Transcription
But what's interesting is that like if you work a hundred times harder, you can sometimes get like a million times the payout. And so like the the top end of work still has disproportionate payoffs. And so I don't even I don't even like there are diminishing returns, but there's a point where you actually get like outsized returns for the effort.
Because like if you think about it from like a Olympic racing perspective, like if I work, you know, 10 times more than everybody else does, but I get gold and the next guy gets silver, the difference between gold and silver in running is everything, even though it's the tenth of a second. And so from an absolute perspective, there's diminishing returns. But from a relative perspective, I think you have exponential returns from being the best. From being number the difference between number one and number two can be, you know, like Uber and Lyft, like the difference is 10x uh the size.
And so I I have now been reinforced enough times of how much more work is required to do something excellent that now I understand it. And I think the one thing that has continued to level up over time for me and this is also for the audience is that like you don't even know how much you can work. Like you think you know how much you can work until you like really really work. And like with this presentation I was like I will not be the reason this is not good.
What do you think changed your perspective? Like flipped you into working 100x harder?
I think just my standards have gone up. Like I looked at the first presentation I ever gave and it's like it's embarrassing. I mean it's truly embarrassing. I think it has like 19 slides with like four bullets on each slide and I remember being I remember thinking man I spend a lot of time on this and a lot of time to me back then was like I spend a day on it like a full day like eight hours.
Yeah.
That's still me right now.
Yeah. And and I think that a little moniker that I have is just count in hundreds. It's like how many hundreds of hours did you spend on something cuz like when you start counting in hundreds like the the depth of understanding of something goes to such a such a large degree and it's like if I were to tell someone to edit a video, right? Like a short clip and I said, "Hey, um edit this clip uh in 30 minutes, right? And give it back to me." And I was like and they gave it back to me. I'm like, "Okay, I'm not going to edit it yet. if I give you another 30 minutes, could you make it better? And they're usually like, I can make it better another 30. So I give it back to him. I'm like, give it back to me another 30. He gives back to me another 30. And I say, okay, if I give you two more hours, do you think you make it better? There's a point to this.
Yep.
He's like, yeah, I think I make it better. Comes back to me. I say, okay, what if I gave you two weeks? Like, well, then I would totally approach it differently. I'd probably restructure the whole thing. like because the the amount of time sure work does expand to the amount of time that you allow it but I deem work done when there is nothing else that I can do to make it better that there's nothing else that I know of that I can make this better right um and that was the point that I got back with the book like I did 19 drafts I did four full rewrites and the last version that has gone out when I I you know read it front to back so many times now like there were I was like I can't take anything else out and I can't add anything to it and I can't make anything clear and I've written this whole thing in a third grade reading level and I've added 106 handdrawn images into this there's nothing else I can do and if it does not succeed that's fine but it will not be for lack of effort.
Real quick if you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like I'd like to give you a free gift so my team and I put together the $100 million scaling roadmap which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it into these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at. And the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so, I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconrain the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out on the thank you page. You can just book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.