Business Was Hard Until I Understood These 4 Concepts

Every business needs to solve each of these four problems in order to make more money and scale.

The first of those problems is figuring out the customer that you're actually going to serve. And in talking to many of you, the issue is you have no idea. And that's okay, because in the beginning, you need to sell everyone because you have no money and they have a pulse and a credit card. And you only require one of those things. And so you ask them for their credit card so that you can pay your bills so you can actually make your business work. And that's okay, and that's normal, and that's expected.

But when you keep taking every single Tom, Dick, and Harry who can give you, you know, a third down today and I'll pay you when I get paid and and everything else, they're like, "Hey, do you think you could, you know, give me the world?" And you're like, "I could give you two worlds." And they're like, "Awesome, here's my credit card again. Bill me on the fifth. That's when I get paid, right?" And you deal with all of these bad customers and you promise the world, which is normal in the beginning because there's only you and you maybe can help this person in a completely unscalable way. And that's what you should do because you just need to generate income, you need to generate word-of-mouth, you need to help people out. Cool.

But there comes a point, and it's usually around a million bucks a year, sometimes three million bucks a year, where the operational complexity of the business becomes really tough. Because now you've got a lot of different customers that all have different needs, that have different promises, at different price points that you've sold. And they're still just you. And so this process is the sticking point. This, this is sticking point number one.

What you have to do is you have to learn how to say no to people who are not the ideal customer. And if you're like, "Well, I don't know who my ideal customer is," that is the problem. And so you take all of the customers that you have that you have sold over your entire history, and then you look at them and you say, "Which of these people do I love?" Okay, column one. "Which of these people have spent the most money?" Column two. "Which of these people did I have the highest operational profit from?" Column three. Column four, "Which of these was the easiest to deliver on?" And so you look at these different lists and you're like, "Huh, are there any common themes? Are there, are there any people who are in two or three of those columns? I really like them, they made me a lot of money, and it was really easy to deliver the thing. Huh." Well, that's weird because that's not the main thing that I sell, but I guess I have sold a few of those. Huh.

Well, if you were to then take that concept and say, "Well, if 10% of my customers are in this really ideal bucket, what if I had 100% of my customers that were just like that?" So you take the same amount of customers you currently have, but they were all just that customer. If you do the math again, you usually make five to 10 times more money. And the cool part about that process is that it doesn't require more infrastructure. You already have the infrastructure to service that number of customers. You're just servicing the wrong people because you haven't learned to say no yet.

And so one of the most attractive things in marketing and sales is saying, "I don't need your money," because it makes everybody want you more. And so what you do to harness this is you tell everybody you actually don't want to sell. That you actually don't want to sell them. And crazy, I know. And then you let the people who are the right type of person, because they're like, "Oh, I'm not that. I'm not that. Hate those people too." Oh. And you say, "But if you just happen to be this perfect unicorn that has these two, three, four traits, I can absolutely change your life in this very specific way that means a lot to you." And they're like, "Wow, sounds like this ad's just for me." And that's exactly what I want.

And guess what happens now? Once you make that kind of change in messaging, you attract more of that right type of customer. You can now charge the premium price, even at the more operationally efficient and product-high service level, because now you're doing the same thing for every single customer. So you get better at doing it. So you get higher percentage success rates. You do it at higher margins because you both have higher price and lower cost for doing this. And this is how you solve problem number one. But you have to learn how to say no. And most people literally never learn. And so I get, I have had this conversation so many times that I want to shout it into a microphone, which is what I'm doing right now. Okay, so that's how you solve problem number one.

Problem number two that I see businesses get stuck at, where they're in a rock and a hard place, they're like, "I don't know what to do." It's two sides of the same problem. You either charge too little or you pay too much. And I want to put caveats around this. I'm a big believer in hiring great talent. I'm a big believer in bringing good people in, absolutely. But if you want to have a frozen yogurt store and you want to pay the people behind the counter 20% of revenue each, your business will not make money. If I'm lying, I'm dying. If you have a physical therapy, you're at a physical therapy clinic and you give 50% of revenue to every one of your people, tough to scale. That was somebody here. You have to nail the individual model where you can make enough money at full capacity.

And so, which is going to trickle into problem three. But you get into this position where you're like, "Wait, I realize now that I can't give profit shares to every single person. I specifically can't give revenue shares to all these people, or my salesman can't make more than I do in the business." And maybe they do in the beginning, but at scale, they shouldn't be able to more than the owners, right? Then you have something that's that's mismatched. And so you have to have these moments because otherwise business owners will stay in this lane for years because they'll just say like, "Well, if I, if I tell them I have to change their comp, then I'm going to lose them." And I'm like, "Yeah, and if you don't, you'll never grow. So which one do you want to do?"

And so the, the, the nefarious part about each of these problems is that they have appearing impossible issues with each one of them. With the first one, you're like, "Well, I can't say no to money because I need the money in order to pay my bills." But by saying yes to people who aren't the ideal customer, then I will never be able to grow this business because I won't be able to charge the premium prices, get the best customers, have the operational margin that I need in order to expand. And so all of these are rock and hard place problems. But you have to have the intestinal fortitude. And this is why your lifestyle is your competitor's opportunity. What you require to live on is what prevents you from being aggressive in the business to make the best decision for the business. Because the business doesn't care. Like, the ideal, perfect version of your business exists. You just have a number of steps that you have to take to get there. And the people who get there faster are the ones who are willing to stomach uncomfortable conversations, low profit months, and a hit on their lifestyle for extended periods of time.

And so you being able to be aggressive with your lifestyle, when I say aggressive, I mean being able to live on very little, especially when you're in that one, three, five million a year range, allows you to take bigger risks, think longer. Because you're like, "Okay, we're going to change this thing. Well, I've got $100,000 saved up, and so I can stomach a year if I need to take nothing out so that we can make this pivot because this is what's right for the business now." And more specifically, this is right for the business for the next five years. And so rock and hard place.

So if you're with the, "I have all these employees and they're all compensated incorrectly," you have to sit down and you have to say, "Hey guys." And this is how I deal with all really hard conversations. I just tell the truth. "I messed up. I said that I was going to help you guys grow with this business. I said we were going to do these big things. But based on the decisions that I made, because I'm a numbnuts, I mispriced your compensation. And because of that, I'll never be able to give you career growth. I'll never be able to reinvest in you. I'll never be able to the opportunity to open new locations or move up in this business because this business will not grow based on how this works. But if you're willing to go on this ride with me and change how compensation works, and to be clear, I'm taking nothing. So like, you work every month and you still get a paycheck. I work every month and I get poor. That's the difference. So I just want to be clear, I'm in this ride with you and I'm taking, I'm not asking you to do something I'm not willing to do. But if you're willing to go on this ride with me for six months, maybe 12 months, we're going to have opportunities to be 10 times bigger than this because it'll be right for the business. But you have to have that talk. Otherwise, you will be stuck in this, 'Well, if they leave, then I won't have a business.' And some of them will leave. And guess what skill you get to develop now? The ability to recruit talent with your new compensation structure, with your new vision of what's going to happen in their lives along with your business." So that's the second problem and the second sticking point. And each of these are just these levels that people just go around and they just stay stuck for years.

This part 2B of that one is not charging enough. And so this is the, this is how it presents. "Hey, my business is at full capacity. My business is at full capacity and we're not making that much money. And so I think I need to open a new location or I need to add another product line." When this is the core thing of the business. If the core thing of the business at capacity, even at a small level of capacity, like if you have one rep that can handle 10 people for your agency, or you have one physical therapist who can handle 50 patients, it doesn't matter. There's going to be some ratio of of cost of goods sold and what you, what you charge. And then you have other costs associated, administrative and fixed costs, whatever. And there's going to be a, a point of capacity with that small unit where if you're still not making money, the business model is flawed.

And so either you need to find a way to dramatically decrease the cost that you have to deliver, which sometimes it's the compensation of the employee team if it's way off, or oftentimes it's just you're charging too little. And you just, and there's all these ethical things of like, "I feel like an impostor." And I'm like, "Dude, you're not an impostor, you're broke. You only get impostor syndrome when you pretend to be something you're not." Like, I get this question all the time. "Like, I feel like an impostor for charging that much money." You only feel like an impostor because you're lying. If you, like, I had an agency owner yesterday who said, "I had an agency, I got to 150 clients and I have a really good client-getting system, but that business stalled because I didn't know how to operate." And so it kind of like crashed and burned. But I knew how to get customers for my agency really, really well. He's like, "But I feel like an impostor charging for that system." And I was like, "Why?" And I was like, "Is it because you're pretending you were a really successful agency owner?" He was like, "Yeah." I was like, "Well, then why don't you just tell the truth and say, 'I got 150 customers despite not knowing anything about running an agency, because the system's really good. I suck at operating.' And so for that reason, I'm just going to give you the system and you can figure out how to operate the business." I was like, "I still believe you." And then he doesn't feel like he was like, "Oh, I guess I can just tell the truth."

And so the whole impostor syndrome around charging, if fundamentally, if someone like you will only have that if you're misrepresenting something. If a customer wants to pay you for something and you have the thing and they're willing to exchange, it's voluntary. Not holding a gun to them, it's exchange. That's how capitalism works. You have a thing, they want the thing, and there's a price that they're willing to pay for it. If they're willing to pay for it, phenomenal. Like, that's capitalism. We want and so we try and do it as many times as we can. And so the idea of like having ethics around price is ridiculous. If they're willing, and you don't want to sell out of your wallet either. There, if you're broke, but somebody, the thing that you provide provides a lot of value to a specific person, then you charge based on the value, not based on what's in your wallet. If you're broke and you're like, "This really would help me." It's like, "Cool, it'll probably help them even more. And if it just happens to help you, that's how capitalism works. Both parties say thank you."

So part 2B, if you're at full capacity and you're not making money, you often need to just charge more for the thing you have. And if people say no, fine. Guess what? You get to learn how to sell better. And that's a skill that if you want to build this big business, you're going to have to learn anyways. So you might as well face that boss now instead of just forever being in this like, "I guess I need to expand this business that already doesn't work, but I don't have the money to expand because the business doesn't work, right?" And so this is an impossible place that you spend for years and years. Where's my phone? I wrote them down. I should know them all, but, um, sometimes I forget things. So let's see. What do we think problem number four is or number three is? Oh, that actually leads perfectly. So I remembered it before I pulled it up, for the record.

The third problem that every business has to solve is not getting over your skis, not over-expanded. Okay, so problem two often leads to problem three. Is that you're not making up in the core business? So you say, "Great, I'll do more of this." But more in that instance is more of the wrong thing. Like, a little bit isn't working, let's try a lot. Right? You're scaling the problems, not the solution. And so, right, glad that one hit. And so, and so the idea, and this happens most frequently, I want to say most frequently with brick and mortar because it's such a clear unit where you're like, "I have one location that's doing mediocre, but I want to have a big franchise." Like, I can't tell you the number of times I talk to local businesses who have this issue. And it's mostly because we have this ego thing around growing revenue. And so a lot of you guys are like, and I say, "What's your goal?" It's like, "I want to go from 1 million to 3 million. I want to go from 3 million to 10 million. I want to go from 10 million to 30 million." Whatever it is, right? Like everybody's got this big number goal. And so what happens is you make the goal the thing that you focus on. But when the goal is an output, you then get weird about inputs because you try and make the output occur rather than thinking, "I have to fix this model where once I get the inputs clear, I jam as many high-quality inputs into it, and then revenue occurs." Revenue is a consequence, not a goal.

And so the inputs that we put in the system. So when we make what we're going to do for content, we talk about how many pieces of content we're going to make, what the schedule of that content is, what's the checklist we're going to follow that will increase the likelihood that these video views go to the right people and get the most of them to see it. If we hit 100 million, like, who cares? Not who cares, of course we care, but what will it change about what we do? All we know is that it'll just give us feedback to change our inputs. But if you make me hitting this number and not attach it to what you have to do, then you start building really stupid things. And so this is the classic internet marketer who scales too fast for their course business. This is the agency who just takes on lots of clients because they want to hit this revenue goal. Or the brick-and-mortar business owner who opens up a second location when their first one isn't even working. And so it's like they want to get to, they want to get to three so fast that they'll never get to 10. And so we did that little thing earlier where if you build, you know, a building as fast as you possibly can, you can't add more on top of it, it just breaks. The foundation's not there. And so often times the fastest way to a $100 million business is slower to 10, but faster from 50 to 100. And so if you can actually have that perspective, you won't care if it takes you three years to get the single location right, because once it's dialed, then when you copy-paste it, it works.

And so the big thing that's missing when you're doing the overexpansion thing, I'll tell you what the core issue is. It's who you sell too many people too fast before you hire, train good enough people to backfill. And then you get too many people in with not enough talent, but you have bodies and not brains. And so now you have to keep selling more people to manage your overhead of all these dumb people that you haven't had the time to train. And they're dumb because of outputs. And the reason that they're dumb is because you didn't train them. And the real dummy is you, because either you weren't patient enough to interview more people, or you weren't patient enough to train them. But both of them are your fault. So you get overexpanded because you have this arbitrary goal that was around growth and not quality. Quality creates growth. Growth creates bloat. So if you make growth the goal, bloat is what occurs. If you make quality the goal, growth occurs as a result. So make getting better the goal, and then you will get bigger. If you make bigger the goal, you'll get bigger and you'll get worse.

And so when I hear the many problems that come here, often times you're over your skis, you're overextended, you have too many people and not enough smarts. And so rock and hard place. "I have to keep selling these customers so I can cover this overhead, but my reputation is getting worse and worse and worse because I can't deliver on the promises, but I have to keep making the promises so I can pay my bills." And that's where your lifestyle comes into play again. You're like, "I made a goof-up. I need to decrease my lifestyle. I'm going to stop taking money out of the business, and I need to have some hard conversations, and I probably need to work overtime for a while." The thing is, is that the overtime isn't like a week or a month. Sometimes it's years. And it's tough. You know, like, it's, it's tough. You give up weekends over and over and over and over and over again. It's not like you give up weekends, you just have, you don't remember the last time you took one, right?

And so I say this out of care, but like, you have to be like, the hardest part of being in business is that you will always encounter these rock and hard place scenarios because you don't know everything. And until you've been there, you're like, "This is all going great until it's not." And then you realize you're whoopsy. And so I think your willingness to endure the pain of undoing your poor decision is what will get you out of the long-term pain faster. But the short-term pain is way worse. And so, and this is where the growing pains come in. Because let's say you do pull it back, you stop selling as many new customers so that you can focus more on training the team up, interviewing new candidates, maybe even having to pay them more because they're more qualified because they come in with some knowledge that you don't have. Profit starts to dip, starts to dip. So what do you do? Well, you know that if you keep going on this path and you do fix delivery, you do fix churn, all of a sudden you can't get your head back out of water because now you're selling people in, they're staying, and all of a sudden you're starting to get referrals again because word of mouth is picking up. And then all of a sudden your profit goes back from negative to neutral to up to your previous max. But it just keeps going again. And then you get excited and you make another dumb mistake. And then you have to repeat the process again.

And so the thing is, is like the entrepreneurial growth path, the pain of it is the big mess-ups you realize you make that you then get into the rock and hard situation. And most people can't make a decision, so they just straddle it and stay in the mediocre middle, destroy the reputation, and stay stagnant for years. And so you have to, like, whatever that hard sticking place you're at is, is you just have to confront it as fast as humanly possible. And so it's like, I always would rather have intense short-term pain rather than very long-term pain of not living up to what I think I can do. So that's sticking point number three.

Number four, I will say this until I'm blue in the face, but the fourth problem that every business owner has to conquer is focus. And what is so nefarious about focus? It's so sneaky because we are rewarded as entrepreneurs for taking a leap of faith, for taking a jump when there's nothing there. And then something starts to work. And so that's such a rewarding experience. You go from complete control to complete freedom. Well, technically you go back to control again, but I won't get into that. And in that moment, you're like, "This was the best decision of my entire life." And the problem is that you should never do it again. Because what happens is you reinforce such a strong loop where you're like, "Man, and then when this gets hard," like my job was, "you then think, 'Oh, I'll do the same thing I did last time. I'll switch. I'll try something new.'" And then that'll be exciting and new, just like your relationship. And then all of a sudden you get out of the honeymoon phase and you realize, "Oh, there's problems in this business too." And then you're like, "Oh, I'll do it. It worked that other time. It still worked half of the time." And so then you jump again.

But the reason that it's so nefarious, besides the fact that it's encoded in your DNA from being an entrepreneur from quitting your first thing to do this to begin with, is that every time it looks different. And that's why focus is so tough. And there's always a very strong argument for why you should do the new opportunity. And that's why, by the way, as a sales pitch, "new opportunity" is a great way to sell because it's so hard to have the discipline to be like, "Nope, I'm just going to keep doing the thing that I've been doing for 10 years, and I know the good and I know the bad, but I know them both, and I know where I'm deficient, and I just need to do these things better for the next six months. And if I just do those things better, we will grow by 50%." And here's the fun fact about this: is that once you get to a million a month, five million a month, 10 million a month, $100,000 a month, whatever, going from that to 50% more is a lot easier than going from zero to whatever number you were just at. So if you have your current thing, you forget how much you've learned about what you're in. You're in there for three years, five years, however many years you've been in real estate, right? A lot. And we forget about it. But this other thing has all of these booby traps all over it, right? This lady in the red dress has chlamydia, she's got daddy issues, she's got an ex-boyfriend with a gun who stalks her, right? You don't know yet because she presents the same. Because anybody on a first date can look good. Anybody on one sheet. It's like, "Hey, my buddy's making a killing on this." And he's like, "Oh yeah, I married her sister. Didn't tell you about the baggage, right?" That's part of it. And that's why the focus part is so tough.

And I had to define focus for myself. And I'll define two words for you because it's helpful for me. So one is commitment. What is commitment? A lot of you guys are like, "I'm committed." Commitment is the elimination of alternatives. Very simple. And so if you want to become more committed, you eliminate alternatives. And so, uh, there's an old story of this where the, uh, where the football coach asks one of the kids on the football team out to breakfast. And so, you know, they're sitting there having a good time talking about his game, talking about his future. He says, "You know, I'd like to play college ball." And he's like, "I think you could. I think you could play college ball." He's like, "But you might not too." And he's like, "Well, what do I have to do?" He's like, "Well, it depends." He's like, "Depends on what?" He leans in. He's like, "Are you interested? Are you committed?" He's like, "I'm, I'm committed." He's like, "I don't know if you are." He says, "You see your plate?" And he's got eggs and he's got ham on his plate. He says, "The chicken, the chicken's interested. The pig, the pig's committed." And the point there is that in order for that breakfast to occur, the chicken keeps having eggs over and over and over again. But that pig only has one breakfast at serving. And so the same way is that we have to eliminate alternatives. It's what we like. The, the word "decision" comes from Latin "diader," which means to literally cut off or to kill off. And so the idea is, what are you killing today? What really juicy, incredibly sexy opportunity that you know you could crush, do you turn down today because you made a commitment?

And I've, I've been thinking a lot about the decisions of my life that have had the biggest return. And the more I thought about this, the more I think that actually, I'll read this. I'll read this to you because I think it might, it might come across better that way. So I wrote this down, um, earlier today, which is: The best diet is the one you follow. The best person to marry is the one you stay with. The best business is the one you stick with. The thing that makes it the best isn't the thing itself, it's our commitment to it. And so there's a lot of different diets that work if you stick with it. There's a lot of different businesses that will work for you if you stick with it. But none of the diets will work if you don't. And none of the businesses will work either. And I think it's a very good framework. There's a perfect diet for you that's perfectly measured and would get you the absolute fastest results, but if you do not stick with it, it won't happen ever. And so it's not about the actual intricacies of the diet, it's about your willingness to stick it out.

And so when you listen to Bezos, and you listen to Steve Jobs, and you listen to Sam Altman, who was in charge of YC before he started OpenAI, they talk about this one thing. And they're like, "You know, the more I've thought about it, it's just persistence. It's just being willing to stay the course despite all odds, despite the many shiny objects that come your way, and just say, 'I get it. No.'" So commitment is the elimination of alternatives. And I measure focus by the number and quality of things I say no to. And so if you want to give yourself a reward cycle, which I like to do because the hardest of these ones that I struggle with is focus, is that every time I say no, I give myself a mental point. It's like, I'm focused. I'm making an active decision to stay focused because I know that if I just only stay focused, like, it's hard to imagine a guy or a gal who's an entrepreneur and does just one business for 50 years and consistently has the hard conversations and just says, "I'm going to get better. I'm going to keep learning. I'm not going to repeat the same mistake." And they do that for 50 years and doesn't become unbelievably successful. It's hard to imagine a world where that would exist. And so we have this blank check from the universe that says, "I guarantee that you will be successful no matter what if you do one thing, which is you just say no to everything else."

And so when I have these conversations, the woman in the red dress always presents differently. And that's why she's so sneaky. And there's always a very legitimate reason why you could make money with it. And the reality is, you could. But you can't do two things. You can't be CEO of two businesses. You can own multiple businesses, but I'm going to be real with you, you're not CEO of both and you're running everything, right? No, no, no. I've skilled myself out of the day-to-day. So if something happens in the business, what happens? My phone rings, right? You're not out of the day-to-day. If you buy a share of Apple, you're out of the day-to-day. All right, you're an owner. And so use that as your litmus test. Do I own this business, or does this business own me? If it owns you, then you're a CEO. Welcome to business, right? And so there's this big misnomer between "I'm an owner" and "I'm a CEO." And a lot of people say, "I'm a small business owner," but you really don't own the business for a very long time. Like, until you get to 10, 20 million a year, very tough to own a business. The business owns you. That's okay, because what else are you going to do, right? You're going to work anyways. So you have to be on the path. But I think it's good to have clarity around that because the amount of times it's like, "I've got this new opportunity vehicle." And people always quote my story back to me. They're like, "Hey, but you had the gyms, and then you started doing the turnaround business." Yeah, I was 26. And before that, I had nine businesses and I made no money. And so this was a big improvement for me, right? But the real question is not, "Did it work?" But, "Was there an alternative that would have also worked?" Which is, if I had just stuck with gyms, being super real at this point in my life, I probably have two or 300 locations, probably worth the same amount of money I'm now. And so there's the fallacy of success, which is, "If I do this thing, it will work." And the fact that it works meant that it was the right call. But you can have multiple outcomes that lead you to where you want to go. But when you straddle multiple, is where you guarantee that you'll never get there. And I'm just saying this, and I'm trying to beat this into the ground because one, I'm shouting at me, mostly, but also because it's probably a third of the conversations I have on a regular basis. And the crazy thing is that all the problems I just said have nothing to do with, "I need more leads," "I need to learn how to sell better," "I need to follow my leads faster," "You know, I'm not retaining customers." None of that. These are the things that get you stuck. These are very easy problems to solve. Market more, do more reps on the sales, reach out faster. These are not complicated things. But it's all this crap that we stay stuck in because we stay in these rock and hard place scenarios, which are the real core issues.

And the last problem, bonus, that I see on a regular basis that walks through these doors is you have a product and you don't have a business. So you sell one widget one time to one person. There's no backend, there's no upsell, there's no recurring, there's no revenue retention. That's from the strict definition of a business. It makes money, so it is technically a business, but it is not an asset that is valuable. And so that's something that you will consistently have to put inputs into rather than it be self-sustaining. And so I've always been in the go, you know, in the world, and probably you are too, where we're like, "I will solve any problem, no matter how complex, once." But I don't like having to solve them the same thing over and over and over and over again. But when you're in that business, you have to just keep doing the same thing over and over again. And the day that you stop is the day that it dies. Which really just means that it's an amplified version of you in terms of a job. Which again, is fine. But I would rather build an asset that I can own rather than just a slightly fancy or higher leverage job for myself, if I can afford to do it.

And so when you're thinking about this with your business, to be clear, it's selling a better or extra version or recurring version of whatever your thing is, so that people will buy again. Now, there are businesses where it is recurring rather than recurring. Coca-Cola doesn't have a subscription, but they know that I buy and I will buy again. And so if people are not buying your product again, then figure out why. And if your business is one that doesn't lend itself to that at all, that's one where I would say, look at the other businesses that are super billion-dollar businesses in your space. What have they solved that you haven't? And then that becomes your path. And if there is no business that is in your space that sells that one thing that's very big, not all businesses are worth owning.

And you might think, "Wait, Alex, I thought that I had to stick with the hard thing." And so the fundamental, this is the, a different rock and hard place. One of the quintessential questions of entrepreneurship is, "Do I push or do I pivot?" And so nine times out of 10, you have to push. It just means I have a problem that I don't know how to solve. And if you have a problem that you can at least define the problem, then you can try and solve it. If you have an issue that the market fundamentally, like wedding rings. If you can only sell one wedding ring and you have no desire to create more wedding rings and you're not a jeweler, then it's probably not the right business for you. Now, the caveat there is that there's probably a jeweler who that is the perfect business for and loves doing all sorts of wedding rings, and then also gets into the girls' rings and gets into multiple rings and, you know, expands from that because they have a specific avatar they can serve. So there's a version of this business that could work.

But businesses don't die. Entrepreneurs fade. Entrepreneurs lose their sizzle. They lose their love of the business. And so one of the things that has helped me stay in love with businesses that I have for longer periods of time, and I've had to learn these disciplines because that's what it takes to stick with something for a very long time. And if I know that sticking with something for a very long time is what's required to build this very big thing that I want to do, then I better learn that skill. And so learning to re-love new things in the business, which I like to frame as, "What do I not know how to do?" And so I love personal development. I think that entrepreneurship is one of the best paths to making yourself better because you have such a quantitative measure of saying, "Did you improve?" And so simply saying, "I don't know how to," rather than, "This business won't work because..." is a much more empowering frame. So rather than say, "Hey, this business won't work because the market doesn't like my stuff," you say, "I don't know how to market my stuff." "This business won't work because no one can sell like I can." No, "I don't know how to get someone else to sell like I can." That's solvable. And so simply reframing what I believe to be problems that I cast onto the universe as things that I cannot change, where I place the finger of blame, you flip to the thumb of accountability and say, "This is a skill deficiency." And because it is mine, I can change it. And so thinking about things from that perspective has really helped me be able to fall in love with the game of business because I can constantly feel and see myself objectively get better. These are skills I didn't have, and now I do have. This, I couldn't focus on anything for more than six months at the very beginning of my career. I'm more ADD than you, I promise. I have no direct reports. Zero. Can't manage people. I don't have the skill.

The question is, what return do I get on learning everything that Ilila has? Well, she spent the last decade doing it, so that's not going to be a good return on my time. And so, but for her to try and learn all the acquisition and marketing stuff that I know is going to not be a good return on her time. And so that's how we divide things up. And so I can go deeper and better on mine. And that's how you start filling out the holes in a business. Because fundamentally, every business operates, I'm trying to give a non-bodybuilding example, um, but you need every component of a car to work, right? Like, is the wheel more important than the engine? You need both. If you don't have an engine, the car doesn't move. You don't have wheels, the car doesn't move. You don't have a chassis, there is no car, right? Like, there's, there's these core components that have to exist. But once you have those things, if you have better grip on the tires, the car will go faster. If you have more cylinders in there, I don't know the car analogies, but you get the idea. If you have faster, the car goes faster. And so you can still have components that can get emphasized. But for the business to work, you have to have all the pieces to go from zero to one. But from one to N, it's how many of these things are we emphasizing? And that's where you can double down on things.

But being able to say, "The problem with this business is that this is the issue. This engine needs to be a 16-cylinder and it's an 8-cylinder." Okay, so I either have to learn how to build a 16-cylinder engine, or I got to find somebody who does, or I got to buy a 16-cylinder engine from somebody else, right? But those, that's how you have to approach it. And so continually relearning that process has helped me stick with things because I don't feel like I'm in the same business anymore. I feel like every six months I'm in a completely different business because the problems I'm solving are different.

And so I'll leave you with this one last thought, which is that number one, I genuinely believe if you love the business or space that you're in, you can take any business to $100 million. I like, I want to challenge somebody to tell me like a business they can't take $200 million a year. I think you can absolutely take any business $200 million a year. The second thing is that when you scale any business, no matter the market, at the highest level, your day is the same. You manage a handful of very intelligent people who do their jobs on your behalf with lots of leverage. That's the end result of all of these businesses, whatever business you're in. And so if you're in that spot where you're like, "I don't like the business I'm in," you're going to get to the same spot in a different business that you also won't like. You have to beat the boss so that you can eventually get to the place where fundamentally you're going to have a head of marketing, you're going to have a head of sales, you're going to have an IT head, you're going to have a head of legal, you're going to have a head of finance, you're going to have a head of ops and customer success. Every business has it, different words for different industries, but fundamentally those are the components. And so if you see that as the natural extreme that's going to occur in any business, the idea of switching businesses because you want to avoid what the natural stream will be is ridiculous because if you succeed, all roads lead there. And so that is one of my antidotes for, "Wait, I should switch because my day-to-day, what I actually do, will not change." And neither will yours. And so you have to push through. You have to confront the fact that it will suck. And you have to undo mistakes. And when you undo mistakes, it hurts extra bad. But the alternative is you never fix the mistake, you never grow, which I think is the larger mistake overall.

So those are the big five that people get in the rock and hard place for business. I see these every single time. I have these conversations over and over again. And everyone thinks that their situation is unique, that they can't raise prices because their market is special, right? They can't change the compensation because everyone will leave. Yep. And they're going to leave eventually anyway, so you might as well learn how to fix it now. And they think that in order to hit the goal, like they have to keep selling even though they're overextended, they have no one to help them. You're right, keep doing that forever. Tell me how that works, right? Each of these problems feels, in the moment, less bad to keep doing it. But what you have to do is confront it. And that's the boss that you have to beat at that level. So thank you guys so much for the ads. Hope you guys enjoyed the workshop. Appreciate you. And then