Transcription
I am in my 20s and in the last 2 years I've scaled an operation that's done over $7 million. I have hired and fired over 50 people, got scammed multiple times, got in different battles with different agencies and companies. And in that process, I have learned specifically five different things that I wish somebody told me when I started out. So, this video is five things that I wish I knew before I made the first seven figures in my 20s.
We're not going to accomplish this billion-dollar goal in one go.
"Professionalized camera, what is that?"
"Only one person on the planet that would buy this."
"We just did 100k."
Selling to rich people versus broke people. If I want to compete with people that are 10 times better than me, all I have to do is for you. So, we were already talking about selling to rich people versus broke people.
"The rich are not broke people."
"I only want to sell to rich people because broke people haven't taken responsibility for themselves. And so, they push their responsibility onto you. Since if I pay you $5,000 to come in here and then you dye my hair and do all this stuff and you're like, 'Hey, you have to use this shampoo.' A broke client would not use the shampoo and say, 'Kim, that was your job. You did my hair bad because I ruined it.' Even though I didn't use the shampoo here. A rich client would say, 'Hey Kim, I messed up. I didn't use the shampoo you gave me. I need you to fix it. Here's another $5,000.'" Right? Responsible.
Part one, don't sell to broke people. You've probably heard this before. You're probably not listening to it and reality is you're selling to broke people and you're just telling yourself that they're rich. I promise you, selling to broke people does not work and I'm going to tell you why so that you don't do it. Okay, I'm going to be a little bit harsh as you got to brace yourself, okay? The reason those people are broke is primarily because they have not taken responsibility for themselves. They've not taken responsibility for their actions. Now, I know this is harsh. I have sold to broke people before. The problem is that when you sell to broke people, because they don't take responsibility, they push all of the responsibility onto you. And so, they don't just expect the things that you will deliver on, but they expect their entire transformation to be dependent on you. Well, here's the thing. There is absolutely no possible way for you to ensure or guarantee somebody's transformation. Here's the reality. Selling to broke people can actually be quite easy sometimes, because if you frame it right, you communicate it well, you can sell it because you can sell a good transformation. And that's true. But, the fulfillment is one of the worst things ever. You having very, very low client satisfaction rates, or maybe even the worst, you getting sued for something because somebody had the wrong expectations joining a program.
The reason selling to rich people is so much better is not just because they have money, although that's true. It's because they know how to manage their wealth, and they only know how to manage their wealth because they take responsibility for their actions. I was just on a call last week with somebody who does $260 million in gross revenue every single year, onboarding them into a program that we sold for a client. And the reason being is because he didn't expect me to solve all of his problems. He expected me to give him something that he very, very specifically bought. And once I've given it to him, it is up to him to actually get transformed. So, do yourself a service, do your team a service, and do your customer service, and leave the transformation up to them to steward well. Is sell to the wealthy people, do not sell to the broke people. A quote from Alex Hormozi that I wish I listened to sooner was "Sell to the rich so that you can afford to sell to the poor." Or maybe just sell to the rich and never sell to the poor.
So, this next point is make money fast. For example, make money fast, we just did um 100k this month, and it was the easiest 100k I think I've ever generated. But here's my point. Myron Golden has a quote and he says, "It is easier to make a lot of money in a short period of time than it is to make a little money in a long period of time." And it sounds wild until you understand it. Here's how I explain it to you.
If you are young, you need a form of leverage in order to jump into business or into the marketplace. And one of those levers that you can use is speed. And this is what I told my entire team when we had 18 members, we were all in our 20s. And I told everybody, "Hey, you all have skills, you all have talents, but your highest leverage point is going to be speed. And so, if you suck at everything else, if you can just do things really, really fast, people will come and pay you just for speed." And so, this is why I say make money fast. Find a way for you to do things incredibly quick. Here's my understanding. If I want to compete with people that are 10 times better than me, all I have to do is be 10 times as fast as them. And so, if I look at these other competitors in the industry, I can look at them and they have 10 more years than I have because they're literally double my age. But if I can just be 10 times faster, then I can actually beat them.
"Yeah, we're at a building that costs $22 million. And it's a potential church building. Uh, so we just moved into one and like now we're looking at another one that's way bigger, way better. It's ginormous for a ton of different things. So, we're checking it out, considering it. Yeah, we're looking for security cameras right now."
"Okay, we are headed to the grocery store right now because we're doing a steak and sushi night tonight. Um, and while we're headed there, why not shoot some content, which is momentum." Now, I spoke on one of these other points. Your leverage point is speed and in the same way part of that leverage point is also momentum. And so you have to pay attention to the momentum that you're picking up. What does this mean? Well, a lot of the times we mix momentum in with doing a lot of things and those are not the same thing. In fact, doing a lot of things often on different projects, on different areas, on different business ideas, etc. etc. causes you to really get nothing done because of how sporadic you are. When I say momentum, it's momentum is taking consistent steps on the same project to move the same thing forward to one goal and not multiple goals. And this is the problem that every entrepreneur has when they start out. They try and do 15 different things. In other words, they do 15 different ideas and then someone else says do this so they go do this and they want to try another campaign over here. The people that are good at multitasking are just people that can switch between tasks really, really fast and effectively as opposed to actually doing two things at once. How do you build up momentum? Cons-
"There's Jeremy. There he is."
So momentum will show up in a couple different ways and the reason momentum is important is not just for your team uh but it's really important for your mental focus as well. When you are starting something out, it is the runway is huge for you because you see this idea that you want to get going and so there's like a million and one different things in there and you think you're really effective by doing all these different areas. You just end up making yourself incredibly ineffective because you don't really follow the laws of momentum. And so the way ways to get good at momentum taking consistent steps towards one specific goal and the second thing is to ensure that you actually know the steps that you're taking. If I asked you where you're going, you could probably define it to me quite well. But if I then asked you what are the steps you're taking to get there, you'd probably start listing out a massive brain dump of things that you're thinking about and not actual tasks in order. The question is are you able to sit down today and detail out every step that you're going to take to a certain goal? If you don't have that, then you don't really understand momentum and you won't build momentum at all.
So, the next point is um fast money versus sustainable money. This whole point is you have to look at the money that you're building. And I'll be honest with you, the majority of the money that we've generated or the revenue that we've generated has been fast money and not sustainable money, and it's not actually something that we can uphold very well. Could the revenue that we generate be completely independent of one human being and have an external unit of value? An external unit of value is anything outside of a person, something physical, something that holds value no matter who touches it. And so, you have to ask yourself, is the product that you have or the service that you have independent of a human being? Does it Do you have an external unit of value? If you don't have an an external unit of value, it doesn't mean that, you know, you have a terrible business. Totally fine, do it, but everything that I'm focusing on right now is not the fast cash. I live on the fast cash, but what I'm building is legacy. What I'm building is something that's far greater than me and even something that I would be able to hand to my kids. That's sustainable money. And I And sustainable money is anything independent of you, any external unit of value. So, even services that I'm providing, it's not very independent. I can make it independent by getting it to run off of other people, but even then it's not the most sustainable. So, I wish somebody told me this sooner because I would have structured things differently. Now again, just to clarify, there's nothing wrong with fast cash, but if that's the only thing you have, you will run into some change in a market or some brand change and you're going to massively regret building your entire business off of this. And I made that exact same decision. So, everything that I do moving forward, I have to ask myself, is this fast cash or is this sustainable cash?
"Where's the freaking mango juice?"
"It's like all the like the super healthy drinks."
"Yeah."
"No, nothing like that. Well, or just a steak. There's only one person on the planet that would buy this."
"Why?"
"That's not true. Dasha?"
"Bro, right here. I've never seen this in my life, bro."
"Dasha, you like mango juice?"
"What size is this? It's like a minute. But, why would you add peach to it?"
"You like mango juice?"
"Yeah."
"Thank you."
"I You guys don't like mango juice?"
"I love mango juice, but peach?"
"Bro, this yours?"
"Yeah."
"Wow. Bro, that's what he does, he makes sushi."
"Sushi, so I just got shrimp tempura and then crabs cuz you guys don't like raw fish."
"It's going to go so bad."
"Dasha, what's the name of your job?"
"It's fine."
"This is a a Nicaraguan blend."
"It's delicious."
"We can We can special with this recipe."
"I'd love to, yeah."
"Just wrapped up a game of pickleball, which means we got to do our final point. Now, I got to do a call to action, but I hate call to actions. So, if you like seeing somebody young building a or scaling a company into the multiple seven figures now and ideally eight figures pretty soon, and we're going to show you everything but the fluff. We're not going to be your traditional influencer showing you just the the glossy aesthetic stuff, although we like the cinematics, too. Then, go ahead and hit subscribe."
Um, the final point is knowing the difference between seasons and your calling. And so, when I was starting out, I really wanted to know or I was trying to find my calling. So, I was like, "Hey, if I'm called to do this thing, like this is my life mission, how do I find something that actually fits that?" There's a huge problem with that, and it's that there are seasons inside of a calling, not just a calling. Which means if you have a calling, right? You have like this mission that you're supposed to accomplish, you're not going to find that while you're young. But, the chances of you finding that while you're young are really low. And so, you have to understand that there are seasons. And so, there are there are roadblocks to get you there. There are stepping blocks actually getting you to this place, and you got to be okay with that. You're are going to accomplish this billion-dollar goal in one go. And if you really look into all of the millionaires and billionaires, none of them had their their one-shot wonder. They didn't do one thing and it worked really really well. They had multiple stepping blocks. So, be okay with your stepping blocks and go all in on multiple different seasons. I have tried so many different things. My dad got me into business when I was 12 years old. I was working with him and we started a graphic design business. We started a drop shipping business together literally when I was about 14 years old. Now, I obviously didn't understand anything at the time. I thought we were millionaires even though we made like no sales. But, those are the little stepping blocks that got us somewhere. Then as we got older, we had our first successful business business in real estate and that did really really well and then that ended after like 2 years and we moved into something else. The point is is this one thing that you're working on is probably not going to be the same thing you're working on in 5 years, 10 years, or 20 years realistically. So, what I'm not saying is don't I'm not saying don't look ahead. I'm not saying have vision for many many years. Definitely have that, but understand that there are seasons side of following us to talk.
"Is that a great thumbnail by the way?"
"Really?"
"Know if you want to hit like a pose or something."
"Okay, never mind. But, not be trying to not do the cringey vlog myself."
"Kind of look like you have a super car."
"I like I have a super car? I don't."
"like you have a super"
"I don't."
"What do you drive?"
"Uh I just got a Mercedes recently."
"How long you just How when did you start YouTube?"
"What did we start? Well, like 2 months ago."
"A couple months ago officially?"
"Yeah."
"You're not a professional ass camera. What is that? Is that an FX3?"
"Videographer."
"I just film him."
"Yeah, that's right."
"much you charge like per"
"Uh"
"Expensive, bro."
"So, you're like a pickle YouTuber?"
"No, absolutely not."
"No?"
"A pickle ball YouTuber. Uh no, I"
"I'm in the marketing"
"Oh, really?"
"for a couple years. So, we doubled on that and now we're kind of like jumping off this. You ever seen like the building in public kind of uh trend online?"
"What is it?"
"Building in public."
"Uh-uh."
"It's essentially where people like showcase their entire ball business or a new scale company or you do something real big"
"Yeah."
"and you show people the process."
"What kind of marketing?"
"Um, import products, conferences, events."
"Yeah, I do meta and he does Google."
"Nice."
"And we mainly do it for tattoo artists."
"Oh, that's crazy. You guys have like a agency?"
"Yeah. I mean, we're pretty much like freelancing it, but we do have like a little like we have a name and website and everything, but we we pretty much just freelance."
"Yeah. You guys doing good numbers so"
"Far enough."
"Kind of. I mean, we just started like 6 months ago. We have a few clients, but we're definitely trying to scale up."
"Perfect. All right. I got to dip, but I'll see you later."
"Take my video."
"Take care. I was sick. Sick addition to the video work?"
"Yeah. Did you get that?"
"Yeah, I did."