How I'm Building The World's Biggest Writing Education Business

My portfolio of writing businesses has generated over $13 million over the last 4 years, with $6 million of that coming in 2024. In this video, I'm going to walk you through our updated vision, mission, values, and operating principles—the exact video that I provide internally for our team to take us to $10 million in 2025 and ultimately hundreds of millions of dollars beyond that. So let's dive right into it.

But before we dive in, if you don't know who I am, my name is Scky Bush. I'm a former Wall Street hedge fund trader turned digital writer, and now I run this portfolio. I make these videos because I wish other business owners made this type of content, and ultimately, I do want people to want to work for this company. So if this type of mission, vision, values, and principles inspires you, there'll be a bunch of job descriptions in the description box below. But let's get into it.

All right, what we're going to cover in this video is a full breakdown of our current vision, mission, values, and operating principles. I'm going to explain how those all kind of work together as we go through this video. A lot of what I talk about will be through the lens of how they've evolved, um, from making our very first dollar to now generating over $13.4 million in revenue and ultimately our goal to generate $5 to $20 million per year as a company and then ultimately get a lot bigger from there. So we're going to start with our vision and dive right in.

All right, starting with our vision, we have a very simple, clear vision, and it's to build the world's biggest writing education business. Now, as I started to put this document together and rewrote our old vision, I can tell it needed an upgrade, just based on the scope of the company, where we've gotten, and where we ultimately want to get to. So why this vision instead of a smaller one, like a highly profitable $5 million education business, which we could definitely build, or maybe a small lifestyle business for our entire team and employees, or other things like the world's best or the world's highest quality writing education business? Three main reasons, and a lot of this is through the lens of the vision has to be big. And I, I think earlier on in my entrepreneurial journey, and still right now, um, it's hard to think that you could take something ultimately to a massive scale until you meet someone or have a conversation with someone who kind of breaks that belief for you. And over the last couple of months, I've gotten to have some conversations with some people I really looked up to who've built way bigger companies than I have, and a lot of them basically said, "There's no reason you can't build this thing to $100 million and far beyond that." And sometimes you just have to be told by someone that you trust that you can build something big. And then, um, ironically, before you're told that, you think it's impossible, and so you almost don't try, and then you don't feel bad because you don't think it's possible and therefore you're not failing. But when someone tells you there's no reason that you couldn't build something massive to the scale of $100 million plus, then it's almost like not doing that or not pursuing that is an active choice, and I just wouldn't feel comfortable with that choice, um, because we ultimately want to build something big and have a big impact. And we're, we're going to talk about that through the lens of all this.

So three main reasons why to have, we want to have a vision like this: Number one, and this is only something that I'm able to recognize as the team has grown, and it's that having a bigger vision allows us to attract the highest quality talent. And you know, you hear people talk all the time of the business, it's all about people, all about people. At a certain size, it only matters the type of person you can recruit. And I remember hearing that until we got to, you know, $4, $5 million a year in revenue and thinking like, yeah, kind of, but it's really about what you do, who or what you work on, and what you do to get to that point. And then beyond a certain point, it becomes all about people. But I think in the beginning, it's really about execution, and then from there it's all about getting people who can execute on your behalf in a way that's better than you could do on your own. And so if we want to attract team members who have ambition, ambitious goals for themselves, um, whether that's to ascend to a high-level position within a big company or eventually start their own, they're going to have a vision that must fit underneath ours. And so I say this here, we need a big enough vision that anyone who works here can achieve their ultimate vision, or at least the vision they have for themselves over a 3 to 5 to 7-year period, um, within our business. And we can't do that if you have a small vision, vision. So if we had something like, you know, build a $5 million education business, anyone who joined who ultimately wanted to build something bigger than that, and if you want to build something bigger than that, you need people who want to build something of massive scale, they just wouldn't be attracted to the opportunity. And that's something we've recognized too, is we started to recruit different higher-level people, they, they want to see the potential for a huge, huge trajectory. And if you don't have the vision set from the top down, you're just not going to achieve that. So that's number one. And so anyone who's watching this video, if it fires you up to potentially be a part of the world's biggest writing education business, we want to work with you. And if you're watching this as part of our team, hopefully that vision excites you, and that is ultimately the goal is to have a vision that's so big that everyone who sees it goes, "Wow, I could pursue the highest version of myself in this current chapter, um, underneath this vision," and then ultimately that grows to, this only happens if you have people who want to build something like this or be a part of something like that.

Second, and this is probably the most underrated one in terms of having a bigger vision, and this took time for me to understand, is I've been just breaking money beliefs and breaking business beliefs and what it means to build something huge. Um, to build a massive business, you need a world-class product or suite of products, services. You can get a small business 0 to $5 million, and I remember when I first started thinking that $5 million was huge. $5 million a year is a very small business. Uh, you can do that with a mediocre product because all that happens for you to reach that is you find new people because you're selling to so few people, and $5 million ultimately does not sell to a very large number of people. If you have like a mediocre product, you can continue getting away with it because you just keep finding new people who don't know anything about you when you sell something to them, and then they don't have that good of an experience, they don't buy something again, and then ultimately you just keep doing that until you eventually run out of people. And that's why you see the life cycle of a lot of businesses, especially education businesses, um, fall off around that 18-month mark because they kind of just run out of people, and that word of mouth has worked really negatively against them. So I said that here, um, at a certain point you're exhausted that small group of people, now everyone knows about you, and they either are disappointed from the experience they've had or they, so they don't buy again, or because they were disappointed, they told their friends. Now, when their friends find out about you, they have that negative association. So not only have you sold to everyone you've reached, but because you've sold something lower quality to everyone that you've reached, they've all told their friends, and now you really expanded the pie of all the people who know something about you, and it's not good. So ultimately, if we want to achieve a large-scale education business, you need two things: Number one, you need customers to buy from you over and over again, and then you need customers who tell their friends about you. Both of those compound positively, and that's the only way you can build something massive. You can't build something massive with a poor product because eventually the word of mouth will compound so poorly against you that you just can't sell anything to anyone, and you it just outpaces the speed at which you can grow your audience. And why we've been able to get to this current revenue level is because a lot, I don't have the exact number, but a lot of our purchases come from people who've bought 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 things from us, and then that compounds in our favor. So when you have a vision of this size, selfishly, we have to create something high quality because we cannot achieve our vision without it. If you had that $5 million, $5 million, you know, small, highly profitable business, you can just continue to operate at a, "I'm going to find new people every single year, I'm going to grow my audience," and then ultimately just would kind of fizzle out, and you'd move on. A lot of people do that, that's fine. Uh, we want to build something that lasts for a very, very long time. So that's number two. And then number three, the bigger the business, the bigger the impact. We're going to talk about this more in the mission side of things, but if revenue generation is a score, reward for value creation over the long term, the more value you generate, the more revenue you generate. That's going to be one of the core beliefs we talk about in the mission. And this is true only if what you sell creates a surplus, and we firmly believe everything we sell creates a surplus where we sell it for far less value than ultimately it could generate for someone who takes our advice, does the work that we lay out, um, implements the road map we create, leans on our, leans on our accountability, all that kind of stuff. So putting it together, building a big business requires a great product, then we can have a bigger impact by having a bigger vision. Putting those together, bigger vision requires a better quality product, ultimately results in a bigger positive impact since more people purchase it, and because we have a better product, it creates a bigger impact. So I'm going to really break down that thought process, but basically, when you choose a big vision, you have to build a better product. If you build a better product, everyone who goes through it creates a, has a better experience and experiences a bigger customer surplus or consumer surplus, and then because of that, the ultimate like the ultimate impact you can have is much bigger because you sell to more people, each person generates, um, you know, receives more value from it, and then you add those two things together, and you get this big massive impact. So that's what we want to do. We are casting a big vision because we get to work with higher-quality people, it forces us to create a better product, which is just a virtuous cycle over the long term, and ultimately those two allow us to make the biggest impact possible. Now, what is the impact we're trying to make? I'll talk about that in the mission section.

All right, moving on to our mission. And just to clarify the difference between a vision and a mission: The vision is where we're going ultimately, and the mission is the impact we want to have along the way to achieving that or to reaching that vision. So I don't need to get too in the weeds there, but vision is just a big picture, what the ultimate vision is for the company, and then the mission is why we're doing any of this in the first place, what kind of impact we want to have on the people that we help. And so we want to provide the education to help anyone make a living as a writer. Say it again: Our mission is to provide the education to help anyone make a living as a writer. To explain the importance of this mission, I'm going to break down three core beliefs and kind of build up this ladder, helping break down what we do on a daily basis, connecting it to something way bigger, and then ultimately working all the way back down. So number one: On average, businesses create a consumer surplus, and which means they create more value than they capture. So put simply, any business that reaches any kind of scale, obviously there'll be some, you know, not good businesses, we're not associating with them. I don't really think that that's why I said on average these businesses do create a consumer surplus, and so we're going to take that as a core belief. Second: The best way for a business to scale advertising is through the written word. We know that writing is the foundation for videos, for content, for, um, all written content on all social platforms, for ads, for podcasts, it all starts with writing, which means the best way for a business to scale what it's trying to sell is by starting with the written word. And then ultimately for people and individuals, we believe that writing is the best tool for an individual's personal and professional growth. So building on those three core beliefs, if you don't believe these three things, probably not a good fit to continue working with us because we are going to build everything around these core beliefs, and they will all build on one another. So starting with the end in mind, we want to make a big impact, the biggest impact possible. And I was talking to someone else the other day, they're like, "Why is that the vision? Like, why, why do you want to make a big impact?" Because what else are we going to do? Like, making a small impact, you just aren't going to become the type of person, you're not going to build the type of company that gets you, that has a big impact if you're not a better person, if you're not a better writer, if you're not a better manager. So to become the best version of ourselves, we have to cast a vision to create some kind of big impact because those are extremely correlated. So we want to make a big impact. Put simply, we can do that if we help as many businesses as possible scale their advertising. Why? Because if we believe that businesses create a consumer surplus, if we help them scale their advertising, each business overall will have a bigger impact because more people will purchase the product and experience that surplus. So put simply, we help businesses scale their advertising because we believe businesses are good things, and those businesses, because they're good things, more people buy them, experience a surplus, and the ultimate impact is much bigger. If we want more businesses to scale their advertising, we need to educate more people on how to provide their writing as a service because right now there's a shortage of people able to do so. We believe there's a shortage of writers out there who could actually help a business acquire new customers. It's just true. If you go to any local business, mom-and-pop shop, laundromat, whatever it is, and you say, "Hey, how, who is running your advertising?" They don't have anyone doing it, and there's no one that's approached them that could lay out a good road map for them to do so. So they just don't, most businesses stay as very, very small because they don't have any understanding of how to do this, how to attract people, how to get more attention, how to convert that attention. All of that is through the written word. So if we want to help more businesses scale their advertising, we need more people to be able to do so, which means if we want people to be able to do that, we have to educate them on how to charge enough to make a living. Because sure, it can be, you know, we want more people to provide this as a service to businesses, but if they could only charge minimum wage, that's not going to help us get there. So on the educational front, we need to show people how to communicate the value that they're bringing to a business and then ultimately capture some of that value that they're creating for the business. And then even before that, if we want more people to even give writing a shot, we have to help them understand the benefits of writing for their personal and professional growth, and that helps them just get into our ecosystem and then ultimately potentially take the path down PGA or whatever path they end up going.

So starting from the bottom up, we need to first educate the masses on why writing is the best tool for personal and professional growth. So anything that we tweet out or videos we make about all the benefits of writing to expand the pie of people who ultimately could help business owners, they have to just start writing in the first place because, you know, I, I don't have the exact numbers, but I would guess that 98% of people do not write anything of any kind, even in a journal, and then definitely don't publish or write anything, anything on the internet. So we need to first get people to take a shot and understand that writing is a worthwhile endeavor. So these are people that are completely unaware that writing has any potential value to their life. We need to educate them on that. Then, once they've started writing, there's going to be a select few people, who, a smaller subset, who really enjoy it and want to get as much out of it as possible and get better along the way while getting paid. So that's where PGA comes in. We want to educate them on how to provide their writing as a profitable service should they want to pursue that as a career path. So that is our role in the educational side because if we do that, this ultimately leads to more people seeing this as an opportunity to make a living, which leads to a larger pool of talent for business owners to employ, and that was the problem we talked about, which, which was business owners did not have enough access to talent to help them scale their advertising. So we're educating more people on how to do that, which ultimately means more businesses have the ability to do so, and if more businesses have the ability to do so, they're able to scale their advertising, sell more products, and ultimately have a much larger impact. So that is how we connect our day-to-day of education on why writing is a good thing and the education on how to provide writing as a profitable service because the ultimate impact that we're going to have from every small action, take helping individuals or putting out content that helps individuals make change to themselves, is all leading to a massive increase in global GDP. So we have the ability through our educational products to make more money for everyone on Earth, just the GDP, which is just the total amount of exchange of goods and services on planet Earth, will go up through the education of why people should write in the first place and how to do it profitably. If we fail to accomplish this, miss this mission, we are detracting from the ultimate growth of Earth, which is a bad thing for anyone who believes that growth is a good thing, like we do. So if you are under, fewer people understand the benefits of writing, fewer people are going to give writing a shot. If fewer people are willing to give writing a shot, that means we have a smaller group of people who are even going to try to make a living from it. If fewer people are trying to make a living from it, business owners don't have the ability to scale because they don't have talent to do so, and if fewer businesses are able to scale their advertising, less value is created overall for the world. So our mission is, is to arm people with the education to make a living while also educating them on the benefits of writing in the first place. If we do so, we can have a massive butterfly effect impact such that when we show up to an enrollment call and we get someone on board, or Cole and I are putting out content, or our team is scaling our content across platforms, or we are providing accountability to someone to, uh, do the outreach required to land their first client, whatever it is, there is a butterfly effect where that, that small action is ultimately leading to such a good long-term positive impact for the world. And that's how we connect our mission. And for a long time, I, I thought this stuff was kind of like nonsense, especially at our size, to go spend a lot of time on mission and vision and where we're going, but this helps me get out of bed because I can say by showing up and making a video like this, it's helping our team, our team's then going to help more people, those people are going to help more businesses, and I can connect, I have a bigger why for what we're doing in the first place. And it's much easier to do something difficult when you have a big why. And so if you picture like, here's ultimate good thing, and then here's the road map to get there, there's probably like a little obstacle in the way, and if where you're headed has this big, big compelling reason to go there, it's much easier to climb over that obstacle versus if you don't see much reason to do it in the first place, you're just going to, you know, not work as hard or, or be undisciplined, whatever you want to call it. So this is why I'm putting together this mission is because I think it is so critical for everyone on our team, everyone we recruit, everyone we create content for, to understand the ultimate huge impact they can have from learning that writing is a good thing and learning how to provide that as a service to business owners. So that is the mission we are trying to get to, which is the why we're doing all this in the first place. And then from here, we're going to talk about the core values, which is the how we are going to achieve that mission.

Diving into our core values, we started with the vision, which is where we are ultimately trying to get to. Then we moved on to the mission, which is the why or the impact we're trying to have through the pursuit of that vision. And then the core values and the operating principles are kind of a mix of the what and the how. I think the core values are more of the what, like what we're looking for from people we work with or what we're trying to bring out of ourselves, um, through the attainment of our mission and our vision. And then the operating principles are more how we're going to get there. These are kind of overlapping. Uh, I would say the core values are just the most important things, the most important principles where all the operating principles above or below them kind of filter into it. And so you'll see as I talk about it, we're going to reference our core values far more, um, during job interviews, during our day-to-day interaction. The operating principles are more smaller frameworks we will use to achieve those core values that helps us achieve our mission and ultimately get to where we want to get to on the vision front. So before we talk about our current values, here's how, uh, this entire thing has unfolded over the last four or five years. So from $0 to $10,000 per year in 2020, uh, we had no mission, we had no vision, we didn't even know we were a company. Uh, I wanted to make $10,000 in side income from an internet business. I was working full-time on Wall Street. Uh, I knew that that was not going to generate the freedom I ultimately wanted or the upside or the, um, learning or growth or the intellectual stimulation. I just wasn't going to become the type of person that I wanted to become working for a giant corporation, bogged down by a ton of middle management with no incentivized upside and no real skill growth. So if you had told me in 2020 that I'd be making this video after $12 to $13 million in revenue, $6 million a year run rate, the ultimate goal we're trying to get to far, far beyond that, I would have laughed straight in your face, uh, because I just did not think that that was possible. I literally just wanted to be able to pay my rent from internet money so the rest could go into savings. Um, so yeah, we didn't even consider this a company, let alone have a mission, vision, values, any of this stuff. Then after partnering with Cole

In 2021, and going to a million that year, and three team members with Daniel, this we had no vision, no mission, no values, uh, any time spent on this. And I think a lot of people go wrong with this where they don't even know what they're selling; they haven't even generated any revenue, and they're trying to come up with these things. They just don't matter; they're nothing but procr-productive procrastination in my mind. So we were trying to sell something and then hoping that a vision, mission, values would emerge from that as the way we operated. So we wasted no time thinking there was just giant reason, reason for doing any of this; we were just trying to increase our income and sell something along the way. And so we were helping people because we enjoyed what we did, uh, and we did think we were selling something valuable, and we were improving on it, all of that, but we just didn't have anything formal because one, we weren't recruiting, and two, we didn't need something drawing us other than just the immediate term of like, let's just see where this goes.

That took us to 2022, where we grew to five team members. Again, we kind of had an informal mission at this point; it was just do more of what we were doing. And so I started to say like I wanted to help more people start writing online. I didn't have like a defined number that was guiding what we were doing, but at the time our only product was Shi 30 for 30, which was a beginner writing course, and all it did was help people who had never started to write online to actually get started. So our mission was just help more of those people. We didn't understand any kind of long-term benefits like I laid out in our mission or the eventual impact we are, we are having and could have over the long term on the global economy. Thinking that big was just unfathomable, unfathomable because we were just a small group doing something on Twitter. All we wanted to do was scale the benefits that we had experienced with our daily writing habits to a bunch of people, and that's what we did. So we were not hiring; we didn't need a bigger vision to guide our operations; we weren't recruiting; um, we had enough internal motivation just to continue to increase our income, and we just didn't need to spend much more time on it.

That took us to 2023 and 2024, which over the last 2 years we've definitely invested more time into crafting this, this vision because the team is grown, and you need a bigger vision as the team grows, and you need a way to scale your decision-making. And this would probably lag like I haven't updated these values, um, or really codified our principal mission and vision during this time. And so most of it, it was very informal. As people came on, it's like, yeah, these are the three values we operate with; this is where we're trying to go; like, are you on board? As the company continues to scale, we need to be able to share the common language and frameworks and make sure everyone is aligned on where we're headed, uh, and that why I'm making this video. So again, we didn't really, really have a vision for where we wanted to go or a mission, but we knew we wanted just to attract people to be part of a similar mission, which was really just people who are in our products and communities and, and cohorts and things like that. And I think of our first like 28 people that have joined this team at this point, like 27, 26, uh, have been a part of our ecosystem in some way through the purchasing of one of our products, and we love that because they experience a benefit and then they want to help more people just like we did at the beginning stages.

Um, so before we started to scale the team, or as we've been doing that, we wanted to scale our culture, and that has been a big lesson for me is you scale your culture top down through the repetition of mantras and slogans and values and just keeping everyone over-communicating where we're going, why we're doing it, and this is probably something I've underinvested in getting our team to this size, which is why I'm doubling down on it now. So instead of coming up with anything fancy during this time, we basically looked around and was like, well, this is clearly working, and so we don't need to go change this, you know, way of working; we just need to codify what it is we're doing. And because we had a small team and people needed to come up or have more responsibility when they came on, and we didn't have any kind of formal management structure, it was definitely rougher around the edges, but we basically said, well, everyone who works with us takes extreme ownership because they take on a project; they basically own it because we had a small team; they're going to help get it to completion; then Relentless tempo, which was during the completion of those products, we want or projects we wanted to move quickly. And so we rewarded speed when things got done quickly; we said that's a good thing; uh, we're not going to overthink exactly the direction; we would rather just move fast and hope that that vision or, um, hope that that path kind of emerges from there. And then Championship energy, which is we did not see ourselves as a family; we saw ourselves as a team of high-performing athletes who are coming together to try to win, and those guided us for two years; they've been the Slack emojis that we've used the most often, and it's really done a great job to get us to hear because it, if one, one exercise I've been doing recently is most companies they have values, and they're all around like the same ideas, but just the way they say it is different. And so I think th-that's what creates culture as like the unique way of communicating a value is different for everyone, but this was all based around individual responsibility, speed, and competitiveness. Those were 100% the right values to attract the type of person we wanted to work with to get here and to actually achieve where we've gotten.

From here we're going to evolve. And so this is where we're at now; this is 2025, what I'm making this video; we went from, and this is what I believe are the vision, mission, values, and principles that are going to get us from $6 million per year to 20 million and ultimately far, far, far beyond that, but I will probably have to refresh this as we get to that next milestone. So now as the team is grown and there's more people, people making individual decisions, and I'm less able to see everything that's going on, we have to be able to scale the vision, the mission, how we do things, why we do things, and what we do, um, from the top down. And so that started with establishing a big vision and mission, which is what I've done so far, and then knowing that our values must support a mature growing company rather than one trying to just kind of scramble and figure it out, what is it, what is what it is they sell and who they sell to, and that you know, type of business that gets to work. And so that ultimately leads us to our new set of core values, all upgrades from the ones we've had in the past, which is Set the Standard, Peaceful Iteration, and Dynasty Energy. And so now I'm going to walk through that evolution. All right, so let's break down each value and its evolution.

So number one, Set the Standard. This is an upgrade from Extreme Ownership, and why we're making this upgrade was in the beginning Extreme Ownership helped everyone take on as much responsibility as possible and own the outcomes they generated. This was good to get us to hear; however, it's a relatively limiting value because it suits a team of individual contributors better than a mature business that has multiple levels and hierarchies and people rely on one another far more rather than everyone operating in their own silo. And we find that extreme ownership is a little bit limited in the ability to expand it to your personal life, and the type of people we want to eventually work with do so; um, they take their company values and they internalize them. And so extreme ownership could work, but I think there's a more, there's a broader encapsulation of the way the type of person we want to be and the type of person we want to work with, and that's setting the standard. And so everything we do personally and professionally, we want to set the standard. And so for product quality and client experience in the education industry, we want to set the standard; we want everyone to look at what we're doing and say, I want to be like that. And so every decision we make on our marketing, on our product quality, everything is saying, how can we set the standard higher and higher and higher such that everyone else is trying to emulate what we do. And if you can internalize that and apply it to everything, both personally and professionally, you are going to become a better person, always trying to push yourself higher and set a higher standard. And so if we want to set the standard for product quality and client experience, each department within the business is going to try to set the standard for all other departments to emulate, and if we want within a department, that means each team, team member within that department is going to set the standard such that everyone in their department looks at them and says, I want to be more like them. And so everyone just taking this and internalizing it is going to help grow the business in such a powerful way because each department is going to try to be the best; every person on the team is going to try to be the best; and then every one of us through our personal life with how we handle ourselves from our health and fitness to relationships to our mindset, it's all going to be in harmony helping us set the standard at the highest level possible. And so you can see how this trickles down through everything; we're going to set the standard as a company, within the company; we're going to set the standard with each department; and if you can just sit down and say, I am going to focus relentlessly on setting the best possible standard for whatever it is I'm doing, we're going to set the standard as a whole, as a company, ultimately achieve our mission and our vision.

So some simplifying questions when you're making decisions through the lens of setting the standard: So when we hire someone new, are they going to set the standard? Could we see them setting the standard for the department, or are they going to bring it down, right? If we want to continuously elevate and set the standard, we are going to likely churn out the lowest performers within a department because they're not setting the standard, and the people who are setting the standard are going to be frustrated that someone else is not. And so if there's only one person ever setting the standard and no one else is pushing them along, they're going to get frustrated because their growth is going to be capped. And so anyone we bring on, we should be able to reliably say they could potentially set the standard for this department, for this company, for whatever it is, and that is a great lens for hiring. When you're evaluating your own performance or you're making a decision, should I stay up late rather than go to bed early, get up tomorrow so I can write, and I'm using this for myself, is this setting the standard higher or lower than it is currently? Very simple: If I do this, will it raise the standard or lower it? And the more choices and the more decisions and the more actions you can take that are raising your personal standard or the standard of the company as a whole, the better we're going to be. When we're creating a product or service, is this setting the standard higher relative to things we've created in the past? Are we proud of this? Is this better? Is this just more effective, easier, faster, more streamlined, higher, you know, less fluff, whatever it is that sets the standard higher; we are constantly asking that with everything we create. And then for yourself, like, where are you lacking? What are your personal standards for the way that you treat other people or the way that you eat or the way that you work out or the way that you focus or the way that you prioritize? Your standards are lacking in some way, not necessarily lacking, uh, relative to other people, but lacking relative to the type of person you could ultimately become. And so if you continue to set the standard for yourself, that creates a virtuous flywheel that everyone else can eventually look up to you as well. And so everything that we create, all the people we work with, we want to set this standard as high as humanly possible. So you're going to hear us say, Set the Standard, the standard's been set, a new standard's been created, way to live the standard; we are just going to obsess over raising the bar, setting the standard higher and higher and higher, and we will have a very limited tolerance for people who are not pushing themselves to set a higher standard or interested in raising the standard of the company as a whole. And so you will see us use this term over and over and over again on rewarding really good behavior, which we'll talk about later, just setting that standard higher and higher.

All right, our second value is Peaceful Iteration, and this is upgraded, and it's quite different than Relentless Tempo. So in our early stage, our only goal was to move quickly on everything we did; we wanted to collapse time down to help us grow as just fast as possible. And so we prided ourselves, and you'll see us talk a lot about this, is that we did more than, more in a week than other businesses did in six months. This was again the exact right value to get us to where we are today; it helped build initial products, created a culture of speed, prevented any kind of overthinking, and just right when people got in, they started to move faster, and we loved that. However, this came with a trade-off that you can only recognize once you get to a certain size; you have more people relying on you; you have just a bigger business that's just, it's, it's still a boat, but it's not a jet ski that's able to like whip around; it's just a little bit harder to steer, and when you steer, you're going to go in that direction for longer. So with the focus and reward around moving quickly, sometimes we moved quickly on the wrong things, prioritizing speed of execution over deliberation on what to execute, or we rush the execution of something that led to lower quality than we would have liked. So these were two trade-offs that are any value you should be able to have like very clear trade-offs of what that means. And so we accepted that that it might lead to working on the wrong thing or moving a little bit too quickly on something that we should have iterated longer, but we are fine with that. However, at this size, like I said, there's an undoing cost; so if you work on the wrong thing or you put something out that is lower quality, the impact is much bigger. And so it's not that we're going to move much slower; we just have to be slightly more methodical on what we're working on so we can move faster in the long run because now strategically if we allocate all the resources we have in the wrong direction, you then have to undo those and then find out where you could have gone, um, where you could have better allocated them, and that just wastes time. And so it's easier to kind of like reverse course and then change the thing when you're a smaller business, but at a current size, it just has a much larger undoing cost. And so that brings us to Peaceful Iteration, which has two parts: peaceful and iteration. You know, not rocket science here, but it's important that we talk about both of them. So peaceful means we don't do anything with any unnecessary rushed energy or stress. Getting to where we are now had a lot of like, just you had to kind of brute force some things, and it created like an energy, at least for myself, of like, what are we going to do? How's it going to work? Where are we going to go? All this stuff. Now we're able to operate from a much more peaceful spot because of all the infrastructure that we built, because of the systems that we built, a lot of things are more or less running, and it's been decentralized where we have high-quality talent executing those things that we feel good about, and they're incentivized to the upside to keep working on it. So that means rather than have this rushed energy, we're going to be deliberate on choosing what to fix or what to pursue, and rather than just jumping into an opportunity or reacting emotionally, especially reacting emotionally, myself included, especially myself, we are going to far spend far more time on the deliberation of what to do, and it's going to be a peaceful, organized process rather than one of like, oh, where should we go? Because we're just so itching to try and move faster; we're going to slow it down and make more methodical choices. And then iteration, rather than building things that are brand new right now, it's more this next chapter of maturity is all about iterating the things we have. And so there are not going to be big wholesale changes to the way we fulfill or the way that we market or the way that we sell; they are going to be incremental iterations that are deliberately chosen and then executed because they are the highest leverage use of our resources. So it's not about finding a bunch of new things; it's finding the small little knobs here and there that we can turn up that compounded over an entire year make such a big difference to the way that we operate. And then because we're at a bigger scale, all of those changes are magnified. So there are a ton of things that we will peacefully iterate, and you will see us just reward the behavior of that's a good peaceful iteration; we're going to measure over a slightly longer time horizon to make sure that the choices we are making have longer-term impact. So brand assets, sales processes, client experience, meeting agendas, marketing funnels, content, CES, team member performance, all of these things are areas in which we used to say we're going to move quickly on them, Relentless Tempo; now we're going to peacefully iterate on them, knowing that it's only going to take a couple small changes that when combined are going to compound into a huge downstream impact. And so from Relentless Tempo to Peaceful Iteration, and it's not going to be perfect; we're still going to have that itch to move fast, and we are still going to move fast and still condense time, but it's going to be, we're going to invest more time than we were on choosing where to move quickly, and that is the next level of maturity for us and why we are upgrading Relentless Tempo to, uh, Peaceful Iteration.

All right, our third and final value is Dynasty Energy, upgraded from Championship Energy. So this was a fun one to put together because when we first started, first before we even came up with this value, we decided that we wanted to operate as a team, not as a family, because as much as I want to hear about everyone's personal life all the time, I think there are certain times that that's just not as relevant to ultimately achieving our mission, and we want to integrate as much team-style, um, conversation, team-style planning, team-style execution rather than family. And so we said we are going to prioritize Championship energy because we are here to execute a mission and ultimately win something; we wanted to foster this feeling of competitiveness, and that worked. However, when you win your first championship, anyone who's been a part of a team that used to not be good and then all started to win, uh, it kind of happens accidentally, like maybe there's a new coach or a couple star players, and they end up winning, and then they can only look backwards, and no one really knew what was happening in real time; they just started to win, and I was like, Wow, let's just keep doing this, and it's usually on the back of a couple ultra-high performers that will the rest of the team along, and that was my experience in high school when we won our first state championship; we weren't that good the year before; uh, we won the state championship because we had like two or three stars that everyone looked at and was like, I just want to emulate them, and that brought the rest of the team up, and then you start to create a flywheel. So that winning culture attracts new players; if you're in college or high school, as new people came in, they saw the like the top-level performers, and they just rose, uh, to that level; their baseline became the behavior of a championship team. So anytime you see a dynasty like Alabama football or Notre Dame football, and I think was the '80s or, um, the Patriots in the 2000s and 2010s, uh, and if you have no clue who those are, it's just sports references; basically, when a dynasty happens, it's because that first championship team sets a new standard that kicks off this flywheel such that new players come in and they adopt it, and then anyone who was kind of like straggling or just along for the ride on that initial championship team is like churned out, and that creates new high performers or new space for high performers to come in, and it's just, just builds on itself, builds on itself, builds on itself, and year after year this happens, which is why often times dynasties happen over like five to seven-year periods, which is a very, very long time in sports because you win one, and then each year just compounds a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better, and that is where we are as a business. So we started with winning our first championship, which is getting us to here, but now we have to evolve from a team that sees winning as the goal to one who sees winning as the standard; we expect to win; we do the type of things that winning just becomes inevitable. So we must become a dynasty. And so you will see us talk about Dynasty Energy; it's just, of course we're going to do that; of course we're going to perform at this level because that is what winners do; we're going to be marked by win after win after win after win, and we are most importantly not going to tolerate a shred of behavior that could contribute to the dynasty falling. So I don't really have this written in here, but the way the dynasties fall is because one, maybe offseason that was underperforming relative to the expectations, and then murmurs start, and then a couple, you know, lower performers start to have a bigger voice, and then just slowly, slowly, slowly this virtuous fly will turns into a virtuous like a, a negative spiral all the way down, and then boom, they win one game the next season; everyone's like, what the hell happened? And you can trace the fall of those dynasties back to like one or two just voices or whatever it is, and you have to root those out relentlessly if you want a dynasty to maintain. And so we will have an almost zero tolerance for any kind of behavior or attitude that is, is not up to the level that we expect. And so we're going to win, keep winning, such that there's no shadow of a doubt that we are the best writing education company on Earth, and I say best right now because we are not the biggest, but on our path to achieving our vision of becoming the biggest, we have to become the best, and we have to treat ourselves as the best; we have to maintain oursel-like conduct ourselves as winners, and that is all through setting the standard, peaceful iteration, and Dynasty energy. So those three core values put together: Dynasty energy is how we want to show up and what we expect from other people; peaceful iteration is all about our process for continuous improvement; and then setting the standard is just how we want to conduct ourselves internally, personally, professionally. Combining all three of those, we have competitiveness, improvement, and just a baseline level of performer that we expect to work with and a process for getting there, and that is why we've combined these three. So we believe that if you can show up every day with the type of energy of a dynasty, if you can peacefully iterate all the improvements along the way, and if you can push

Yourself to set the standard with the Department, the team, your products, yourself. We are going to, not easily but very simply, follow a road map, follow a path to achieve our mission and ultimately become the biggest runting education business on Earth. All right.

Our fourth and final section is a breakdown of our operating principles. And so I talked a little bit about this in the value section, but the values are kind of what the principles are more of the how. So, how do we, like, do those values? How do we live them? So how do we set the standard? How do we peacefully iterate? How do we show up with Dynasty energy? How do we combine all these things to effectively achieve our mission? And the way I think about principles are they are nitty-gritty frameworks that just describe the way we do things. So it's really a way of using shared language when you want to repeat something or expect or train a behavior and say this is the right way, and you have an easy way, a memorable way to describe it to someone. So how do we make decisions? How do we see the world working? How do we get work done? How do we communicate? How do we create an amazing client experience? All of that, uh, is broken down in this ever-growing list of operating principles. And none of these are set in stone. I change my mind on things all the time, and I think that's a sign of continuous learning, uh, and if we find a better way to explain something or if we find something that over and over and over again we find ourselves repeating, we will add it to this operating principles document. So, without further ado, let's dive into them. All right, starting with the first operating principle: every problem is solvable.

So the first handful of these are really beliefs, and they are beliefs that shape the way that we will solve problems and grow the business in general. And so we always believe that unless it defies the laws of physics, we can figure it out. And so I was debating, when putting these together, of just having "figure it out" as the operating principle, but "every problem is solvable" is a more helpful belief. So we have no shortage of information on how to solve a problem. It is very—it's never been easier to get the information necessary to solve something. The hard part is deciding what to solve, which we'll talk about later, and getting ourselves to do the boring work to solve the problem. And so, like I said, you have no shortage of information, and you have AI tools like ChatGPT that can almost be a sparring partner to help you move problems along on your own. We just do not—to a mindset of "I tried and I just couldn't figure it out," like "I tried," we—that it just—I—I can't—I don't even like saying those words because we believe that it might not be easy to solve, it's probably not that complex to solve, and it might be difficult, but it'll be simple. And if you do the type of thinking and explore all of the information at your fingertips, we can solve every single problem. And that first principles—if it doesn't defy the law of physics—way of thinking, that's a big Elon Musk way—we are going to solve more problems and Ely move faster. And so if every person on our team takes ownership of solving problems when they come across them, or at least getting as far as they possibly can towards the solving of that problem until they are just unable to move it any further without help from someone else, we are going to move much faster. And so when you present a problem, this is the exact formula we will use, and we're going to kind of expand on this in some of the other frameworks, but basically: here's the problem I'm experiencing, or a client is experiencing, or um, just in general, the problem of the business; here's why it's a problem, using data and connecting it to some high-level KPI within the business; and here's my proposed solution and what I've already done to explore its implementation. This is the most important part: we don't just point out problems; we point them out, we explain why, so we understand that it's worth solving; and here's my proposed solution and what I've done to potentially implement its solution. And so if you don't have a clear hypothesis to improve it, and you don't bring your progress on the proposed solution, we won't even entertain it. It likely is not a problem worth solving if you can't explain why and you haven't even done the work of potentially improving it. And so every problem is solvable. We are going to repeat that and repeat that and repeat that, and it is such a powerful way of thinking of, like, I don't care what the business throws at me, I am going to be able to solve it because I have the information necessary to do so. And then if I don't, it's probably a skill issue, which takes us to the second one: that everything is learnable.

Building on the one above, we view everything as a skill. Sales is a skill; writing is a skill; editing is a skill; giving feedback is a skill; making this video is a skill; organizing my time's a skill. Everything is a skill. Furthermore, we view everything—every skill—as a subset of micro-behaviors or smaller skills. So sales is made up of on-the-call skills and off-the-call skills. On-the-call skills include things like building rapport, closing talent, empathetic listening, all of that. And then you can get even more specific, all the way down to get like the most micro-skill of: how do you build rapport while you smile? Will you say their name? While you make a, you know, common connection to a city or a place? Like you can get extremely specific. And so, going all the way up, we view every skill as learnable. Some skills are just harder to learn than others. So just because it's harder to learn doesn't mean we should learn it, but everything sits on a spectrum of hard to learn and easy to learn. And so if we combine the first two principles—that everything is learnable and every problem is solvable—it means that any problem is a skill issue that we have 100% control in solving. So if we say that the ability to solve a problem requires a skill, and every skill is learnable, and every problem is solvable, you can solve every problem by learning the right things. And so I—if I could leave you with the single most empowering combination of beliefs to be a better entrepreneur, better employee, better team member, better anything that requires building, it's this one: it's that the highest performers are constantly identifying the right problems to solve, then rapidly acquiring the skills to solve them. And from there we'll talk about how to train them, but I just want to sit here for a second because if you believe that every problem is solvable and everything is learnable, and we just—just soak on that as a company, we will move so quickly because every problem that comes to us we go, "I am not able to solve it because I lack a skill; I'm going to go rapidly learn that skill using all of the resources at my disposal." Those two things alone got us to here. And then from here it's now we have to take the skills that we've learned and the beliefs that we have and train them to everyone who works here, and that's what I'm doing with this video.

So the third operating principle is that everything is trainable. So if every skill is learnable, then every skill is trainable. That works because if you can learn it—some—some is training you—which means if you learned it, you can train someone else. And again, just like on easy to learn and hard to learn, it sits on a spectrum of easy to train and hard to train. And so this is so important because if everything is trainable, that means there's nothing that you do within the company that someone else could not do eventually. And that is an extremely important belief, and one I'm trying to, like, just drill into myself: is there's nothing I can do that someone else couldn't do. Now, this doesn't mean that one other person is entirely replaceable by another person, but there are individual behaviors, and that's—goes back to the "everything is learnable"—that the skill itself is a subset of skills, or the role itself is a subset of roles, such that each individual thing could be replaced by someone else, and not the entire thing as a whole. And so the way to visualize this: if you want to replace a unicorn, uh, you're probably not going to find another unicorn, but you can combine a horse, a rhino, and a bumblebee—with some of the, you know, or I think it's a, like, a bumblebee, not a bumblebee, uh, what's the thing with lights—night—I'll—I'll think of it later—but whatever, you need something with sparkles, and you put that on the unicorn, you combine all those, and then you've effectively replaced it. And so once you have effectively learned a skill, the way to ascend within a company, or the way to ascend within a department, or the way to ascend from a company to a private equity portfolio owner is by training individuals on the skills that you learned. And so it's only through trying to teach someone else that you fully understand it yourself. So it—it's like an awesome double-edged benefit sword because not only does it make you more talented because you learn it better, but the person you're training learns a better version of the skill than you knew because you got better through teaching it. So you're passing off a better version, and then that works its way all the way throughout the company. And so combining these beliefs—"everything is solvable," "everything is learnable," and "everything is trainable"—is just going to proliferate through all of our communication. We're going to expect you to solve problems; we're going to expect you to believe that things are learnable; we're going to expect you to train the people below you once you've mastered a skill because if we can do that, we're going to identify the right problems, we're going to learn a ton along the way, we're going to train others, and you build a just powerful engine for continuous personal growth because you're achieving just more, you're learning more, you're doing more, and the business is going to grow as well because of this ascension model where you learn it, you teach it, and then better—the—the person you teach it to is better, and that works all the way up. So just to say it one more time, really soak on these beliefs because if we feel that someone is coming to us and they're not using these beliefs to guide their actions, it's not going to be a long-term working relationship with us. We want people who really ambitiously, with high agency, solve the problems that come to them by learning skills and then teach to the people behind them along the way.

So those first three operating principles, we're probably going to reference the most often, and these will be the ones that really just soak, uh, through the entire company where we're just going to build something absolutely massive if everyone thinks this way. All right, our fourth operating principle: praise over punishment.

So how do we train the behaviors that we just talked about? So we identify the problems; we know we can solve them; we know that the skill necessary to solve them is learnable; and then once we've learned the skill, it's trainable. How do we actually train behaviors within our company? And we will follow something that I've ripped straight from the Hormos, and it's praise over punishment. And so this entire breakdown is basically behavior change one-on-one. So there's two ways to reinforce behavior: praise and punishment. You can reward a good behavior, and that will make the person more likely to do it; and then you can punish a bad behavior, and will make the person less likely to do it. If you take nothing else away: reward good behaviors—people will do it more; punish bad behaviors—they'll do it less. So these work in different ways. Punishing a bad behavior will change it the fastest, meaning if someone does something wrong, they will be far less likely to repeat that if they're punished. Rewarding a good behavior—they're not necessarily going to immediately do it the next time—but over the long term it will change behavior the most sustainably. And I'm going to explain in an example how that works. On top of that, the amount of behavior change that a punishment or reward will provide is directly related to the time between the behavior and the reinforcement. So this will, again, make more sense in an example, but the closer you can put the punishment or the reward to the behavior, the more likely it is to reinforce that behavior. So let's look at training a dog, and we want them to stop using the bathroom in the house; we want them to go outside. So if we want to change its behavior, we could do the following: first, the next time it uses the bathroom in the house, we will punish it immediately with a tone of voice. So right away—hopefully immediately after it does it—we're right there and we go, "No, don't do that again." So that's the punishment, as an example. If we waited 6 hours and got home and then we try to punish the dog 6 hours later for using the bathroom on the floor, uh, or in the house, it had no clue what we're punishing it for; it's just—going to associate it with, you know, maybe it was on the couch 5 minutes before you got there, or maybe it took a nap; like he has no clue, he can't remember what was that far ago, uh, and obviously humans are a little bit different, but we are not that much different in terms of how we learn behavior. So ideally this happens immediately after, and if it does happen immediately, it's far, far, far more likely that they will avoid that behavior in the future because they will associate the punishment with that exact behavior. So, like I said, this will change the behavior immediately, and then it will stop doing that. Then—and this is the most important part—we're going to religiously follow it around until it uses the bathroom outside, and then we will praise it like heck when it does. The second it does it, will just feel so good, and we will start to associate that new behavior with a new reward. And so the bigger the reward, the more praise we can give it, the—just, however, you know, dogs could be treats, it could be love, whatever it is, whatever it values the most, we just give that to them, give that to them, give that to them, and that is going to make it far more likely the next time that they have to use the bathroom they're going to go outside or let you know because they want to experience that reward again. And then from there we will continue to reward the dog again and again and again and again each time it does the correct behavior until it is so automatic that there's just no reason for it to do anything else because it just associates with the reward. Now, behavior change 2011 is what you do if it's too relying on the reward; if anyone wants behind the scenes, you would make it more random such that you don't do it every time, you do it every third, and then every fifth, and then every tenth, and then you just phase it out entirely, and it no longer needs the reward to do the behavior because it's so ingrained. That's not where we're at; this is more basic stuff. So where most people go wrong is they only punish, or the time between, um, reinforcement and the behavior is too long for it to actually make a change. So if you only yell at the dog when it uses the bathroom, it might stop for a little bit of time. And so most people think they're doing it right, but the second the threat of punishment is gone, it will go back to the baseline behavior if you have not rewarded it for the other behavior. So if it only associates punishment with a certain thing, it will just, like, go back to doing that the second the threat of punishment is gone. And so I'm going to lad this all the way back up, um, with how we change behavior as a team. So we do this with—whether we like it or know it or not—our behavior change model is as simple as this. And so when working with our clients, we can use the same thing; when we're talking to our team members; when we're managing our team members; when we're working with ourselves, this behavior pattern is all you need to know to change something over the long term. And so if we want to build a culture internally, we want to use punishment as little as possible, only when necessary to immediately stop a behavior, and then during that process we should clearly communicate the expected behavior and reinforce doing so immediately after it occurs. And so lading back up, we want to reward good behaviors, punish bad ones; we want there to be as little time as possible from reward to—uh, from behavior to reward. So the second someone does something good, boom, good, do it again, do it again, great, awesome, all right, do it again, do it again. That's what we're trying to get to. And so we also want to make sure that we aren't only punishing; we only notice when things are done incorrectly. We want to notice when something's done incorrectly, immediately establish what should have been correct, have them do it again in real time, and then reward them for doing so. And if we can build that as a management team, or when working with our clients from an accountability perspective, we are going to change behavior the most positively over the long run, and that's through praise over punishment.

All right, our fifth operating principle is airtight communication. And I repeat this all the time, but you can solve most business problems through just better communication. You can—you can honestly solve problems in your personal life, too, which is better clear communication. And so we are going to clearly communicate the company mission, vision, values, principles—what I'm doing in this video—we are going to clearly communicate the goals and initiatives, clearly communicate the expectations, the status of a project, whatever it is. Always, always, always air on the side of over-communication. And so our goal is to minimize the number of open loops and uncertainty anyone experiences. And so we do that by giving direction here to everyone; everyone knows the current goals and where we're headed; everyone within a role doesn't have any kind of uncertainty; and anyone who is responsible for managing a project and has other people helping them accomplish it doesn't have like 15 open tabs of, like, "What's this person doing? What's this person doing?" We want to give you something and rely on you to feed updates back to the person who gave you that assignment or project or task, whatever it is, such that it's not their responsibility to hold the progress in their head. You're going to feed it back to them such that they can forget about it. And if I'm going to give you one thing on communication: there is no such thing as overcommunication within our company. No such thing. And so if you ever feel that you are over-communicating and you might be annoying someone, you are not. We would way rather air on the side of giving too much information and too frequent of status updates than the opposite. Now, this doesn't mean we're just talking for the sake of it; it means that everyone is—just let me pause for a second—it doesn't mean we are constantly talking for the sake of it; it means we understand that everyone is busy, everyone is thinking about their own projects and priorities, which means they're thinking about whatever you're working on far less than you are. And so I stare at the business every day; I know the big high-level numbers; I know where we're headed; I know the projects, whatever it is. But someone at the, you know, a—a beginner or individual contributor doesn't understand that big mission, so they might feel a little bit lost; they might not see their trajectory, and I could see their trajectory, but if I don't tell them enough, they're not going to see it. If I'm working with someone on a design project and I think that, you know, I'm not going to give them the status update because I—I've give them—I gave one yesterday and they don't need to know what I did today—never, ever true. All we want to focus on is over-communicating. And so you'll hear terms like "closing the loop," which means someone gave us an assignment, they came back, they did it, and then they say, "Closing loop, this is done." And so the person who delegated it can now no longer think about it. And so just as a culture: over-communicate, over-communicate. I'm just going to keep saying it: always air on the side of over-communication because there's never a time where giving someone additional information or giving additional expectation or additional rationale is going to lead to a worse outcome. I've never experienced it, and we never will. And so airtight communication is extremely important to us.

Already, our sixth operating principle is no decisions without data. So put bluntly, we do not make emotional decisions as a company. Ever, ever, ever do we react emotionally to something that recently happened and then go make some big change. So anytime we say, like, "It feels like" or "It seems like," uh, when proposing a change, we will not entertain it. Now, these feelings can be signals, and they shouldn't be ignored, but if that feeling cannot be supported by data, the only action item is to start capturing data that would allow us to make a data-driven decision in the future. So if you feel something is off, it could be the signal that there's a problem, but if you're not capturing data, you need to start capturing or go backfill a bunch of data to support the feeling that you have if you want to make a change. So, for example, let's say we think carousels are fatiguing on LinkedIn, and we would probably think that because a recent post underperformed, and because of recency bias we're going to overweight that data point and think about it more top of mind to make a decision. However, unless we can verify that the average engagement on our Carousel is—over like 180 days—has trended downward, we're not going to make any kind of change. That data is findable, and therefore if we think that this is a problem, it is solvable with data, but we would only act if the necessary—was—data was presented. And like I said, with "every problem is solvable," with the proposed solution of what we should do as we talked about in the first one. And so we wouldn't just say, "Hey, if this feels off, we should post it." That is going to lead to too much volatility in decisions, and instead we make data-driven decisions or data-supported decisions. So we don't make a decision without data. This works in reverse as well, and this is borrowed from Horos again, but basically unless a piece of data is going to change your behavior, you shouldn't even look at it or capture it because there's just only so many things that you can give your attention to. There's no shortage of what we should capture, uh, as a business. And so instead we should say, if that piece of data was given back to me and it was higher than I expected, or lower, or spot-on, what would I do? And so if you're tracking things that do not change your behavior, you should stop tracking them. And if you want to start tracking something, you should say, "Here's what would happen if it was higher, lower, or spot-on than what I expected." So the goal is to capture the least amount of data possible to make all the necessary decisions. So if we're capturing data that's not helping a decision, we stop it. And if we want to start making a decision on something and we're not capturing data, then we would start capturing it. And so no decisions without data. You will always hear me say, "What data do you have to support that?" And if you come to me with a problem, or I come to you with a problem, and I don't have data or you don't have data, we're not going to entertain the solution until we can make that data-supported decision.

All right, our seventh operating principle is end-of-day default. So if you work for us and you're a member of this team, we expect you to accomplish a large amount of work on a daily basis, every single day, day in and day out. We want you to move the needle forward in a big way. If that makes you uncomfortable, go ahead, and I don't know where the big red X—

Is top right of this video, um, there's going to be better places for you to work, uh, that will expect much less of you. But for those of you that are still here, we obviously want to continue working with you. So when we set deadlines to accomplishing something, we want to start with the end of the day and work backwards. Most companies start with the end of the week, which means just that simple operational change means we're going to get, on average, seven times more done than someone who uses the end of the week as their way of thinking about it.

Now, if something cannot be completed by the end of the day, we should say why not. And most of the time when you just ask why not, you're like, "Oh, I guess it could be," and then you do it. And so you can move a lot faster if you just start to question why can I do this by the end of the day? But if you believe it can't, we want to say what's either keeping you from giving your full attention, and then do that thought exercise of like, why, if I had to complete this by the end of the day, is stopping me? And are those things actually more important than this thing? And there are often times going to be valid reasons why you can't have something done by the end of the day. But if, as a default, you just put it behind all the things that you think you should be doing, we're going to move slower on the most important ones. So it's not whether or not you can complete it in a day, but how much could you complete, or what parts could you finish today?

And so that when you're trying to move forward a project, it's not that the whole project needs to get done, but if that's the most important thing—and we'll talk about prioritization in a second—if that's the most important thing, you want to move it as far forward as possible. At least identify the parts you could complete by the end of the day, rather than think, "This project is going to take two weeks; I better start out in a few days because it's big and it's intimidating, and you know there's easier things that I know how to do that I could just continue to do in the meantime." So again, there're going to be things that you cannot complete in a day: creative work or hiring someone, anything that's time-bound, or just like the—I do think the laws of physics work in terms of creative work of how much you can possibly do in a day or make any kind of improvement—um, those are not going to be able to be completed in a day, but there are certain parts that could be, and you can max out the amount of effort you put toward something during that day.

And so this entire framework is just: when you're planning your day, you want to figure out—we'll talk about priori prioritization after this one—but basically, I want to get as much accomplished on the most important thing by the end of the day, and I'm going to do them in that order. And so it's just the thought process of like, what is stopping me from completing this today? Because over time you will just prune and prune and prune the unimportant things that, for one reason or another, have ended up on your constant to-do list that are actually not moving the business forward. And so there are other frameworks that will really help you figure out what you should start and stop doing, and that's number eight. But basically, we expect things to be completed when we agree upon them by the end of the day, and if not, we should figure out what parts we can complete by the end of the day and then eliminate all the other things that would prevent us from completing an end-of-day completable project. But we got all this other stuff that's actually not as important as the thing we just talked about. So how do you figure out what is actually that important? That is solve and sequence, which is number eight.

All right, our eighth operating principle is solve in sequence. I was debating calling this one sequence over splinter, but solve in sequence I think is is catchier. So anytime we create a task list or a project list or any kind of to-do list, we use numbers to prioritize them. If there's—this is the 80/20 of this entire principle—it's that you need to do things in order. Now I'm going to break down how this is more important than just a single list, but basically this habit on its own will always force you to prioritize what is the most important thing that needs to be accomplished. Now the goal is then to work on the first item and only the first item, whether that's the project or the task, and I'll talk about that in a second, until it's completed or until you've done the limitation of what could be reasonably completed for the day on that thing. So this is true on the micro level: so your tasks on any given day, you should have an order with the most important one at the top of the list, and you spend your most important and most productive time on that. So, for example, me, I'm spending the first 90 minutes of every day writing and creating videos like this because it is the most important work for me to get done.

Now, as I go further down this list, you'll recognize that my project is much longer term, and so there's only a like—there's only so much I can do to complete that project on any given day, and I find personally that's are like 90 minutes of creative work. But because it's the most important, I exhaust as much resources as I can in terms of creative energy on that thing, and then I move on to the next one. And so it's true on the macro project level as well: you want to focus as much of our team's collective resources on the thing that has the highest impact. And so I'm going to walk through an example here, but basically multitasking is not what most people think when it's like, "Make a phone call and read a book at the same time." Uh, no one actually does that; everyone knows that they can only work on one thing at a time. But it's far more insidious because we do it without noticing, and this is—I'm the most guilty person of this—it's—I try to do one thing on five projects in a day; that's multitasking, and that is what kills your speed. And so this feels productive because in my head I'm like, "Oh, I have five things going on; if I move them all forward a little bit, I'm being productive; everything's moving forward." And if I were to do this over five days, like let's say I have five things on five total projects, uh, I could do one each day and get all five projects done this week; that'd be a very productive week; I'd feel great about it; it would be awesome.

However, if instead I took those five projects, I ranked them in—far in terms of order—like, um, importance, and then I only completed five subtasks for that one project at a time, in a row, in sequence, I'll move much faster. So, for example, those same five tasks that took me an entire week on each project to complete, I likely—had I done only one project—completed all five of those subtasks in half a day, given them—not context switching between things like, "Write this email, hire this person," all like whatever the bigger projects are—if you can spend more time. So, for example, let's say I wanted to complete—um, the best example of this is any kind of creative work, so anything that's not bound by time like hiring, then there's just like, you know—because hiring there takes communication cycles, and you're not going to be able to hire someone in a day. You can do a lot of work to hire someone in a day, but you're not going to be able to—but it's something like a slide deck, um, for example, if I had five slide decks to create over a week, and I did a little bit on each one, and those were my five subtasks, I might complete them all in a week. But instead, if I worked on one, I could probably finish an entire one in half a day, and then the next one in half a day, and then the next one in half a day, such that I could do all five projects in 2.5 days rather than five, which is moving 50% faster or 100% faster, whatever you want to look at. So there's obviously nuance to everything here, but it's—what matters is the prioritization exercise of saying, "If I could only do one of these things," and I remember hearing this so much of like, "If you could only do one thing, what would you do?" And I'd be like, "But I got to do 10 things," so like that doesn't matter. But if your day was going to get cut short, like what would have to get done that would move things forward the most? Just the act of doing that prioritization as a company, as a department, and as an individual contributor, you're going to move much faster. And I am—the reason I wrote this up is because I do not do this; I don't do this, and I don't do it well enough, and I'm trying so hard to get it done, and so I'm still working on like how I implement this on my own. Basically, anytime we run a department meeting where we decide what we're going to build, we are going to stack rank the projects and make sure that everyone is pointing their efforts on the most important one possible. And so you should—just as you're watching this—think about, "What am I responsible for? What are the most important? What's the most important one? How can I move that one as far as possible before my brain is unable to do more on that before moving on to the next thing?" And we dramatically underestimate how far we can move one thing forward in three or four focused hours without any kind of context switch. And that's like—as I put this lessons and/or vision mission values video together—like it took me a week to do this, but each day I said, "I can probably give two really good focused hours on this before my brain can no longer think about it." And so I maxed it out every single day, which is why I'm able to complete this in a week rather than, you know, maybe 30 minutes on it and try to do that. If I said, "Okay, I'm going to only do 30 minutes on it," it wouldn't take me, you know, four times as long; it probably take me 10 times as long because the amount of depth that you can get in these deep work sessions focusing on one thing of one project—uh, I am always blown away with. So again, there's going to be overgeneralization, nuances, things like that, but all that matters is on any given day you're trying to move the most important thing as far ahead as you possibly can before you move on to the next one, and that is solve in sequence rather than splintering your attention across 10 different things.

All right, our ninth operating principle is more, better, new. Again, straight up from Hosi, but I just think he does such a good job, um, putting these principles in action, and then we can do a good job applying them to our business specifically. So anytime we're iterating something peacefully, we are going to use this framework. And so any business that is input-driven, like content or video or, um, outreach or whatever it is that is—when you do more of something, um, you see a better result—the lowest risk-adjusted decision is just do more of what you're already doing. So more emails—if we're sending one email, probably worth sending more—five a week if we're sending one right now; if we're tweeting one time a day, probably try five; if we're spending 30 minutes writing, more than likely 90 will be better; if we're holding three client 101s, five or six might be better; more hours—whatever the input is, it's always the best risk-adjusted decision to do more of that thing. And so anytime we think that something could be improved, we're going to start with, "Can we just do more of that thing?" until we've reached the point of negative marginal return. That's extremely important: negative marginal return, not just diminishing return, but negative, such that if posting on Instagram is only good for two—time or link, for example, where one time a day is like known that that's the best thing—if I post twice, I get less reach overall, so that is negative; that is fully maxed out. Twitter doesn't really have a limit; we find that around five is that limit, and so posting a sixth time does not actually get us closer to our goal, so we stop there. If you force yourself to write for three hours when your capacity is really like two, that extra hour is actually negative because it's going to burn you out creatively, and the work you put out you're going to go have to fix later, so your long-term output is lower. And so another example: if you have an additional one-on-one call with a client and that overwhelms them rather than helping them, we've reached the point of negative marginal return, so we will not do any more volume once we've reached that point. We will then keep the same level of volume, and that's important—the same level of volume—and focus on doing it better. So, for example, if we're posting one time per day on LinkedIn and we find that that's the max, then we're going to figure out, "How do I just take that one post to make it better?" So once you're maxed out, the best risk-adjusted decision is to do better: write better emails, have better one-on-one calls, have a better sales script, whatever it is. And this right here, especially at our current revenue level, is where the majority of business value comes from, where we find the sweet spot between volume is maxed out, and now we are going to build a system to improve that volume and improve that volume and improve it and do nothing else but build that engine for continuous iteration. And so most businesses—ourselves included when we were in our beginner stages—we struggled to do more of anything, um, I didn't really have that problem, but a lot of—a lot of beginner businesses, especially some of the ghost riding clients we work with, um, and helping them start their own—is basically they're not doing enough of the outreach; they're not doing any of the volume in the first place, and they can't get themselves to do more. So if you struggle with more, you need to figure out what types of rewards need to happen or how you can have a bigger why, whatever it is that gets you to do more of that input that you know verifiably gets you closer to your goal. Once you are doing that, or—I—I guess just to double-click on this part—most people start a current level of volume that's nowhere near maxed out, and then once it starts to get a little bit harder to do more, they say, "I should just be doing this other thing," and then all that happens is they switch to that other thing, and they get to that same level of volume, and then they're stuck again, and they reach the wall faster, and then they switch to another vehicle, and they reach the wall again, and they're stuck again. And so when you feel that friction of like, "More, I know would get me closer, but I can't do it," you have to sit there and figure out what system needs to be built to go do more effectively. The only time we do something new is when we have fully maxed out the volume, so we're at the maximum of more, and we have a continuously improving process that allows us to get better over time. And so anytime we want to improve something—so if it's a sales process, if it's a content cadence, if it's a fulfillment process—"Can we just do more?" And that's more than likely what we'll start, and we just need to max it out. If we're maxed out, how can we do it better? And if we're already maxed out and we have a verified process for improving the thing, then two things could happen: we could just let time pass, and we actually don't need to do anything new; we just need time to catch up such that the improvement engine can continue to hum; or if it's so dialed in, then we can jump to something new. So I could give like 20 examples of ad platforms or, um, email cadences, content cadences, design cadences, thumbnail iterations, whatever it is—it always just starts with doing more, doing it better, and then very, very rarely, in very rare circumstances, do we do something new. Now this is true at like the macro business portfolio level: it's like, "Should we start a new business?" Well, can we do more of this current one? Could that be making more? Could we be doing that one better such that it would make more? And unless we have the engine in place to that thing to improve and it's fully maxed out in terms of how much quickly or how quickly it could get better, then we would move on to a new business. So it's true with the macro—the micro—more, better, new. You will hear us time and time again: is this more, better, or new? If it's new, it's—it's got to have a damn good hypothesis for why we should deploy efforts there because it's always the riskiest. Anytime you do something new, it's going to take time, resources, and attention away from something that you know—verifiably—if you're making it better will lead to higher returns. So more time is better allocated from a resource allocation perspective on the more or better area.

All right, our 10th operating principle is total trust. And you will hear us—anytime you're taking on a project that you own—we will say, "We got total trust in you." So as a default, if you are on this team, we have total trust in your abilities to complete whatever it is you're taking on, and we will treat you accordingly. So the way to think about this is you start with a full trust battery, not an empty one. Some businesses will operate with a trust battery that must be built up over time, like charging a battery from zero; we start at the other end, which is just—by nature of hiring you—we have full trust, a maxed-out trust battery, and you start with that from the beginning. So importantly, this does mean that you can lose trust should you underperform or give us evidence that we cannot trust you, but this is very rare for members of our team, and given we have a short challenge for underperformance, like we just don't experience this much. But anytime you're taking something on, we have total trust in you to move that project forward and make the proper decisions to do so as much as possible. Now, in making those decisions, I'm just going to share a framework that I got from James Clear, which are—there are three types of decisions, and you will find that you're making these more often than not, um, the first two, and that the third one, the tattoo, is very rare, but, um, let me just explain these three. Hat decisions: these are easy to undo. So, like, for example, if I wanted to, you know, I was deciding between hats to wear for this video, and I got halfway through and was like, "Ah, shoot, I actually should have worn the black one," I'll just grab the black one, put it on; easy to undo. As a default, you should be making hat decisions with no one else's approval in the interest of speed. If we are constantly hearing questions that are hat decisions, we're going to be frustrated; your manager is going to be frustrated; the team's going to be frustrated. If it's a hat decision, meaning we could easily undo it if it was wrong, and it's got a very small cost of incorrect decision, move quickly on it. Haircut decisions are a little bit more time to undo, especially really bad ones. So anyone who's ever gotten a bad haircut knows that like that two or three weeks where you're stuck with it, it kind of sucks, but eventually you're okay, and there's no long-term damage done. So again, for the most part, we're okay; we trust you to make haircut decisions, period. We want you to be thoughtful with them, and you should be clearly communicating why and how you made that decision. But again, if you're owning a project and it's a haircut decision where you're not 100% sure and there's a little bit of like undoing cost—it might take some time—get feedback if you need it, but we really trust you to make those haircut type decisions. So I don't have like immediate examples here, but you'll see more and more. If it's like, "Hey, I just need, you know, feedback on this mug style," that's a hat decision. Like if we ship one out and we decide we don't like it, the next one we'll just change. Haircut decision could be like writing this ad copy that's going to, you know, live on our website for a long period of time, and if we publish it, it's going to take time to take down or something like that. Honestly, that's a hat decision; a haircut decision—if—let me think—if I—let me see if I can think of one while I go through this—but it's anything that's going to take a little bit of time to undo, like maybe a hiring decision. Hiring decisions are kind of like haircuts; if you—if you get the wrong one, it's going to take some time to undo, but ultimately not going to kill us over the long term unless we just constantly get bad haircuts, then everyone's like, "That's the bad haircut guy." Obviously, we want to avoid that. Then tattoos: this is the last one; tattoos—extremely hard to undo and very painful. So if you think something is a tattoo decision, then get approval; like explain why you think it's important to get approval, but uh, we don't want you making half-hazard tattoo decisions that over the long term could hurt us. So anytime you're maybe thinking of publishing something very public that you're not 100% sure about, and if it were to go out, then like we got to undo a bunch of stuff, that's a tattoo decision; that's very hard to undo. Um, there's a lot that I could dig into here, but you'll start to recognize like, "Is this a tattoo decision?" We'll never be disappointed if you come to us and say, "I think this is a tattoo decision, and so I'm not going to make it yet, and here's why." And if it turns out to be a haircut, we'll help you understand like, "Okay, here's why that's actually not that big of a deal and why it's more undoable." But if it's constantly just—"I'm getting approval on hat decisions"—we're going to be frustrated. But we will never, ever, ever, ever be frustrated that you came to us because you thought something was more important than it actually was, and so then we can help give you feedback. So if you're coming to us, you say, "I think this is a tattoo; I want to make sure it's the right one," but if you come to us and you're like, "I think this is a hat, but I need, you know, I'm coming to you for no reason," we're going to be frustrated. So total trust on you to make these hat and haircut decisions if you're part of the team and if you've been given that responsibility. So almost all decisions are hats or haircuts; we have full trust in you and total trust in you to do so.

All right, our 11th operating principle is simple scales and fancy fails. So as a default, we operate with Occam's Razor, which is the simple solution or explanation is usually correct. So for anyone who's seen the midwit bell curve—and if you don't know what that is, you just don't spend enough time on the internet as I do, clearly—um, but basically it's got, you know, the idiot over here, the midwit in the middle, and then the genius on the right. And basically, we want to be either extreme—genius and extreme ignorance—because they always default to the simplest solution. And in terms of how to operationalize that, the simplest solution is the one that requires the least amount of operational complexity or change. So anytime we want to create a system or make an upgrade of any sort, the fewer number of steps or decisions or conditions or people or tweaks, the more effective that solution will be—actually, I should say that that's a likelihood that it's the most effective solution—but the risk of making that change is the lowest, and we always want to operate with the—

Highest risk adjusted meaning the return relative to how risky it is to do it. And so anytime we have a big change or increase in complexity, we want to expect a 20% decrease in performance. So I'll say that again: anytime we do something new, or a big, big change, or increased complexity, it should, as a default, think that it's going to be 20% worse than what we currently have.

And so if we want to improve something by at least 20%—which anytime you're making a business decision, like 20% is a good ballpark for, you know, “this upgrade I think leads to 20% more throughput of the sales funnel, or the marketing funnel, or Student Success, whatever it is”—we should expect it should drive at least 40%, if not more, to be worth the effort due to the default 20% discount. So there is a big hurdle rate to doing anything more complex that involves change because of the default discount we're giving it.

And so your first pass at something will probably involve complexity. So anytime you come up with a solution, you should say, "That's the V1. How can I make this simpler?" You should present it to the person you're working with: "Here's my V1. How could I, you know, remove steps, make this easier, make this faster?" Um, just in general, we—I tend to especially—overcomplicate anything we're doing. And so I want to get feedback on it from someone else, saying, "Here's my V1. How do I make this better?" So anytime that you come up with something that looks like this complicated graph tree with a bunch of different steps, we're going to say, "How can we make this simpler?" Because simple scales and fancy fails.

All right, our 12th operating principle on our ever-expanding list is: Delight with details. So it's always worth asking, in any kind of business, "Like, what business are you in?" And when I say that, it's like, "What core thing that when you do at an exceptionally high level makes every part of the business basically not matter because of how well that part is done in the flywheel that that part creates?" And so, for example, like a supplement company—uh, if they think that they're in the product business, but really they're just in getting as many people to find out about that supplement and start using it—they're really a marketing company. We are in the hospitality and accountability business. So I'll say that again: hospitality and accountability.

So we can learn the most from hotels and the way people are treated there, restaurants, things like that; and accountability, which is any kind of coaching that helps people achieve an outcome. And this is where most education-based businesses go wrong: they think it's the product, or the marketing, or the branding, or the sales team that drives the success, and that's where they focus all their attention. We do not do that. We instead understand that their long-term success will be driven exclusively by the experience of our clients, specifically how we made them feel during their time working with us. So if they feel frustrated, or helpless, or lost, or ignored, no matter how good our stuff is, they will not recommend us to their friends, and they will not buy from us in the future. That is how we build a business to the highest level possible: it's our friend—our customers tell their friends, and they buy from us again. And so we have to make them feel good, so feel heard, supported, at ease, attended to; that the entire process, like we guided them from A to Z; the outcome they unlock will be simply the cherry on top, because the way they felt during the process was way above expectation.

Now, it does not come—this experience that we're trying to generate, this hospitality and accountability—it's not one thing done well; it's a million small details, each iterated over time, that eliminate all the things that suck and make someone feel bad when they're using it. So friction, risk, difficulty, frustration, uh, like unanswered questions—everything that prevents an experience from being as smooth as possible, we're going to remove. And so you can apply this not only to your client that you're working with, or managing, or helping, uh, or the people that you're having a conversation with to potentially enroll, or our marketing assets in terms of communicating the product we're creating, but we can also do that with our team members. So employee experience is the same as client experience in terms of: you have a marketing funnel, you have retention mechanisms, you have incentives, you have an overall experience. If we want our employees—and if you're watching this, you're one of them, or or a potential employee—we want you to work with us as long as possible and build as much personal growth and professional growth into that journey as we possibly can. And so we want our team to refer to their friends, or tell their friends to come work for us, uh, as much as possible, and we want them to stay as long as possible.

So I just share that because it's not just on the hospitality—hospitality and accountability business within the people we work with, but also the team uh that we are working with. And so, for example, just to see that you can understand like experiences are just small, small details—um, I can't remember the name of the book, but I think it's Danny Meyer, *Unreasonable Hospitality*, excellent book, and I need to write a video or create something on that because it informs how a restaurant can create a great student—or student experience—customer experience, and we want to emulate that level of hospitality and accountability.

So, for example, we recently attended a workshop at acquisition.com—this was like their nth or 10th workshop—and their attention to detail was so apparent. And I'll tell you the story: where every single thing that you had to do, every decision you could possibly make, they made for you. And so there's, like, picture this big conference hall; there's only one door to exit. And so when you get to that door first, everyone in the room says, "Exit that way," so you know where to exit. And then there's only two reasons you could be exiting: uh, restroom and food. And so the food was this way, and the restroom—the restrooms were this way. So you, like, you turned—you see the door, it says, "Restroom and food, both this way," that's the exit. So you turn out, and then the second you turn, you saw another sign that said, "Food this way," and uh, "Restroom that way." And it's like, okay, clearly someone got lost, and they were like, "Wow, we're just never going to make it." So someone got lost again, and we're going to make every possible decision. And it was just such a small, like, thing that made me feel that this was easier. And then, like, the signs on the wall—um, I already explained that one—the greeting basket they gave us, it was personalized and thoughtful. There were just so many small details. And as a result, when we were leaving, we felt this was an amazing experience; we're telling other people about it. And it wasn't because of one big thing; we just left with, like, a thousand lessons that we could apply, and just the entire thing was easy, low risk, little friction, and we just didn't find ourselves frustrated at all.

So I share that story because with everything we create, we are trying to just build the most incredible client experience possible, because that is what ultimately helps us accomplish our uh, mission and reach the vision we're ultimately trying to get to. All right, we covered a ton there, so just a quick recap: we covered everything from our vision, our mission, our values, and our operating principles. So our vision is to build the world's biggest writing education business. We talked about the reasons for doing so. Then we talked about our mission, which is to provide the education to help anyone make a living as a writer. We explained why that is the impact we ultimately want to make and the way that increases the global GDP. Then we talked about our core values, the evolution of our core values at each revenue level and team size, and then our new updated core values of: Set the Standard, Peaceful Iteration, and Dynasty Energy, with some examples of how to put those into practice. And then we finished with our operating principles—all 13 or 12—yeah, 12 operating principles—uh, of a list that could definitely grow in the future, and a lot of these could change. And we just broke down the way we want to see the world, how we want to treat our clients, how we want to treat each other, um, how we want to communicate with each other, how we want to make decisions, uh, how we want to move quickly, how we want to prioritize—all of these laid out in one long list. So, lot here. We're going to reference these throughout the process of working with one another, uh, as the business continues to grow; these will continue to evolve, but for now, this is what we got. And if you're watching this and you're part of our team, excited to have you working with us; we want you to keep working with us forever. Uh, and if you're just watching this as a prospective employee, obviously if this inspires you, uh, this is the type of business we are operating, and we'd love to have you on board. Boom. That finishes up our vision, mission, values, and operating principles. If you enjoy this type of content, be sure to hit subscribe, leave a comment with your biggest takeaway, follow me on all social platforms, and I'll see you in the next one.