate the level of trust I have that that person is going to keep doing it. Everyone wants to cut corners and just be really lazy. And the reality is that they're probably going to be lazy with the influencer. And that's why the influencer doesn't want to do a deal with them. They want somebody who works as hard or harder on this business as they work on their brand. It's like, I want you to be obsessed. I want you to just do, they're like, "Just sleep on the floor of of this school community. Make sure it works." Like, that's what you want.

I think the issue is that they apply like other cold outbound tactics to organic.

Yeah.

And volume is not going to win it. Like, you can't just send 100,000 emails. Especially with the following thing. Like, if you're not following the content creator, they probably won't see your message. Like, the deliverability is just not there. It goes into that like spam thing or whatever. Like, you never see those.

I still check message requests for mentions so that I can make content.

The secret ones where it's like.

Oh, the secret ones. Yeah. I don't even know. It's like four levels of inboxes. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, but yeah, so this is, this is basically the, the, the process that I outline, which is like, then go to people you follow, then people that like, like, have just ideal. But even then, like realistically, you should follow the person. Like, if they're like, "Well, I don't have any people that I follow." It's like, "Well, welcome to the world." Um, and maybe this isn't the right model for you. You know what I mean? Like, if you follow anybody, then those become your target, you know, your targets. And I think S made this point last time, which is like, actually look like you give a [ __ ]. And the fact that you have no one is also the biggest advantage because you're like, "I will do everything for you." Whereas, if you went to a company that has like 20 of their accounts, then you're going to be 120th of their business. They don't really care. They're going to put you to an account rep. You have my cell phone number. I'll give you my home address. I'll give you my firstborn child. I'll name him after you. Like, let's make this happen. You know what I mean? And I'm also in the, you know, in the area next week. Um, which also makes you look a little bit more legit. Like, if you want big boy, big boy partners, you need to act like a big boy.

If you were to flip that really quick and like, so if I wanted a growth partner, would you maybe reach out to your following is maybe the first start to bring in?

Yeah, I mean, if you do that, you'll probably get a lot of responses. And so what I would do is I would have, I would put a lot of hoops because then that, that's like, that's my reverse approximation of getting. So like, all of the, the editing team that we have, or almost the vast majority of them, at least the first big amount that we got in, we did. Riley, did you come from, uh, a competition?

What?

A competition where we like, where we like said.

Yeah, you did. There you go.

Yeah, Jason did. Um, we just made a post on YouTube in the YouTube community and just said like, "Hey, we're looking for more editors. Uh, we're going to put up, like, let me know if you want that." So we had 1,200 people say that they wanted to be editors. And then we gave them one clip. Everybody got one clip. It was the same clip. And we said, "Edit it and send it in." So from the 1,200, 60 people sent in the clip. So just to give you an idea of like, how lazy people are. So 60 people sent in the clip, and then we got like four amazing editors from reviewing the 60. And so if you do the same clip too, you don't want to say like, "Just go pull something," because like they could, like the quality of the clip can then be, it's really hard to judge between the quality of editor. But if everyone has the same clip, then you can really see how good they are at what they do. That's just for editing, for example. But yes, if I wanted to, um, have a growth operator, then it might be like, "Tell me the plan. You like, how basically you want the closest approximation of what their job is as what they do beforehand to prove themselves based on the, the size of the following you have." Like, if you have like 200 people, then you probably can only have like one step or just field all of them and see what happens. But yeah, you just add more friction and the best guys will get all the way through. Like, and all four of those editors still work for us and they're all awesome. Join all the programs that are teaching people how to become growth operators, and there'll be groups of thousands of people that all looking for people like you.

Yeah, actually, that's a wonderful idea. I like that.

That's exactly what I did. I was, uh, I was a person looking for like a competent, like growth operator. So I joined the community, I learned about it so I can understand how to vet operators. So I wanted to understand that model first before I just like shoot my shot at some random kid. So I learned.

Operator guy should keep a deans list.

A deans list.

Of his like, of his best operators. So when celebrities come along, you're like, "Here's my best guy. Here's my."

That's what Eddie does. He has like a, um, a board where he throws out like editors, sorry, um, operators and and two influencers. So like, I got this and we, he has an inner circle group chat that we're all that, that people are making the hire people and he puts him in, "Who needs operator? Who needs a influencer? Who needs a a creator?"

Oh, so he is matchmaking.

Yeah, he is. There's like three forms of matchmaking in there.

Cool.

Yeah. Tinder for influencers. Love it.

It's how you add insane value.

Yeah. Unbelievable.

I got, I got one question, um, about your relationship actually. So, basically, your relationship with Leila is actually quite similar to me and Lawrence. Uh, no pun intended.

Think so.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think you said enough, man. Just leave it there, you know? It's good.

I don't want to hear it.

Yeah.

So, so, um, you've had a, like, you've been with Later for a while and we've, we're actually cousins.

Oh, cool. And we're like, "Yeah, blood."

Like Leila and me.

Yeah. So many similarities. Yeah.

So, how would you use that to your competitive advantage? Because we know that we, we have this bond that we're able to just fruitfully grow. How do you leverage that? Because you guys are.

Gotcha.

It's just like the, like trust lubricates all relationships. Like fundamentally, reputation is a proxy for trust.

A proxy for trust. Basically, if I don't know anyone, but someone knows me because of my reputation, they act as though they know me and trust me.

Gotcha.

So, reputation is, is a, is a substitute for trust. Which is why if you could have, if you could have everyone in the world trust you, which is the value of a brand, then people would buy what you tell them to. They would pay premiums. They wouldn't go elsewhere. Like, all of those other advantages you'd have of somebody you really know and trust. Brand gives you a proxy for that at scale.

Okay. But how does that help our relationship grow so that it could impact the business higher?

Well, I'm saying you have trust, which is the most valuable thing. And so the idea is like, you just divide and conquer. You don't have to check in on each other. Like, Leila and I run like, we, we basically operate separately. Like, we don't actually work together almost at all.

Um.

So like, like.

So would you say having clear roles?

Yes, 100%.

100%. I think from working with each other, like we've been close ever since, ever since birth. So like, I feel like we're quite similar to each other.

Like me and.

So like, I feel like we have very similar opinions and we.

Each other for pretty much everything.

But I think where that gets a bit difficult is that we actually dip each other's toes into literally every single role and responsibilities.

Yeah. Like, like, "Oh, yo, help me with this recruit." And then so in the, so that's normal in the beginning, but you have to draw a clear line and say, like, "You do that stuff." And that's where the trust is important because you just trust that he'll take care of it and you trust that you'll take care of it. And I trust that if Leila makes a decision in a hard situation, that she will get it about as close to what I would have said anyways. If Leila then comes to me with like, like a strategic question, it's not like a question, it's like, "Hey, this is where I'm thinking. What are you thinking about this? Like, is there anything I'm not, I'm not seeing?" And I do the same with her if it's like a big picture thing. But the vast majority of anything that's day-to-day, like she just trusts. I'm like, "Hey, I'm going to change how I'm making content in general and I'm going to move the brand." She was like, "Cool. Like, you spend more time thinking about this than I do." And she doesn't have the time to get read up, like for me to catch her, like, it, it, it's less efficient.

Like getting her involved in it, like causes her to be.

Sam's not like, "Hey Alex, can you make these pieces of content?" You know what I mean? And I also am not like, "Hey, I think this should be the roadmap." Now, every once in a while, I'll see a cool comment. I'll be like, "Hey, maybe this would be neat for the the roadmap." But if he's like, "That's not going to be a priority because of X, Y, and Z." Or just like, "That's not a priority." Then I'll be like, "Cool. I trust it. You, you're spending way more time on the product than I am." And I think, same trust that I am spending way more time thinking about content and media than he is.

Yeah. The best partnerships are when you like, you just take care of your zone so the other person doesn't have to.

Exact. Like, no mental space goes to his side of the business. Like, for me, like in gym, like rewinding the clock, Leila just ran everything and I just like made ads, like for the most part. And then.

It's like not diverting it, so then you can put 100% in and get the most out, like basically leverage what you said.

Yes.

Like my biggest thing that I used to tell like our team or like at least Leila was I was like, "No matter who we're going against, it's like there's two of us. It's like there's two of us. It's not like it's like they, if they beat me, you're still there. And if they beat you, I'm still here. Like, they have to beat both of us."

Yeah. That's a good thing about growth operating is because like, actually, we're trying to set the standards for growth operating. Like, like, even though, you know, some of you guys know may not know us, but we have high, like standards for what we put, like our business. So I think having that relationship start is the foundation of the whole, like business.

Yeah. I, I found a good way to think about what your zone is, is if you've ever had the thought, "If only I could just spend all of my time doing this."

Yes, that's me. Is just content. Like, I believe content is so important and I want to maximize. Like, one of my first questions is, "How do I make a seamless content system?" But I have to like, go into product sometimes. I have to go into like, uh, moderating the community. I have to do all these things which actually take away from content.

And I see a dip. This is for you. So, what we do when, because we install operators in almost every, every single business we've invested in, we, we put in an operator because an entrepreneur can get to a certain level and then they can't go past that because they get spread too thin. It depends on the skill of the entrepreneur, how far they can go before they, you know, they have to bring someone else in. But we bring operators in. It's probably one of the key value ads that we do at acquisition.com. And so the, what we do is we, we run a time study. So, it's the first thing we do when we buy a company and we have a time study for all the leadership. The one that we care the most about is going to be the entrepreneurs or the found, you know, the founding team. And so, we do 15-minute increments and it's just like an Excel sheet. It's not hard. You, 15-minute increments, you do, you know, whatever, six, seven days a week. Um, and all you do is you set a timer on your phone or a kitchen timer and every 15 minutes, you just write down what you're doing. And you think this is going to be a really big distraction. It's not at all. It actually makes you like super focused because you're like, "Oh, I have to do stuff all the time." Like, forces you to actually like take action. Um, and so what you do is at the end of that whole process, you then look at your time and then you add it up and you say, "Okay, you bucket it." So like next to the, so you have your time, like whatever, what time of day it is, it's 9:00 a.m. And then you have whatever you did, action, right? And then you put here, you go, category. And so it happens at the end of the week, you're like, "Okay, I spent six hours on, you know, moderation [ __ ]. I spent, you know, eight hours on product. I spent, uh, you know, 20 hours on content." And you, you know, you work your way down the list, right?

It's like grouping like you've done.

And so then what you do is you look at that and say like, "Is there any of two or three of these things that actually fit into a single role?" Well, that becomes the next person that I hire. And if you have an operator, then you say, "Okay, is there any of these things that you can full-time take off my plate?" And so the way that now everybody runs differently with their operators. The way that my relationship works with Ila is that she just, it's actually kind of interesting. She kind of like protects me. And so she tries to actively, like, she checks my schedule every week before, like before the week starts, and she pulls things. She takes things off my calendar and she puts it on hers and then she bears the load and then she goes and hires and trains people to to shoot it off. And so I think, uh, Aayakoka said this, is the speed of the boss is the speed of the team. And the point is, is like, how quickly you can offload things from the head person in the business so that they can stay in the highest value, highest leverage decision-making and actions that they're good at.

What's really helped me? So when I go into a company or with my own businesses, I just develop systems. I split them all up on a Miro board and then I just build something and then one person is responsible for that. Another system, one person is responsible for that. So even the peer me society that we built now, it's split into four systems. The only thing that I'm responsible for is the operational side that everyone's running the other three systems. I could not work. I don't have to do anything anymore. There's only three people in there. So yeah, just visualizing everything and then when it come, when you come to scale, the only thing you need to do is maybe take off some of the heavy load stuff and employ something for that and it's easy just to visualize everything like this needs to be ticked off. This needs to be ticked off.

Does that make sense? So you need to protect him and take as much off his plate as humanly possible because if you just did content and you had nothing else to do all day, you'd probably murder it.

Right? And the like, so I think it's like, what's the biggest domino? Like, and I think we both have like, if, if only this thing were true, we'll win. And you want to have as many of those in a row as you can. So it's like, if all we did was just build the biggest brand around, uh, this space as humanly possible, we'll win. Cool. If we build the best absolute product in this space, we'll win. And so it's like, how can we protect those things at all costs so that those people don't intermix or crosswires or get off the main task.

I think one of the things that is different about our relationship is that I also, um, ideate with him all the time about content. So I spend a fair bit of time doing that as well and I actually record with him to make sure that the execution is well done. So maybe I should stop.

So it's a super high leverage role. This was something I had to learn is that, uh, there was a long period of time where I had videographers that I just hated.

And so I just hated them.

Um.

They were bad people.

No, I just hate, I just like didn't, they didn't have the skill of like, like the performal turn is talent management. But basically like.

Videographer right now is like.

No, they're Jason and D. Those guys are [ __ ] awesome. Um, but it's because we actually learned the difference. So like, the first hire I had was Caleb, who was at the time, he came in as a quote videographer. He had experience beyond that. He was going to build the team with us. But

Caleb was exceptional behind the camera. So, like, I just, like, it felt, it felt fun. It was good. It was light. And so it was really good.

And then Caleb had to kind of like get out of that. And then the team that was left, I was like, "This sucks now." Like, I don't look forward to recording. And as soon as I don't look forward to recording, no one's going to look forward to the content, believe me.

And so then it was like, "Okay, what makes Caleb better behind the camera than other people?" And so we started, like, looking at behaviors. I was like, "Okay, well, he nods his head when he's behind the camera." And so we were like, "Jason knows." He [ __ ] nods his head. It's because of how it works. I'm like, "We trained this." So he nods his head. He also, like, if, like, there was a banger point, he was like, like, he would just throw, like, a thumbs up. And I was like, "Awesome." So I had very rapid feedback loops with him to know that it was good.

Like, Caleb would also bring, like, water and nicorette because he knows that, like, I would forget. You know what I mean? Like, "You want some nicotine? You want some water? Like, you need anything?" You know what I mean? Like, and he would always, like, be cool about it. And so, and then as soon as we'd finish, uh, whatever clip, he would just be like, "Boom, that was [ __ ] awesome." Right?

And so those were the activities because, like, everything's a skill. If you just take, like, take away all the mysticism around, like, behavior and stop being like, "Oh, this, he's just got this great vibe." It's like, there is no such thing as a vibe. There's behaviors. There's a series of behaviors that someone does that you associate with good times, right? And so as soon as you can codify those behaviors, we were able to transfer that. And so the team knows that on the onboarding, like, when we bring videographers in, that this is what is expected of them to be able to do behind the camera.

And so you do that. And so it might be also, like, that's the, that's how you create good vibes in the recording. But you also bang on the, um, on the ideation side. And so you probably have a process, whether you know it or not, of how you go about that. And so, like, Michael, who runs our YouTube, like, he has his process for coming up with ideas for those days. And then he can riff on those things. And so that's the idea is, like, you have a few things that you do, a bag of tricks that help you out when you're making content. You just systemize what those bag of tricks are and you train someone else to do it.

>> Because if you hate recording, it will suck and you won't want to do it.

>> And you can definitely offload a lot of your, like.

>> That's, that's all the thing right now.

>> Yeah. You could get eight hours. Like, because you said eight hours screen time. How much of that is actual recording?

>> Uh, well, not part of it. I do spend, like, one, two hours just analyzing content, seeing what people are doing in the space to generate ideas. But then probably like, two, three hours of recording.

>> Oh, so it's still reasonably efficient. So it's like 60% waste, basically.

>> No, but part of it also is me on the school lab as well. And then.

>> Oh, okay. So you need to break all of that apart.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> Use, use school. I mean, that's what I do with my sales team. Go through the pitch. This is where you do an inflection. This is like, use school, like train them, just make it easy. So everyone is going the same SOP and they have videos as well. People learn much easier through videos in the way.

>> So just teach from your brain, put it in school, get them to themselves.

>> I'd even rather record myself on Loom and send videos into the community rather than type out messages. I'm just like, setting videos, just get a message out with.

>> Do you recommend, uh, time blocking?

>> Yeah.

>> Sure, why not?

>> Yeah. Because we have a system at the moment where we time block every single. We try to estimate how long we do things. So.

>> If it works for you.

>> What system do you use for this? So, do you just track it like.

>> So, I have a big piece that's coming out soon called the difference between makers and managers. It's actually a, um, Paul Graham has an article in like 2014 for Y Combinator about this concept. And so we just kind of like expounded on it. But basically, there's fundamentally two types of work that exist in a business. You've got manager work, which is basically lots of meetings. And the optimal manager is somebody who spends, who, every single second of their day is time is like, is is filled. They have people they're talking to. There's decisions they're making. They're communicating to people every second of the day. And then you have makers. Makers have like two time blocks per day, morning and afternoon. And if you interrupt the time block, it's shot. So if you've ever like edited or you code or you write copy or you like deep creative work, you tend to need extended periods of time to like, kind of get into flow and then you don't want to be interrupted for long periods of time. Each of those types of people work really well apart. The problem is when managers try and get in the way of makers. And so they just put a 10 a.m. meeting on their calendar in the middle of a work block and the whole morning's screwed. And so what we did is we tra created guidelines for our companies is like, "Are you a maker or are you a manager?" And then if you are going to interact with a maker, one, the makers have clear times when they're like, "Okay, you do have to interact with people. We're going to block those all off so that all interactions, you then become a manager for that day or that half day, you put your hat on and you try and get as many meetings as you can in so you can disseminate information, communicate whatever you need to, and then get back to work." And so if you're a maker, like, I can show you right now, like my schedule. I'll show you guys because you can see it because it's really clear. So this is my week. See these big blocks here? That's my whole week. There's there's nothing on my calendar.

>> You're the maker because you're you're writing.

>> I'm a maker. And it took me a long time to realize, like, I hate management stuff. Is.

>> That [ __ ] Can you try mobil saying maker concept?

>> Yeah. So maker comes from really deep work. And I'm assuming you do deep work. And when you get interrupted from that, like, it, the quality of the work suffers and kind of getting back into it kind of sucks. And so a manager has 20 plus work blocks per day that they can separate into five, 10, 15 minute chunks. A maker has two, maybe like morning and afternoon. And even if you know you have something, you start thinking about it and you're like, "I got to prep for that meeting." You're like, "I got to set a timer to make sure that I don't keep working like and I miss the meeting." And so it still takes a certain percent of attention. And so, like, does anyone here have, like, a day where you just have, like, nothing on your calendar, like, Saturdays or Sundays? You have nothing. You know how great you feel those days? Like, yeah, I can finally just work. It's like, that's what you want to have every day, or at least that's what I try to organize my life to have every day as a maker. And so I had to communicate to my team and I was like, "Okay." They're like, "Hey, can you, like, I see that you're open on Thursday morning at 10." And I was like, "Well, what do you build my time for if I, like, speak?" They're like, "$250 grand." I'm like, "Okay, is that meeting worth $250 grand?" If it is, I'll do it. And they're like, "I don't think so." I'm like, "Okay, then put it on [ __ ] Monday." They're like, "Well, they can't meet then." I was like, "Then I guess we're not going to meet."

>> Is Monday your manager day?

>> Monday is my manager day. I just get hammered. Yeah.

>> One day.

>> Yeah.

>> I used to have Mondays and Thursday afternoons and now it's just Monday.

>> You said manager day.

>> Yeah.

>> What's that?

>> It's where I do all my meetings.

>> You can't.

>> But it must have taken you, cuz like right now I feel like I'm at the point where I'm like maker and also like I'm doing both.

>> Of course. So you block the time so that you have manager time and maker time. Otherwise, the maker time just becomes zero and that's the highest quality time, or you end up having to only work from like 10 p.m. to, you know, 3:00 a.m. and then it becomes a hassle from that perspective.

>> Yeah. You're everything all at once.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> You don't meet with anyone because you have no, you have no employees. So.

>> So what, what I'm hearing is.

>> To get to that full maker point, right? At what point do you, obviously once you're able to outsource and stuff like that, but like your main focus is is the path inside, you know, getting.

>> Well, it's not just that, but yeah, it's, it's deep thought stuff. Yeah.

>> So, I mean, because I want that, that I want that to be my main focus fully, but like, where do you draw the line of how much, uh, implementation have in the product and stuff like that, or like how much I don't even know how to put into words. I'll tell you what I did when I started and I had to like manage [ __ ] throughout the day. So I got a brick-and-mortar gym with people coming in every day and I had problems and fires. And so the reason I like for the earlier part of my career I was known for waking up and starting work at 4 and it was because I could work from 4 until 10 and get six hours in. So it gave me guaranteed five maker blocks per week and then I had doubles on Saturdays and Sundays. So I had nine, if you include the weekend. So, I had nine maker blocks that I worked, but I also like didn't really do anything besides just that because then from 9 or 10 in the morning until 8:00 when the last client left from my gym, I was there. And so, I couldn't work the late night. Like, I'm, I was cooked at that point. But first thing in the morning is when I'm freshest. And so, I'd go to sleep as soon as I could, wake up at 4:00, and then I'd start working. And so, I just worked like, and most, most makers end up having one of those two things. Either like, if you have a family or whatever, it's usually like, I either work first thing in the [ __ ] morning before everyone wakes up or I go to bed, or I work when everyone's asleep. Usually end up going into one of those two directions. And so knowing that that's what you naturally do because you know you need that uninterrupted time, it's just doing it on purpose rather than on accident. And then letting everybody know when you interrupt me, this is the cost of your interruption. For you, you lost like, manager, you lost 15 minutes. For me, I lost half a day. So they have to understand the cost of the interruption.

>> Just pull one thing out at a time initially. Like you've, you've got all of this stuff happening in one day.

>> What, what one is the most demanding that you don't need to do? Take that out first. Give it to your operator.

>> Yeah. I mean, for me, it's just been a [ __ ] show. It's been college and like all these things at once.

>> Well, maybe you should drop college.

>> I finished yesterday. I finished yesterday. My god. Jeez.

>> Because when I realized that I was like, [ __ ] college on my schedule, I quit and it was a game changer.

>> That's why I came for it to work because now is the first time where I'll have that.

>> You're going pro, man. Becoming a professional. It's like you do it for a living.

>> Yeah. But find the next thing. It never ends.

>> It, you do this all the time. You just keep, you keep spinning up and trading hours.

>> But now all 24 hours see you rack it towards craft, which is not.

>> Yeah. But then there's going to be elements of the craft. Like right now, if you're editing, like someone can do that. And prep and research, someone can do that. Like, you're like, "Oh, I spend two hours a day." Oh, well, cool. I can have somebody else spend 20 hours.

>> Because you have some sort of help with ideation as well.

>> I just tweet.

>> That part's hard. That part's actually hard. I think the ideation.

>> Has to come from within.

>> Yeah, but the editing for sure. And the posting. Like, who knows? He doesn't edit or post.

>> Don't post anything.

>> I don't even have login. Someone could totally destroy my life. I have, I have lo, I don't have login for my bank account. I like, login for anything.

>> And community management, by the way, is a, is a hungry one, too.

>> Yeah. Like.

>> Hungry.

>> Hungry.

>> Big time consumer.

>> Yeah. Like I caught myself spending two, three hours a day moderating.

>> When Homozi first started promoting.

>> So are you saying as, as a maker, then you need that? Like, I'm assuming as well, if you guys are influencers, you need to think of content ideas. Like you need this time as a maker to come up with the ideas.

>> Or product, same thing. Yeah. As a maker, is there any value in like doing a little bit of operating and then like generating ideas and like.

>> I think there, like, I still provide value to businesses.

>> If you're, if you're making content about operating. Yes.

>> But if you're making content about music, hell no.

>> Right.

>> Because musicians, it ruins the music and like spirit to be doing accounting.

>> You know what I mean?

>> Yeah. You got to find a synergy of like doing and then making content so that you can still do both.

>> Yeah. Because, because I found like, if I, if I solve a problem in my community, usually that content does very well publicly. So, and I'll go back and forth. Like, and sometimes I'll go into the time blocks, but a lot of times it's like, if I just really provide value and it's really good, like, it goes viral.

>> Yeah. When I don't know what product to make, like, what feature to design, I don't make product. I talk to customers until it becomes clear what I should make. And that's all very chaotic. Definitely not a maker schedule. But then when I got it, I've got the idea, I flip back. So I alternate. I'm not just pure maker because I don't, I run out of things to make.

>> You get it though? Like, because you, you wear both hats, but just the knowledge that like, "Oh, I'm entering making mode." And I'll tell the team like, "It's a maker day. Like, leave me alone." And so they know that. On the flip side of like, I am taking calls or like, I'm doing portfolio stuff or whatever, like, a lot of those calls become content or media that I can make later. And that's what keeps it legit. It's like, this is what I did. If you stop doing stuff, then then you're like, to Sam's point, you're just making it up, basically, which sucks.

>> What's the cheat code for a maker who also become more of a maker and less of a manager? Like, better talent or.

>> Say that again.

>> Yeah. If you're a, you know, like, in your core, you're a maker and right now you're just way too much manager stuff. Like, what's the cheat code to just have most of your weight?

>> You offload the things that, like, the, the hungriest demand. That's the, for me, I just go to the one that's the lowest price or easiest to replace.

>> How do you emotionally deal with that girl and trust?

>> Emotionally deal with it. What do you mean?

>> Good talent, honestly.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. I used to think I needed more process and more management. I've found that the best talent doesn't need any process or any management.

>> I agree with this entirely. Entirely, like a thousand percent.

>> Like, geniuses don't need management. You put five incredibly smart people in a room and you give them a problem, they would just solve it. Organization spontaneously occurs. Like, the, the stupider the rules you have to create in the business, it means that you're hiring dumb people. So if you're like, "Why do I have to make this a rule?" It's because you have a dumb person. You need to get them out rather than making more and more bureaucratic rules in the business. Like, this was something that, like, it took me a while to figure out.

>> So just hire people.

>> Yes.

>> So, so let's, let's start with like, let's say, a, something simple as a community moderator. What's your vetting process and requirements when you hire someone, something like that out?

>> I can talk to the specific one because.

>> I haven't heard.

>> Um, someone that's got a lot of activity on their profile in school. So, I'm not even joking.

>> Yeah, but like, think about what they're going to be doing. They're going to be using school all day. They're going to be in the community using the platform. So, you want someone that's been in the community using the platform, right? If someone applies for a community management job with us and we, I look at their profile and their last login was 12 days ago, I'm like, "[ __ ] off." Like, if they're online now and their activity chart is green, just packed, and they're in multiple communities and they've made their own community and it's actually legit. Okay, now I know they've covered every side. They're, they're a fan of being a, a community member. They've also been a moderator for other communities and they've even made their own. So, and they're using it all the time. That person is. It's almost like they were already doing it, but now they're just going to get paid and there's no onboarding training, or it's so effortless.

>> Because we're thinking like, "Oh, let's, let's put a high post out on these agency like Upwork or like Facebook like or like Fiverr like we have to train them to use school. We just hire someone within."

>> Yeah. Just go to your community, sort by like highest points.

>> Yeah. Okay. Gotcha. Go down and look into, look and go down until you find someone who would probably be willing to have a.

>> And what's, what's the pay like for them? Like, is it per day? Is it how much they do? Is it like, like, how do you gauge on like, what, how to pay them by?

>> Because you got to have an incentive somehow to to make them want to grow. That's, that's what we base it on.

>> Grow.

>> So for our editors, for our videographers, we have incentives, for example, commission-based. If a poster does better, uh, they get rewarded for it. So how does someone like a moderator get rewarded for what they do? Paid.

>> Yeah, I, I'll, I'll throw this out there, which is that school, and it of itself has been built to be a rapid reward system. And so if they've already demonstrated that they have super high activity on school, then they find engaging with school inherently rewarding.

>> And so you're not, like, they will take the job because they now get paid to do something they are already doing.

>> Yeah. But you'll never get the person to be motivated from Upwork.

>> Right? Like.

>> It's got to be there. The like, the, the seed of like wanting to do it. You'll never be able to police someone to do their job if they don't want to do it.

>> So for community managers who work for free, like their, their compensation is that they get to work to with the person they look up to and manage their day.

>> Yeah. Most of them don't get paid.

>> They're going to feel a bit of respect being a model status. Yeah.

>> Yeah. And I don't, like, I don't want to put it down, but I don't think it's the hardest job in the world or the hard. I don't know what KPIs you put being a community manager. How many posts you delete a day? Um, yeah, the respect and just some money that they're happy with. I'm sure they'll do it for a month.

>> Yeah, I know. Like Reddit mods don't get paid. Same with like Discord mods.

>> Maybe you don't even have to pay them.

>> Yeah. I mean.

>> Maybe not. That's kind of, that's kind of funny you all say that cuz when we first, like, launched everything, we had people come in that would join the group calls and would be like, "How can I help? How can I help?" And then it got to a point where I was like, "Let's hop on one-on-one so I can see how you can help." Then I'm like, "Look, I gave you an admin role. What would you like, kind of want to do?" And they didn't want to get paid for it. Like, he, he even said he was like, "Do you want me to go on the counseling? Do you want me to go on the train? Look, like, I'll message them to make sure they don't." And it was just like, "You do you."

>> Yeah. Depends on how involved this community manager is, right? So, like, if someone's literally just approving new members or like removing reported spam content, then that's like really basic. But if this person is like what Kirby's doing, he's far more involved. He's like, he is way more involved actually. So that's a different type of community manager.

>> Um.

>> Yeah, Kirby's essentially running the school games, more like he's like.

>> Pseudo head of school games. If it's kind of like, Kirby works as an extension of me to a degree, and also an ext, like, he kind of blends both sides.

>> On a perspective looking in, Kirby has, like, we, we had a perspective of Kirby has a big role in, in, in the school general.

>> Yeah. I don't think we could get him to do it for free.

>> I didn't try. I have been on school for like 3, 4 years now. I've started multiple communities on school. I think I had the free first, the first free group funnel on school. Now everyone's doing free stuff on school. So if you can find someone in your community that's been in the community since the beginning. It's an active member in the community. He's basically doing a lot of what you want them to do. He's already good at it. You can look at all of his comments. That person will be a hundred times better than anyone on.

>> Yeah. I got Kirby because he was like a power user, right? But then when we needed someone else, Kirby got his community's number one power user, Wicked,

>> To join.

>> And then when we needed more, Wicked knew someone else.

>> Who had been helping him.

>> No, no, that's the, when you can get that going, that's how you build the best culture.

>> Yeah. I think if, if you guys like, make some content about that on like, how to get someone to manage that, because I think that's a problem with a lot of communities is that they don't know how to find a moderator or they just don't know how to moderate the community in an optimized way.

>> It's weird. You have to constantly be speaking to people inside of a community. You have to almost feel the community and then you'll feel their needs, their desires, and you'll be able to constantly adjust what you're doing to fit that. And then the weird thing is, is you'll come up with a solution and it'll work for a short period of time, but then you'll sense that it stops working. Like the winner interviews I was doing, the first month it was incredible. Everyone loved it. Second month, it's like, there's now probably too much content. So you have to feel that and then change what you're doing dependent on the needs of the community. Yeah.

>> Yeah. This is going a bit into like the product creation zone, I would say.

>> Where it's not pure community management.

>> Um, but Kirby does kind of both. It sounds like you do both.

>> Like you're actually kind of creating the value in the community as well as, I said, that's how I've been with my mentor for so long. That he recognized the same way how you guys said you found Kirby. Um, he just recognized I was somebody that would that could help lead and I was already coaching and everything like that. I think just finding that person to think within your free that's more powerful than just trying to outsource that position.

>> Do you feel like as, um, sometimes when you're not moderating it, like I feel detached from the community because, because you know, you're not really actually the one doing it, you're just creating the face of it. Do you feel detached sometimes and how do you deal with that?

>> One comment says me, that's not me. So that's like just a rule across everything. Like I said, like, if you ever see anything that's written anywhere and has a blue check mark next to it, it's me. Um, which is why like the team has tried to get me to comment on stuff for years and I just don't. Um, like, but everyone's different, you know what I mean? But in terms of the like, in inside of the school group, like, I, I go in regularly to just kind of check on what's going on, check the pulse, see what's see what's new. Um, but yeah, I mean, even when I had gym launch and it was the gym owner community, like, if I, the more time you don't spend there, the, you lose touch with the customer. I mean, I like Paul Graham's quote, which is, uh, "You can solve every problem in the business by talking to the customer." Like, if the marketing sucks, talk to the customer. If the product sucks, talk to the customer. Like, like everything gets solved by talking to them. Like, and so the more in touch with them you are, the better the content you make, the better the product will be, the more real time it is. And I think that's actually an issue with a lot of quote influencers or like personality brand driven businesses is that the personality gets quote too big and then loses touch and then that's when they're like, "Yeah, he's just like not relevant anymore." He talks about stuff that, like, problems that don't exist anymore. Like, that's like the old way of doing things and then you just age out.

>> Like I see in the internet world.

>> Yeah. They talk about that with musicians. When the musician starts making music about touring in airplanes and hotels.

>> It's when they suck.

>> Like, because no one, but it's when they're like the small town country person that everyone's, cuz their experience is like, is what makes the the art like relevant to people. So that definitely exists. But yeah, I personally have to spend a lot of time in my communities, like at least probably like an hour a day, like just personally, because I need to see what I need to make. That is my product.

>> If I'm not using my product, how can I possibly know what to do to make it better, right? Um, but if I'm spending three hours deleting spam, that was actually still a good experience initially because it showed me that we had a spam problem and I needed to fix it, right? And then we did fix it and then it wasn't three hours anymore. But like, I need to feel the pain to know what to do. But then once I've done whatever I can about it, then I can put someone else in place to to manage the ongoing maintenance of it, if that makes sense.

>> Yeah.

>> You learn the process, figure it out, and then you can teach someone else to do it efficiently.

>> Makes sense.

>> Is it, is it bad for me to like, moderate the community on his account because he's not actually commenting?

>> I mean, I would just do like, if you just have your own profile, do it as you. They'll know you have, like, he'll transfer authority to you and they'll, it'll, it'll basically solve the same thing. I hate, I hate, um, the idea of someone speaking as me. I hate it personally because I also just never want, I don't want to lose trust. Like, if you feel like you've talked to me and had exchanges and then you realize it wasn't me, I like immediately hate that person. Just like I go from zero, like liking them to just never wanting to talk to them again.

>> That's why we got Kirby in. Yeah, I don't interact, right?

>> Yeah, we knew that we couldn't be real interactive with the community. I've got to focus on the product. Got to focus on the content. That's why we built Kirby up in that third position.

>> How did you do that? Because I think I was going to do that on my account. But then I was like, damn, these guys don't know who I am. But I guess it's obviously a whole process.

>> Yeah, it's totally fine. You're like, here's Kirby.

>> And in the school games video, like, hello to, like, live with your community.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Every week.

>> Do you, are you on the live? Like, do they know who you are?

>> Yeah, but I don't really say anything. I, I think I moderate the chat sometimes.

>> So, that would be a good way just to like, come with Craber. Just start introducing yourself so people know.

>> Yeah, you can just introduce him like, you just want to basically, you just make the association. You transfer brand power over to him. And then.

>> Yeah, we've done that in the modules like, yo, he's just as you know, qualified as I am. He's my strategist that does all my content behind language. Instead of saying he's just as qualified, just say he's better at this than me. And have them on the calls. Like, we all three of us are on the calls, if you've noticed. Right.

>> Your last call when we were together, every, everyone was, we saw familiar faces, right?

>> Yeah. It's like introducing a new character to a TV series.

>> Yeah. It's fine.

>> And also if Kirby makes a post and says, "Hey guys, stop doing this." It's not like you're like, "Well, it's not Sam or Hermosi, so I don't give." Like, you're like, "Oh [ __ ], okay, I won't do that." You know what I mean? Like, he, you transfer the authority and then it's done.

>> Hamza did this too with his brother Desh. I've noticed he's featuring more and more. Like he's doing posts, now he's doing calls, he's doing. And before DH was like completely not there at all. But now he's introducing new characters and it almost add, it almost makes the group more interesting, honestly.

>> Cuz you have a second, uh, element to it.

>> It's a group.

>> Yeah. Well, there's, it's like you've watched those sitcoms like The Office or whatever, right? Like, it's the relationships between the characters that make it interesting.

>> Imagine if you just had one character.

>> Yeah.

>> It creates more context, more dynamics. Like, I mean, even having like little integrated jokes in there. Like, I think there was a video recently where I said, I said some sort of like double meat or something. I was like, "Calm down, Jason." You know what I mean? Like, and I think people like the, the, like, the continued characters in and out. Culture. It kind of sets the culture between from you two, how, like, you and the person interacts.

>> That's the best way to do it, honestly.

>> Yeah.

>> So for implementations, we were always actually working with each other in person. So do you think it's good to like, be next to each other during that call, or do you think I should do a whole another call since I understand their quality?

>> I'd do it together in the beginning. You want to transfer the, you want to transfer the association, transfer the authority.

>> I would only do your thing way later if you really wanted to. Yeah. All of the authorities on him right now.

>> Yeah.

>> You need to be on the same call as him all the time for a while.

>> And then the both will feel the same. But if all of a sudden you start putting out content, everyone's like, "Who is that?"

>> Yeah. No one will care.

>> Yeah. I walk through this process for, I mean, I even did this front-facing with Gym Launch where Kale, who's our GM, who had worked up as he was a gym owner, followed the whole process, sold us gym for a bunch of money, and then started as a sales guy, became worked his way up, became sales manager, then became head of coaching and product. So he was actually the one making the modules, not me anymore. And then, um, eventually I was like, "Okay, the last thing you need to learn is the marketing side." And so he basically appeared in ads with me and said nothing. Like, I'm not kidding. He just appeared next to me because I, I did the same mistake. I like, put ads out with him and, and then they just got attacked. People were like, "Herosi got his his account taken over. This random dude is taking." Like, I was like, "Oh, no, no, he's with us. It's fine." And so I had to have him in the ads and this took 12 months. He was in the ads and users there. And then over time, we both would talk. And then it was, I interviewed him. I was just like, I held a mic like this and I was like, "And what about this?" Huh? All right. You know, whatever. And so that became the ad. And then, um, I started, we then he would start recording ads in the same setting, wearing the same clothing as me. Not like, seriously, like same exact, like, same shirt, same setting, same background, so people knew it. And it was no, literally. And so then he and those started doing. And then eventually he was able to just make his ads on his own. I wasn't there. And that took 12 months. But then he, I was able to transfer the, the kind of the brand association over to him. So you can, you just do this on a way smaller level. You don't even need to worry about that. I want to hit on this point really quickly because I think a couple of you guys brought this out, like, how do you, how do you stand out in this world? And so, um, the big thing in my opinion is going to be proof above all else, which is what you have done or what you do. The value that you can give people is going to be a function, oops, value, there we go, is be a value of the time deal that you give them, which decreases the risk they have because they don't have to spend the time or the money to get whatever outcome or lesson that you're teaching them. So this is specifically for educators. Is like the thing that makes, like, I'm not a fool. Like, if I had not sold Gym Launch for $46 million bucks, no one would really give a [ __ ]. Like, I think I'm decent at making content, but like, if I just didn't have that one kind of very important thing, it just wouldn't really matter. And so, like, I see people all the time who are like, "I give financial advice to people and my advice is better than Warren Buffett's." It's like, "Yeah, you just forgot to build, you know, Berkshire Hathaway on your on your path there." Like, no one believes you. And so I actually see this as an economy of attention perspective, which is that people don't have to think when they listen to an authority. And they don't. It's something they study a lot. But like, let me, let me explain. So if Warren Buffett gives investment advice, I don't have to think, "Do I agree with this? I don't know if this is contextual. Does this really relate to me?" You just say, "This is God, and he is now giving me a decree." Right? I'm just being like, very, you know, transparent about this. If you have a teacher or somebody who doesn't have any evidence, then you have to really analyze every single thing they're saying. And that's a lot of work. It's a lot of, it's a lot more cognitive load. And so it's just easier to listen to an authority. And so then it means that if you want to get people to listen to you more, then making sure that you establish yourself as an authority, which is not like, no internationally recognized speaker has a bio that says "internationally recognized speaker" because everyone [ __ ] recognizes them.

>> And so, and so you just say what you did or do, and that accomplishment will just continue to grow in time, ideally, if you're doing a good job. And so, like, that will just continue to compound and accrue, and so will to, so too will your reputation. And so to stand out, actually do stuff and talk about what you did. State the facts and tell the truth. And the idea is that you just want the truth to be more and more compelling over time. And if you have zero reputation, you just do what Mr. Beast did and say like, "I'm going to count to a million because no one's going to do this. I made 35,000 posts." Like, no one's going to do this. And so just thinking from the p perspective of like, what can I do that no one else will do? And then I will talk about what I did. And like, that's how you start from zero. But once you have accomplished that, like that starts to become an accomplishment and then things kind of compound from there. Um, and then from a, uh, the, the, the other standout piece is, uh, is the gifts. Sorry, I'm just not spelling gifts right, but you get the idea. GI, there, there, yeah, you get it. Um, is that you just need to give away what everyone else charges for. So, I mean, I've said this, but people still don't do it, which is, you have to actually make your stuff better than other people's paid stuff. So, that's where like, I see like the free PDFs that people give away and like, I think more people go in, see it's a piece of [ __ ] and then never want to do anything from that person again.

>> It's like, it actually has to be exceptional. And so if you were to sell the thing genuinely for $1,000, what would you make it like? What would you actually do? And then treat the things you give away with that level of effort. I give away my books. I give them away. I spend more time on the books than anything else. But the amount of people who are like, "I read that book and it changed my life. I read that book and I 10x my business." Like, from that, from that point going forward, they're like, "I'm a fan." And so, and I give the book away for free. But people still pay for it. As a total side note, which is random, we do a million a month from book sales. And I give it away for free. It's free.

>> How do you give it away for free?

>> The courses are like the video version of the book is free. The audiobook is free. It's on my podcast. It's free. I say it every time.

>> So if you want to buy a printed one, yes, you got to pay for it. You know what I mean?

>> So would you say that if, let's say I'm creating something that I think is worth $1,000? So if I'm creating something for, for free for asset.

>> Not what it's worth, what you charge for it.

>> Just to be really clear.

>> If I have a feeling that man, I should charge for this.

>> It means that I'm doing something right.

>> Yes. If you're very scared to give it away because you think it's so good, that's what you give away.

>> You should have this feeling like, man, I should charge for this. Like, gotcha.

>> Like, this is absolutely insane. Not like, this is so much value. Like, you should be, you should feel bad. Be like, "This was too much work. I shouldn't give this away for free." And then give it away for free.

>> And so then the question is like, well, shoot. If I give all that amazing stuff for free, what, like, what do I charge for more amazing [ __ ]? Which just means that you have to work more. Like, you have to just do more amazing stuff.

>> So would you say that like, if you give, like, there's, there's actually more pros to giving the danger of giving more than it is.

>> There's no danger to giving more away.

>> Zero. It's only perceived.

>> Like, people like, you give amazing stuff away and people are like, "This guy's free stuff is better than everyone else's paid stuff." And then who do they want to buy from? And the thing is, the reality is that most people don't do anything, but they still recognize that this is way better. And then they're like, "Well, I will pay him to help me because I think his stuff's way more thorough."

>> And that kind of helps your reputation, too.

>> Yes. For the 99% of people who don't buy from you, which is like almost everybody, your reputation will be good. And so then those people make other people feel okay about making the purchasing decision. Whereas if, like, you look like everybody else, which is, I give away half-baked solutions and then say, "If you want the rest, you know, go here," then everyone's like, "Screw that guy." You look like everybody else. And so, like, to do, like, say what else no one else can say, show what else is going to show what no one else can show, and do what no one else will do.

>> There's a lot of depth into that, like simple phrase, say what you did and.

>> Yeah.

>> Well, it means you have to do something.

>> Yeah, that's.

>> Which is the hard part. Yeah.

>> And he said, "Is there ever too much?"

>> What value?

>> Not valuable. Like, like you said, like, if there's something I know that is worth X amount, be sure that good need that amount of time to figure out.

>> You give it away.

>> Just give it away.

>> Something that's no high ticket mentorship is we'll give up free if they join the high ticket mentorship. We give them free access to other high ticket mentorships. So, like, the last, the last, um, enrollment we had for our high ticket to get mentorship, um, it was like $20,000 to get in. Um, but if you join today, he brought like all of his seven-figure friends on. So, if you join today, you'll get access to this person's mentorship for 30 days or 60 days. And it was like seven people that they got access all. So, it's like they were just giving us so much value that it was so many people that joined. Like, the value is much bigger than the offer, the price. You want to do that before the price, though, to be clear. Like, yes, you want to do that in the offer to also make it more valuable. But you want to take that same value and put it before. Which means that you need to have a lot of value. And so that's the secret. Like, have lots of things that are valuable. Some that you give away for free and some that you don't. But the re, like, the real reality of this is that implementation is what everyone wants help. They want access. They want implementation. And so that's what they're willing to pay for. And it feels very legitimate. Whereas the world just based on how it is, it's like when people felt weird paying for news, like news just had to, like, when the internet came, people were like, "I don't want to pay for news anymore." And so even the news, like, it took us, we had to fly a report out. We had to interview all these people.

They were like, "Yeah, I just don't care." And so that's why, from an information perspective, people don't people have a harder time putting genuine value on it, even though it is valuable. Don't get me wrong, it's the most valuable thing. Um, and so I like to give away as much as I can and then put the gate towards, you know, access or other things like that.

One problem I see with that is that what if the community members, let's say we have a very nice content engine in there and we give it to the public, wouldn't people in the community be like, "Yo, I paid for that."

Right? So then you give them more stuff. That fundamentally just is building trust, right? Like it's it's what I do on my calls as well. So like I pretty much show them exactly what they're going to be learning, how they're doing it, the fundamentals of growing their business, getting clients. They could go and try to do it themselves, but it's just they're like, "Oh, it's easier if I just pay $1,000 a month and I can just get it there all the time. I can follow it step by step." But that only that only comes from just showcasing, you know, what you're talking about.

Yeah. It's demonstration of expertise. And as soon as you give it to like those people, like there's there's always going to be another thing that they need. Like problems don't disappear. You never permanently solve any problem. They just have another problem. So it's fine. You just solve the problem for the most people first and then the next thing that you sell is the thing that the first problem, the new problem that is created from solving the first one.

Yeah. You're disrupting yourself.

Yeah. So like someone else could come along to you and do it to you, right?

Yeah. And they will eventually. So, you may as well do it to yourself and get credit and continuously get better. Do you know what I'm saying?

Yeah. Yeah. Like my Gym Launch Secrets book, I was so frightened to publish it. Like very frightened. The entirety of the whole Gym Launch system is in a book that you can get for $10 that people pay $40,000 a year for. Everything is in there. I have the...

And I say that, but then people are like, "Well, I don't want to send the price increase letter. I want to make sure I do it right because if I do it wrong, then I'll mess my whole gym up." And we're like, "Yeah, well, there's probably some nuances. I tried to do as much as I could in the book, but I had 400." The book's almost 400 pages. I was like, "And so if you want more help, you're welcome to." And when people read the book, they just get on the sales calls and they're like, "Yeah, I'm in. Just I'll buy whatever."

I'm really not afraid to a question, but...

Okay. So part of our product, like I said, ding is helping people achieve bots. Sure. But over the last two years, I've spent thousands of hours cracking the code of how to go viral on social media. And I'm really passionate on that. Social media growth track and I've never spoken about on socials.

Sure. But I know for a fact, like I know I can make anyone like grow their social media. Um, super well. I built out this 35-minute video that's only in my community for those people who are interested in that side too. But I've had like this internal battle of like, should I put this out because I know it's worth a ridiculous amount? Like in my head, it's just so much valuable information. I don't know like where to draw the line of like really different product offer. How do you mix that in? Just say screw it and see what happens. Like...

Yeah, you give it away and then you make more stuff. That's awesome. If you prove you can do the thing, even if you show them exactly what you're doing for them to copy it, they will just pay you to do it anyway because they're like, "Well, this guy kind of knows what he's talking about. Let's just pay him. It's easy."

And then they'll have questions about the 35-minute video where they can then like again, so when you're when you're thinking about community, so this is a so there was a willingness to pay thing um that ProfitWell ran. I I will continue to redraw this until everyone like memorizes it, but it was willingness to pay and then basically like expected feature. And so they had newsletter over here and you have exclusive content, access, and events. Now, there was other things they looked at. It was like discounts, merch, there was a few other things. I can't remember what they were, but these were the ones that these were the ones that people see as the most valuable for inside of a community. So exclusive. They want access to you or access to the expert, which is usually in the form of Q&A and, you know, engagement in the community. That's that's what it is. So you responding to comments, you doing Q&A's live and and/or bringing in other experts that you deem that they wouldn't otherwise have access to. So like you have access to people that they wouldn't have access to. This is super true for you, Rashidita, right? You have access, you can get people on calls that they can't. And so they can get a fractionalized version of that value through the community. The content is just other like there's like you have an unlimited amount of content. Some of it you make public, some of it you don't. And that's okay. You still want to make sure that they're both great. And then the events, you can do these virtual, you can do these in person. Like these are the elements of value within a community. And then you have the newsletter obviously, which is like something else they have, which I think is just more just written content. You don't need to do all of these. These are just the things that people find the most value in.

If you were to go back when you had Gym Launch, and what would it take for someone to convince you to take Gym Launch and put it into the community model with all your gym owners there with...

I said Facebook.

Yeah, but you would now use school instead if you...

I mean, yes, I'm just saying it wouldn't be a hard...

No, not at all. It's a better product. I mean, it's just like you get way more engagement. People like, yeah, it's just it's better on all fronts. I don't have to worry about my people getting distracted with ads. I don't have to worry about my competitors targeting them. Like, just all of those things.

Would it be a free or a paid community to launch?

Well, I I we had both. I had a free community. I had a paid community. So free community, I put stuff in and then I had the paid community which included like way more of the like super in-depth boring stuff. Yeah. Like I would say like if if you want to draw a line, I don't want to make this a black because everyone wants black and white stuff, but if I had to draw a line, I would say conceptual stuff I make public. Like implementation stuff I would make private. So it's like step by step, you know what I mean? Like guides that um they just like they don't tend to do well in general in terms of content. I would probably put those there. I'd still take some of them and maybe put them public out, test it. Anything that's conceptual, breaking beliefs around concepts, like a different model, like that's all stuff that I would put public. Like math breakdowns on like why this is better than this, like all that stuff I'd make public.

Cool. Okay. Um, so that was the standout piece. So hopefully you got got pieces on that, which is say what no one else can say, show what no one else can show, do what no one else will do, and then just talk about it and use proof as the main thing that separates you because no one else does. They're like, "Look, like seven tips." Like, no one gives a [ __ ]. Like, no one cares. Looking at the two lists, there's the traditional versus e-learning thing that um you guys brought up, which I'm happy to talk about. I think that that actually has like tangential relationship to brand, but it's kind of like a little bit more about business strategy overall. Um, and I've thought a lot about that. So I do want to hit on that. Uh, there's retention and then there's obstacles for scaling, which is like six, seven, eight figures. Um, see if I got anything else here. So those are the three big ones and recruiting. Okay. So put that up. So we got recruiting. Let's put this here. Recruiting, uh, traditional business stuff, and then retention. What was the other word I just said? Oh, the scaling thing. Scaling six, seven, eight figures. And then, uh, you guys had a high ticket pricing thing, which I can handle really quickly. So let me hit that real quick and then we'll do the the rest of these.

So, um, so from a a pricing perspective for high ticket, uh, we tend to start low and move up because if you start too high, then no one buys and you just get no data. And so we want to start really low and then just look at conversion rate times price. And, uh, if you plan on selling over the phone, ideally, like that's where it gets kind of complicated more so because people have variable performance in terms of how well they sell. Like even like week to week, if you have the same price point, you'll have close rates that can start changing. And so, um, there tend to be pricing tiers overall in terms of the types of buyers that exist. Like there's a reason that I think in the info space is at least B2B, you've got like you've got a mass market bizop price, which is usually like right under $8K right now. That's just what I'm seeing with like huge amounts of volume is a lot of people are at that like $7,500, $7,800, $8K, maybe $8,500, um, where we see tons and tons and tons of transaction volume there, which means you're selling to consumers, ideally something like for you guys with the barber thing, like some some way to make money, but it's like an entry-level thing. And then like I think there's another tier in that like $15-ish thousand, uh, and then it jumps to like $25, $30, and then you've got $50 and $100 in terms of like there's kind of no man's land in between where someone's still basically it's cheap for another type of buyer. And so you get the same conversion rate and then you have a lot of flex in that new band, if that makes sense. That's just like my observation from it. And so you guys are consumer-based. What's the thing that you guys are trying to sell?

Well, we haven't decided 100% what that higher ticket offer is going to be yet. That's the first step.

Yeah. Um, but our our offer right now is just a combination of fitness, nutrition, achieving a fast lifestyle through different mental health practices, um, all different types of things like that.

If you're going to do high ticket, my my recommendation, this is just like for everyone. There's a little bit of a trade-off, but the more infrequent that you can bill, the higher the stick and the higher the renewal rate. And so, like, if you get someone into annual billing, you have like a fifth of the churn of monthly billing. And if you get quarterly billing, it's still less churn than monthly. And so the trade-off is though that what can someone pay today upfront that's going to last for the whole year? So that's a bit of the trade. So that's the trade-off because what they're only going to really consider is what they have to spend right now. But you're also thinking churn over a longer period of time because if I look back over a year, did I get value from something? It's a much easier decision to say, "Yeah, I got value from this in excess of this price." Because I look at that $12,000. You know, I I gave an example earlier. If you $1,000 a month, I make $20 grand for somebody the first month. If they look back on the year later, if they know that they made more than 20, they're like, "Yeah, I'll buy again." And that's why they after they make 20, they buy the next month. But I'd rather that be over a longer and longer period of time. You just sacrifice on what that price can be. So that's the give and take in terms of how I want it. So I want to incentivize as many people to prepay as humanly possible and get them into some sort of annual renewal if I can.

What about paid in fulls?

That's what. Yeah.

Yeah. Basically, idea, like perfect world, you just want everybody to pay in full and renew on the longest cadence you can.

Like Amazon Prime is $99 a year. It's not $9.

I had a question about like the difference in delivery on like a $10K and a six-figure program. $10K is like the lowest opportunity someone has to work with us. It's good for data. It's good to check marketing against practice for the sales team, practice for the coaches, but like we don't make any money. It was like 25%. But like after admin costs and all stuff, like there's no money in that.

You mean because CAC $7,500?

No, CAC is like 30%. But like fulfillment cost is high because our coaches rock.

Is there a done for you thing?

Yeah, that's the six figure. So like it goes up. 10 is our lowest price. But like should I keep 10 around? And...

So you would send people from 10 into the other things.

Sometimes. I would just look at what the like so if all three levels, do you have three levels?

Yeah.

Yeah. So all three levels of the business are gonna have an LTP to CA.

Yeah. And so I had a a lady a month ago or something who asked me, she had a, I'll just, there's a parallel. She has a hair stylist business and she taught um people how to like do hair extensions for girls. And so that was like a new way to do hair thing. It's like two grand. And so it's way more expensive than whatever girls normally do. And then she had like a business consulting thing. And so she was getting 40 to 1 LTV to CAC on the just teaching hairstylist to do hair. And then she was getting like 12 to 1 on the business consulting thing. And she said that, uh, she could send people from the hair thing to the second thing. And so she was like, "Which one, like, should I market both? Like, what should I do?" And so as far as I'm concerned, I want my acquisition to be the strongest as humanly possible. So I might want the thing that's going to be the highest LTB to CAC up front. And then I would spend all my effort on the bridge between the two products as long as they're related so that I can make an ascension process um for that person. Because then the blended CAC even just improves even more because then it's 40 to 1 with the first product, but if I get 20% of people to buy that, you know, the whatever it is, the five times more expensive product, I double the LTV C.

The product is similar, the demographic is really different. Solopreneurs buy the cheap thing 'cause they're broke. 10, 20, 30 people businesses buy the six-figure thing because they can afford to.

They can't afford not to. Like, there's a difference.

So it's like two different markets almost that want the same thing. Should we keep the cheap thing that breaks even to train the team or just like have only like 10 or five sales a month, um, and and like not have any data on what those people come from, but have super, super good margins on the only thing we sell?

I mean, I prefer the simplest business humanly possible. Like, if you need the $10K to create those people, like I would be worried I would lose that. But if you're not worried about losing the higher ticket people and they're coming from a different overall acquisition system, then I would I will always lean towards the thing that has the highest LTV to CAC up front, provided I continue to I can I can sell more. And I'm sure you can sell more than five or 10 a month.

Okay. Selling 100 besides operations.

Yeah. Right. So for me, it's like, cool, that just to scale the options.

Yeah. I mean, I I always go where the the LSP to CAC ratio is. It's like my whole life is just going for where the biggest arbitrage opportunity is in terms of what I spend, what I make. That's how I see it. Okay. Um, okay. So that that I just wanted to hit on the the high ticket price. Did anyone else have any high ticket pricing stuff?

Shoot. So like with the like putting together a high ticket price based on because I believe like getting the price would just be asking people like market research, right? Kind of...

If that makes any sense. Like...

So there's um, I don't... 'cause I don't want to like change the offer too much because it just needs to be amplified to be able to, you know what I mean? Make sense. Or...

So there's two ways that we'll take. Like if we have a lot of people that we want to go after, then we'll we'll run something called the Van West Store pricing um survey. Uh, and I can walk through that. But if I'm looking at high ticket, which you guys are, like sometimes it just means like you get on the phone and like rather than saying like, "Would you buy at this price?" Just ask them to buy. Like, you'll get better data if you just ask them because people like, "Oh yeah, totally buy." You're like, "Cool, do you have a credit card?" They're like, "Oh, no." You're like, "Okay, well then that was completely."

Yeah. But I like starting so that it's a completely no-brainer offer and like everyone says yes to this and then I start edging my price up. That's like what I do. And then if it goes too high, then I can offer a bonus to those people to make them not feel bad when I like rightsize the price.

How do you know when it goes too high?

H... How do you know?

Conversion goes down.

Yeah. That's it. Just conversion rate goes down.

With the high ticket, would you create like a whole different community towards that? Like two, one for low key, one for low ticket, one for high ticket, or would you combine them?

No, I would definitely put those in different communities.

Different.

Different people, different problems. They're going to have way more value from a smaller, tighter community of people who all pay the same thing that are at a different level.

Would we need to worry about the original one dying because the highest quality people... No, they're going to solve that. Like they're so the Okay, so what you want to do is not consume value out of your own pocket. Like what you deem as valuable is where you're at right now and what somebody who's brand new deems as valuable is completely different.

It's actually one of the biggest challenges I have with my content is that um the stuff that I'm actually doing is usually so far from a lot of the people who consume my content's reality. I'm like, "Yeah, here's how I we added 40 sales guys in 90 days." Really [ __ ] valuable, but unless you have the like the sales to go in 90 days, add 40 sales guys and add $5 million a quarter profit. Like they're like, "But what do I say when someone says they don't have the money?" Like, right? Sorry, I forgot about that. Okay, let's go back. Like, you mean? So, you're you're you're going to be catering and the content is going to be entirely different. I try and hit all the strata when I'm making content for my audience.

So, so for a vibrant context, like we want to keep the retention as high as possible in the low ticket. So, we're going to give most of the course, even the basics of business case, um, implementation information. You're still going to have others, higher-level things that are going to be more like that. I don't want to provide like again, the line which is there will be things that are not relevant to somebody unless they've already solved this problem. And so this level is everything you possibly need to solve this problem. We just more narrowly define the problem. And then a new set of problems emerges when you are at a higher level. When you're at a million a month, you have very different problems than you have when you're at $100,000 a month. When you're at $100,000 a month, you have a very different set of problems than $10K a month.

So what's it, what would you say like when building out the high ticket? So you, what do you think you were spending more times building in terms of duration, let's say of like modules?

So I'll be very clear, I haven't built modules for a high ticket anything in a very long time.

Um, just like full transparency.

So what's so how do you...

Well, first of all, I think you want to ask like, um, first of all, do you even want to do high ticket or should you just dial in what you've currently got? That's like the first question. Because it's it's already hard to juggle doing organic and, you know, ramping up that system and running this program at scale and putting community managers and running the opt, that's already a lot of work, right? Imagine also adding something else in and dealing with sales people, that'll probably overwhelm you. Just focus on dialing in the organic first, scaling this up, putting the ops in place because you can hit $100K months with a with a lower ticket group for easy. Like there's people doing it on the leaderboards and dial it in and then maybe think about doing high ticket thing, right? So I would do that.

So you would dial low ticket like full first, like say max it out first.

Dial in everything before you do anything.

Like just being real like...

It's way harder than you think to sell two different things.

Like really hard, actually. Um, and then I would let the need emerge naturally for high ticket before I'd even think about doing it. So it'll look like you have some students, they're your most successful students, right? They're very successful and they are literally asking you, "Hey, how can I go to the next level? How can I get more? I want to pay you more. What else can you help me with?"

That's when you know when to start.

It means that there's an opportunity for you to do high ticket. And at that point, you know what it should be asking.

'Cause the feedback will totally. And then when you get enough of them asking for it, now you should actually think about maybe doing it.

Right. But never before then. Because...

Scratch that question.

Good.

Yeah. Because I believe great, how we can double our like little ticket price and convert the same. We have $25 a month, which is...

Test it. Willingness of his phone. He's out of school. We're good.

Alex, can you talk on Gym Launch?

Sure.

I can do whatever.

Why not? Um, why do you think they don't have their sales team go from like three or four to like eight or like 40? You mentioned you staff like 40 people.

Into...

Yeah. Right. Different company altogether. Like, why not? Or why did Gym Launch like reduce their sales staff from like PE? Was it market? Or was it like the skill level of the sales team?

Um, what are you referencing something specific? Because the sales team's still like pretty big.

Yeah, but it's decreased, right?

Over the last couple years.

Not sure. I think um Kale wanted to focus more on inbound and less on outbound. And so the outbound sales team by headcount is much harder. You've got you've got dialers, you've got setters, and then you've got closers.

Yeah. And so he basically is compensated more with marketing and done less um done less outbound. And now it's just the decision he...

Yeah. I guess that's kind of the question I'm asking is like, do you know why or like what the was it?

I think they I think um some of the more talented guys on the outbound team because Gym Launch has got a lot of reputation for me got siphoned to other people who were like, "Oh, you were on our sales team. Can you do what you did there here?" And so we lost some key talent in the outbound side, but the marketing side still worked fine. And so the LTV to CAC was still basically the LTV to CAC was still really strong on the inbound side and it started to creep up on the outbound side because they didn't have the skill or the talent there.

And that was that was the the major reason. It wasn't a strategic thing.

I probably would have kept staffing the [ __ ] out of that and kept it. But like that's where like that's that's his call. You know what I mean? What do you think about um also a high ticket staffing someone in sales that has like sales experience from different industries like real estate or car sales into uh the education space where it's like...

I try to step like bring people in who have done as close to the thing that I want to do as humanly possible.

Yeah. Like as almost a rule of thumb across everything.

Yeah. So, high ticket price, you know, now. Okay, cool. I'm going to check this box off. But I I do want to impress upon you guys. Um, the amount of companies that we look at where the founder comes in is like, "Hey, we're doing really well with this thing, and so I want to start this brand new business that has nothing to do with this other thing that I'm doing really well with." is like probably the single most common thing that I see and is just so so dumb for so many reasons. And yet the character traits and the behaviors that you have to become an entrepreneur is like, "I'm going to stop what I'm doing. I'm going to start this new thing. I'm going to quit my job. I'm going to quit college. I'm going to like you have to stop one thing and start this." And so you get this huge massive reward for doing that. And then it teaches you the absolute wrong behavior for how you grow a business. And so that's why you have so many entrepreneurs who every six months they reimagine themselves and reinvent themselves rather than being like, unless there's a hypothetical max to what the market had, like the amount of times people like, "I, you know, I think I've just saturated the market. I'm doing $100 grand a month." I'm like, "What? Like what? What are we talking about?" And so really the the the the subscript of that is like, I have encountered a problem that I don't know how to solve and so I want you to go back to zero and solve problems that I know how to solve. And so they just play that game because they feel good at that game rather than bad at the game they're in. And so it's like that's the discomfort of like, "How the [ __ ] do you figure out what an online icon of green looks like for school?" Like that's a really hard problem to solve. It turns out the more you learn about it. And so it's just being really clear about what the real constraint of the business is rather than the hypothetical constraint. So people just spend a lot of time solving problems that aren't actually the problem of the business or pursuing opportunities that are not relevant to the core problem of the business. Like either we need to market more or we need to keep people longer so that we can market more. That's it. Like LTV has to go up or we have to get more customers.

What's LTV?

Lifetime. How much people spend? Like how much profit LTV in a different way of saying lifetime gross profit, like what you make versus what it cost you to deliver over the whole period.

And there's so much like reward to just lasting.

Yeah.

Like I can't tell you how many people you see come and go when you just last. It's almost like that's all you need to do.

There's no one left.

Yeah. Yeah. You become an OG if you if you make it five years in the internet world. Like, seriously.

You, what if you see something that you think is a big opportunity? For instance, right now I feel like you want to talk to me. Like it hits my heart. I've done so many different things.

I, everyone suggests to you.

But um, but yeah, I I have a passion for working with companies. I love that. I've worked a lot and like that's just what I love doing.

Um, and I do feel like there is just this untapped market with businesses coming to school. Like there are a lot of businesses that need customer education on their products and I can name like five that I've worked for. So I feel like when you have that new thing, how do you know where you're not getting like shiny object syndrome for business and where you really have something that you think is a big opportunity or you keep you know growing the $40K a month community that you built? Like...

I mean, the question is like the eternal, "When do you push and when do you pivot?" It's like a very hard business problem in general because you can never do pursue the other path. So like, what is the right answer? Like, could I have gone to 200 locations for my gyms and not even done Gym Launch? Probably. If if I added 10 years to that, would I be there now? I don't know.

Like I feel like I have the skill level to do it now. Already done it with two other chains. So like I feel like I could actually do it now. Getting there, getting to that point. Maybe I would have gone there faster because I wouldn't had anything else to worry about. I was just only trying to beat other gym owners, which...

Actually not that hard to beat.

Yeah. So that's kind of...

You could probably win on both, but what you can't do is win on both.

Yeah. You could win with either, but not both. They're better, better stated.

And so it's the it's the choice that's the hard part. And you just have to stick with the decision. It's the sticking with the decision that gives you the outside outsized returns more than the decision itself, most of the time.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I built it to a stage now where it can kind of run itself and I'm wanting to do the consulty thing. I'm wanting to do that. But yeah, I don't know if I'm just jumping...

When I have something that has actually can run in its own. Like I I have this saying that I had internally called scale zero, which is like, I want to get the thing so that it absolutely doesn't need me so that I can then scale the living [ __ ] out of it and it still doesn't need me.

Yeah. Because it's like, you're like, "Okay, this thing doesn't need me. So now I'm going to start something that needs me again." It's like, you just got to the good part. Now just gas the hell out of it. And then it's like, "Well, I don't know how to get more people in." It's like, "Great, now we have a problem that you're just not equipped to solve yet." And then what you focus all your time on is how do I get more people? Which then means you do partnerships, you learn ads, and become exceptionally good at that. Or you scale out an outbound team, or you whatever you make content if that's the if that's the avenue that you think you have the the highest likelihood of of winning on.

Yeah. For your, you know, customer. I definitely think now because I've been in different industries to talk to different companies that I have. I mean, my first company from when I was 18, 32 now, like I feel like this next thing, and I don't know, maybe it's just short, it is going to be the next thing and that's going to be my thing. So it's like I don't want to be, for instance, this is permanent makeup. I have no passion myself for it. I just know I could build something that solved a problem, I could scale it. So now the next thing is the thing that I want to be known for, like the thing that I want to be growing, and that is like working with companies.

Yeah. Well, I mean, when I was done with Gym Launch, I was emotionally done with the avatar. That was actually it for me. Um, but I was also really comfortable keeping the company and um, I almost didn't sell the company and just kept it and still was going to do this other thing. Um, you know, what we're doing now. Um,

Why would you stick with that? I mean, to the same point, I've been doing, I've been selling. Like I have to talk to my husband and like I promise I follow the meal plan and I haven't lost weight for like a decade. And so I was kind of tired of it. Um, not to say that like honestly was was that the best strategic decision? Like if I had to not have done what we're doing now and done that instead, I would have finished out the CRM, which Gym Launch is currently doing, and I would have probably added a franchise component to it and continued down the path. And the thing is, I wouldn't have had to start at zero. I would have started at what Gym Launch was doing and then built from there. And so like again, pursuing multiple, like what I didn't do was try to do this and George.

Yeah. So you're saying just stick with one. Stick with one.

Yeah. Like you're going to be done with this.

That's another thing. How do you...

Maybe don't put this into people. How do you sell a community? Like just transfer ownership.

Yeah. Yeah. You. Yeah. And then the one other thing I saw and I'm going back a bit, but the high ticket sides, I know in the last one that you said a month ago that you were maybe going to be doing like an annual subscription because that's something that's coming.

Yeah. I mean, we'll do one-time course purchases, free trials, and affiliates first and then we'll see what people need. Um, but I think people want those things more.

Yeah. We'll just do those first because it's gonna take us like this year to do all that.

How would you franchise an education business like Gym Launch?

Um, I would I wouldn't franch like, I mean, it would just be a gym franchise. Brick and Mortar.

Oh, Gym Launch.

Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't call it Gym Launch because I feel like ladies would be like, "Gym Launch. I don't want to go there." It'd probably be called Burn and Tone, which is probably what I'd call it. I have orange and blue. I have the whole thing. But no. Yeah, that's what it would have been. Half the gym is lifting weights, half the gym is is cardio. They flip back and forth between sessions. Clo, but we didn't do that. So, that's fine. But yeah, I mean, the thing is I I got asked this the other day was like, "How do I how do I how do I franchise my my education business?" It's like, unless there's a local component to it that you can have a market that's sold, that's how franchises work. Like...

You just like it's like if if you have a national business, then just scale the national business. Like you don't the only reason franchise even exists is because you lack capital.

Like the only reason to have a franchise is that you basically it's a structure that is very already organized legally so that you can bring partners on. They front the capital for the location and you have a predetermined split in terms of revenue and profits and what merchants they have to use, etc. And the rules they have to follow in order to keep your brand name. I thought the direction you were going to go was like master resell rights, not like a physical location.

No. I mean, we could do that, but we had such a good acquisition system for onesie twosies that I would just plug in franchise sales right into it. And we already have such a massive base of gyms that I'd say, "Hey, go on this side. Fees might be less because I can know that you're going to stay for 10 years or whatever."

And with franchise compared to uh like a quote, you know, coaching model or something, uh, they have to stay and they have to pay. It's legal. And so, but like you also have limitations as a franchisor. So, there's it's two sides. It protects the franchisee. It also protects the franchisor from an IP perspective.

They can't go and take your model and then do another location that's not your model and not pay you. And if they sign a 10-year agreement, they pay for 10 years or they go out of business. Like, that's it. Those are the only two options. Yeah, I can talk brick and mortar stuff, but you probably don't want to hear about it. But yeah, we have two very large chains that we have.

Would you recommend like for example in, 'cause ours is a is a barber accelerator.

Sure.

Do you think opening a franchise of barber accelerator would be applicable?

I mean, you could. It probably wouldn't be what I tell you to do.

Yeah.

I mean...

It's not the most optimal decision.

Given the resources that you have currently and the skill set you have currently.

Right. And so if you were to try and build the largest global barber education company, that's a very, very, very large business. And so like the question is just like, why not just do that? You're already here. So that's that's like that's always where it comes is like, "I've got to this stopping point. I don't know what to do from here." And so I want to try something new rather than like, "Let's just solve the problem and then go to here."

Focus on the main thing.

Yeah. Unless you can give me a physical like constraint, which is like, "Actually, there aren't that many barbers in the world." Like, or like are not enough people who can do the barber skill. Like, "People are born without hands," or "People are going to stop growing hair." Like, unless you gave me the argument, then I'd be like, "Well, why are we just doing this?"

Yeah. Sweet. All right. I'm going to go reverse up this because it feels this is more like what we're talking about now. Um, so scaling six, seven to eight figures. Um, won't go to nine figures, but maybe it doesn't matter. Um, so six figures is really just going to be ads and product market. Like you have to learn how to sell and you have to learn how to market and that's kind of about it. Um, I mean, [ __ ] what's that? Oh, six figures. That's $10K. I mean, literally, you just need to learn how to sell something. This is just...

Everyone's already doing that.

I think everyone. I have to say this for the camera. Um,

Yeah. At seven figures, so you're going to, you know, $100,000 a month, you pretty much just do more of that. Um, going from seven to eight is where you start requiring infrastructure. You start to need people. And so most of these breaking points come with levels of management. So like $10K, you can do it on your own. $100K, you can almost do on your own, but you still need like that first level, the first few people. And then going from there to eight, it's like now those people have people underneath of them. And so people get stuck at each of these levels because there's layers of infrastructure in terms of operations of the business that they don't have or don't have the skill to run. And so that's usually why like one of the first things we do with companies that we take on, usually we take on bigger companies than that, but is we bring in operators who have operating experience. And a big difference is a lot of people who market themselves in the information space as quote operators know jack [ __ ] about operating a business and have like a $30,000 a month oper operations business. It's like that's not even the constraint of the business right now. You don't know how to sell [ __ ]. Um, and so they come in and they talk about like systems and process. But one, most businesses that are of this size still don't need that much system and process. And two, a real operator of the business, just like cross out the word operator and just write leader, and you'll get a much better person. Like you need someone that everyone in the team looks up to. You need someone where there if there's a hard conversation with an employee that has to get. You want them to have it. That's the type of person. But most of the type of people who market themselves as quote operators, entrepreneurs think they need systems and process. And so they have this person who comes in and just puts a lot of red tape and puts basically just like says everybody has to follow these check marks. But what happens is systems and process. So you have you have glo, I'll zoom out for a second. You have local cost and global cost. I'll give you an example. So if I want to put process in the sales system, I might say, "Hey, sales guys, I need you to write notes about all the prospects that you're selling so that customer success can know who the hell they're getting on the phone with and what their issues are." Right? I when I make that process, the sales team incurs a cost. It's the reason they don't want to do it to begin with. They incur a cost. And so I need to make sure that that cost is worth the global benefit that go that gets conferred to the business. What happens with most quote systems people is they just come in and just put lots of costs, but there's no global benefit. And so unless that you can have a clear ROI for like, everything should always have as little friction as humanly possible. And if you are going to put a problem in one person's business, a bee in someone's bonnet, then it better be worth it.

Real quick, let me pose you. What do you mean by everything should have little friction?

You want to make you want to make it easiest as easy as possible for people to work as hard as they can. And so like I want closers, like the perfect, the perfect day for a closer is someone appears in front of them and then they talk and then the person says yes and then another person appears in front of them. That is the perfect day for a closer. So as little not that is humanly possible for someone who has that skill set.

Minimum viable process.

Yeah. So if you, if someone wants to put a project management system in place, I'm always concerned.

If you can just have a huddle on Slack for a minute better, or like a Google Doc better. Like it's less overhead and complexity and process in place. Like you don't want that stuff. I swear most young business owners try to like add as much as they can.

We try to like make it like complicated more than...

Elegant is what you want.

We wanted to make it look sexy.

Why?

Then you've got to use it.

How do you lie?

Yeah. That's the friction is that you want it to be as elegant.

As humanly possible.

Like for example, we have a content engine on Notion. So, how do you make your 350 like content, um, like productions? So, it's so simple.

You got one guy who schedules posts. That's his whole job is to just organize. It's a lot of posts.

So, so he's basically a virtual assistant.

No, no, he actually he's much higher up. He's like, you want someone with a brain. He has to think about that stuff. And so, he—

He wants someone with a brain.

Yeah.

If they don't have a brain, then it just definitely will not work.

Oh, have some of that. No, you're good. No. And like this, this goes back to, so, so the amount of process that you need in a business is inversely correlated with how intelligent the people you hire are. So if I had a franchise business that was for, you know, cooking burgers, like In-N-Out, tons of process because they're dealing with really low-skilled labor and lots of them, and they turn through them really, really quickly. So you have to take as many decisions as humanly possible away from people.

If you're trying to build a company that's going to be very big, you need, um, I think Peter Thiel said this, but the, the reason that a lot of really great companies are built during recessions is that the IQ per square foot goes up. Basically, all the bad people get washed out and then the amount of intelligence per square unit. So basically, people who create drag in the business go away. The smart people get to hang out more, the high producers, and then all of a sudden they make cool [ __ ]. And so the idea is we just want to have as many smart people as possible. And the best talent you have is always in the future. And so your bar for talent always has to increase. I think Bezos said that, like one of the big rules they had at Amazon is that whenever you hire someone, it has to be, has to bring up the average. And if you keep that process, then the business always just gets better and better and better.

But the, the, the, the natural occurrence of a business is that intelligence gets diluted. And so people, because they're insecure, they hire people who are less than them. And then those people hire less than them. And all of a sudden you have a bunch of monkeys. You're like, what's going on? Right? And so you're like, this is bad. And then you're like, "Oh, I have to put a rule in place that says that you can't drink while you're on the job." And I have to put a rule, being serious. This is how it happens. Like I have to put a rule in place that says, like, you can't solicit customers to process payments through your PayPal and not ours as an employee. Like I have to put really stupid rules in place for stupid people. And it's way easier to just avoid all of that. Just not have stupid people so that everyone, so that everyone else who is intelligent, who is a high producer, doesn't have to pay the cost of dumb.

Just setting high standards.

Yeah. For people or, or like just like unspoken high standards.

Or, or spoken high standards.

Cuz spoken is like, you have to set the rules.

No, you want to set the values.

So, how do you hire? Okay. How do you hire like intelligent people? Because like intelligent people—

It's like the 20%, right? Or like the 10%.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's older than one.

Yeah. Correct.

Much less.

Like our hiring process, to be quite transparent, is like going on certain groups. For example, we hired guys on, um, Facebook groups and we just like did the exact same process. I'm not sure who said it, but like the editors, we did the exact same process and we just took the best guys and we put them through a semi-finals. But like how do you—

How did it work?

It worked great, actually.

Yeah, it worked great. That, um, we don't, we, like, it's our first time, so we don't have any things to compare it to. That's why, hence the question. How do you? Yeah.

Well, a lot of it does come to your standard. And as soon as you see what good, like what happens is, at least for me, the better I, the better talent I got, the better I realized talent could be. And so then that became my new standard for what, like, I remember when I had my first, I mean, I'm way back in time. I remember my first $50,000 a year employee and I was like, whoa, like this is, because I only had hourly wage, low-skill labor before that. So I was like, this is the [ __ ]. And then I went to $70,000. And I was like, whoa, like this is, that was when $70,000 was like $100,000, right? And then I had my first six-figure employee and I was like, this is, I need this stuff. And then I have my first $250,000 employee. I was like, whoa, okay, totally different type of person. And then I have my first million-dollar year employee. I was like, oh my god, these people are just amazing. And so it just keeps going up in terms of the quality of the people that you can bring in and attract.

And so I think about this here, I'll throw this up. So I think of a business like this, is that you have two funnels that happen in the business, right? You have an external funnel which is bringing customers in, and then you have a second funnel which is bringing in talent. And in both funnels you have the same process. You, you advertise, right, and you get leads. So like, I'll say like this. So you, you get a lead, you qualify the lead, you sell the lead, and then you deliver for the customer, and then you ideally ascend and retain them. And with an employee, you market to get the, to get the employee, you qualify the employee, then you sell the employee, which is an interview, and then you onboard the employee the same way you do a customer. You give them training, and then you manage or ascend them. So they move up in the company, or you try and keep them in the company, or get them out of the company. Right.

So how fast do you fire and how like fast do you—

As much as I want to give you like, it's exactly 72 hours. Like if we see somebody who sucks, we fire them when we think that they suck. And the question is like, we have a, like we have a belief that every person could be trained to be a great employee. And so the question then becomes, what's our return on effort? Is are we willing to incur the cost of getting this person to be proficient at the thing?

So do you hire more or do you fire more? Which one?

Well, if you're growing, hire more. And if you're shrinking, fire. But, uh, be real. Uh, in terms of, I think we've got like, in a business, you either have to get really good at training, or you have to get really good at picking. So either you can take people who are unskilled and you have a very good training system for getting them to be skilled, or you have a business where you just pick the best people. It's way easier, or say not easier, it's way faster to get just the best people. But it is harder because you have to have something that really smart people are attracted to. So if you have an OnlyFans business, for example, really hard to recruit talent. I know somebody who's does really, really well on OnlyFans. Just pure business guy, like not even involved in the actual production side. And so he has, he, he has such a hard time getting anyone who's even barely competent because no one wants to be associated with it. More especially like really, really high-level people. And so that's like a huge problem for him in terms of scaling the business. Like a really fast-growing software company that has a really compelling story and mission. Much easier to get high. Yeah, of course. A family office, private equity firm, pretty easy for us to get really high-quality talent. People are proud to put it on the resume. And so that's the idea is like thinking about like what your sales, your offer is, which includes everything to a new prospect, which is an employee prospect rather than prospect.

And so this is where like brand starts paying dividends in other ways. To put this in an example, we actually just recently hired a guy, um, who's a copywriter and he actually reached out to us and gave us an example, a sales page that he wrote off himself and it's pretty high quality.

So like free, like he, he did, he spent like six hours before he, we took for us, maybe even not even to see it.

Yeah.

Even do you need a copywriter though?

So is that too?

Did you need a copywriter?

Yeah, we, we, we were doing a lot of copy ourselves. Like. But do you need a copywriter?

For scripting? We want to do it for—

Don't want to invent a role just because this guy presented himself.

Yeah, that's a trap. You'll build your mess.

Yeah.

Cuz then you're like, "Oh, we have to do stuff. We have to give stuff for Stan cuz he has to write some copy for us. What copy do we need?" Like you're starting to create, create work problem.

Yeah. Exactly.

You don't want to invent work. You want to try to reduce work.

Because you can't do a lot of stuff really well.

Yeah. You have to be very selective if you want to achieve a high standard.

But it's very conflicting that way. It's like if you're growing, you're hiring more.

Mhm.

But then now it's like, like, do you need that? And—

Not necessarily. Like when you're, you're growing your customers, not your headcount. I don't think there should be a prize for growing headcount.

Like, no, I think it's insane that some people want to grow their headcount.

Like, like employees, right? Why would you want more headache, more management, and more cost?

You want to stay as green as possible.

Always.

Right?

Always.

So, so it's basically just trying to find the highest quality people and you can keep a smaller team. Like, so what is it, like headhunting? Are you just CRM, just calling these people, pitching off—

Borders of leverage. The highest and best way to get a customer is for a customer to bring them in. The highest and best way to get an employee is for another really good employee to refer them in. Referrals are always referrals.

One more time.

Referrals.

Like, like that. What did you just say?

So—

You speak real fast.

Oh, no, you're good.

I can speak slow real fast.

So if I could only pick one client source, it would be that everybody refers me all my customers. Like, everything's from referrals. That'd be the best way to have a business cuz you, because if I refer a friend of mine to a business, I'm going to be invested in their success. I risk my relationship and my personal capital with the friend to say that this is good. So I definitely want it to be good. So I'll help them. The person immediately buys, they way less sticker shock. I probably told the price when they came in, like the best customer.

Mobile, right? Same thing with employees. If you have, if like, like who's your best, best—

Uh, one of our—

Okay. So if that guy was like, "Dude, I've got this other editor who's an absolute savage." You probably like, [ __ ] yeah, that's awesome, right? And so that's a referral. So it's the highest leverage. Like thing underneath of that is is headhunting. And so either you can hire an agency to do that, which is a recruiting firm that does headhunting for a specific skill or niche, or you develop that, that skill in-house, which is that you do the outbound yourself, or you, at certain size, you hire recruiters and they start doing it for you full-time.

Sam's point, like, um, because I hire as least as possible, like, because I don't like dealing with management side of things.

So when do you actually realize that, like, this position needs to be filled? If you were to go into a company to look what you're employing next, like, if they, if I go and guess like, "Oh, I need to increase, you know, hire an outbound team or sell it or my callers," like, I would know what to do and I know that process of what they should be doing. So therefore, I can make that process. And as you said, if you get someone that's better than you, they can make that process better. But then there might be something else that you're not even understanding, you need to hire.

And there's somebody who has that exact process in their head that can do that thing and knows all the steps underneath of it. So like the more kind of pieces you understand about the business, you kind of know that these are the holes I need to fill first. I need to hire top talent for this thing first.

When we scaled the 40-person team from zero to 40 in 90 days, I hired one person and I said, "Go hire 40 guys for the sales team." And he had done that before. And so then he did it again. Leverage. Like one of the things in the investment world is, "Hire one to hire 10." Like, don't hire 10 people, hire the best person and then have them use their network. And that guy had a huge sales network from his past, uh, from his past role. So I was like, "Great, use your rolodex. Bring all your best guys from all the companies that you worked at. Just bring them all in." And that's exactly what he did.

I feel like there is kind of like, I don't know, like I'm definitely too small to like go buy like $100k a year guys to go hire like X amount of people. Um, but one thing that I've like seen that's really helped me with employees in training is the school community itself to actually get them to go through the courses and then have like a staff training thing within there so they can just get on board quicker. Um, but you said that, um, like having like you need to do XYZ can kind of be detrimental. I mean, you want to have onboarding and training for somebody. If like, perfect world, somebody comes in knowing how to do something better than you, and then you're like, "Dude, you make the training. You're better than I am." That's ideal. If you, like, again, some of these, like, there's always, this is why answering business questions in general requires context. And so like, if you don't have a lot of money, then you have, so you have to train people. If you can't afford good people, you have to train bad people to become good because you can afford bad people because you can attract them at a low price and then you add the value. You have a training process that teaches them how to do something. And so then you—

So the benefit here, if you have that model, is that you get high-value people at a lower price, in theory, assuming that the cost of training them is worth the difference of what it would cost you to just hire the person who has the, has the skill already. That's the arbitrage. So like somebody who goes to Burger King has no skill. They teach them how to do burger flipping, and they make that person more valuable within the context of their business. And so it's worth it for them than trying to hire someone at twice the price who immediately knows how to flip burgers.

I got a question about scale.

Sure.

All right. So—

Everything comes down to LTV to CAC.

LTV to CAC, the ratio between how much you make per customer and how much it cost you to get a customer. Like that ratio is the, the only thing that I really spend my time managing. And then I want to spend as, as soon as I have good LTV to CAC, I spend as much as I possibly can.

Now, when you scale to seven and eight figures, does the average conversion rate drop?

LTV to CAC will drop normally. But if you have a business that keeps customers, then LTV continues to expand. So basically, I'll say it differently. CAC always goes up as you go to colder and colder audiences because you have, like, if you just hypothetically, if you start a product, there's a certain set of people that are tiny that it's literally perfect for. These will blow their minds. These are the early adopters. And then you go to the next ring out and it's like, okay, these people, it's still a really good fit for, and it costs a little bit more than the people who, like, immediately hop on and say yes. As you keep going out, it goes to broader and colder audiences that are less and less interested. And so the only way that you can compensate for that is to have increasing LTV over time. That's how you can achieve really big scale.

Okay.

So a lot of people are like, "I can't scale my ads past $100,000 a month, otherwise I stop being profitable." And that's usually because either their ads absolutely blow, which is really common. Um, you can only scale the quality of creative that you have to $100,000 a month, not the quality in general, because there's a competitor in your space doing 10 times more than you, and they're also using ads. Or they have an LTV problem, which is like, they're not making enough money per customer. And so you just can't scale. To like, I had a business the other day who had CAC of $3,000, and he was like, "I just need to drive CAC down." And it was a, it was a, it was basically targeted like chiropractors or something. And I was like, "That's kind of what it costs to acquire a, like a niche business owner. It's two, three, $4,000. Like, that's kind of where it is." And so he just had a $5,000 product and he had nothing else afterwards. It's like, "Well, you have an LTV problem. You don't have a CAC problem." So he was spending all his time trying to solve a problem that's not the problem. He knew how to advertise. He just, and kept trying to think, "What's the new thing that I'm going to get cheap eyeballs for?" But if your business requires cheap eyeballs in order to exist, advertising only goes one way: more expensive. It always just goes up over time. And so you need something else that will also go up over time, which ideally is your LTV.

So, um, all right, like if you guys want to know the equations that I use most commonly to figure out [ __ ] in business, this is one for LTV. The other one is, um, sales velocity times LTV equals hypothetical max. So if we sell 10 customers a month and our LTV is $10K, we will not grow past $100,000 per month. It won't grow. That's it. This number of new customers times LTV equals hypothetical max. It won't go up. And so if you're stuck at a certain level, it means that you need to change one of these numbers. Either you have to sell more people, or you have to make them worth more. Like that is literally it. And so if you see a group that has $100,000 a month and they have $100,000 in new revenue that month, and they're a 10, you know, a one-year-old, uh, group, then it means that that guy brings in $100,000 and that is exactly what his revenue is. And that means that all of them leave the next month and he does it again the next month. Like, and so you can, you can, if someone does $50,000 in new sales and it's $100K and they're stable, then it means that they have a two-month average. It's a $33K, three-month average. If they're assuming they're stable, which most businesses very quickly stabilize because they don't know how to grow them.

What would you say is the healthy churn rate for, from the, like, really good communities on School? Talk to me.

Sam would know this. Sam and Kirby would know this better than me.

Yeah, like 10. I think it's below 10 and below is considered good.

Below 10?

Yeah.

No, no, but I think it's normal to start at around 20.

Um, until you figure out what people value. Like, we've been trying to do this in the School Games, right? We tried these winner interviews. And now I can tell the main problem with the School Games is overwhelm. There's too much. So, we need to take away, right? If we just added more, we'd make the problem worse. So, it's like trying to find this balance of what people value and stuff. There's also some things we can do on the platform side that will probably cut that number in half without you changing anything. Yeah. Um, which we'll do. But, but there's still stuff you can do on your side, like figuring out the things people value and the first-time experience.

Huge. The first-time experience is the most important one. And overwhelm is one of the main reasons people tune.

That's, that's what one of our, that's what one of our members told us because as we add more modules and as new members come in, he was this kid made analogy. He's like, "Dude, it's like I've had members reach out to me saying it's like starting a Netflix show in like season 3. There's so many members and so much activity going on, it can cause overwhelm." And I noticed that sometimes when there's like these big traffic, like when we do a CTA and it does really well and a lot of traffic comes in, some people just like, like to cancel immediately after subscribing.

Like they subscribe and then, I guess because they don't want an auto re-trigger, they'll just like cancel.

I don't know. It's a, I don't really understand it. Like, we, I think a big thing that we noticed too was like, we started locking modules and so like locking based on level and so they would have to come in, they would have to do like step one, step two, make a post, introduce themselves, and then go through the process and it would keep them in because now they had like a step-by-step.

It's like action.

Step. I mean, you can't. I mean—

Well, that helps with overwhelm, right?

It's like, the last, I, I read a cool analogy about this. It's like, you don't want to build a library because how many of you guys go to the library?

Yeah. No one goes to the library, right?

Um, so you, you want to like release gradually and kind of ease someone in. Think about like, have you played like GTA like five or four? You know how it, how they start you like, you can't actually play the game. You have to like, just have, but they teach you the first little thing you can do and the second thing you can do. Yeah. And then they ease you into it. Otherwise, you'll bail. If you want to see who does this well, look at the app store. Go to the games category. Look at the best games on the leaderboards on the Apple things. Download them and just try the onboarding. Damn, they're good. They're so good. And they, they really limit you in what you can do. They like ease you in. Um, that's the onboarding, right? If you just, if they just open everything up to you, it's overwhelming.

Yeah, I think we're, we're going to ship a feature real soon where you can unlock a course by time. So you could say, like, "Start with this course," and then you might release a second course on the second month, and a third course on the third month. Do you know what I'm saying?

That's a real basic mechanism you could use. But you could even say, "At this month, you get to attend this call, right?" So that you get, you earn loyalty earns you rewards, essentially.

Yeah. So, like, how would you recommend going about, because I know there's like a drip sequence that you can do with inside the modules.

Yeah, that's only in a course, but I'm talking about releasing a whole course at a time.

Do you know the difference?

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm saying, like, what would you recommend for the drip?

That's drip. Yeah.

Well, if that's what you use if you've got a massive course, right? But it depends what the structure of your membership is. You, if you have one massive course, then yeah, drip out the modules over time. But if you have small courses that are different, then release one of those each, like, month. You, depending if you have many light courses or one heavy course, you should use those two mechanisms. Do you know what I'm saying?

Yeah. But I think also access to a call could be cool to earn.

You can do that with a course.

Are you doing group onboarding?

Are we doing—

Group onboarding? Do that.

Okay. What is that? Every new, like, you say every week on Mondays, we do all the new people hop onto this thing, and you just let them know. And then that way you can like meet them. It's super high leverage for your time. Like, they get to feel like it's access, they can ask you questions.

Like, at first, I was answering, like, anytime someone would give like an intro message and like answer like preliminary questions, I would go in and respond to everyone. But at this point, it's just like, cannot do.

You know, there's something interesting that you can do. I've been personally doing this with the School Games. So it's interesting, but I just kind of sit back and watch what people value. And by accident, sometimes interesting things happen. So for the last opening ceremony or close, I think it was the opening, I was so tired that, like, I had done no preparation. And I think I was like, getting ready to light the torch, but it was already like 9 a.m. Like, all of this stuff. And then Kirby just, like, we had nothing planned. So Kirby just resorted to Q&A because we had, because it was, I basically wasn't prepared and was out of it. Um, and what was surprising is that more people were on that call at the end than the other ones. More people were interacting. And then I saw posts afterwards where people were like, "Oh my god, I just realized that we're in like Hormone's mastermind for $99 a month from that Q&A." And it changed the way they viewed the value of the School Games. Instead of just a community software, they saw it as a mastermind. So, and I started seeing that happen more and more. And then that made, then I started talking to people about the things they valued because we're doing a lot of these winner interviews. Not that many people show up live to those, only like 20 or 30. And they're always on the calendar. So, someone might join and think they're paying for that, but if they're not using it, they might feel like it's being wasted. So, we're actually going to get rid of the winner interviews from the Games. We're still going to do them, but as a podcast, not as the, not as part of the School Games. And then we decided to do one Q&A call a week with me, Homozi, and Kirby because that, and we're going to stop doing the opening ceremony and the closing ceremony. So, it's very simple value to understand. You get one Q&A call a week that's recorded, and one one-day event recording a month, and that's it. Because that way, it's, it's actually, you're, you're able to keep up with the consumption so you don't feel overwhelmed. And it is just the things that people value and not the things that people don't value. And I think you're trying to do that iteration with your, what you provide. I think the biggest mistake is people just keep adding, adding, adding. Where does it end if you continuously add? Think about it.

I would say there is no limit to access in terms of value. Just to be clear, it's just that it might bastardize or might cannibalize something else. But the more access they get, the more they'll value it. I just put that out there. Like when I started Gym Launch, as a side note, like I, uh, I did a call every day for 90 minutes. And that was actually how I eliminated not having to have customer service for a very long period of time. And so people had questions. They were like, "That's a great question for Alex that you can ask him today." And they're like, "Oh, I missed the call today." It's like, "Then you can ask him tomorrow."

I swear the calls are the things people value the most.

Hanging out with you.

We're doing coffee.

Yeah. Coffee hour.

But you should talk to your users and just see what they value and see what they don't value and keep try to remove things because it creates space for the valuable things to expand a bit more. Do you know what I'm saying? We did a value survey to our customers at one of our events. And so the Van Store is a pricing survey, but you can also use it to get customer feedback on features. And so the question that we asked is, "If we eliminated everything from our membership except for one, which would it, what, what thing would you want to keep?" And then the second question was, "If we eliminated one thing from the membership that you wouldn't care at all about, which would it be?" And so by getting all the answers, we could just see, okay, everyone thought, at least for Gym Launch, lead generation stuff for them for their gyms and sales, secondly, were the two most valuable things that we did. And the thing that was least valuable was that we had, uh, we had a 35-person customer support team. And I cut the whole department. And turn changed zero. Nothing happened. And I was like, "Wow, we just had a bunch of people cutting grass with scissors."

But like, you find that stuff. And like deletion is underrated when it comes to product. Like, just having the fewest possible things that can provide value. Like, the reason the books take me so long is not cuz I don't know what to say, but it's how, how in how few words can I say it.

You guys utilize like the welcome message, that automated welcome message?

Because, um, like, I, I always, me and my team will always message the person again, kind of hold them accountable. We're all watching you and how you do with our course. Um, but we like always type it. I don't know, just in case they might think it's that automated and like say their name, say something about them on the sales call. So if like I take a sales call, I'll be like, "Oh, she's just had a baby six months ago." Say something like that. Just try to get that bit more niche. But it's not hard for me because I have 50 members in thousands. Like, so the card when they decline, because one thing I notice is like, it takes a while for, for the payment to retry. Like, would there, would you think might be beneficial because it tries every three days, right? If you just reduced it to like two days—

What would that achieve?

You think? Well, again, maybe it would just reduce chat a bit. They get reminded maybe one more time throughout the sequence.

Yeah, but that's a smaller window. You're trying over. You've got to think about that bank balance. The longer in time, the more opportunity for a deposit.

I just think, I just personally like the three days wait just like two.

I think the first attempt is like the next day.

But we just don't send an email then because we know something like 80% of declines succeed on the second attempt. So there's no point in emailing them, right? So we do a bunch of work that's invisible before we start sending emails. The, the charging and the emailing is decoupled.

Oh, I, I didn't even know that they get an email. When do they get sent to email?

Oh, that is day three.

The first one is that day three. Yeah. And that happens over the course of 14 days that we send multiple emails, including showing a big red banner across the bottom of the screen.

Like, it's going to leave.

Yeah. Like, have you declined for a School payment before, like for your group or anything?

No, we love it so much. It's worth trying, like, just to, to see what, to see what they see. But it's pretty good. Like, it really does—

Or just sign up for your—

Yeah. I do it all the time to test, like, to make sure it's all like working how it, how it should be. I think the DM is the one that, cuz we can't do that. We're just sending system emails, "Hey, your payment declined for this." But if you send a personal DM to somebody that's like, "Oh, [ __ ] Diddy Wellness is messaging me."

The welcome DM. Maybe you can have like a—

Yeah, that was an idea we had at the last event. Yeah.

And I'm so, like, every couple of days I'll see who's asking you share why, just offering support. And I'll see a lot of them, they're not really canceling. It's just their payments, their payment. But then some people, they'll explain, you know, why they canceled. And then I'll, you know, just appreciate them for being transparent and then kind of hit those pain points, like, "This is the reason why you joined in the first place. You know, if you leave, you're still going to be in the same situation." Like, the situation hasn't changed. Just to try to retain them. But yeah, the DM works. Um, we're going to start moving the phone call as well.

Yeah, I've been reading a lot about the world's most successful memberships to see like how they do it. And they said that like with membership, it's more about buying a feeling than an outcome of belonging and of identity and like, "I'm now a part of this." Also an interesting thing about that map, people that put themselves on the map are way less likely to turn.

Because they made friends.

Yeah.

I looked into this extensively, by the way, just, just this last week. Yeah. Um, the people that use the map often meet up in real life, and those people also seem to stay for longer, which I found quite interesting. I think people are looking, cuz those experiences, how can you value that? You know what I mean?

We're thinking of, we're going to implement an accountability partner system. How can we like maximize that? And do you think that would be a high leverage thing to create that kind of effect of community and creating friends within the space?

Well, there's, you could implement anything. There's so many things you could implement, but you shouldn't. So, you should really find out what those few things you should do are. I think most people add too much. So, I wouldn't be looking for things to add. You could ruin your group in four hours. Like, you should instead be looking for things to take away.

Thinking a lot about that users should be able to consume all of what you provide so they feel like they're using it, right? That they should also be able to like, just think, "How can I stay on top of this?" Oh, one Q&A call a week at the same time, and one event drops every, every month. That's manageable. But it's kind of out of control right now with the amount of interviews we do all the time. Um, the course content, I think you can absolutely overwhelm people with that. So you can remove stuff if people don't use it, and then you can drip stuff over time. If, and that will probably help as well. I would talk to your users and also scroll through the posts or maybe even do a post and say, "What, what part did you find most valuable about this group?" Right? But you, I'm sure people are actively saying it. Like, what I, that example I talked about, like, I've got the screenshots of different things people said, and I was collecting them.

Cuz I'm trying to see what do people value and how do they articulate the value, because then I can put that on the about page using that language. Yeah. Um—

Because we'll do like, we haven't been doing it too much, but like when we first launched, every like week or every other week, we grabbed the top 10 people, not all, but like, "Hey, what do you like so far?"

You know what I mean? Or—

What did they say?

And it was just more of like, and those people that I hopped on are still top 10.

Yeah. So—

Crushing it. And the top two people are the ones that we actually implemented to have a call.

Feel like there's accountability. So matters. Yeah.

But what are people?

One, one common theme that, that I mean, I didn't, I didn't think it would develop so quickly is where it's like, one of the, like, the value that they're getting is that, like, some of these people see other people already seeing results, and it provides them like this reassurance.

Is hope is val, is the most valuable thing because who cares about content if you believe that you're never going to succeed. Yeah. So the accountability with the motivation is like right there because people are making like subgroups. And it's a feeling.

I think that's what I was telling you about. I didn't understand like the digital accountability, like how much accountability can you actually have amongst someone that you're not even speaking to directly. But the more and more I see it, just in two months, it's like actually real. Like the top members are just like, "Yeah, these people are reaching out to me as soon as they come in." And they're, it's, yeah, still don't fully understand it, but it's really interesting. So, I would explore that more and lean more into that and maybe cut back on content.

Yeah. I think I've been thinking a lot about more martial arts.

No, no. That's how you ruin it.

Yeah.

Make it public.

Yeah. That's what you put on the outside to bring people in, right? But once they're in, they're probably looking for motivation and accountability because you can't get that on YouTube.

We actually do live accountability calls, too. We do that maybe like twice a week because we notice that's like people that join these mentorships, a lot of them need that accountability. They need that motivation, that push. And I think that's one of the things that kind of separates us. We just have like, we have a mindset coach. So we do those early in the morning on accountability, talk about some of the things that give them that motivation. Yeah. We did something pretty similar that we experimented with the first month, which was, um, guest speaker calls, which I don't know how much could apply to other communities, but anyone related to like the content that I make in the industry, I reached out to them, and they would come in to the community and kind of talk about, uh, do like an open Q&A where the members submit questions and I'd ask them questions. And we then create a flyer for that guest speaker call, put it on my story, and then have a CTA for other members to come and all, like, to bring in new members and also have the members a chance to speak to people they couldn't speak to regularly.

Did it work?

Yeah, it worked really well, actually.

For bringing people in or for like adding value to people in—

For bringing people in and adding value. So, it would be like a kind of—

I definitely like it as a lead strategy for sure.

So, it's kind of like a live podcast.

Yeah.

Um, that's pre-recorded and they can watch it over again. And then at the end, we do like 15 minutes of like asking questions, and people really liked it.

Interesting. But—

Yeah, the hard part is continuing to get, uh, guests in the space and like scheduling them out because at first it was going to be like, "Should I pay you? I'll pay you like a flat fee for whatever you charge for like one hour of time." Um, and then I also thought of potentially doing like a rev share. So like, if we post a certain, um, DM, like a word, and however many people join based on that word, I'll give you X amount of dollars for user that joins. But everyone who joined so far was kind of just like, "We'll do it for free." Which was great. Sometimes you can overcomplicate it, though, because we were doing these comp, a complicated schedule of live interviews with winners and opening ceremony with all of this [ __ ] in it, giveaways, wheels, double or nothing wheels. Um, and it was, what happened when I prepared nothing and just did some Q&A, and everyone was like, "Holy shit." Yeah. So—

The, there's one massive tip that like, you, I probably all do, but maybe the people who don't, um, like have big communities don't, but like, what I do on my sales calls is that we have a, a wins category. So that's it. Like, literally just post your wins. We have a target, they hit the target, we reach out, we say, "Please can you post about that on the wins section?" So then whenever I get in a sales call and someone comes on, I just click wins, and then we just go through that. I'm like, "Oh, let's look at what the random things people are saying about this." And you scroll through, then it's obviously just got wins. So then when someone comes on, they see that they're like, "Wow, like everyone's crushing it." Like, it's so easy to do. It takes like five minutes.

You mentioned earlier, right, the, the best, like, the whatever the best way is referrals, right? Organic referrals when people are just word of mouth, they love the product, the product markets itself.

What are your thoughts on incentivizing referrals? I mean, it's not the same when someone—

It's definitely something that's coming in the pipeline.

I mean, it's a great idea. It's just hard to implement technically right now.

Coming from like, not from just our end as well, like, where, where community leaders incentivize their members.

Referral is a great idea. And I think doing it via some sort of unlockable. So, like, if you have one module that's only for like, homies who bring homies, might be a great way to, uh, like, we know, I mean, like, and you put some, some wording around this, which is like, "We know that if you actually bring one other person, you're five times more likely to be successful." And so I want to make this absolutely crazy incentive, but I want it to help you because I know that if you do bring someone, and this is also true, they will probably have, because now they, they can't, they can't cancel while they invited somebody else. Like, right? And so, yeah, come to this group and you're, I'm dipping, but like you—

Yeah, we've found ref, we've found referrals are more likely to refer and less likely to churn.

So, when you think about that, it's really interesting. We'll make some platform changes that'll allow you to do all of these things, but it's not going to happen in the next, like, referrals is going to happen this year, but not in the next few days.

Super minute question or suggestion. When you go under members and you look at cancellations, is there any way that we could put it in like ascending or descending so we can see like if these X amount of people are churning in seven days, then we know that we have a seven-day period to retarget potentially before they churn to try and make them resubscribe?

Sometimes having to go through it manually and seeing like the time periods. It's just all depending on when they cancel. I see. And maybe I know it's a super small thing, but for me, I was just thinking about the other. Wish I could just see like one week, 10 days, then I can retarget potentially and retarget me or yeah, or have some sort of communication in order to get them direct.

[Music] It definitely works like I mean I don't have a. Does it justify doing it? I would say for future, personally, yes. So like I would say I don't like call them like, "Hey, buy my stuff." Like, "Don't cancel." I say something like, "Hey, it's cool. Like, you, you know, your next phase of your life, go watch my free content. If it gives you value, come back." And I believe that's successful. I've seen a lot of people come back and then they like actually like me more.

So maybe we can do, maybe the easiest way to do it is just like an auto DM when people cancel instead of giving you sorting them in the right way so you can spend your time. You're already spending enough time on your phone. So maybe we can just automate it. Yeah. And then you can focus on this content.

So I just wrote this on the board just for everybody. Like I like to know what my milestones are. And so if I think about like, what does a perfect customer do? It's like the first thing they do is they activate, which is like, I have identified the key value that I can give them. And every one of your businesses is different, and sometimes it's different by customer in terms of what's the one thing that they're looking for. But often times when you do like, do these customer interviews and whatnot, people buy because of one thing, not many. And so the reason like bonus stacks exist is because you're really just trying to find that one thing that they're like, "That's what I really want," and then they buy. No one does an aggregate list when they purchase. There's one thing that they're like, "That's this one thing alone is worth the purchase," and I'm going to make it. And so we want to find that same concept from an activation post-purchase, which is, what's this one key experience or key result or outcome that I can deliver as fast as humanly possible? And so like with Chip Launch, for example, it's like if someone made a $2,000 sale in their first seven days, they're in because they're like, "Holy shit." And it's probably like your first $300 haircut, you believe. You're like, "Oh my god, this could actually work." Like, I've been selling, I've been struggling to sell $99 a month memberships, and I just sold $2,000. This is like, I can't believe this happened. And then it's like the whole world has opened up in terms of hope, and then they're super malleable in terms of what other things you can tell them to do because now they believe.

The second thing is weight loss. What's the weight loss activation example that you use? Because it could be relevant.

Oh, yeah. I mean, weight loss is, I would try and get. So, we actually did really aggressive diets up front. Um, and we said, "This isn't permanent. We want you to do this because we want you to see very fast results and then believe me when I say, okay, I can do this for you, but this is what's best long-term." And from at least the long-term weight loss studies that I've seen, um, people who lose a lot of weight quickly are more psychologically bought into the diet process and then they end up losing more weight overall. And so there's this whole like hating on quote "crash diets," but a crash diet in the beginning allows people to see like, "Oh my god, I actually lost 10 pounds in the first two weeks. This could work." And you're like, "Cool, now let's actually make this so that you can stick with it for a year." That kind of thing. And so as soon as they got on the scale and they saw progress, they're like, "This, this works." And then they're, they're way more malleable. And for me, I would just sell them again at that point. But get that later. So first thing is activation. Second things I want them to do is testimonial. So giving an unlockable one is for the referral, but you can have a different one that's also for testimonials. And then you just give them the format of exactly what I want my testimonial to look like. And then that way, if you put in the wins category or you know, like, "Hey, when you do that, put in the wins tab, structure it this way, put as a video," and then those can also become ads. That ads, or I say that in the literal sense, like you can advertise it even on your stories, not necessarily even as a paid ad, and it'll still bring people in. The referral, we already went over, and then ascension. And so I like to make sure that I have a clear process for each of these four milestones for every customer that I bring in because if I do this on purpose, I will increase the likelihood that it actually happens. And so it's like, "Do I know all the things that I do to get someone to ascend, to get them to refer, to get them to leave a testimonial, and to activate?" Literally just defining those out, like, "This is what we're going to do to get them to do each of these things."

The testimonial is like a clear process. You tell them what to say. You said unlockable, meaning they get?

Yeah. They get a core, they get a module, they get a course, or you have a a call that they have access to that they wouldn't otherwise have. Like any of these things, they get tickets to an event that they wouldn't, they would have to pay for, like anything. We actually got like really fired testimonies from our students without giving them anything. But the way we framed the message made them like really enthusiastic, and they're like, "On, thank you for this opportunity." We were like, "Okay, so the message was like, we're saying, 'I really appreciate your commitment and enthusiasm for this for the mentorship,' and so we have handpicked you to provide a testimonial to represent the community." And since they're so enthusiastic about the community, they're like, "Oh my god, I would love to represent it."

And to like be a face of it.

Yeah, I think "represent" is the key word there. You could say "brand ambassador" if you want to. Do you guys do Trustpilot testimonials?

I think we're we're actually building out a landing page right now, which we got a copywriter to write up, and we're going to put the testimonials within that landing page.

Okay. So you don't actually send like an external review site that like people would trust, like for like cold conversion? That's what I find always helps. So like when people are on the fence, so you're like, "A lot of people have even said to me like on the call, but these could be fake people. This could be a scam." So, um, we obviously work with artists, and they have names that you can Google and go see that they're real people, and we're working with them. So we don't Trustpilot. So if they put a testimonial in the group, we'll get them to leave us a testimony on Trustpilot. And then that way, we can actually get people outside of the group. We haven't got sales calls yet, and send them to that page instead, just to build some trust before we start.

Because Trustpilot is such an established website already.

I think it's cuz you can't go in and add or remove like. So. So I mean.

Yeah.

It's. Yeah. It's its own thing. Is more trusted than like you could do your own page. And like, so we use like Trustpilot branding on a on a page for a lot of these reviews, but they're still real. Um, but we just make sure that we send them to the Trustpilot website because obviously they know we can put, they're not done, we can put anything on our page, but we can't put anything on Trustpilot. That has to be from real people. So that makes them search those people to find that they're real, and then when they see their businesses and see they're thriving, then they normally actually contact those people and get a review directly. But you're only getting positive like, you know, reviews because like you asked them to go on there.

Is this is this just text testimonies we're talking about?

Yeah. So yeah, that that only is is text.

So then you do like the video on separately. We do. We're only starting to build a video on now, and that's like we don't normally do it as like, "Leave us a testimony." We just go like, "Can I don't know if this is right. We just go, 'Can we film this?'" When they start saying positive things. We have a bit of software that you can go back like 40 seconds and just record that that section.

We just straight up told them like, "Could you make a video for us?" And then send them three questions that they do. And then like a bunch, a handful, like about eight. How many?

Oh, I think around. Yeah.

Yeah. Eight of them just like made a whole production. Something that we we don't really do yet. I think cold calling, like even just telling like, "Yo, like we've handpicked you. Can you make a video for us?" And if they like to to represent them, and they will, they will happily like just associate with like your brand.

Do you guys feel like a massive impact on on the video reviews over say like text reviews? Do you know how many views you get your videos?

Oh, so we haven't even posted them yet. So we're just still through the processing phase, and we're going to see how much that converts.

But but they're really good. They have a lot more depth, and they're like, like, "This has changed. When I joined, I joined only two weeks ago, and I instantly already felt the community, and then I already implemented this, and this changed this." And it just allows them to have more character, more depth towards the testimony.

And and me personally, even when I look at Trustpilot sometimes, I'm like, "Damn, this person even like." Like, for example, like me booking the flights to Vegas, like I use third-party websites, and I'd search them up on Trustpilot, and then there'd be some reviews like, "This didn't work well, complete scam." And then there'd be another one like, "This is really great." But yes, like I still didn't have like that much trust, even though it's a real person. I think a video testimony, you can see the face, you can see the emotion.

Yeah. Yeah. I see the.

So for assumption, is it like you ascend at when they can afford it, or like when they get results from like the lower ticket?

You sell at the point of greatest need, not the point of greatest satisfaction. So you, sorry. If I give you a steak and then you eat your steak, and then I say, "Would you like a steak?" You won't buy another steak. If you're really hungry, I probably off ask you if you want two steaks, and you probably say yes, 'cause you're starving. You sell when they're hungry, not when they're full.

For video testimonies, is it better to provide them more or less structure?

I like to have struct. I like to give structure. I've always done that because otherwise it just, I get a lot of just not good view. There's not videos I can use. And so to increase the likelihood that the video can be used, I like to just be like, "Tell me what it was like before," and like, "Outside and inside." Outside is like, what are things people can see? Inside is, what was your personal experience with life at that point? And then you're going across the bridge. Okay. So then walk, talk to me about how you saw my, saw my stuff, what your concerns were, why you chose to do it anyways. And then what life is like now, externally, what people can see, and then internally, what your experience is. So that's it. Internal, external, bridge to getting here, and your biggest skepticism, internal, external. That's how I've done it. There's lots of like 28-point test. Like I, that has been able people understand that.

Disclaimers wise, do you have to put any wording so that it's not some sort of like overpromise or?

Well, usually you put, um, you put disclaimers around testimonials regardless. That thing with like compliance overall is, ideally, you want to promise nothing. Um, and so where anybody gets in trouble is when they, when they claim things. That's where you get into trouble. It's unsubstantiated claims. And so you want to have substantiated claims or no claims, which is like, I usually only look backwards and promise nothing forwards, meaning these are all the things that have occurred. It means nothing for you. And that's it. So it's like, 30.44% of people who, you know, finish their first month in school games, make their first dollar online. It means nothing for you, but that is what has happened, and we could substantiate that.

Do you have a system to get people to refer?

Incentives. And the biggest one is have a good product. Like I have no system for the book. People just read the book and told their friends about the book, and then people are like, "These are the top five books that entrepreneurs should read," blah, blah, blah. And then they make, they make ads about the book, and then people buy. It's still the product. As much as there's all the hacks in the world for referrals, it's just the product. It has to be really good. In the very, very, very early days of Gym Launch, the average gym got 30 to 1 returns, meaning they made $30,000 in their first 30 days. That was the average. Average. I don't think there's a single thing on the planet that at that time in any system anywhere that did that kind of result. And so we were just taking orders. Like I was spending $100 a day in ads. We did like $10 million. It had not like it. It was people came in, they made more money in a month than they had made in the last year, and they told every single human they knew.

When you were developing your product, like how did you make it so good? Like, what did you?

I spent five years launching gyms.

Yeah. So yeah, so so like doing it and then teaching it can be like sometimes different as well. So what was your thought processes in like, um, going back and like, "Oh, I did this to do this?" Like?

I had a gym launch business where I would turn around gyms. And so I turned around 32 gyms over two years after I had my chain of six. And so I had made training for my sales guys that I would fly out to gyms that they had to close, or I wouldn't make money. And so to Sam's point, I had probably had the shortest sales training on planet Earth. And it was just like, "I will explain zero psychology. You will say these words, and you will say it in this order, and you will set up the lobby this way, and you'll sit across from this chair. This is how you'll do it." And it was like 70 minutes. Everything that I had for sales training for that. And that's how I trained my team who actually had to close. And so all I did when I made Gym Launch the product was I took all my internal trainings that were my was my company of launching gyms and then just made it the product. And so the only thing I had to do when I started selling it to gym owners was I just had to add in the lead gen part. Everything else was there. So, like how to do the meal plans, how to do the the nutrition stuff, how to do the supplement upsell, how to do the, um, the weigh-ins, how to do the the sales consult, how to work the leads. All of that was training I had for my team because that's what what I already was doing. And it was as little training as I possibly could because I wasn't trying to impress anyone. I needed the employees to as quickly as possible be productive.

Gotcha. But that's that's in person. And then us.

Well, that's irrelevant.

Yeah.

It's completely irrelevant.

Right.

The main thing is that he was doing it. Yeah.

He perfected the like a simple way I found to think about it is imagine you're just like a skateboarder. You have to be good before you can capture it on video, right? And the only thing you can do to get good is to practice. So, it's better to spend most of your time practicing instead of like playing with the camera. You you know what I mean? It's just the same in business, I swear. But everyone gets all caught up in the like the way they teach it or the way they capture it on the camera. It's still about doing it, which comes from hours. Like, just do it. Like it's like flying a plane. You have to do so many thousand hours. Do do you know what I'm saying? I kind of see it like like cuz it's one way to like play basketball and then teach basketball. Like someone learning like a book about basketball. They actually have to go and do it. So like as someone teaching.

Learns basketball through a book.

Exactly. No one. No one. No one. Right. So you have to like go back and and think about like, "How did I dribble the ball?" And like, "How did I like, like learn when I just started?" A book so that you just tell someone, "Go bounce the ball."

Play is about product side or sales side?

Product. How do you teach the client to do the thing? Like, like just getting them the fastest result?

I I find personally, I this is about product, right? So like, I need to experience the pain that people experience. So like moderation, I go in and moderate myself for a while, and I'm like, "Yeah, this, this is painful. I can, I can see what I need to improve here." Or like, I declined on my payment on purpose to see what that experience was like. Um, and I'm always trying to put myself in the experience. Or I told you I was downloading mobile games. This was just the other day, just to see what that flow was like. Like, I don't try to theorize about it and sit there and try to just come up with all these concepts. Like, that's madness. I go and try really good stuff, or experience the problems that my customers are experiencing, or talk to them and understand the things that they value and don't value, or even asking questions like, "What could I take away?" Um, constantly being in this mindset of like of pro. This is how you make good products, I think. Is this helpful?

We develop a product, like let's say software, right? Like I think a lot of us are creating modules as well, videos. So like I think fundamentally, in terms of teaching, yeah, it could be the same, but in terms of production and delivery, it's it's a little bit different.

No, but I'm like, the school games is still part of our product, right?

The course is like half an hour long in the school games.

But that experience of using the school games is a lot of people, that's a lot of people's first time experience of school. So I'm thinking about the school games as a product, right? I'm also building a software platform, but I I'm also thinking about the content and the packaging and how we present it. And I think it's overwhelming. So imagine Kirby has an info business that teaches people how to use school, the platform. He doesn't own the platform. It has nothing to do with him. He absolutely has an info and coaching business in that context. So it's 100% the same in terms of translating the school games to what you're doing. One frame that I'll give everyone here because I think some people think that I teach things relatively well is that I eliminate everything that is not action. And so I see so much content that's like, "The intent and the because, and let me give you the reason." It's like, "Do this, and then do this," and that's it. It's just focusing on utility. And I remember there's this one product that I bought that changed my whole like worldview around length of what I would put into modules and whatnot was, um, it was a Facebook ad scaling course. I bought it like eight years ago. People was like, "Which one?" I was like, "It's eight years old. Don't. It's not worth it." But I went in, I bought, I bought it for $700. I watched the webinar, I bought it. The whole thing was 45 minutes. There was nothing else. And I watched the 45 minutes and I was like, "Oh, okay. That's how you scale Facebook ads." And I immediately scaled my Facebook ads using what I learned in the 45 minutes. And I was like, "That was the best product ever bought from an info space perspective." So it's not about more, it's about better. And trying to think about value per second and ideally matching the value per second to what the person has to do. It's like, "What I need them to do, and this will just cut out 90% of the stuff that people are putting into modules." It's like, because at the end of the day, in order for them to get a result, they have to do an action. And so just tell them the actions they have to do. By the way, for weight loss, my closest friend, my brother is a PhD biochemist and very, very smart. And all he did to his product, because he has a he owns a business that does weight loss, is that he kept removing things from his intervention until he found out there was only one thing that mattered, which is that you just have to weigh yourself. He doesn't even give meal plans. He's a PhD path. He can [ __ ] give me plans. He took like taught the Olympic teams like like worked in Zerbai John for their whole Olympic committee, like very [ __ ] smart person. He just has people weigh themselves, which he calls it uh measurement as intervention. Like literally getting people to measure what their weight actually is takes care of the majority of what they need to do, and it's one thing they have to do. That's it. That's it. And then after they finished the first month, they're like, "Well, what should I eat?" He's like, "What you have been eating because you've continued to lose weight." So he just, he had me, he had all the, and he just kept peeling things away.

You think that can be applied to all of our niches?

Yes. You just have to find out what that thing is. Now, them, it's a scale. For Facebook, it was seven connections. Like, you have to figure out what that thing is that they need to do. That's the activation. I think our models are like not too personal, but one thing that I did learn from Alex, um, was that when we had the agency model, we just took what the best performing agency clients were doing, what we were doing for them, and that's all that we taught. We didn't teach any other stuff that we applied in the agency. So just taking the most successful, impactful things and getting them that that first, making that as like efficiently as possible. So just take the best performing people in your community, most successful, apply that early on as empty as possible.

Yeah, I think to your point is that like most of the time the answer is right there in front of you, and you just like searching for other [ __ ]. That's. Everyone here has customers. So what you do is you look at the top 20% of your customers and you say, "What are their demographics? What are those psychographics? What are things they believe about the world, and what are the things they did or do?" So you look at those three frames on the top 20% of your customers, and then this becomes the marketing front end too, which is like, "If you're the type of person who does these things or likes this stuff, this is for you. If you're not one of these things, then you're not." And so you end up having a two, like two-sided multiplication. One is that you attract your ideal customers. You attract the people who are have the highest likely becoming the top 20%. And then you also arm them more specifically, deliberately, rather than by accident, on what the things they need to do are. Does that make sense? Like, this is one of the things that I do in like almost every business as soon as I buy it. So like, Time Studies is one of them. This is another one, and I got this from, so Vista, if you guys heard Vista for private equity, 100 billion, whatever, very big, lots of money. Anyways, I made friends with their head of pricing, and he was like, "Do you want to know the secret to bet Vista?" This is probably also boiled down, but he still gave me this. He said, "We just know the companies that were buying customers better than they do." I was like, "What do you mean by that?" Like, so when we do the acquisition, we have to, we get all the customer data beforehand because that's how you validate if you want to do the purchase, etc. And so we run all these analytics on their customers to figure out who are the most valuable customers, where do they come from, what do they like, etc. And so then as soon as we acquire the company, we eliminate all the marketing channels that don't acquire those customers, and we just 5x that marketing channel that brings that specific person in, and we change the messaging so that it gets just the people that are the highest leverage, the most valuable. That's it. This is you, by the way. And so if we have customers that are worth five times more, and then we literally just keep the customer headcount the same, we 5x the business. And so for them, Vista triples in three years. That's their whole investment thesis. And so we did this with Jim. I was like, "What are the things that these guys have in common?" And so we knew, we didn't have any demographic issues. I did know that we have almost 80% men, but I think that's part of the industry. Um, psychographic, they're right leaning in terms of like, they're more conservative in nature, they're small business owners, they don't like getting taxed, things like that. And then from an activity, so and then the things they have about them, sorry, demographic wise, is that they had one employee, they had 30 members, and they had assigned lease. If you don't have those three things, you're probably not going to end up succeed with us. And so we just stopped taking anybody who didn't have those three things. Even the sales team's like, "Oh, this person has money." It's like, "We don't accept that."

Is that how you'd recommend to run like an ad like this?

A thousand percent. Everywhere. It becomes the ad, it goes in the funnel, it goes in the product, and then you can tailor the product to not because you're like, "Man, I got to meet people at all these different levels." It's like, "No, who's the most valuable person? Only make [ __ ] for them. Market only for those people." And then the thing is is that you'll be amazed is that when you say, "Hey, I only want these people." Mostly those people respond. And then you're like, "Wow, it's like I have all these dream customers." The problem is that everyone's so afraid of saying no to money. And if you do that, you'll be able to get, you'll make way more money. Saying no to minnows for your current school ads, I've been studying them a ton. Like these three, if you could backtrack, how how are these three in your current ads? Like?

So I am going super wide with school ads. Yeah. Now, if we found out like right now the like, we'll do more and more demographic stuff like over time. Um, but basically right now they're cranking, and so it's all good. Um, but over time as we develop more and more data. So like for us, it's like we're focusing on growth and activation. Um, how do we make it easier? How do we make it less friction for people to get started, things like that? But right now, in terms of ads, it's looking at the type of people who want to start a business online for the most part, and that's the widest swath. Now, we will look, and this will be a Kirby assignment, to see like what are the things that separate people who are successful from people who aren't. And we also got, we've already gotten like more and more targeted with the ads, and it's had a huge difference in terms of uh retention and churn. Just making sure that we're targeting the right people. Like, just doing that, like massive differences. And so a lot of people are like trying to fix the product when a lot of times you have to fix the person, like you're just selling to the wrong people. How long, how would you say the the learning phase of the ad? Because when I run.

I know I go like broad, broad as possible, but I was going to say like the more money that you're like budgeting in, do you find that demographic faster just based on those three things?

I know nothing about media buying recently. I just, I like if I, I would be making up an answer from when I ran ads like six years ago. So yeah, I just don't want to give you wrong.

What was your what was your question? I I managed all over KDF.

Okay. So if you're trying to find like a specific demographic by disqualifying them by going, you're trying to find obviously like these three things of this person that you're looking through, you're funning it through the ads, the funnel, and the product to find that demographic. Ads have to learn, right? And we have to find them. And is that very much related to the budget? Is it like you have to spend a certain amount? They learn quicker, the higher the budget, like the feedback that ad gives to find that demographic, basically?

Yes and no. So you don't want to blast, blast the face. You don't want to blast your Facebook ads with uh money right off the bat, especially if you're starting a new campaign. So, all of our campaigns start with around $60 to $90, but you do want to fail as fast as you possibly can. But the more, the more that you give Facebook to spend right in the beginning, it's going to spend everything.

Um, but it doesn't necessarily spend better.

So, we start small. When we see KPIs, um, we generally will scale vertically and horizontally at the same time. So, we'll increase budgets and also duplicate adsets.

Is is that one mass CVO campaign? Do you start like $50 per set?

$50. So, I always set our budget on the adset level, not on the campaign level.

Yeah. Okay.

And then multiple adsets.

Yeah.

Dozens of adsets.

So, do you say you remove the successful one and put them in a high budget? Is that you duplicate it into a high budget adset?

Right. So sometimes, so with Facebook, we have found that there is a with YouTube, you can run really, really, really big budgets because the audiences are just a lot bigger. Um, on Facebook, when you have at least for us, our targeting is uh fair is is fairly small. So we run about 8 to 10 million uh individual audiences and so uh person audiences. And what we have found is that when when you um, there's an inflection point at where your adsets do are no longer profitable in a single adset, but you can duplicate that adset, and sometimes that second adset, even at the same budget, will run better than your original adset.

Yeah. Refreshment.

Yeah. Combination of scaling it vertically and horizontally depending on how much budget you have behind.

How high do you guys go budget wise, if you mind me asking?

Yeah. Um, so.

$5,000 a day across. So not like crazy, but.

Yeah, that's big.

Across across a few.

Appreciate. Thank you.

And so similar to this conversation. Yeah. So I mean, my original was that the cost is like 180 bucks for a $50 purchase.

I'm guessing my head just really aren't great and just making them better.

In the about page. Like actually looking at the copy and the bullets and the images and the video that you put on the page itself. Those are all things that will affect conversion for sure.

And then I'm going to do the organic on Instagram, so then I can retarget more.

If you retarget anybody who showed interest in the stuff that you had or clicked over.

Y.

I want to make sure that I hit all these pieces because I think we we we talked about retention for a little bit there, and we talked about scaling for a little bit because those were the two kind of bigger buckets that I started the afternoon with. Is there something that um that you guys wanted that that we've missed so far in terms of topics? Not that one. We did the standing out one. We got to do more stuff. Do that. Is there anything else that I'm missing or that we're missing?

Trust.

Yeah.

You're already getting trust from your business. It's already.

Big enough. Is that?

Well, then that's where I mean, that's where that's where you know, brand does come into consideration.

Which is which is what I wanted to do. It's funny you mentioned about what like you guys get out of those interviews, which obviously for you guys is like very limited now. Um, but for me, like what I do, like I love it when companies want to trust one. I got about 15 messages, 10 emails from companies asking to help grow their businesses, but they're all like probably under like 50k a month, which is not the clients I'm looking for. One lady even said that should fix my teeth for free. Pretty cool. But um, but yeah, so it's funny because I've got a lot of trust just from from that one thing. It's like the first bit of learning like that I've ever really got in terms of like influence perspective. So yeah, I can see the the impact that it does have.

I mean, I'm in favor, just to be clear, I'm in favor of everybody making content because one, it brings you customers, but in the beginning, the most important thing it does is it converts other customers. So, if you're doing outbound, your outbound will be more effective if you have just even basic content on your page because then they'll they'll respond. They'll look you up. They'll watch it. They'll be like, "Oh, this guy's legit." And then they'll complete the purchase or complete the next step. If you're running ads, your ROR will go up because people will click over to your profile, see that you're legit, go back, complete the, you know, complete whatever the next step is. And so, it's something that always compounds. And so I see it as like a like kind of like SEO for a business is like it's you've got like your ads which immediately make you money, outbound which immediately make you money, but the day you stop is the day it stops making you money. Content keeps making you money just like SEO keeps making you money. Like as long as the content's still there and you have the following, it will continue to compound in time. It just takes longer.

Don't get me wrong, like I do like I say that to people that I work with for them to always have like good socials and good images and all that stuff. Um, but it and my other companies have you social media very basic level, just basically having a therefore you said when they when they look you up, um, just for this business, I didn't have anything need to scale as fast as possible to to get my seat here. So we just turned the emails. Um, but I understand that it is obviously super super important. I think now like getting just a taste of this and you guys obviously you add it is that like organic for anything where I do need to grow that trust is.

It's high leverage. I mean, there's a very, the nice thing is that to accomplish the conversion objective, very little content has to go out. Like you just have to have stuff that's on there that shows that you're like active and like you're a real person and that you have gains. You just put your best stuff out there. Um, rather than thinking like, "What's my cadence?" And all that stuff. It's like, make sure you get, you know, one or two posts a week up on whatever your, you know, one or two major platforms are, not a huge lift.

I just think like if I start something, like I have to like do that thing completely. Easy, just ignore it, not focus on it and send some emails or.

Then dude, send emails. I don't give a [ __ ]. You know what I mean? Like, you know, like I'm not going to sell you one. I don't care. Do whatever the [ __ ] you want. So like, if you want to go send twice as many emails, send them.

But like, why not? Why aren't you sending more emails?

Well, we we are. We've done it. I mean, we just built this based on how many we could, how many clients we could get in for this last two months. And um, first month, we got, I mean, it wasn't anywhere near the end of school games. For the second month, we managed to do it.

Um, yeah, I I can, I will, but uh, we're going to run out of our mailing list. It's like 49,000, 20,000 already. So.

So what do you need to do to build your mailing list? New countries, new.

Buy the mailing list on. What do you do?

Yeah. So, right now, we we I had a few lead gen guys that will go and you pay per leads.

Um, and then that wasn't, it wasn't even outperforming our B mailing list. So, now we're just doing the B mailing list at 49K, and then we're going to new countries. And I actually have for scaling this business, I have contacts in two other countries to kind of run it as a.

You sound like you're good at that. I'm just going to, cuz I want to make sure that everybody else get like, it sounds like you're good at that. Just do that.

Yeah. But I will do this a little bit organic content.

No, you don't want to do that. You told me you didn't want to do that. Pick.

Yeah.

Oh, you like I'm playing the other side right now, cuz you just, you're just opposing whatever I say either way. So like, pick. I like whatever.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. I know. Yeah. I I know you don't give a [ __ ] and no one else should give a [ __ ] about that.

But um.

I care because I'm making a point. Like if I say go make content, you're like, "I'm not sure if I want to make content. I'm actually really good at at emails." So I say, "Go do emails." They're like, "I don't know." But actually.

You send emails for companies. I mean, like, just in terms of what I want to do next for consulting, I just want as many companies connected to me as possible. So, that's what I'm going to build, and I'll build it with emails and organic.

Awesome.

Love it.

Okay. Is there anything that was on this list that we didn't that we didn't hit on? Like stuff that you came in for today that you were like, I'm looking for that.

Anything on ads again, you forgot about?

Uh, you were mentioning right to about page, right?

Yeah. About page.

Um, beforehand, I would opt in and build the email list, and that was like a major part of how I got clients in. So if I'm sending them right to the about page, we're not lead generating. So what it's a little trade-off. Would you have any answers for that?

Like, you have workarounds and stuff?

Um, you can put on Wistia, you can have an email pop up on the video. So when you run ads to the about page, they have to enter their email before they watch the video. Okay. That's like a nice seamless way, cuz you can still send them straight to school.

Okay.

We have.

I know you have a a hat.

Yeah.

We had about a third of the customer acquisition cost for Facebook ads when we decreased friction in the sales process.

Okay.

So, just forget about the app because.

It's going to lower the capacity.

Okay. Do you guys see Evelyn's test that she ran?

Like the cost to acquire on her school page, which was unoptimized, had this was the same as her incredibly optimized, super long sales page that had like pages and pages that she had already spent lots of money on already. And here's a prediction for later is that the school pages will outperform any other page like within the next couple years. Like there, there would be no page that can outperform it. And like, we're not focused on conversion rate on that page right now because that's just not the objective today. But if you think about, I give this extreme example of like, I have a Shopify page for my book. People can buy the book there. I also have an Amazon page where they can buy the book. Price is the same. My Amazon page converts at 30%. To purchase for anybody's e-commerce is absolutely absurd. Straight to purchase. Like 100 clicks, I get 30 sales. My Shopify page is like two or three percent. Which is like fairly. And so because this has no trust comp, like it's just a website, Amazon people have massive histories of positive experiences with buying things on Amazon and knowing that it's trusted. And so even though we like we do some API call that like puts Amazon reviews on my Shopify page to show that there's like 25,000 five-star reviews for the book, it still outperforms 10 to one. And so like my prediction is that as much like I think there's a very like a little bit of an intermediary period right now, but over time everyone's just going to run straight to the school page because they're just going to make more money.

There's a psychological thing that people do in e-commerce to build their checkout sales page like Amazon's checkout sales page. And it's funny because I think you guys use a very similar color on your subscribe button to maybe for the same reason.

They did some research for sure. That's not why we did it.

It was blue, and my wife looked at it and said, "Make it yellow."

She did it because it looked more friendly.

Their's is orange. Actually.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anything else that you guys want to hit on? Something I did forget to mention earlier when we're talking about lead gen. Um, something that we recently started. We're talking about like organic lead gen as well.

So for everybody that opted in to join a few webinars. Um, like we'll have like a thousand people opt in, but then maybe only like four or 500 show up.

That's great.

We'll cold call all of the ones that show up and just ask them, you know, what happened and try to get them to join. And then even the ones that showed up to the webinar but didn't pay, we'll still cold call those leads as well and try to nurture them and get them into into.

Into the group. That's right. Right.

The more you reach out to people in general.

We go crazy on lead generation.

Yeah.

That's correct. Right.

So, so for my group, I have a pure.

When they opt in. So, we send them to the funnel.

Um, when they, um, get their mini chat link, it goes to the funnel. The first thing they do is put in their main email through the Instagram chat.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. But like, yeah, my plan is like pure organic. I'm thinking about going paid advertising. At what point can you do that? Cuz I know if I just make a story, like I just get sales. I know there's so many people that want to buy, but I don't want to overwhelm them with the call to actions. And not only that, but I'm only one person and I'm like running out of steam. Like I work a lot.

Okay. So, like I was more. Yeah. Like I don't know. Like that's what I was asking for your person. Their problem first.

Yeah. One problem at a time, man.

Okay. It's hard enough.

Otherwise, should have a call to action or is that too much?

No. I mean, like, no. No. Um, I think you can have like again, I think it depends on the call to action. Like, if it's like to comment or if it's to get a free thing, I don't see that as taken from the audience at all. If you're like, "Go buy my thing in every, you know, video and it's like right in the middle or a third of the way in," people go be like, "Nah." But like my book has a CTA right in the first third that's like, "Hey, please leave a review." So like I don't think I don't have a problem with CTAs. I think Tastefleet on CTAs are totally good and are pro business. So like good idea.

By the way, we've had a lot of client success with CTAs in the middle of the video because then after the CTA, they don't scroll away. They want what's in the rest of the video and they feel like it's like a value sandwich.

I don't know what you mean actually. So, when you say client success, you're saying like in modules like post-purchase or pre-purchase?

Oh, sorry. Like uh like for organic content, our clients will notice if they if they shove the CTA in there.

Okay. Uh in people finish watching the video and like they they get benefit after being asked for something.

Right? They like that those those posts perform better to liquidate.

As an ad.

As organic.

So was it where they liquidating?

Like their audience?

Oh, okay. They liquidating ad. Okay. So you're saying they convert better?

Yeah. Converse way better.

Than having a CTA at the end?

For most of the ads. Yeah.

Cool. For most of the videos.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean most most entrepreneurs in general it's like you everybody everybody basically works themselves to death for the most part or like they work to their capacity like most entrepreneurs do and then they stop and it's because like they need someone to take stuff off of their plate otherwise you just don't make more money because you unless the activities you do per day change you're not going to make more like you know what I'm saying like there are things that you're doing that are less valuable get those things off your plate and then so you can do more of the high value stuff and then there'll be Over time, that stuff will become low value because there's something else you can do that's more high value.

How did how did you plan your weeks? Cuz I find planning your week in advance can get quite overwhelming.

I don't. I mean I just try to eliminate everything from my week. That's how I plan my week. Just being really real like Mondays are when I do meetings and that's it.

So you just do it like like do you plan the day on the day or do you just go with the flow? Like how does.

I'm like the least productivity hack person in the world. Maybe better. Well, I sort I make space until there's enough space for me to make something.

So, like for example, we did this Homozi launch right the start of this year. It's been chaos since then. I've had no time to even think about adding a big new part to school. There's no room. I've just been trying to deal with the emergent problems. So, for example, support blew up. We've had to hire more support people, put more process in place, put a manager in place, like get metrics, and that's been a whole project spam. So, we've had to put a 24/7 moderation team in place. We've had to build AI tools to detect them. We've had to build processes into that. And then fraud. We've had to put a team in place on that. Tools. People are cheating on the school games leaderboard. We had to build tools for that [ __ ] We had to put a person in in charge of it. Figuring out the structure of the school games. So, should we do interviews? How do we get these recordings done and edited and uploaded? And how do we run these every month consistently? Then the ads side. How do we get the ads working right? Then there's been quality problems. Like we were getting the wrong type of people into the school games at one point. Like we were getting a lot of third world country people joining and being like what do I do? Um and so we were like we had to fix that. And so basically I didn't need to think. I wasn't doing any creative projects this whole year. All I was doing was solving immediate problems until there was no immediate problems left. I'm only now starting to see some space and now I'm thinking of improving the business, but it's like I've been in war mode basically.

I think we're in pretty similar position like what I've been doing. Like we had to go we scaled so much and then there was a bunch of problems that came in. So it feels like I'm just.

Fix them all and put people in charge and get them off your plate until there's space. You can't make anything good if you don't have any space.

So what what did your day-to-day look like with you solving those problems? And would you say that's that was an optimal system on how to do it?

It would just be wake up, go to the office, have a coffee, and pick from the list of [ __ ] And generally I picked I followed the thing that I was most motivated to solve because you have to you can't you've got to work with your motivation if everything sucks, right? Like I'm not joking. Like all of them were problems. I wasn't overly enthusiastic about any of them really. But I needed to do them. They were like existential essentially. So, and my brain wouldn't let me focus on anything else cuz your brain's good like that. It It helps you survive. His survival instincts. You can't fight against them. You're not going to make a great product when you're bleeding.

I'm serious. Like, this is this is really it. Like, you have to stop the bleeding.

I feel like that's what people have been bleeding last month.

Yeah, it's true. You need space. Um, and you just I just exhaust that until it's fixed and then I've got some space and then I'm like, "Okay, now we can add something cool in like and then I'll then I'll pick off a big project like for example affiliates." That'll take me four or five months and it will be all I do for five months. I'll disappear.

You have to literally clear everything else out.

No. I don't get that luxury. But like you never really get that luxury by the way if you're responsible for a business. Um, but I might only get distracted for an hour a day instead of all day. Yeah. And I might actually be able to batch and queue a lot of stuff. So only one day a week I'm working on operations. The rest of it I'm just focusing on on this other stuff cuz I I try to like scale and then experience where are the problems spaces like we noticed fraud school games support moderation right we had we introduced new things like the ads the school games events and we took on all of this extra surface area right we had to like figure out how to deal with it put people in charge of different things learn it all. And now we've got that covered and I don't have to look at it anymore. So I'm Is this making sense what I'm saying?

Yeah. So I'm always moving back and forth between these things. Like we scale, fix everything, make space, and then when it comes to building product, I either know what I need to do and I'm I know when I know what we need to do, it's so obvious. I have no doubt. If I have any doubt, I talk to the customers until I know what I need to do without any doubt. And so I move. So it's either like cleaning up mess, making space, talking to customers, building, going back to talking to customers, building, going back, or this thing blows up again, and I have to go over there. And I just live between these three zones. They're very different. And this one's full chaos, full like slack sliding up. You know, I work on a task for 2 minutes before I get distracted by another thing. You just have to embrace it. But you're not going to do anything like any deep work in that state. That's just fine. You accept it. Um, talking to customers is very social and you don't know if you're actually productive because you're you're in discovery mode. You're kind of wandering around and talking to people. You're like, "This call might be work, might be helpful, but you can't force it too much. You've got to let it kind of come." And then the other one is just building. I I alternate between these three schedules. I don't know if you relate to that at all.

100%. I I have a I have a tough time with the question in general which is why I tend to have like very strong responses to like the the optimization everything because like in well, it's just in my the best entrepreneurs just get the highest returns for their time that's it like and so whatever way you organize through that so like if you're bleeding the highest return is to stop bleeding like because then nothing else matters if you're not bleeding anymore then you either have to figure out what to do or do it fundamentally like breaking those buckets, right? Like that's that's what it is. And so if you have a really clear goal on what you have to do, if your processing gets shut down tomorrow and you can't process money, well, all of your plans don't matter if the business doesn't exist in a month. So you have to solve that. And then you get back onto the figure out what to do and do it train. In terms of time, it's just maximizing how much time you're doing the thing or maximizing how much time you're spending trying to figure out what to do. I mean, hopefully when you come here, like the my goal for you guys is just that you have clarity on the problem that you need to solve right now. And so unless any of you guys has like an existential crisis, which it doesn't sound like you guys do, like you have to create space right now, which is probably hiring a an operator or taking some of the things off your plate so that you can start, you know, putting more time. And I think some of the some of you guys are in the need to figure out what to do to improve my product phase actually rather than immediately just like go make more stuff because making the right stuff is so much more valuable than making more stuff. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah, I just I sp I I see so I mean there's a zillion videos on YouTube on like day optimization and like the billionaire routine, but like most of the billionaires I know just kind of like do the same stuff like you wake up, you have a coffee, you start.

Yeah, it's a simple framework and then within that period of work there's no do.

Yeah. You're trying to eliminate as much stuff that's not doing as possible. So Sam and I were talking at lunch, but like my lunch gets delivered to me. My dinner is pre-made. My breakfast is pre-made. I get driven to and from work. I like my clothing is I is the same thing every day. Mostly because I just find this comfortable and it gets folded and it's put in the same drawer and I open it every day and I do the like I try to like basically anything that could potentially take any time, stress, energy from me that's not doing the thing that makes us the most money, I just try to eliminate that. Like to me that is the like the ultimate productivity like hack is just don't do stuff that isn't productive. It's what what can I stop doing rather than what do like it's kind of like the process thing where am I going to add processes to my life or do I want to eliminate everything that's just cost.

That is honestly the the biggest unlock ever. If you're cooking your food and washing your dishes and going to the supermarket, you're an idiot.

Or you enjoy cooking and that's fine.

It's different, right? Like because that's now a leisure thing. It's like playing the guitar or something, right? But if you don't like cooking and you're doing that stuff.

Yeah. I went to Target the other day and I I swear to God, I can't make this up. So we we went was like, "Let's go to Target." And I was like, "Okay." And so we go to Target and um I got to the checkout part and she just like the woman just stared at me and I stared at her. She was like, "Are you going to take it out of the the bed?" I was like, "Oh yeah, sorry. I forgot that's how this like I hadn't been in like two or three years." And so I just forgot how like normal society functioned in in that thing because I hadn't been there in such a long time. And so like there's certain thing like I don't get gas like I don't gas I don't get gas for the car. I have two electric cars and they get plugged in every night from somebody else and I I drive them. um if I'm driving my cars or someone else is drive, you know what I'm saying? Like it's just how can I eliminate everything that's not the thing that makes me the most money. The food one is ridiculous. The food one's like if you if you add up because I had a meal prep company in gym or Prestige Labs because we sold it through the the base and like the sales pitches it was 13 hours a week. 13 hours a week is what the average American spends on buying food, prepping food, eating food, and cleaning up before and after cooking and before and after eating. 13 hours. It's like two work days.

The amount of decisions, if you actually slow it down and if you were to write down like a step-by-step instruction about how to cook a meal, including going to the supermarket, finding the items, those decisions work the same way. Those could be decisions about growing the company. You burn the same amount of kilogjles in your brain. It's decision fatigue. You can fatigue your like how you spend your decisions is your brain doesn't really discriminate. It's

currency. It's like brain currency. That's the beauty of getting rid of those things like off your schedule.

How do you go about that like with your wife?

Eliminate what's good is that.

You've got a good story for. I think I think you have a good.

Yeah. So we have a chef person that cooks for our whole house.

So she gets these delicious meals cooked for her too.

Yeah. Cuz she now we have children. She can't cook either.

Yeah.

So.

I don't know if I'm at the I mean like make a nice amount of money but I don't know if I'm at a stage where I could be like personal chef money but how.

It's not that much half.

You can at least both get a meal delivery.

Yeah, she would feel about that. She got as well cook for the baby anyway.

It's 1,500 bucks a month. Maybe two grand. Yeah, it's not huge.

It's probably less. I think you're like dealing with the UK mindset. It's probably less than.

It's not a lot.

I actually thought you were going to tell the story of of from a time productivity perspective of your wife uh Sam's I'm not going to tell your story for you, but like Sam's wife was like, "I want to spend time with you." And he's like, "Well, I need to work 12 hours a day." I was like, "Huh?" Do you want to tell like how how you figure?

Yeah. I don't know if I'm going to be able to tell it the same way as it was. I think it was funny the first time I um but it's.

It was amazing that she it took me at like a year or more to figure this out by the way, which is amazing to me cuz in the end it was so simple. But I wanted to work 12 hours a day, but she wanted to spend time with me and the kids. And so I was like, "What do you want?" And she was like, "I want you to be home for dinner. at 6:00 and I was like, "Okay." So, I was like, "How do I work 12 hours a day?" So, I I actually got Excel open or Google Sheets and I was like, "Oh, I've got to wake up at like 5." And then I was like, "But if I need like 8 hours sleep, I got to go to bed at 9:00." And the key to all of this was just going to sleep at 9:00. That was the only thing I needed to do to wake up feeling fresh at 5 and then get a full 12 hours in and still make it home at night in time to make my wife happy, which made me happy, which made me more productive. Like, so you just got to like be real about it. Figure out what she wants and then figure out what you need. And that took me like a year to figure out honestly. What I find different so my wife had we have a son uh six months old so she's on she's been on maternity leave the whole time so we just I work from home just work on my office there so like we're both always in the same house like I'm just locked in a room and obviously I have there.

I work from an office.

Oh, so when you had the baby then you left the house so you didn't.

Yeah. I found that when I work from home I'm with them more but my wife resents me.

Yeah, that's exactly what happens to me if I don't go down. It's like, why are you spending time?

Yeah, exactly. It's a trip.

It's a trick. If I go back now, but in Vegas, what I learned is I need to go get an office so I can leave you guys alone for the full day.

Do you know what's amazing is that both my children and my wife love me more when I don't work from home because they're all excited to see me when I get home.

Deprivation creates motivation. You're deprived of the happiness. You get lots of everybody.

But they don't really get me. I'm there, but I'm It's like my body's there, but my mind's not there. So, like, and that's what causes all the problems.

For both me and my wife.

Yeah, I 100% understand that. Like, talk to me, I'm thinking about all these business things I've got to do in my head. And then she said something. She's like, "What do you think?"

So that separating I I honestly could not get anything done if I work from home with children. Yeah, that was helpful. Yeah, again to just I have said this we are getting him but it's just hard to justify cuz like she's.

Doing 50 grand a month you can pay for the the food you can pay for the cleaning.

All of that's like it's like 50 grand a year.

Yeah. So you pay one month to get all of that time back between all of it.

Dude, our clean is $25 an hour.

So. What kind of CEO are you?

Okay. Say you had an amazing employee and they were spending half their time on cleaning food. Would you immediately like you're that person just have to spend.

I get that it's weird though because like I see a teammate that I'm like this person's obviously constrained. They make us a ton of money. I immediately I'm like okay where can I spend money around you to like free up all this time and then just like taking that same frame of if I'm the owner of the business and I'm also the employee like how do I free me up so that I can make more? It it is. So obviously you spend so much time thinking about that optimizing or like my thing is like reducing the operational drag for the business.

Sure. But not for my life.

Yeah. Do. There's more drag in in life.

Yeah. No. No [ __ ] Like that's where I found most of my productivity gains.

Yeah. Systemizing the home life and personal life.

Yeah. You'll make more like highest like if I can have those kinds of power decisions every day in business, I'd be stoked to tears if I could just because like there's there's not nearly as many of those just obvious like for 50 grand a year I can get a third of my time back. Like my god, that would be amazing.

Well, I even got a doctor that comes to our house.

Yeah. Cuz I was sick of having to drive to these appointments.

Yeah, I have the same thing. My barber comes to my thing every three weeks. Like he does my beard and he does my hair and then I like I keep working and they record content while I'm doing it. Good.

But the in in order of priority, I would do food delivery, cleaner, laundry.

Ideally, your cleaner can do your laundry, too. That's what we have.

That's what we have.

Well, what does my wife do?

She's your wife.

Yeah. Looks after the children like that's that becomes hardcore.

You know, it is something that we been wanting to do for a while, but not done it because already I' already thought about it. No, my wife was weird about that, too. Like, she didn't want other people doing stuff. The moment she had kids, she's like, "I need help."

Yeah. That changed everything. And she can go to higher levels of value in terms of what she does because she.

Doesn't have to do all this stuff.

Yeah. She's a teacher.

She's thinking about leaving her job um to help me out because something obviously.

Does she like business?

I think she does like she's a nurse practitioner, but she yes, she has like a lot of qualities of like entrepreneurship for sure. Um, and creating. She doesn't like my business, but there's things in my business that I believe that she can fit nicely. For examp.

It's worked out really well for me. I don't necessarily recommend it just because I've seen it not work out so many times. It's like, oh yeah, we started working together and then we got divorced. Okay, but maybe I mean because then it's like people end up spending a lot more time together and they're like, maybe we shouldn't be together. Like we were terrible. So like I think a lot of it is super unique to the dynamic. Leila and I met and on my first date I said you should work for me and quit your job. I was like even if we don't work out like I immediately saw that she was very good at some of the stuff I needed. And so like I pitched her on the first date. So, and I would have hired her even if she didn't like we didn't end up working out because I thought she was really good. So, I might ask a potentially hard question which is like if you think rather if you think she's like the best person for the role like why haven't you been hardcore recruiting her since day one?

So, I have but the thing is that she's also a very good nurse practitioner.

Okay. She likes that. I'm like I like I think there's so like some of the happiest couples are dual income like both people have careers that are separate. They mutually respect that each person does something different. That's this is like a life happiness question more than it is like an optimization question. Like you get one quote free employee, but like what do you what's the cost? And you lose your income. So I guess it's not free.

Or at least like personally stopping. You said a pose that stuck with me on a podcast a while back. You said so many people want to add years to their life but not life to their years. Um, I haven't forgotten about that quote. Stuck with me when you said that. But when you talk about like work life balance and entrepreneurship, it's like a hard subject to kind of.

Sure. I don't know bring together. Could you expand on that a little bit?

I see the best version of my life is doing maximizing the hours spent on the things that I find meaningful and for me it's being useful. So like I think happiness for me has been always really elusive. But the idea of being useful I have found really clear like just be valuable to other people and if you're valuable to other people like other things happen that are good for you. And so what I did was um I looked back in my calendar and was like what were the good days that I've had this last year and what were the bad days that I had over this last year? And I was like what happened on the good days and what happened on the bad days? And so then I started looking at all the stuff that was on bad days. And I said, "How do I minimize that?" Part of that was social obligations. I was like, I don't I don't like a rule that I have for myself is that like there are no such things as social obligations. You just have consequences. They're not obligations. And so some people get really bothered by that, but that is what it is for me. And so I try and do as much of the stuff that I do on the days that are my best days. So my best days I work out. I work on deep projects that I find really interesting. I eat with people that I like and I get, you know, as much sleep as I can. If I do those, I see Leila, right? And if I do those things, then that's like a good day. And I had a boss that I really truly hated. Um, I need to stop saying that because I can't use it in clips because I don't know who they are. But anyways, um, and she gave me this one amazing piece of advice. I had this really good weekend and I was like, "Man, I had a great weekend." And she was like, "I'm pretty sure the key to life is living as many days in a row like that as you can." And that was the that was the thing that stuck with me because that actually felt really operationalized. It was like, "Oh, I can do that. I just do that day as many times in a row as I can." Which is why from the same perspective of uh like the bedtime thing, it's like I pretty much try to go to bed the same time every day. I live Sundays and Saturdays the same way I live Fridays and Wednesdays. Like they're just days. And why would I change the schedule on a day if the day that I live every day is the day that I like living? And so I just try and get the my everyday and my dream day as close as humanly possible at the point that I'm at right now because I'm like I'm going hard right now lifestyle-wise in terms of I mean work. Like I don't actually have a lot of room for new friends. Like I barely have room for the few friends that I have right now. And so when people are like, "Hey, I want to introduce you to so and so." I'm like, "I'm just good, man. I'm dead serious. I say no to like all introductions. Like really, I do. And some people are like, "That's really bad. What about networking?" Well, I believe that if we build school into a gazillion dollar thing that helps everyone across the world learn whatever they want to learn and teachers teach what they want to teach, that person will still probably take my call if I really want it.

That's one of the hardest parts I honestly find. Even now, like I get messages from people, hey, can you come to this dinner? I still experience physical pain.

Saying no or trying to come up with a way to say no politely.

You don't need an explanation.

No. Yeah. It feels different when it's you.

Or maybe what? You don't feel bad saying no to everyone?

No, I definitely do. You shouldn't feel bad. What I'm saying is that.

Yeah, but you do. Yeah. No, of course. But I mean, you shouldn't. So, my hack for this.

That's what I'm saying is like you did you did you know that when you were 23 when you were younger? Obviously.

I've been a little odd, but um I my big hack for this is just not right now. And I just always say not right now.

That's pretty good actually.

Yeah. No, like because that way it's like I didn't say no forever. I just said no for now. I say like I've got like right now my book launch is is coming out way far in the future. And so I'm like I said nothing until the book launch and people are like okay well he's got this thing and then after that but then after the book launch I'll be like nothing until like I just whatever just pick something big like we've got this big you know high ticket thing we won't do which for hopefully maybe the takeaway from day is just scale the thing you're doing now but whatever like we have to get to 100 you know thousand members in our group it's nothing until I get to a thousand members that's it I don't have time until I get to a thousand members and you're like actually now that I'm a thousand I it's actually 10,000 that's what I actually have to get to. It's like the goal has always been, we were talking about this earlier, like the goal only exists to facilitate the activities that you want to do every day. It's like the only real meaning for the at least for me.

Yeah. I just got over social obligations and the realization that as long as I continue to pursue my goals, I will always be in demand and be more in demand the closer I get to my goals. Like I have yet to have doors actually close on me that I chose not to walk through. Like Joe Rogan, if he doesn't get an introduction, is still Joe Rogan. And then if he wants the introduction, he can go get it. And so like especially actually this is like super relevant for everybody like your your size right now is everyone wants to make introductions. They're like I thought there might be synergies. Maybe you guys could collaborate. Maybe I think you guys should connect like maybe like oh there's this guy who's in town. You definitely have to meet them. I like I don't actually have to meet them. I don't have to meet them. And another one is um like where people will trick you. This is the trap is they'll say like hey are you free Friday night? And then you might say, "Yeah, I'm free." And then they say, "Let's hang out." And they equate me not having plans with them being entitled to my time. And so it's like, "No, no, I'm like, I'm not doing anything, but that's what I'm doing is not doing anything because I'm recovering." And I see rest as an active thing. Like if it increases productivity per unit of time, then it is productive.

To span off of that, this is one thing I would search Google all the time and never found in. Do you have one day where you just fully rest?

Yeah, if I need it 100%. If I need the rest, I'll rest. Tomorrow I'm resting. I've had a really long last two weeks.

But do you think that's necessary? Like, do you think you should have a day like out of seven days a week?

I think you take rest if you need rest. And I think different people have different cadences of when they need rest. I also think that if you work, you know, uh if if you work 6 to noon every day, you can do that seven days a week for a very long period of time. At least for me, if I work 6 to 2, 6 to 3, I can do that ongoing seven days a week. Like I don't need I don't need to take the days because the second half of my day, I do other stuff, whatever. And that becomes my active rest. Like I don't see anything magical about a day versus eight hours here over and over and over again because like you have a certain amount of output you can have and a certain amount of recovery you need. And so it's just like that cycle. And I think that what happens is if I if I work really long hours, day day, then my refractory period, my period of like rest has to just basically I'm I'm stacking work and then I have to rest. So I just think that that can just get evened out. So I just don't believe in any shoods around work versus not work time like at all. I just throw.

That's what happened to me after that chaos period. I had like a 4-day crash.

Yeah. It happens cuz I was just riding adrenaline for 4 months.

Yeah. But then I was like then once I solved the chaos, my body's just like rest and then so like cuz there's no immediate danger anymore. There's nothing there. And then I'm like, "Oh [ __ ] I can't do anything. I need to just like lie down for a few days."

And I think.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think the more you work, the more you like I there there was a day um earlier this week where I like I just like I got into the office and I was like I have nothing like I'm like hitting the gas and like there was just no thoughts that were coming to my brain and I was like okay well today is not going to be a productive day. And so then I just basically called it and so like just not feeling guilty about that because as long as you're working the time like if you feel good work but if you don't feel good the work's going to be crap anyways. So, like tomorrow for you, like what do you do?

I'm going to go to the pool.

I'm dead serious. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go to the pool and be in the sun for like the whole day. That's how I rest. Some people are like, I want to hike and that's amazing. I want to do literally nothing. I either have pool in sun or dark room and like chain series of television. I'm like those are my two rest modes. I recover the same from both. Either one works. Now, it's nice out so I'm going to go outside. But I know people who like they do chores to relax. Like everyone's different. I think it's just whatever you do.

So you basically just work until you feel like.

Yeah. I work until I can. I do that every day.

So yeah. And do you plan that day with Ila or are you just like, "Oh, okay. I want to rest."

No, we operate separately. She like driver brings her back and then they'll come back for me and then I'll go or sometimes I go first and then she'll go. But like then we get home and we do whatever we feel like doing for both of us. A lot of times like at that point sometimes I just like want alone time and so I just go do whatever I feel like doing. Seems like you've like built in spending time with each other into your throughout your week like time.

And also I think that you have like these different factory period like you have a work work rest cycle and I think you also have an invest and space cycle with relationships like there are like when we're not in like crazy work season we don't need like dates it's like that we feel fine but like we usually are pretty in sync where I'm like you know we haven't seen each other in a while let's go on a date this week and so it's like if things get more hectic then we have to like be more purposeful about carving out time like I don't like I just abhor rules in general like in general if we both don't need to see each need to see each other then we're like I'm said differently if we don't need to like carve out specific time like we feel like we're in sync then we're fine if we need more time if we need to do three dates in a week okay we'll do that you know like we just go by feel.

But for other people they need the rule to be in sync.

I guess like with you is you got you have a very healthy relationship in the way that you always feel like that.

It's worked. That's all I know.

Did you have a lot of friends like when you were in your early 20s doing the gymn.

That that weren't business friends and you have they they just live normal lives, right? Most most of my friends are like just normal.

Yeah. My family, they have no idea.

They can't even comprehend.

If you keep getting bigger, you'll lose those.

Yeah. What do you drink with them?

I drink with them.

Is that the kind of drinks? Cuz you're from the UK, right?

Yeah. You guys are always at the pub.

Yeah. So, I actually.

That's true. I'm not joking.

No. Yeah, I understand. I actually I thought about this. So, I actually moved away to the countryside. So, I'm like 40 minutes from my closest friend who's also like he actually works for me. But, um I'm I just made sure that I was far enough away from everyone I could lock myself in a room for two months just to work on a project to do the things that I do because I like working quickly. But, um yeah, I actually moved away just with that exact reason. So, we're like in the middle of nowhere. I don't cut out all my friends.

Yeah. Yeah. So, we I I go to the pub with my wife sometimes, but we don't drink cuz of babies. So, we just Yeah. I do try to live like productively, but I don't have like any friends that I go see that are like business friends like family members as well. Like when they like I hate money, talk about money stuff. And they were found out that like my community.

You hate talking about money.

I hate talking about money. Yeah. Like and my my family like found out oh my community makes 30 grand a month.

With them.

Yeah. With them.

But you like talk about money.

I talk about money.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Like.

But it's like the social media side like imagine going to my friends, oh 50k, this is how we scale to 50k a month. And but it's like that side I find really awkward. But um but yeah, and the family, they can't comprehend that. And my friends can't comprehend that side. And and I just want to talk about business all the time. They're literally obsessed with like sports.

I'm on the same page as you.

Football. That's why I asked the question before. It's like that's like I feel like be my biggest challenge. It's like none of my friends can comprehend anything.

It's like [ __ ] a different language. For me, it's just like all right, I guess at some point like.

You know. Let me throw this out. The people the people that you can change your behavior the least with are the people that you are the most you with and those are the people that you want to spend time with. If you feel like you have to change your behavior constantly to like I have to not be me so that you can like me, then you're not even liking me. You're liking some version of me that I put on just so that I can be with you to not be me.

I still like I have that the two modes. That's why I kind of asked like did you have this thing where like you weren't all business when you're.

I've always been that way.

Yeah. So like I'm I'm used to play video games and stuff like that. I gave all that up and moved to the country like I put my head down like last year make more money like my life especially but um.

Through a few businesses but like doing this and like now wanting to go to that next level like yeah probably what Andrew said is like giving up the people that you normally hang out with to hang out with new people who will make you a better version of yourself and more productive and they can share business strategies and advance your life.

It's the game. I felt that the identity that I had crafted to be friends with those people were holding me back.

Because they wanted me to be someone that I wasn't and it was impossible for me to make progress as quickly as I wanted to with the identity that they had of me.

So it was either be held to the identity they had of me or cut them out.

Do you feel like they kind of like uh like patronized you for things that you.

Of course. Yeah, of course.

I feel like even like coming here like winning this and like telling people I'm.

You go to your school winner event so good.

There's so little achievements that you that you happen in business like you know there's no one tapping you on the back giving you a certificate for doing this. This was one of them. This was one thing that like we could all achieve and doing it winning it and telling people they're like oh that's great you're in a meal like all your family sitting there and then they go like oh when are you going out like and then they ask like you know official questions about it and then they're like right like and you're like this the next thing no one gives a [ __ ]

No one cares. No one does care for yourself.

That's what you learn more I think as you get more successful.

That no one really gives a [ __ ] Yeah.

Oh. Not even your wife.

I don't even bother telling my wife about my success. I come home and it's all she cares about is like me grabbing this baby.

You're just doing it for yourself really. Like Yeah. We were we was saying earlier um like I don't know if you guys felt this as well but like after the school games finished and like you're in that top 10 position like I thought I'd be like so happy. I was just like so deflated. I was like it's done. It's like it's happened and I thought I'd be like really happy about this thing and it's just why doesn't it feel like that? It just doesn't feel like what I feel. Um even when I sold my last company, same thing like they've transferred the money, it's done. Why doesn't it feel good?

So like why doesn't it feel as good as I thought it would?

You remove a source of reinforcement.

Yeah. You can compete for affiliates now.

Don't get me started.

And there's the all time leaderboards.

Don't forget that.

Do you like those?

I look at it.

Do you guys like all time leads?

Yeah. It's it's slightly wrong though on Ming I've noticed because I've done cuz we kick we kick them out on the lower when they're on the $400 a month and then they upgrade and they want the like we call it ambassador. So when they upgrade, but it doesn't add the higher MR. So it just like keeps decreasing our MR. So it says we're on like 27, we're like 30.

Yeah, it's method of calculation isn't perfect. It will improve it, but it it's too complicated to explain. Um, but yeah, it measures it differently. I didn't know if you if you realized that.

Yeah. No, it's just lumpy. It depends on the day. Yeah.

Yeah. Something goes up dashboard that shows you your MR is correct. But the all is different. Yeah, there we go.

Yeah, the dash. All right, I'll finally get it out. What what actually is going on? Um,

so your dashboard just looks at all of your people that are active and the price they're paying and multiplies that and gives you your MR. That's like actual MR, right? But to do the alltime leaderboards, we had to do something hacky to put it up live like it fast. So, we just looked at how much money you made in the trailing 30 days. So, it's kind of the same, but it's more different than I thought. In theory, you're like, "Oh, like MR would be your last 30 days, but it it actually it goes up and down cuz your re your MR isn't perfectly distributed. So, like there's lumps. We'll fix it. It'll we'll use the same calculation on the dashboard to do it on the alltime MR."

What What about the leaderboard? Like I know I noticed that the leaderboard refreshes like real time live

every 2 minutes I think.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cuz like doing monthly challenges it's hard to track that like because like you it doesn't refresh in terms of like the last days but not not the last day. It doesn't refresh in terms each month but it refreshes like current lifetime. So like it's very hard to like do reward systems for monthly challenges based on points.

Yeah.

Well, you have to do last 30 days which is all it gives you and just see who added the most in the last 30 days and just measure it at consistent intervals each day of the month. Like first or you could just do it at on the first day of each month. We're going to look at who has the most points over the last 30 days. That is essentially a monthly leaderboard. Yeah.

Doing that or are you thinking about doing that?

Yeah, we've been doing it.

Have you found that the people that rank the highest are the ones that actually contribute the most value or just the people that post the most?

I think they contribute the most value.

Yeah, they give the most value for sure.

They're a few spammers, but I think they just don't get enough support. Nice.

Do you guys do like all time leaderboards in general?

No, we don't.

We g we're giving away three like 350 USD plus free clippers this month, but like I don't think it worth much actually to be honest.

We we give away like 100

doesn't work yet.

Doesn't make much difference. We just post it. refund more about like what you get to to do based on like a lot of what we get engagement is like from the classrooms like we have little like call to actions in the classrooms themselves like a manifestation module that's like bridal goals so that's one small thing like introduction like like say intro about yourself stuff like that you said earlier You and your wife go to the pub to not drink?

No. No. No. We go to the pub to to drink, but we don't drink a lot.

Uh we don't like I mean if if you know English culture like an English thing was like you just go to the pub to just like

you go to the pub to eat.

But uh but there's good food in English.

Yeah. But um but we uh we we have a little boy now. So we don't too messy.

Too messy. What does

What does that mean?

You know what? Is there anything you guys do to optimize for not getting sick and when you do get sick to optimize getting better as quickly as possible? Sick of crush.

Oh, this is from little kids, right?

They just they make you sick. I don't think there's any getting around that. I didn't get sick before children, but every now and then now I get like taken out probably like twice a year I found.

Do do you guys do you guys drink? I actually don't drink. Hi, Drake.

Uh, yeah, maybe only like a glass of wine here and there or on a team day. We just had one of those. I like I got had I gave Victor his first two beers ever.

How old are you?

We're drinking together.

He told me he had never had a beer before in his life and I was like, "All right, we're changing that."

And then after one beer, he told me he couldn't feel anything. So,

so it's like we got to keep going until you find something.

Yeah. I I I drink um like once a I mean I kind of go through like phases where I'll drink like once a week or every other week and and then I won't drink for like a month or two. But like but I I like but if Leila and I are going out to dinner or something like I'll have a martini or a cocktail or an oldfashioned or something like

so it's that just that wiping out thing the next few days if you do go too heavy that's

I track my my sleep pretty well and so I see the I see the impact. So I can drink one beverage and it doesn't affect my sleep. If I drink two it affects my sleep

that with wood is that an or

No I have a actually total side note um uh there's this thing called sleep eight. It's a

eight sleep. Yeah, there you go. Eight sleep. Um, it's this like thing you put on top of your mattress and you can adjust the temperature

between the two cuz like Ila likes it warmer than I do. And it's it's been like the best $2,400. Like such a good because I I never like I don't like tracking stuff. I don't want to have any effort to track stuff. So I just go into bed and it does all this tracking for me. So I can just see stuff which I actually find really nice. And so I've been able like kind of measurement as intervention. Like my sleep has improved dramatically just because it's tracked. And so I've just started to notice when I do certain things it affects my sleep, you know, in different ways. Like I know if I stimulate too late, the quality of my sleep goes down. Um, and like uh I I know that I I pretty much always wake up to on the dot at 3:45 in the morning to pee. And so like I I know that if I drink too much water, like that happens and but it's always like the same time. Um, I know that if I go back to sleep after that, I get a ton of REM sleep post pe postp pee clarity. Um, and so like just just like little things like that that you start picking up. So I've gotten better at sleeping if that makes any sense.

It's funny like the difference between like you guys taking it to like that next level just to biohack. Like

I hate the term, but yeah.

Yeah. You hate that term?

I just hate everything that comes with it. I hate the brand of biohacking.

The meaning behind it.

Yeah. It's like the like I'm I'm calling my wife and like cuz they also get into like the optimization of everything

like optimizing everything

like the 5 hour morning routine.

Yeah, that's I hate all of that. I hate all of that.

Yeah, but like you're still you're doing it really agree that it's like your own thing that you just don't need to think about.

Yeah, I want zero zero mental bandwidth. I just go to sleep in that thing and it and I it took me a week to set like the temp because you can actually change the temperature throughout the night. So you just like the first night I was like I just want it cold as [ __ ] So, I just made it cold and then I like woke up in the middle of night. I was like, I'm cold. And so, then it was like in the middle of the night it goes from like, you know, minus 7 to minus three and then it's like, okay, that that works for me. You know what I mean? And so, like you just you find this stuff out and it's been like really really good. Like really worth it. Especially if you sleep with someone else.

Yeah.

Like the whole the eternal like who has enough comforter battle like is done. I can actually sleep with the same comforter as her because my side of the bed's 55 degrees. So, it almost it's so cold it feels wet. It's great.

Did you sleep in the same room as the the baby?

No.

I did the f with the first baby and it didn't work. So then I learned. So then with the second baby, I was like, I'm not going to sleep in this bed. Yeah. And my wife is totally fine.

So your wife's very supportive. You like just everything business, you focus just business business. She wants me to be happy and she wants me to be home at 6.

If I do those things,

it's all good.

Are you able to be present after 6? Like, can you switch up?

If I got a good day in I find I'm in pain if I didn't.

What is that like spending enough entrepreneurial energy or what does that mean? Definitely time I wake up cuz if I slept in or something then I I didn't get to work properly or yeah just getting just making progress like getting things done. If I don't just keep getting things done or making progress I feel anxious.

Like a waste. At least that's how I feel. Like I just wasted a day. Sucks. So that's like the perfect day for me is like I've worked on I moved a ton of stuff forward and I worked all day. I worked out. I ate with people that I like. If I knock those out, like that's a good day for me. And I just try and do that over and over and over again. And if I don't sleep well, I tend to not have good days. So it's like I also need to do that. If I go to sleep late, I don't sleep as well. You know, I sleep shorter or whatever. So like I think having an alarm clock for when you go to sleep is way more useful. Like I haven't had I haven't woken up to an alarm clock in years. I just but I go to sleep at the same time.

It's like like you cleaning your life like reducing that drag there and like taking over to your business is like the same thing. I feel like that's exactly what I did with the agency model which I hated because I felt like it was so mentally draining having to have meetings all the time doing all these different things. It's like when I moved and like just secluded myself to clean room where I did nothing but work all of a sudden the business that I created was just a line. It's just like someone comes in, they do the thing, they get results, and they leave. So, it's like we just cleaned everything up. Maybe that's because like that's the only thing I feel about doing.

Yeah. You only thought about one thing and it gets really easy to solve.

The identity stuff like how did you ever break through any of the ceilings you ever had? Or like Sam, I know week two for like a lot of your trainings was all about self-image, identity work. So, did you ever have to like balance that stuff in to like break through any internal plateaus or anything like that?

Sam probably has I have probably a very different take. Um, I'm not well, I just have whatever. Anyways, um, I've just always been down to like what's the math and like is the math possible? And that's pretty much how I just like break it down to that and then I'll believe it or not believe it. So it's like the amount of people who say like I come in and like my business is capped. I'm like explain to me how you don't have like you have a marketing problem. You don't have a like it's not like your business is capped. Now if you sell in a onem radius because whatever you do requires a onem radius then you will be constrained by the population there. But then are you constrained by opening another location? So then it's capital con like you mean like it's just break down to math why this no longer like this can't grow anymore. And so in terms of like all the like the feeling worthy and all that stuff, it's just it hasn't been something that I've dealt with because I just never identified with being like a good person to begin with. And so I kind of thought business was a cool thing where it didn't matter whether you were a good person or a bad person, you could still do the thing and get the result. And I actually saw that as very freeing. Like I didn't have to feel good about myself to still like sell people. And I'd have to feel good about presenting. But if I practice a 100 times, I'm usually a lot better than if I don't. And so it's just like just my whole life is just focused on what do I have to do and then just ignoreing everything else. That's been me.

I don't focus on that stuff at all anymore.

Yeah.

I honestly found that you can overindulge in that,

which is what I used to do. Spending time thinking about how I was thinking and and coming up with an identity and and all of this. I there was just a standard I wanted to get to which was real clear like I wanted to attract talent that was like top tier software engineering Silicon Valley the best of the best talent. So I was like I want to get I want to get that talent. I want to build software at this level and I want to make a product at this level and I'm just going to do that and I don't care about anything else. Um, that was very helpful actually cuz then I didn't care about what I thought of me or what other people thought of me. I was just like, I'm trying to get to this level and I just it gave me something to grind on every day. And then you you start to notice progress towards it and that was very helpful. It's like because Do you get what I'm saying? Yeah. And I never thought about my identity. And to really let go of it, that's why I like grew my hair out. So I looked not like a business person. I looked poor. So I was like really not giving a [ __ ] if people thought I was successful or not. I was like I will just get I will just do it at the highest end possible. Not even talk about it. Not even tell anyone. Like not even tell my wife. It's just I just tried to reduce it and make it as like pure as possible without any like distortion if that makes sense so that it was very real and there was no faking or anything like that. Um, and I've read about this actually that the problem with a lot of like generally the problem is with everyone's work in any field is always quality. the thing that separates them from like where they want to get to is quality of their work. It's always that, right? But the problem is that most people don't believe there's a problem with the quality of their work, right? So they they might be making stuff and they might believe that it's good enough and that's why they can't progress because they don't actually believe that their work is not good enough. So and apparently that comes about because they haven't experienced high quality. Do you get what I'm saying? So, I think this made a lot of sense to me and I because it it clicked like these patterns because I know the people that I've looked up to in product and engineering and stuff, they were surrounded by the best always and then they wanted to reach that standard or maybe surpass it and that's why they were able to do good work. Is this making sense? So I think for a lot of people like you you need to improve your taste of what good is or what quality is and the only way you can do that is by experiencing the best stuff. So like you finding the best books if you're into writing, finding the best videos, the best movies, the best music, the best food, the best software products, the best art. Do you know what I mean? And even trying to like discern the difference between like why is that better than that? And noticing those details that I think helps you a lot and then it it creates an immediate gap between where you are and where the level you want to get to and then it's very clear what you need to do. You're like, oh, I'm not at the I'm not getting what I want cuz look at the gap. So, you don't think about trying to hack it with some [ __ ] Um, you're just like, I need to get better and then you just wake up every day and grind on it and just keep moving forward. Does that make sense? And the on one end you have like experience quality and the other hand is the improvement process of the grinding. And I think that in my experience people wildly underestimate the amount of work that it takes. It's like most people think they need to work like twice as much and it's more like a hundred times as much. Like I have a lot of entrepreneur friends who are successful and they're like, "Oh, your book worked out really well. Like I'm going to write a book too." And then, you know, a month later like, "Hey, I finished my first draft. It's going to be just like yours." I was like, "No, it's not, man. There's just no way you can write a book that that that's that good in a month." Like, and I would just be like, "Show me one all-time bestseller that was written in 30 days. Show me one. You can't." And that's from experienced writers who also spent 10 years writing stuff beforehand and wrote every day. And from like the video content perspective, like what are the hacks for making my content, you know, go viral or whatever, it's like you have to make more content and get better at it. Like I've done 35,000 pieces of content. Like it's a lot. And that's in three, you know, two and a half, three years. It's a lot of volume. So I've gotten better at it. I'm not as good as I could be. Mr. Beast is at like 12 years. And he also is an entertainer. I'm an educator. So it's a little different there. But like it's just the sheer volume of work people just don't understand. And like people were like, "You're really good at teaching sales." I was like, "I did 4,000 one-on-one sales, 4,000." So like, you do a hundred and then you do that 40 more times. It's a lot. You know what I mean? And so like I think that's where like all the elimination of everything else is so important because it's the only way you have enough time to get in enough volume to do better. Like I I got reached out by different entrepreneurs like, "Oh, uh, this other guy, he's building something that's like school." And I just immediately was like, "No, it's not." Like, "No, it's not. I know it's not because they're like, "Oh yeah, he built it. He built it in like a like no he didn't like it's not I already know it's [ __ ] It doesn't matter. I don't even need to look at it. I know how how long did it take you? Great. There's no way it's good just because you can't you just cannot get around it. And that's the that's the whole expectation reality thing of like I'm really nervous in speaking in front of people and I'm like how many times did you practice the presentation? They're like I mean I um I mean twice. I'm like well yeah I mean you've only done it two times. You think you're going to be good? Do it a hundred times. and then like you'll probably be a lot better. But people are like a 100 times. It's like yeah that means that you do it twice a day for two months every day. That's what a 100 times is. And then they're like oh wow. Yeah. By the time you get to number 100 it's pretty good. It's pretty good. And you see the difference in quality. And it's and the number one versus number 30. There's just like a hundred tiny little things of like pauses and let's put an image there and let me emphasize this word better. And like watching game footage. It's like you watch yourself present or you watch your own content and you're like, "How could I make this better and you just try and do one thing better and you do that at the next time and then you try and do one thing better and then eventually you just have this big stack of things that you do every time that make it really good and then people ask you how did you get good so quick?" You're like, "I did a shitload of shitload of work." You know, and then from the identity perspective, like we describe people by what they do and so like that is a carpenter. He is an engineer. We describe people by their actions. And so if you want to change who you are, you change what you do. Do you feel like your goals have changed from experience or do you feel like there's any kind of aspect to getting older that's changed what what you're kind of motivated for or aiming towards?

Honestly, the goals I was saying earlier like my goals only facilitate me living the same day to the greatest of my ability. Trying to do that over and over and over again.

What about you, Sam?

Um, I've just become much more realistic about what I can actually do, right? Which is almost nothing. Um, I just want to make a really good product and have a family and that's it. And that's pushing it.

I think

Yeah. Once you realize how much work it takes to do something well, you realize how few things you can actually do. And I think that's the like that's what like new entrepreneurs are like I want to have five things. It's like there's no way that you can do that well. There's no way. And if you want to do it well, then you have to do one and then that kind of it self- selects for you. Like if you have a super high standard for what you want to accomplish in terms of quality, then that already does the prioritization. It takes care of the prioritization. You can't do anything else because in order to hit that bar, you have to put everything you have into it. Well, but you take multiple companies.

I don't runs the whole thing.

Seriously. Well, it's like I have I technically own a slice of Coca-Cola.

I don't think about Coca-Cola at all.

I'm an owner.

But the businesses that you invest in, you implement the team that you built around scale businesses.

So, our whole team like we have a portfolio team and Leila runs the portfolio team that does the data like all of that.

How long did that take to build that team to build the business? Two years. And did you start by building those businesses oneon-one?

Uh, yes.

Just you?

No, I mean I had a even day one I had six people. I just like I like I like even with six people I feel like nothing could happen. I was like, "Oh man, this sucks." Like I we can't get anything done with six people. We need like we need way more. And so um I think our hold go has like 35 or 40 people that work at just a holding company. But like we have big companies, you know what I mean? Like I think we do an aggregate like 17 million a month. Like it's it's a lot, you know what I mean? And so I wrote checks three and a half years ago for companies that do, you know, 2 million a week now. So it's just it they got bigger. And the big thing like what acquisition.com specializes in is recruiting talent. And so because that's the highest leverage thing we can do because I don't want to. So like the recurring work thing, I don't want recurring work. I would like recurring paycheck. So the hard part is I need someone else to do the recurring work for me. And so I can either hire that in my company or I can hire that into the business. And so that's what we do. So we take a company on, we write a check, we earn this much. And then we hire people and place them in the business. Like almost all of my free bandwidth is on on the content that we make that drives school. I mean obviously drives my brand. You have a figure that actually how long it takes you to get the return on investment for your average.

We get very good returns. Basically, if I have to figure out if it's a good return or not, I won't do the deal.

Do you always look for companies that are missing the same thing that you guys can easily build and fix?

Um, I mean, we haven't done a deal in a while to be honest with you. Like we don't do that many deals. Like now like we have five companies currently, maybe four that we're active in. The rest of the investments we have, we have zero interaction with the business and that those four companies like their director of sales talks to my director of sales and that's the communication cycle. You know what I mean? Like that's the quote deliverable. And so like if a if a if a private equity firm buys the business, they do whatever they own the business so they can they can do what they want with it. And if the business is growing with the team in place, then like I want it to keep growing. And then our team can can add in people that are missing that are better than the people that are in the business because we can leverage our brand to do that. And that's how we get that's how we have leverage in terms of adding value to a business. So one I'm telling you one of the most difficult things that I have is translating what like what we actually do to grow companies into into making it appropriate for the level of revenue that people are coming in the room with. Um, because like the day-to-day is all people is all talent. Like everything we do is talent because it's the it's the it's the rather like I want to take someone's 10 years and just put it into the business and say great do the thing you're good at. Do you have multiple people or that the high talent individuals working across different businesses at the same time implementing the same systems into

we have what yeah we have our our big bag of tricks in terms of things that we know will you know make a business better for each function but yeah so like Jacob for example will go in and he'll implement all of our sales systems into a company that has sales and they already are making sales they are good but like if we do the stuff that we know always works it tends to always work. So that is almost like a business agency model.

I mean, it's what an investor does for private equity. So yes, you buy a company and then you improve it. That's what it is. But I don't I don't even I've never even spoken to any of the salespeople at any of the companies we own.

Really?

No. I buy I buy and then I own and then I say, "Hey, Jacob, do the stuff that we do." And then Jacob does the stuff that we do and then the sales go up. And then it's like, "Man, the media bike sucks." And I'm like, "Hey, Paul, do the media buying stuff." And he's like, "Yeah, yeah, I got that." Like, you asked me this the the ad question. I'm like, "I don't know. I haven't run an ad in nine years. I have no idea." You know what I mean? Like, and as soon as I had I could hire somebody to do it, I had them do it. And so recognizing talent is super important so that you can not have to do stuff except for the few things that you're good at. And I hate having stuff on my schedule. Like, I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.

I think you just said the key word there, which is recognizing talent. Yeah,

you need to develop a taste for again like quality

cuz I swear that's the problem with people. They don't know what good is in terms of product and in terms of of talent. But you will never be able to get good people if you don't know what they look like. And so recognizing them, having an eye for it is is you need to develop that taste before it for it to have any chance.

How did you develop that taste? What was the process like for you? I'll give you two hacks right off the bat. One is the interview process itself is an education process. And so you basically want to keep interviewing people for whatever role like say you want to learn like I wasn't like a customer success specialist. I don't know anything about that, right? But if I talk to a bunch of people who are leaders in customer success, I want to hear what all of them think. And until then I can't make I don't have a perspective from which to make a judgment on who's good or not if I start at zero. But if I take people who have the track record over and over and over again, then I start to develop like a little bit more of the language, a little bit more of the understanding. And then you start to see if you interview 20 people on customer success, you can almost quickly you'll be like, "Oh, okay. Well, clearly this person's better than all these people." Okay. And that gives you like at least a a starter. From a quantitative perspective, what I have noticed is that the quantity and quality of the metrics that someone tracks is directly proportional with their skill in a particular subject matter. So, what that means is if I want to hire a sales manager or a sales director, I'm not and I say, "Okay, so what metrics do you track for your role?" They might say, "Um, well, I just I just want, you know, I want the team to be happy, feel supported. Um, you know, I'll I'll, you know, obviously close percentage, you know, I want to make sure that's that that we're, you know, we're tracking that." I would already I already know the person's not good because the right sales director would be like, "Okay, well, we we need to know what our they're going to start at the very beginning. They'd be like, first off, I need to know what percentage of leads are qualified and then what percentage of those leads are showing and then of the percentage of uh people that are qualified. What's our offer percentage on the phone? And how many calls are we taking, you know, per prospect per closer?" So, if one closer is averaging two or three, you know, calls, another one's averaging 1.3, he's doing something a little bit different. And I want to make sure I can drive down that that number of, you know, conversations per per sale. What's the average amount of cash collected? And of course, what's the closing percentage? And what is the offer to close percentage? What's the call to close percentage? What's the show to close percentage? And I want to understand that dynamic so I can see what levers I can pull so I can increase overall throughput. So if someone says that, then I'm like, okay, this guy is looking at all these things. My follow-up question would be like, how would you affect this? Like, okay, well, if we needed to increase show rate, then these are the things I would do. Like, well, how would you affect this? and they'd be like like which means what would you do? And so if I know that they track lots of different high-quality metrics and then I ask them what they do to change those metrics which behaviors then I have high confidence that they will then do those things to fix those metrics if the metric is off like in the business. And so that is a that's like those have been my two is like talk to as many people as you can about it. That'll increase your understanding of it. And then how many metrics do they track relative to their role? Yeah. So in the first one you said um how do you talk to those people? You said talk to client.

No no you like customer success like if I went and hire a customer success manager I would say like what are the metrics that you track and one person might be like time to value and I'd be like okay what does that mean? Just like I act like a like an ignoramis like tell me like what does that mean? Get them to define the terms for you. Get them to give you all the the the because there's different language in every one of these. Like the deeper someone goes into a specific subject, they're gonna have a whole set of uh words and terms that you will have to learn.

Get them to qual qualify themselves. Like

we'll just teach you. They're just teaching you in the beginning because you don't know anything. So you can probably like if you're really good at sales, you probably have a good idea of what a good salesman looks like on some level. But if you don't know anything about product, for example, then like how are you going to know this person's good at product? You have to talk to a lot of product people and hear like follow the blogs that product people follow and see what those people talk about. I know Sam has insight on this too. I remember hearing a story about like the early days of Google and it made it it really drove home to me like what talent meant. It was so in the early days of Google, uh, Larry Pageige was typing things into Google and seeing the results and he saw that the ads were not relevant to what he was searching for, right? And so he took a screenshot, he printed it out and he got a red marker and wrote these ads suck on it. And then he walked over to the engineering team and pinned it on the wall and just tapped it like slapped it to be like, "Fix this shit." He didn't even say that. An engineer walked over to the board, picked it off, stayed up all night, and invented AdSense, which Yeah. Okay. I was like, there was no process, there was no briefing, there was no training. There was like, you need to do this thing, then this thing, then this thing. He didn't. He just did that and that person reacted like that. That's good talent. And I was like, "Holy shit." Okay. Um I got a long way to go basically cuz I was giving my team like instructions for things to do and they couldn't do those. So I was like, I'll never be able to succeed like this. Um so that that then showed me that there was like levels to it. And then so I studied all of the best companies like Amazon. I read the stories about them and read their letters to shareholders and it just made so much sense to me about the gap between where I was and where they were. And I was like, I need to get these kinds of people. And so I started trying and it took a long time before we could get those people. You had to go through that education process of talking to a lot of people before you were able to identify a talent.

Well, I realized first and foremost I wasn't even good enough to attract that talent.

So, it wasn't about talking to people. It was like I needed to get better and so that's where it started,

right? like and then I started reading about what those people cared about and then I started finally talking to some of them but they weren't interested in joining my company right so I was like okay well I'm going to fix that thing and then I would try again and eventually I managed to convince someone and then it grew from there and now every single person pretty much that applies to work at school comes from like SpaceX, Tesla, NASA like the best companies in the world and we don't like all the time.

But that took five, six years.

Wow.

You need to have that experience cuz you don't know what like hot is without cold. You need that contrast. That's why I'd recommend like experiencing that as soon as possible so that you can see the gap and then it's clear like what you have to do. Meeting a smart person is a good start. Using a great product,

right? Like I always like to get the latest MacBook Pro because I I look at it and I'm like, "Oh, they changed that thing and oh, they changed that thing." Um, and then even Tesla, I can appreciate like some of the engineering decisions they've made. And so I I see that what work I know the companies that the smartest people work at and I know the products they make and I can learn a lot about the people by looking at the things they make. And I like I can read a lot about that actually. Um, and seeing new Yeah. new products, but even like anything that anyone that's developed mastery in anything, honestly, whether it's music, sport, um it's just interesting to see what makes someone really exceptional at something. Yeah. Like right now the the it's like so asking like how do I not get involved? It's like, well, I have like multiple Harvard MBAs who work at acquisition.com or like Ivy League MBAs, I'll put it that way. And so, they have experience turning around companies in private equity firms that bought and sold companies multiple times over multiple funds. And so, I have them I just say like do like like it sounds handwavy when like sometimes the answers are like, yeah, I just brought in this really good person and I asked them to solve the problem. But that is very much what we do. And so like I I remember in the early days of my entrepreneurship, I would watch these, you know, talks from these, you know, iconic CEOs and visionaries and they would just be like, I just brought in unbelievable people and I just got out of their way. And I was like, it can't be that. It's got to be he's just not telling me the secret. Like he has to tell me how I split test my headlines. Like that's what I'm missing. Like why is my email he's not talking about email deliverability? Like why is he not talking about you know the offer stack and things like that? They were just like, "Make stuff that customers absolutely love and bring unbelievably talented people together and get out of their way and don't give them red tape. Just let them work."

And so that is what it takes. But then the the meta question above that is what kind of entrepreneur and what kind of company do I need to build to attract that level of talent? And then that becomes the massive gap that you identify and then you're like, "Oh, wow." And so for me, part of that was like, well, I will try and build this brand to attract that level of people. is like building that business is literally like building that should be the goal.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes. And you always get I would tell you this from a personal perspective. You will always get really good like such like the amount the delta between what you have to pay between a B and an A and an A and an A+ is one of still one of the greatest arbitragees that exist in business. Like a B player, you know, you get three to one on and an A player you get 20 to one on and an A+ player you get 100 to one on. But you only have to pay the A+ player like three or four times more than you'd pay the B player.

Is like building that business is literally built. Like that that should be the goal,

right? And this is the that's the recognition thing. Like that's where like I absolutely do think that it's a skill. pattern recognition and part of it is seeing like I mean I remember when I when I saw APG's team and I was like oh wow like every single one of them was Harvard Stanford NBAs like as much as the internet community shits on like these Ivy League schools like they're [ __ ] smart and there's a reason that each one of these guys is also 30 years old and he will also take home three four million a year and doesn't risk anything like they're looking at us they're like oh man you guys work a lot I mean we work a lot but we pretty much guarantee that we make money And then their ultimate career path is they own the fund and the guy that that bought um Jim Launch has 1.2 billion under management. And so if he just does his job and triples triples what he has, he'll have 3.6 billion at the end of it and he'll make 20% of that. So he'll take home 700 million like net income like as in cash like not an idiot. You know what I mean? And so like we have this idea like yeah, I'm just going to sell it to somebody. like that guy you're selling it to who's writing you this massive check you're really excited for has more than that money and he's not an idiot and so like you're not going to fool him on value like they'll know if there's value and they'll also who they're really buying is your team because they will say I'm trying to buy this asset which is a combination of a product and the people that are going to be running the thing and if they feel confident in that team then your asset has value

I still think the first thing you should do is just save a million bucks

think about like hiring the best talent in the world,

but a great first step is a million bucks cash in the bank,

cuz that's a great place to start cuz you're not even with that, you're not going to be able to afford the best house.

Yeah.

So, like

they make more than that a year,

but at least that gives you some balls.

Yeah. Like I don't even think you can think properly until you put a million bucks. They're going to say till you balls. Yeah. Well, don't count their money.

Yeah. Don't count their money, though. business school.

You know, we use school.

You're selling us.

Yeah.

Everybody here uses school. Everybody watching this uses school.

I've never heard anyone actually talk about selling businesses. I think it's just such a

There are plenty of businesses that do I get reachouts from people asking to build communities or asked now I mean they know now they know not to ask but like before this I had tons of people being like hey I'll build you a whatever

but that's you

sure

no I get it but yeah

like even like

we agree

yeah yeah you're selling you, man. You're not

the performance gap.

Yeah.

Do it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Does that make sense what I was saying about the performance gap thing? Like identifying that standard. Can you see it for your different products and businesses now? Cuz I was

Showing some people versions of our app at lunch, and I showed them the next version. And everyone was like, "Oh." And I was like, "You should see the one that's one year away from that." So, I'm thinking like years ahead, and when I use the thing I use now, I cringe. I think it's not very good. Even though a lot of people say it's good or it might be better than like the competitors, I still personally am not satisfied, and there's a long way to go. So, I think that's always what you've got to have, like, and that's my main motivation to wake up every day and like just keep perfecting it.

That's when business got a lot easier for me. There were less distractions. Like, "Oh, so and so, have you seen so and so's funnel?" I don't give a [ __ ]. Or so and so's webinar, or like, whatever. Like, I'm just like trying to make this thing better.

"What? For the individuals?"

"Yeah."

"Well, what's a full company? Like, take Hamza for example. He's a great example. He makes like 220 grand a month. He employs his brother and his sister and his dad, and they all live at home. So they chat about their community over the breakfast table, and they work from their bedrooms. It's not like a formal business, but it is the most profitable and efficient company. There's no real business that's more efficient than that, by the way, cuz spending like, I mean, making 220 grand a month and having maybe 30 grand a month in expenses is insane. And not having to have an office, and not having to have like employees and payroll, just having some family members. That's a real business. Like, I would not get fooled by this whole like, 'real business' thing. A real business is profitable and efficient."

"Yeah, we probably overkilled that for you guys. Like..."

"You guys just need to make more money."

"Yeah, we kind of might need that. All right."

"You'll get to it, but you for now, like, you guys just need to get off your phones and like hire an editor, hire a community manager."

"But you want to become that talent first."

"Yeah."

"Have you you guys ever actually felt like I made it at this moment?"

"No."

"Doesn't I don't want to speak for Sam, but no."

"No, not at all. Sometimes I feel sad. [Music] I'm like, why can't we do it?"

"Yeah."

"I wanted to write this on the board for you guys because we obviously talked a lot about talent, and that's because that's what we're thinking like, that's that's gives you a little bit like insight in terms of like where what I'm thinking about every day in terms of like what can we do to expand our media? I need the actual best people here. And same thing about the development side. Um, but for everyone here, like you only grow your business by getting more customers or making them worth more. That's literally it. And so if you want to grow the business, if what you're doing doesn't get you more customers or make them worth more, then don't do it. And breaking that down a little bit, it like getting more customers means you're getting more traffic or you're increasing your conversion. If you're trying to increase LTV, it's we'll just ignore that. I wrote it down here. But it's increasing your price or decreasing your churn. Like within this business model, it's very straightforward. Like get them to stay more times, increase how much you charge. Like those are the only two things that will increase LTV. And increasing traffic and increasing conversion will the only two things that increase your customers. That's it. And so those are your four boxes. Take this out. So price, sorry to make this clear. Turn, like those are the four things you can affect. So like if you want to grow the business, increase traffic, increase conversion, which is tweaking your about page, increase the price, decrease the turn."

"That's not save money."

"Personally."

"Yeah."

"No, because I found that the more money you have, the longer term you can think. That's a great idea."

"Because when you're not when you don't have enough money to survive like three months, you're obviously not the but the best long-term decisions are like in many years."

"So, you need to have enough cash reserves to think that far ahead. Does this make sense? It's a survival thing. Someone who needs to make money this week to pay rent is not going to be thinking about a four-year business strategy. And so that that just gives you confidence and you just have that sitting there. I still need that today. If I didn't have enough cash, I'd be in full panic. And I was able to build my personal brand for years without doing any like without really any ask and school being the first real one that I ever had because I could frontront the cash and I could do it for a long period of time because I was like, whatever I want to do next has to be orders of magnitude larger than what I just did. So like coming in for $100 million exit, I don't really care. I want billion, multiple billion dollar thing to be my next big kind of opportunity that I'm pursuing. But you can't do that if you're like, 'How do I pay rent this month?'"

"That's when you actually started to think longer term, the new brand, right?"

"Yeah."

"Because he didn't have to make money now."

"You thought big."

"Yeah."

"Yeah. You're not like, 'How are the ads doing this month?' Like, and to be fair, you have to do that. Like it's not like it's just it's just you keep extending out the horizon. The reason that a lot of Silicon Valley quote entrepreneurs can do it is that like they'll just raise a zillion dollars really early. And so that becomes it's like almost like a false, you know, blanket. But well, I'll just not even get into that. That's a whole another game. Um, but anyways, I just wanted to simplify this for everyone here because like when if you're ordering because how I leave these events is that I have all these notes and then I have a separate page where I just look at all of them and say, 'Okay, these are the three things I'm actually going to do and that's the only thing that actually matters.' And hopefully those three things translate to one of these or this one you just do in the meantime, which is like, don't spend money on [ __ ] that doesn't matter."