The Game with Alex Hormozi - How To Make Money So Fast It Feels ILLEGAL | Ep 789
Episode Date: December 18, 2024Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make m...ore profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Wanna scale your business? Click here.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition
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The last three companies I founded and sold grew so fast it felt illegal.
Use Allen got to $1.2 million per month at the end of the first year.
Prestige Labs got to $1.5 million per month by the end of the first year.
And Jim Launch got to over $2 million per month by the end of the first year.
And I'm going to show you the strongest growth levers I used to get these results so that you can too.
Let's start with the first one, which is nobody knows you exist.
So here's what most people think when they think about their given market.
So let's say you're a local dry cleaner, all right?
You see that you're advertising on Facebook and so you see you have the whole pie and so you're happy. So that's just you
Then you have you plus one other person then all of a sudden you've got half of the pie
Then it's you plus three other people in the marketplace and now you feel sad
But the reality is the marketplace is significantly bigger than you ever give it credit for. There are so many humans on earth
And so this is what it looks like in reality. You're actually only only
advertising on one of four different methods and the way that you're doing it is only on one
slice of the medium and then within that you have your tiny little quarter that you are
taking up and so the marketplace has so many different ways they can communicate
using each of the methods of communication so for example if I'm talking about
content I'm like oh there's somebody else in my marketplace who's marketing on
Instagram okay cool so there's that but isn't there also other platforms you can do
it on and don't you think that maybe there's enough people in your marketplace to
satisfy your business. Probably. The amount of times that I would have a gym owner, for example,
who'd come to me and say, hey, there's this other guy in the marketplace who's now running
Facebook ads. I'm like, you only need 200 people in your gym to be incredibly profitable.
And right now, the last time I checked, you've got 1 million people in your city. And so you just
have to get 200 of them. And so if there's 10 others or 100 other gyms that are advertising your
area, even on the same platform, you still just need to get 0.000,0002% of that audience to just
come to you. And so you think that as these people enter, you're losing market share, but the reality
is you're this tiny little spec, and most people don't even know you exist. Now, the reason that I talk
about advertising more so much is that advertising is a boom. And if you're like, what's a boom?
It's actually a term that I started using internally for our business, which is a business
order of magnitude change. Fundamentally, if you think about a business, there are many things that you
can optimize. You can increase your close rate by 10%. You can increase your conversion rate on your
on your opt-in page by 10%.
You can increase your email follow-up.
All of those things are optimizations.
And so the problem is, with optimizations,
you can only go to 100%.
They're capped.
But with advertising, you can, in a very real way,
100x the amount of people who find out about your business.
And one of the keys that small business owners get stuck in
is they get in this little optimization mouse trap
where they're like, I need to move this.
Oh, I was at 10.1 to 1.
And now I need to be at 10.2 to 1.
It's like, dude, just get a hundred times the leads and your business will grow.
And if you're under $1 million in revenue, I can virtually guarantee that basically everyone on
earth doesn't know you exist.
And so the first four hours of every day should be dedicated to solving that problem and
going from obscurity to being aware.
And so we do that by doing the core for more, which is you have to do more outreach, cold
or warm, you have to make more content or you've got to run ads.
But the thing is, you don't need to do all of them.
You pick one, you go all in, and that's what you spend your first out.
four hours every single day on. So the next growth principle is instead of trying to beat your
competition, shrink your competition. What you want to do is overwhelm the marketplace so that you
drown them out. You want to be so loud that no one else can hear them. You shrink them into
irrelevance by comparison. There's two ways that you can become the tallest building, right? You can
knock everyone else down or you grow so that they become smaller in comparison to you. And so everyone
sees their little building and thinks, oh no, I should knock all my competitors down, right?
When in reality, all you need to do is build the biggest absolute building there, and the thing
is that you're going to block out the sun, and your shadow will be so big that no one can even
see these people.
And let me tell you a story about this.
When I launched my last book, $100 million leads, I spent a tremendous amount of time and effort
across, I think at the time we had 7-ish million subscribers or audience size across all platforms.
I emailed a bunch, I made a ton of content,
we spent money on ads, we did outreach,
we had affiliates going,
we had all these different channels going
to get as many people as possible to the launch.
And when I walk around Las Vegas, because I live here,
I will usually get stopped about three-ish times
when I do about a 60-minute walk.
Mind you, I walk in a crowded area,
so it's not like I'm just walking in the neighborhood
because then that would just be weird.
Anyways, and of course you should be recognized
for your neighbors.
But I'll get stopped by three people,
and every time for the month leading up to the launch,
I would be like, hey, you go to the book launch?
19 times out of 20, the people would look at me and be like,
what's the book launch?
And I was like, how do you not know about this?
Right.
But it was this wonderful reminder that most people,
when you get tired of your advertising,
most people don't even know your first name.
If you have deluded yourself into thinking
that you should only have to say something once
and somehow everyone in the entire world
has heard you say that thing,
you are kidding yourself.
You need to become a master
a variety in terms of how you can re-say the same thing in different ways. Taking the natural
extreme, there's this fallacy that most small business owners think and myself included for years,
I thought this, was that repetition in and of itself is somehow bad. So let me explain. There's
probably people on the internet. I personally follow a bunch of philosophy accounts. Most of the
philosophers are dead. And yet, I still love to see the quotes they have because they remind me of
things that I want to follow the way that I want to live and it's not like oh
another Seneca quote does this guy never give up it's like he's dead he hasn't
come up with a new quote in 2,000 years and yet I still like seeing the quotes
even though I know I've seen them before and oftentimes you serve that
role for your audience more than anything else we think that it's like oh I've
said this one thing therefore they have all changed other behavior immediately and
they never need to learn that again but the biggest lesson that I've
learned is that people need to be more reminded than they need to
to be taught. And in the off chance that you've received hate or you have a competitor who's
talking crap and it happens, this counts double. So instead of trying to beat them or prove them
wrong, you only have two options. Option one is you grow so big that no one can even hear them.
The alternative is that you kill them with kindness, which is that you do not beat them by
proving that you are right. You beat them by proving that you are correct. You beat them by proving that you are
kind and then by comparison they will look bad i can only thing i can tell you about having dealt
with plenty of it in my day is that on the occasion that i do choose to respond to hate i try to respond
with kindness and so someone can just absolutely tear me one and just say like this guy sucks he's
terrible whatever right i will then usually say hey you're right i'm a super flawed person
that being said it seems like you've developed like a big audience here and they seem to like
you and so congrats on your success right when someone sees that it's
very hard for everyone to be like, man, that guy sucks. It's just like, now, if I were to
try and list out all the points, all I do is invite more back and forth, which I don't want
to do, and it's a waste of my time. And so instead, you start all hate responses with you
are right, because it's all they want to hear. And there's really nothing else to say after that.
Eminem has responded to hate in two ways publicly that I absolutely love. So the first is that
when Will Farrell confronted him about some things that Afrojack had said to him, he said,
hey, Afrojack's been talking trash,
do you have anything to say about it?
And Eminem just said, who?
And he said, and then Wilfarrell repeated the statement.
And he just looked at him and he was like, who?
And he was like, okay, yep, that's what I thought.
And so the first is, I'm so big, I can't hear him.
The secondary is that you kill them with kindness.
Right, so you either grow so big
that no one can see them or hear them,
or you meet them where they're at on a different game,
which is you play on kindness and grace.
And so in eight mile,
Eminem tries to claim all of the flaws that he has
so that no one else can say anything.
And so I get hit on a lot, not like that,
for talking about working a lot,
people are like, that's not healthy.
And of course, I try to put disclaimers in every video.
I'm like, do whatever you want.
I get hit on for like, oh, I think he's trying to make money.
Duh.
I try to say it all the time.
But people assume that I am trying to hide this for my own.
Of course I'm trying to make money.
I'm in business.
That's the whole point I do this.
And that way, if I always start,
with I'm here to make money.
When I do something nice, then people are like,
oh, well, that was nice of him.
Rather than me claiming that I have to be
this super kind whatever person, then when I try and make money,
people are like, oh, shake their finger at me.
Like, it's not good.
I try and learn from Eminem and just take all of the negatives
that I can think that somebody would possibly say,
and then just claim them as my own.
Because yes, we are all flawed, and none of us are perfect.
And so for some reason, we are bothered
when someone else points out our imperfections,
that we would readily state ourselves.
We know we have deficiencies.
If I had one thing that I wanted my
life to represent. It's do what you want. But don't complain about what you've got. So if
you're not willing to do the things to get what you want, don't complain that you don't have
them. You know, in this particular incident, it's like, could I have tried to say, hey, you know,
we make your annual revenue every other day? I could say that. I could say that our goals are not
the same. One billion is not the same as a million, right? It would be the same as you making
$200 a month at a lemonade stand versus somebody who's doing $20,000 a month to give a proportional
comparison. So of course the effort that I have is outsized. And so what's interesting is that
oftentimes hate if you boil it down comes down to I do not prefer the way this person does
things I have a different preference and it's like great right like I make money one way
he makes money another way and therefore he is wrong it's like no you just do the way
you want which is awesome because you do it their way and they do it their way and the people
who attract to that will do that and people attract to you will do yours and great I mean of course
there's engagement baiting and things like that because you know people people want to get views
and all that and I respect it I get it but big picture I think you can't
take it, you can't take it personally because whenever I fall into that little trap, I think to
myself, I'm a relatively developed monkey that is sitting on a little blue marble in a solar
system that's in one of a billion galaxies, and I'm worried about some screen that has words on it
on a made-up language that we had in the last 1500 years of how we communicate face noise to
each other. And when I think about that, I think, you know, this would be pretty silly for me to
like ruin a day over. So the third big growth lever, and this one's massive, is clear, not
clever. All right, so what do I mean by that? Well, when I looked at the highest converting ads
that I had run, and I do this pretty regularly, I look for different components. Sometimes I'm
like, what's the hook? Sometimes I'm like, what's the color scheme? What's the visuals that are
being displayed in the first however many seconds? In this one particular pass, I just looked at the
grade level of the language that was being spoken. And the reason I looked at that, it was, I think
it was, you know, one or two election cycles ago. I had heard this research study that had
stated that the president who spoke in the lowest grade language
was the one that won the election over and over again.
And when I heard that, I see presidential elections
fundamentally as massive brand campaigns.
I see that as they were able to communicate a message
to a higher percentage of the population
because they lowered the barrier to entry of comprehension,
meaning more people got what they said.
And so when I hear that, I thought, man,
I like to use all these big, fancy college words
and no one knows what I'm saying.
And so all I do is,
feed my ego not my bank account I made one of my big marketing rules clear not
clever and so you want to take whatever communication is look at your landing
pages look at your ad copy look at the words you're saying in your content
and say does a third grader understand this and the point that some people try
to make as a counter is like oh I don't want to talk down to my audience no
when you speak in a more broken down manner you help the experts understand
it more easily and you help the beginners understand it for the first time
And so it's not that experts are all of a sudden saying,
oh, no, I don't believe that.
Because listen, we get tons of very big companies
that come to Acquisition.com for investment.
And the guys who run those companies, very intelligent.
I try to make my videos in a way that people can't understand them
because who do I prove when I use a big word
and then all of a sudden, three quarters of the audience can't understand it?
And if the point of me making these videos
is to make real business education accessible for everyone,
part of it making it accessible is making it interesting,
making it fun, and making it comprehensible,
which is just a fancy word for understandable.
What you guys don't see behind the scenes is that I will typically self-edit.
And so I said distilled earlier in a sense and then I said broken down for experts.
It was because I said distilled and I was like, I have to use a different word, broken down.
And then I said comprehensible and then I said fancy word for understandable.
And so I try to constantly catch myself in this and it's also made me a significantly more effective leader.
So if I'm trying to communicate with my team, I'm not trying to say big words.
I don't want to impress them.
I want to change what they do.
it's a great litmus test to show whether you actually understand what you say you understand.
Because if you can explain it to a third grader, and this is Richard Feynman who said this is famous physicist,
he said if you can explain to a third grader, then you understand it.
If you can't, you don't, and you need to understand it better so that you can break it down.
And so the broader the audience, the broader the analogy, and the simpler the language.
I'll give you an example.
One element of this is the gray language of the words you use.
The second is what visuals or stories you use to depict them.
If I'm talking to mechanics, I might use an analogy
where I relate something they understand cars
to something they might not understand a business, right?
If I wanted to teach a specific concept.
If I was talking to the same,
I was trying to teach the same concept,
but I was teaching it to realtors,
then I'd probably use a house analogy.
If I was teaching to baseball people,
I'd probably use a baseball analogy, right?
If you have a narrowed down audience,
you will increase comprehension
by using analogies that they all understand.
If you're talking to a broader audience, then you need to have a broader slice of the market,
probably a more human experience that all of them have.
So if I'm talking to everyone, I might talk about food, I might talk about sleep,
I might talk about driving, right?
Because most people do that, assuming I'm not talking to children.
You have to match the analogy to the history of learning from the people that you're trying to communicate to.
And this is what takes your marketing and your advertising,
puts it on steroids and to put this to the test this is something you can do right now
look at whatever emails you send run them through a reading a reading grading
level app keep working on it until it's below fifth grade minimum third grade
if you're awesome and then send it I did this to our email follow-ups and had a
50% increase in conversion I didn't say change anything about what I said but I saw
that as I got 50% more people to understand because the goal here is
is to decrease the friction of comprehension.
So if we think about the elements of value,
speed, ease, time delay,
these elements are all impacted by complexity.
And so something complex takes longer to understand.
It takes more effort, right?
And it's harder, right?
And so instead what we wanna do is say,
okay, how do I make it easy and faster?
Okay, well, then I'll just speak in a way
that everyone understands.
The next massive growth lever is proof over promise.
All right?
And so what this means is that,
In my earlier days, I would spend so much time on my promise, right?
I wrote a whole book on promises, which is basically offers, right?
And I would obsess about the offer.
And the offer is super important, but the only thing that's more important is proof.
All right, so let me give you two hypothetical examples.
Let's say that you've got Business One that's selling Thing One and Business Two that's
selling Thing Two.
Well, let's say they still compete for more or less the same audience.
And Business Two says, we'll do X, we'll do Y, we'll do Z, we'll do W, and we'll
guarantee X, Y, and Z, right? And you look at their reviews and they've got a five-star rating
and they've got one review. The other company says, we'll do X, and they've got 11,382-5
stars and they've got a 4.7. Who do you buy from? This guy, obviously, but why? This guy
has a better promise, because you believe this guy. And so you want to have proof up to your
eyeballs. Proof is your single highest priority as a business owner or marketer or advertiser
or promoter for your business. It is the one thing that you prioritize. Before I enter any new space,
launch a new product, the first thing that I do is try and get beta users. I get people to do,
I work for free in exchange for testimonials, reviews, and feedback. And sometimes referrals,
if I'm lucky. But in the beginning, that is the highest, most valuable thing that you can do.
People will say things like never work for free,
and you only hear that from people who don't make that much money.
If you make a lot of money,
you will know that you spend so much time in the free phase
because getting the product right is so important,
and is such high leverage.
The proof process both makes you convicted
because you get the opportunity of many feedback loops
to make your product better, so that you then can collect
the positive feedback that you can then advertise
to get more people like those customers.
The most compelling way to advertise anything is show, don't sell.
If I just stand here and said nothing, and I said, and I just stated the facts and told the truth, and I said, I have 11,382 reviews and our average review is 4.7, and I make pasta really good.
And then, or I have one review from my mama,
and I make super fragile, calliolistic, expeialidocastia pasta guaranteed.
Which one do you like better?
Obviously, this one.
You don't need to say much more.
The proof is the pudding.
So the most important part of a message is the messenger themselves.
They're inextricably linked from the thing that's being communicated.
And this is what people seem to miss when they're making content,
which is why I'm a big.
big ad video, do epic stuff first, then talk about what you did. And if the stuff that you didn't
do is epic, focus more on the doing epic stuff, not on the talking about it. I started this channel
with a commitment to a vendor saying, I'll make three YouTube videos a week. And I was busy,
and I was like, I'm just going to head a webcam, and I'm going to talk to the camera. And that is
how this channel was started. The only reason, in my opinion, that people decided to listen
was because I just so happened to have sold a company for just under $15 million. And so,
Because of that, there was proof
that I was able to deliver on the promise,
whereas somebody else might have
a totally beautiful studio and have all these things,
but they just forgot the one most important thing,
which is why should I listen to you?
Either is gonna have to be proof
that you generated for yourself
or proof from other people saying
that you help them achieve that thing.
So the next big thing is the hook.
Now you're like, okay, I've heard about hooks before,
not the way that I'm gonna talk about it, all right?
So the hook is greater than everything.
Now, you're like, wait a second,
I thought proof was greater than everything.
Well, the proof is gonna be contained in the thing,
but no one's gonna see the proof unless you have a good hook.
The one thing that I think has consistently been reinforced,
and it's just like a greater and greater percentage
of my time is allocated towards this one part
of my advertising that grows my company the most,
is I search for the best hooks,
and then I don't convince myself
that I'm more creative than I think I am,
and I just keep using the ones that work.
So think about it like this.
These are the only four things
that you can do to advertise any business.
You can warm outreach,
So reaching out one-on-one to people you know, cold hour reach, reaching one-on-one to people you don't know.
You can run paid ads, which is going one-to-many to people you don't know.
Or you can post content, which is one-to-many to people you do know.
And in each of these four situations, you can double, triple, 5x the amount of people who open and respond,
who click and watch your ad, who watch your content all the way to the end.
And if you do something like that, and you do increase the click-th rate by, go from 1% to 5% or 2% to 10%, which absolutely can happen.
When you do that, you in a very real way can, 2x, 3x, 4x, 5X your business with just that one thing.
Remember I talked about earlier that advertising is a boom?
It's an order of magnitude change.
Well, what other one thing can you just tweak that then opens up the flow to the entire business
based on how good the first five seconds are, or the first one second?
In thinking about hooks, I think about both the visual hook as in what's how much.
happening, what that people can see. And then there's the auditory or verbal hook, which is what are
the actual words that are being communicated. Right now, we've reviewed our top YouTube videos of all
time, and I made a video about six months ago saying what we found, which is our hook formula is
proof, promise, plan. And this is a force multiplier on any kind of advertising you do. And so when I
think about all the different things, all the effort that goes into advertising a business, if I can just
do one thing. And the crazy part about hooks is they're the shortest part. They're the shortest part of
the whole darn thing.
This is where David Ogilvie says,
if you have written your headline,
you've spent 80 cents of your advertising dollar.
The more advanced the advertiser is that I meet,
whether it's a content creator,
somebody who's on outbound, somebody who makes paid ads,
the more obsessive they are on the first frame,
the first impression that someone gets,
because they know, one, it increases the likelihood
that the person's gonna watch the rest of it
and then potentially buy, and then two,
it changes their entire perception of what follows.
We actually looked at this,
for speakers at an event, which was if we changed the intro,
the one to two minute intro that we had for a 60 minute talk,
the person's net promoter score,
so what people rated them in terms of how good they were,
changed massively, even though the actual presentation
was the same.
So simply how we framed the presenter,
the person had even gotten up on stage yet,
changed how everything they did afterwards was perceived.
If there's two minutes that could influence
the score that you get, the customer satisfaction,
the amount of prospects,
The one thing to focus on is nail the hook.
Let me show you the force multiplication of this.
We just started reviewing short form content on the content team
and just doing a more regular activity of saying,
like, what are the things that make content do well?
And there was a video that we're like,
we think this thing is good.
All we did is we took the same video that got like 40,000 views,
and then we just chopped out the first three seconds
that was kind of like getting into the video
before the actual real hook was delivered.
And by sniping those three seconds
and then just starting where the hook really was,
it went from a 40,000 view video
to a 780,000 view video.
So you're talking about a 19x improvement.
So I'm talking about 1%, 2%,
I'm talking 19x.
That is why obsessing over the hook is so important.
So the next big growth lever
that gave us the super fast growth was more.
So I talk about more, better new
in the Leeds book as one of the three strategies
that you can use to grow any business.
So I talk about more,
better and new as the three primary strategies of growth.
You either do more of what's already working,
you do what you're doing to make it work better,
or you do something entirely new.
Now, most entrepreneurs love doing new stuff,
and that's why it's called Shiny Object Syndrome,
and it's a cancer, and you should get that looked at.
The very boring answer is the mundane more.
You have to master more.
And it's going, instead of zero to one,
which is what most people love doing,
oh my God, I finally got it to work,
but actually doing one to end, which is, how do I do is this thing as many times as seemingly possible without wanting to kill myself?
Here's the actual math explanation of this, is that more is typically the highest risk-adjusted return strategy.
All right?
And so what that means is if you can do something and you already know it works, the likelihood that the next thing you do works is much smaller.
And so this is why once you have a control, meaning you have a specific landing page or ad or copy,
or email that you know converts whenever you deviate from a high converting
advertisement the likelihood that the variant is going to beat it is typically
low and so you have to try a bunch of variations because all you're doing is
messing something messing something up that actually already works and so let me
give you an example if you had one sales guy and he's closing at 30% well
you could try and obsess to get him to 35 or 40% and that would be material
you get a 25% lift
overall, 30 to 40% is a 25% improvement.
But you know what would be even cooler?
Just hired three more guys.
And then you have a 4x or a 300% improvement.
It's like, I could get a 25% improvement
or I could get a 300% improvement.
And me trying to change up the sales script
also has a significant shot of me taking it from 30
down to 20, because it's a change.
And so here's the thing is that when you change anything,
you guarantee you incur the cost of change,
but you do not guarantee that you get the benefit
change. And so in each of the core four methods, you do more outreach, which is cold or warm.
You go from 100 reach out a day to 200 reach out a day. Paid ads, you go from $100 a day to
$200 a day. You go from posting content. You go from posting once a day to twice a day.
Those are how you do more. Again, when I talk to the most experienced advertisers that I know,
the most experience business people that I know, the most common thing we talk about is we kind
of laugh in the back room of like if people just don't know how much more they can do.
That's the real.
Is that when I have conversation with small business owners, they're like, hey, I don't
think I can do any more ads.
You know, I'm running, I'm already running a thousand dollars a day.
I'm like, I mean, dude, there's businesses that run like $2 million a day.
You usually have so much more runway than you think you do.
Sometimes you just need someone ahead of you to be like, dude, you can like 10x this
and nothing's going to change.
But they think because of whatever mental limitation they have are like, you've never
spent that much money on an ad before.
You've never made that amount.
Is it going to hurt my account?
No, they want you to make good content.
Is it going to hurt my ads?
No, they want you to spend money.
Is it going to hurt my heart?
You're going to people who've never met you before.
So why would they know that you've sent it to another 100 people?
Right?
Is that there's these perceived fears, but most of the times it's just between your ears.
Yeah, I'll tell you guys a quick story about this.
So when I had my first, I would say, real business, which is my first location in my first gym,
I had a mentor, and he was a really good local marketer.
He had a strategy for his tanning salons where he would bring in, I mean, thousands of customers.
every single quarter.
And what he did was he would put out flyers.
He just put flyers on cars and then had like a free VIP gift card
and people would come in and redeem them and he'd flip them into memberships.
And so I figured, okay, I'll just run the same play.
I did the flyers and I put 300 flyers out and I waited by the phone being like,
oh my God, I'm going to get 300 people in here.
It's going to be sick.
What happened?
Well, my phone only rang once from the flyers and when I picked up the phone,
the guy was like, hey, did you put the flyer on my car?
my car and I was like yeah I did like what time do I didn't but he cut me off and he was like
you damage my Mercedes and I was like oh click and I I didn't know what to do as soon as I I
and thankfully he never called me back because I definitely didn't have the money to fix any Mercedes
at that time I called my mentor back up you know a week or two later once it was clear that no one
else was going to call I said he said hey how the flyers work out and I was like well they didn't
work out at all actually you know I was like taking some attitude with him he was like oh
what was your test size and he like he didn't take the bait he was like oh what was your test size
I said, well, what do you mean?
He was like, well, like, would you test with before you, like, did the real campaign?
And I was like, oh, well, I mean, I put 300 out.
And he was like, 300.
He's like, you can't know anything with 300.
I was like, what do you mean?
He's like, I test with 5,000.
He's like, and then we put out 5,000 a day for 30 days.
I was looking at his results from 150,000 flyers over 30 days
and comparing them to.
my results of 300 in a day and once I saw that juxtaposition I was like got it I will
never make this mistake again it was very embarrassing for me because I was on the
right path I just didn't do enough and so one of the big meta lessons of this is
that what presents as volatility is typically a symptom of low volume so if you're
like man I only get like you know a sale every week or every other week it's kind of
Like, you know, most days I don't get a sale and then every once in a while I get one.
It only appears volatile because you're doing so little per day.
But if I looked at your year and saw that you closed about, let's say, 12 customers in that year,
you closed one a month, for example, every three or four weeks you get a customer,
well, all I would do is look at your entire advertising activity for the year and say,
okay, if we wanted to get 12 customers a day, we would have to do 365 times more advertising than we currently do.
And if we did that on a daily basis,
we would get 12 customers a day.
And so you just take your total calendar horizontally,
and then you flip it vertically for a day,
and that is how much volume is required.
And so most people just think that it's like,
oh, they can't be doing more than twice as much as me.
But in my experience, the people who are crushing it
literally are doing a thousand times more than you.
And that's the part that like,
until you sometimes you hear it
or you have someone ahead of you say it,
it doesn't become real for you.
And it's why I make these videos is to try
and push as much out of my brain
and history so that you can just get the story
without the scar.
And that's the whole point.
So once you're like, okay, I have something that's working,
I should just do way more of that, awesome.
Well, the next thing, the next power lever here
is word of mouth, and it's not the way that you think.
So word of mouth, people are familiar with referrals,
you know, customers tell other customers
or to other prospects that your stuff is good.
What a lot of people don't understand
is that negative word of mouth
is significantly stronger and faster
than positive.
Disney did this big study where they found
that it takes 37 tragic moments to make up
for one magic moment versus there's basically
like a 5x versus 37x on,
if someone has a good experience,
they tell five people,
if someone has a bad experience,
they tell like everybody.
A new business owner often will get customers pretty cheaply.
And then all of a sudden costs start going up.
And part of the reason that costs go up faster,
because you can actually put math to this,
which is understanding the difference between CPM,
which is cost per impression,
and it's like, why is it M, it's more,
which is French for thousands, so cost for a thousand impressions,
versus CPL, which is cost per lead, all right?
And so if your CPMs more or less stay the same,
but your cost per lead has 2xed,
or 3xed, or 4xed, well, if it's not costing you more
to reach those people, then it means that fewer of them are responding.
And if that's the case, and you're just going to still
relatively warm markets, the issue is that
instead of having positive word of mouth working
for you, which should be actively lowering the amount of cost
that it takes to get a new customer,
you have word of mouth working against you.
And so people who would otherwise purchase from you
heard something negative and then choose not to.
And so now all of a sudden you have to reach three times
the amount of people because two out of the three people
who would have gone and bought your thing, heard it was bad,
and then now you only have one person who's just heard nothing.
Over time, the percentage of the audience
that's neutral or hasn't heard of you
get smaller and smaller and smaller.
And so it's way harder to grow off a word of mouth
that's positive, but it's really easy
to get crushed on negative word of mouth.
And for whatever reason,
no business owner ever claims
that they have negative word of mouth.
But I can tell you, half of you are below average.
That's a fact.
And this is why I emphasize the proof over promise
earlier on so much,
because if I'm gonna get negative word of mouth,
which I know I am if I'm starting out,
I wanna keep that as concentrated and quiet as possible.
I don't want anybody to know, right?
And so of course I'm not gonna charge the money
because the last thing I wanna do
is also have their money when they're upset.
So it's like, hey, I'm making this trade,
you're gonna get stuff, it's probably not be that good,
my only ask is you give me feedback, right?
Tell me how I can make this right,
tell me how I can make it better.
And when you ask those types of questions,
you get the types of answers
that can ultimately create more value for the customer.
And then once you get positive feedback,
positive feedback, positive feedback,
now you have something that people actually want,
then you can need to introduce strangers to it.
And of course, you're gonna roll into the next issue,
which is, okay, how do I have to do I,
keep that consistent because now it's not me doing everything I've got a team and we'll get into that so the next big growth lever is steal from
Yourself and so everyone's like oh he's just steal from his competitors no so think about it like this all of your competitors are copying your stuff and taking what's working
When you find something that's works keep doing it
Deviation from what works is more likely not to work
Think about it like this if you demolish a building so let's say we build a building and it takes us two years to build a building
Demolishing it might take five minutes.
Just put a bomb, boom.
Because the place of the bricks and the steel in that building,
every other potentiality that those bricks could go to create not a building.
But there's only one placement of that brick in steel that creates a building.
And so you have unlimited options for destruction and only one for solution.
And so when you do find something that works,
the likelihood that when you change it and you move the brick and you move the scaffolding,
that you destroy the building is very high.
Something can literally go anywhere except for the right place.
And so you can have more options and all of them be wrong.
So one of our portfolio companies, which is very large, hired a new advertising director.
And that advertising director came in with lots of new ideas.
And so the founder, because he wanted to teach an important lesson to the advertising director, said, sure, let's do all of your ideas.
And so he sat there, he said the scripts, he recorded all these ads, he took multiple days to do it.
And what ended up happening is that they ran all the ads and they didn't work.
And so he said, hey, crazy idea.
What if we use the same hook that's been working for three years?
And they used the same hook and the ads worked.
Think about it like this.
Nike on its second year after Just Do It wasn't like,
hey, just do it's kind of old.
Let's switch it up.
It's like when you find a message that converts,
you keep hammering the message.
When you find the ad hooks and you find the processes that work well for you,
most times you'd be better served
just continuing to reuse it
because you will get bored of it
far before your customers ever do.
So believe it or not,
there's actually math to support this.
So Sergei, Bryn and Larry Page,
I can't remember which one of them,
is like a brilliant mathematician
and actually was able to prove this ratio out.
So when you're stealing from yourself,
you want 70% of all of your effort
to go into basically carbon copying
the thing that works.
And this works across all functions.
This works for a sales script.
This works for product.
This works for reinvestment activities
like this rule works.
The second is adjacent.
So something that's just like one degree removed.
Right?
So it's close to the core of what you normally do.
Okay, so instead of saying,
starting a school community is the fastest way
to start an online business, right?
I could say that would be a hook
and it's a hook that worked.
I could say one of the fastest ways
to start an online business
to start a school community, right?
That would be a variation
of something that we knew that those words weren't,
but it would be adjacent to it,
not the exact carbon copy, but similar.
Now, 10 is, that means that one out of 10
of the things that you're putting your effort towards.
All right,
would be something that's brand spanking new,
completely out of left field.
And when you look at your effort in your business,
I can almost guarantee you that you have this flipped.
And I only say this because I speak from experience,
is that this is what I would do.
I would spend 70% of my time on new crazy things, new ideas,
all the stuff that excited me.
And then 20% I'd be like, oh, yeah,
I'll do something kind of different from what I was doing before.
And then 10% I'll be like, fine, I'll maybe.
And this is a maybe.
Most of times like, oh, I already used this.
that, use that hook once, I don't want to use it again,
I don't want to use the same hook that worked before
in another ad.
It's silly.
Also, a different version of this from an advertising perspective
of the 20% is you use the exact same hook,
we have a different background.
So it's just like a different variation.
So it's like I could wear a different shirt,
I could have a different setting,
and I could still deliver the same hook,
and to me that would still be kind of a 20% variation.
So once you're done stealing from yourself,
then let's talk about emotional versus logical buyers.
This is a huge monstrous increase in business for me.
Have you ever heard from,
the marketing world, there's logical and there's emotional buyers.
I had heard it growing up and I kind of repeated it over and over again because I hadn't
really thought about it.
I don't actually think that's true.
And so let me explain.
I actually think that there's a continuum of buyers that people sit on and you've got people
who require more information, so they're high info buyers, and then you've got people who require
less information.
There's two elements of this.
One is their information requirement and secondarily how much info they have received.
And so you could have a high info.
buyer that's further closer to this dollar sign here that only needs a little bit more
information in order to buy and then you have some people that just generically buy lots of stuff
everybody loves those people of course but guess what everybody fights over those people
the thing is is that the amount of low information buyers is like this the amount
of high information buyers is an order of magnitude or multiple orders of magnitude
greater only crazy people buy immediately it's very normal for people to want to have
more information before making a decision
When we think about our advertising,
the reason that the direct response community
typically can't grow very large businesses,
most of the time,
is because they only advertise to these people,
and this pool of buyers is significantly smaller.
But the reason building a brand, for example,
and investing in an audience is because you're trying
to move them down this line.
Now, when I heard this in the earlier days of my career,
I was like, I don't have time for that, I need to make money.
I get it.
Sure, in the beginning, you just advertise the six inch pots.
But when you want to scale, you have to educate a higher percentage of the audience because they will require more to buy.
The way to move people through this is something that Eugene Swartz pioneered in his book, Breakthrough Advertising.
And he talks about the five levels of awareness.
So he has unaware people, so people have just no idea about anything.
The next is problem aware.
so they have some sort of pain, you have solution aware, you have product aware, and you have
most aware. So those are the five stages. Now, a customer will basically move in this direction,
going from unaware to most aware. If you want to go to broader and broader audiences to get their
attention, the unaware audience, you typically have to go off of broad curiosity. And so if you've
ever seen those crazy like ads that are like weird articles like, you know, Arizona State,
blah, blah, blah, has this new blah.
Like, they're trying to go after a massive audience of people
who have no idea what's going on.
That new, you know, scientific breakthrough
could lead you to buying a supplement.
It could lead you to buying a weight loss thing.
It could lead you to buying some sort of equipment.
It could lead you to buying insurance.
Like, it could go in any direction.
But it's the curiosity that gets them at.
Problem aware would be something to the extent of like,
do you wake up to pee three times a night?
Does it hurt when you bend over to tie your shoes?
Do you get out of breath when you play with your kids?
Those are going to be problem wear.
Now, they, again, that could lead you to a supplement, that could lead you to insurance,
that could lead you to whatever, but it's a slightly more aware person.
At least they're problem aware.
Solution aware is that somebody knows of the potential things that they could buy and you're
helping them select between them.
Product aware is any of a more micro level.
And most aware is typically your existing customers.
So here is where you just make offers, right?
This is why the book offers is where I started because the people who are here is the
tiny audience here and so you just make an offer to get them to buy. But that only works for this
tiny audience. So you will make money quickly doing that, but you will also cap yourself quickly.
In an effort to figure out, okay, well, how much should I allocate between these most aware,
less info people and the maybe problem, unaware, high information people who require more
education in order to make a purchasing decision? Well, I had one of the most enlightening
conversations I've had in a really long time with Ben Francis, who's the CEO of Jim Shark,
and then he introduced me to Chris Davis, who's the CMO of New Balance.
And so we had an awesome conversation talking about what Chris has done at New Balance
and helped them just skyrocket their sales.
What they did is that when he took over 30% of their advertising budget was going to here,
was going to the broad awareness level, storytelling, emotional stuff.
And then 70% was basically geared towards buying shoes, saying, hey, go buy these shoes.
What he did when he took over was that he flipped them.
that he ended up with 70% going to big, high-level pairings,
endorsements, specific athletes that they wanted to recruit,
that they felt represented their brand,
and only 30% of their advertising budget
went towards actually telling people that they had shoes
and that they were for sale.
After he made that flip, here's the crazy part.
It took 18 months for them to see the return on that budget.
And so if you're in a rush, this isn't going to work.
But if you're in a rush, you're never going to get big anyways.
Keeping this ratio made this concept tactical for me.
And so when I think about my marketing effort, my marketing dollars,
and most importantly how I measure it, my marketing impressions,
I want to make sure that 70% or more of the advertising impressions
that someone's going to get are going to be around the pairings that I want
of me giving something rather than asking.
So when we look at this ratio, this is actually super well studied between 70 and 30% here.
Because right now, it's actually three and a half to one.
is the ratio that has been studied to basically not lose audience.
And so if you look at television, for example,
and they've already studied,
how many commercials can we jam into the show
before people stop watching?
And so they figured it out that it was every three and a half minutes of content,
they could basically put one minute of advertising it.
If you look at your Facebook news feed,
for every three posts you get when you scroll,
you'll get one ad.
And the platforms that go the fastest
have a larger percentage of this give,
and a smaller percentage of ask.
TikTok for years had zero ads on the platform
and just wanted to grow as virally as possible
and they acquired more users
because they had to give first, give all the time strategy.
The fact that they settled on this ratio
and it has been corroborated, fancy word for it,
it's worked in multiple other places,
made me think, wow, there's something to this.
And so this makes this concept
of how do I balance high information buyers,
people that need more brand,
people that need more education prior to purchase,
with me making money is that you basically start with that ratio, add patience and time,
and then it becomes a snowball that compounds unto itself.
And then you will get to a point in the future where you're still, you're doing so much more
than you could ever possibly do if you only focused on the direct response, on the less
information, but you're actually still digging the well for what you're going to do next year.
And so basically you can see when a founder stops running a business and then the corporate
execs come in because what they do is they flip the ratio, they basically
pull forward demand from the future. The founder dug the well and then they just suck all the
water out of the well, but then they didn't dig the next well. And so you always are to be ahead of
demand. B2B businesses and B2C businesses do this differently. And this was something that took me
a really long time to figure out. And so B2C businesses, so like business to consumer, businesses
will typically do these types of pairings in terms of high information buyers by telling emotional
stories, making associations, getting endorsements from athletes and influencers or organizations
that represent the values that they think resonate positively with their ideal audience.
Once they do that, they then can place the product next to those associations so that they
can then pair them and then the person wants to buy the product as a consequence.
That is what it looks like in a B2C business.
But it took me a really long time to think through, well, what does this look like for B2B business?
And so I break this down into several tactical things.
So number one is aspirational outcomes that you have achieved
or the business has helped facilitate.
Secondarily, people like this person, like your avatar,
that you have helped facilitate.
So just to be clear,
it's stuff that you did, stuff that you help other people do.
The third is stuff that you help them do,
the prospect themselves,
which you can only facilitate, at least in my opinion,
in two major ways.
One is that you give them free content and education,
which is why I make this stuff.
And the second is that you give them free products and services.
just why the books are free, they're on my site,
you can read them, you consume them,
there's a scaling roadmap there, personalize,
all that stuff is free.
Because fundamentally, it's two degrees of separation
if some person does it.
Alex had a big exit, now he's a big portfolio,
cool, that's two degrees of separation.
There's other companies in the portfolio
or other businesses who look just like mine
that he helped scale, one degree separation.
I used his stuff and made more money,
zero degrees of separation.
And so we wanna, and this is always gonna be stronger
than anything else, but it'll take longer.
And so in understanding the difference between B2C
and B2B in terms of what do I do top of funnel here,
how do I allocate my resources,
it means that I'm spending time
putting together the course in my spare time
so that you guys can go consume it
on how to make offers, how to get leads,
how to scale company from zero to 100 million.
Like that's time, that's effort,
that's my team who's behind the camera right now,
that's budget that goes towards that
because I'm not looking for demand today.
I'm looking for those of you who are gonna scale
your companies and in
five years hit me up. Here's the thing. If a new, let's say, let's say Acquisition.com
with Public Tomorrow and I got asked it for being rude, which I probably would. And then
they put in a new CEO. And that new CEO says, I need to hit quarterly earnings. So what
would he probably do? He probably switched to lots of direct response and he probably
cut down all the budget on the gives and the books and all this I'd be like, well,
there's no ROI in a book. Like books don't make any money. It's like, yeah, not today.
But they bring people into our world. And when they do
have the next billion dollar company they will hit us up first and that's the goal but that guy will
just say well you know screw all that i'm going to recapture all this marketing spending effort we're
going to focus it all on these direct response ads to tell people to buy by buy and you know what
for a quarter it'll work maybe two quarters it'll work but all of a sudden it'll start slowly going down
slowly going down slowly going down then what happens they call the founder back up and they're like
hey help help help us fix this and then the founder's going to say i can't do it in a quarter
it's going to take me a year year and a half to basically right size the ship because you sucked
all the wells dry and I'm going to have to start digging again.
So the next one is some of my marketing laws.
So I'm going to give you a few of them and I'll start with the first one that you,
if you've heard my channel, then you should know this one.
It should be ingrained in your brain, which is state the facts and tell the truth.
And the reason this is so important to me is that it forces me as a advertiser,
business person, to change reality.
And so rather than try and exaggerate, it makes more sense to put all of the effort
into doing epic stuff and then telling a truthful story, rather than telling an epic story
about something that was underwhelming. And I think the vast majority of marketers and marketing
do the second thing. They have something normal and then they try and tell an exaggerated story
of it rather than having something absolutely insane and just stating the facts and telling the truth.
And I can tell you that the second, this one, stating the facts and telling the truth,
is the best long-term strategy. How do I actualize this? All right? So number one is that we make
the truth more compelling. We actually change reality. The second is that we
that we show only what we can show.
I remember I was talking to a martial arts guy,
and he's like, there's all these other martial arts studios
in my area, how do I stand out?
And I said, well, what's your specialty or whatever?
And he said, I'm a double secret black belt of something.
And I said, okay, well, how many double secret black belts?
He's like, well, there's only six in the nation.
And I was like, okay, well, do any of them live in your era?
And he said, no.
And I was like, well, why don't you say that?
Right?
Why don't you say that?
So every business, if you get narrow enough,
has something that's unique about it.
You might have the best parking.
You might have the fastest introduction
to getting somebody to sit down.
You might have the most gyms, you know, whatever it is,
the most customers, the most customers at a certain price point,
the most, you just need to slice the data of the business
to figure out what is unique about your business.
And I remember this moment in Mad Men,
which is an advertising show, it's like an old 50 show.
Well, it's a new show about the 50s.
And Don Draper, who's the lead character,
who's an advertising guy, is pitching a client
who's a cigarette company.
And they're trying, they're like the third,
third or fourth in the category. They're highly commoditized. They're competing on price and they're
losing. So he asks them to explain how cigarettes are made. And they kind of roll their eyes.
They're like, why is this important? He's like, okay, well, first we have the plants. And then he keeps
going through it. He's like, and then we let it sit out in the sun. He's like, what do you mean?
He's like, you know, to dry out the leads. He's like, so you toast them. He's like, yeah, we toast
them. He's like, it's toasted. And so that was a unique part. He just sliced down. He just sliced
down and got really narrow about one particular part of the process and was able to pull that
out and emphasize it so that people are like, oh, this is different than other things. And the really
important part about this is that maybe some of the other cigarette companies also toast it.
But they don't say that they toast it. And so the perception is still that it's different,
even if it is the same. The best version of this is finding something that's truly unique.
The second best version is to just say something that's unique about something that everyone
else already does, but that your customers don't know. The corollary to that is say what only
you can say. So you show what only you can show, and you say what only you can say. So the showing
part is going to be like, okay, with the toasting thing, how do we display that visually? With the
super secret blackout, then how do we display that? And you could show the blackout, you could
show you shaking your hands, getting the certification, you can show you winning some tournament, right?
If you're toasting, you could show the bed of all the debacle that's getting toasted and the
smells and the wafting through the air, whatever. And then you describe
it in a way that only you can say.
To do this, it's more important that you are the best
than what you are the best of.
I would rather be from a marketing perspective,
not absolutely.
I'd rather have the 10th biggest company in the world
than the first biggest company in Indiana.
But from an advertising perspective,
it is more compelling to be the best.
And I'll tell you a story that I haven't told.
John Rockefeller, when he was early on in his oil empire,
bid to buy the biggest oil refinery in Cincinnati.
And he was the second biggest.
He ended up overpaying for the business.
And the business owner of the oil refinery laughed at him
and kind of laughed his way to the bank,
he's like, you completely overpaid for this thing.
And so then what John D. Rockefeller did,
after he bought the first biggest,
and he already had the second biggest,
is that he then was able to say he was the biggest.
And then in the next 30 days,
he'd over 20 M&A D's,
in the next 30 days to consolidate the entire rest of the market because he became the gorilla.
He was willing to overpay for the asset to get the story.
The difference in value between what he should have paid for those 20 deals and what he was
able to pay by strong-arming those smaller competitors because he was now the gorilla more
than made up for what he minorly overpaid or maybe even majorly overpaid for the one company
that he bought.
And when he recants the story, when he tells the story, he tells the story he
again, he talks about how that competitor didn't see the bigger picture. I remember reading it
in the letters that he wrote to his son and thinking to myself, that is powerful. He was willing
to overpay for the story. He saw it as an investment in his brand, in his reputation. And so
the guy who sold it just saw it as him overpaying for a product, but he wasn't appropriately
valuing how much true brand value that would give Rockefeller as a result. The next big growth lever
is all about the list, all right?
So when I talk about the list,
people immediately think that I'm talking about
email list, direct mail list,
and sometimes that's true.
But I'll give you a hypothetical example.
So let's say I am selling winter coats,
and I advertise an amazing offer on some killer coats
that people love, they look amazing,
and nothing comes back.
Well, what could have happened?
Well, if I showed my advertisement
to people who live in South Florida,
the likelihood that they buy my very expensive
really heavy and hot winter coats is very low.
It has nothing to do with my offer,
nothing to do with the ad creative,
nothing to do with my pricing,
nothing to do with anything.
It's just the wrong people are seeing it.
Many smaller businesses
think that marketing doesn't work
when in reality they were showing it to the wrong people.
And so the first thing that you have to get right in marketing
is targeting the correct audience.
This is different by method of advertising.
If we pull up our core four here,
You want to reach out to people that you know are suffering from the problem that you solve
or have a high likelihood of suffering from the problem that you solve.
And the narrower the problem, the smaller the list.
From a paid ads perspective, this is where the targeting by platform gets more important.
And this is why some ad platforms tend to be more profitable than others,
because what makes an advertising platform successful is how well targeted is.
In fact, Facebook was so good that they had to roll it back because of privacy loss.
But it was so effective at targeting people that people complained because it was so good.
felt creepy posting content this is where the algorithm itself based on what
you look like and how you talk and what you say will impact what the AI serves
your content to the same works with paid ads and so if I want to get more women to
buy a product guess who I'm not gonna have in the ad me because this is not
what attracts lots of ladies right this is just usually a bunch of entrepreneurs
who didn't have beards and like
or whatever else, all right?
But like my audience is like 89% male.
And sure, for my 11% females, keep rocking, I appreciate you.
But by and large, I have a male-driven audience.
Now, maybe it's because I talk about money,
but there's tons of female entrepreneurs
who talk about money and don't have predominantly male audiences.
And so it's just that my way of saying things
and or the algorithm just tends to display it to dudes.
One of the easiest ways to make sure
that you're displaying your ads to the right avatar
is make sure that the person in the ad looks like the avatar.
And I'll tell you a funny story.
So when I was running the gym launch 1.0 version,
which is where we used to fly out to gyms
and do the turnarounds,
I found out that when I put the thank you page,
this is before automated schedulers even existed,
so it's kind of wild.
I remember when I had my first automated schedule
to put it on the thank you page,
I thought I had cured cancer.
I was like, this is the coolest thing
or people can automatically book.
Like I don't have to call them to work to leave.
The thank you page that I set up
was just like, hey, Texas number.
And then the second version of the thank you page
was, hey, my name's Alex,
I'm gonna be able to call you.
So I put a picture.
picture of me and I said, I'm going to be calling you from this number. So I tried to put some visual to it.
Then when I put Layla's picture on the thank you page and said, Layla's going to be the one
contacting you. What do you know? Our response rates went through the roof. People were immediately
responsive. They were showing up to appointments. They were, oh yeah, sure, I can make five o'clock.
For me, they're like, oh no, I don't give you right. And so if you want to attract a certain
avatar, try to make sure that what is in your content, how you talk matches the way they talk.
because fundamentally all marketing works
as long as you get the targeting right.
Think about this way.
If you walked into a room,
this is how I like to visualize marketing
because people overcomplicate it.
If I walked into a room and I got on stage
and there was 1,000 people in the room,
if those thousand people were my ideal customers,
then even if I had just like a really mediocre offer
and something that they like kind of wanted,
I would get some response.
Now, it might not be efficient,
it might not get me the return,
want so I might lose money but I might I would probably make something right I would get
some clicks I would get some leads right and so it would allow me to start the feedback
loop so I could improve but if nothing is coming through it's typically because the wrong
people are seeing it and so one of the highest leverage ways of getting more from
advertising is just making sure the right people are seeing it which is a perfect
transition into the next one which is how do you know that you've mastered something
which is that masters have more ways to win now what does that actually mean they
understand the many different ways that you can measure progress. So if you were to talk to an
HR professional, okay, you ask them, what do you do? A lot of times they're going to give
you a couple vague answers. Like, you know, I'll payroll and I'll make sure that people
get in their benefits and whatever. But when you talk to someone who's a master at this,
and I remember the first time I had somebody who's completely improved my understanding of
talent and acquisition in recruiting. In the interview, the candidate said, oh, well, what's your
time to fill and I was like what do you mean just she's like well the average time to fill a
role I was like I don't know she's like oh well what's your what's your two-sided fit I was like
I don't know what you mean she's like okay uh what's your cost to acquire talent I was like
I don't know she had all of these different metrics that she was using to measure which completely
made sense to me like I have cost to require a customer I should have cost to acquire a talent
you know what's my cash conversion cycle how quickly do I get my first sale how quickly do I fill a
role and then in terms of like customer satisfaction is basically employee
satisfaction of how likely is it that the manager and the employee both say
at day 90 that this is a 10 out of 10 fit and so when I started looking at
that I was like oh wow there's a total there's a whole another level of
understanding this that I had no idea about because masters have a higher
quality and quantity of metrics that they use to measure progress if I am
trying to fix this function I have nothing to know how well I'm doing
And so a beginner will try to advertise or will try to sell and they will have binary outcomes.
They'll just say, I didn't sell or I did sell or I got leads or I didn't get leads.
But there are so many nuanced steps between that.
When you have the milestones, the progress markers, it allows you to fix things so you can keep moving the buck along until you get the outcome.
And so I'll tell you a story about this.
When I was starting outbound way back in the day, it was a new channel for us and I'd never done it.
And about 90 days or four months in, my executive team kind of did like an intervention.
So they came together.
It was like I was getting like a drug rehab.
Right.
They were like, we think this is a problem.
We think this is a shiny object.
We think you're distracted and we should double down to what works.
I was like, how dare you use my words against me?
Right.
And the thing is, is that strategically I knew we needed to have a second acquisition channel for us to sell the business.
I was like, no, it's because they could only see that we'd only done one sale in four months.
and 100% of my time was going towards this.
But what they didn't see was all the progress that we were making.
And so I had hired degrees of mastery in this.
Now, to be fair, it was just because I had learned it along the way.
But when it started, it was like, okay, well, we have to get a list.
So where do we get the list?
So we bought a bunch of different lists.
A lot of lists didn't work.
One of them did.
We're like, okay, this is a good provider.
And then we start, you know, like, oh, we got to enrich the day.
So we start learning how to enrich the day.
Then we started calling them, but then no one was picking up.
And then we had to learn how call wrapping works.
So we get local numbers.
And then all of a sudden, people start picking up,
but then we had to fix the hook in the script.
And then we had to fix the script.
People would make it a minute, but then they'd hang up on us.
So then we fixed the hook, and then we fixed the offer,
and then people would then go to the second call,
but then they weren't showing up for the second call.
And so it's like, we have to just keep moving the buck along the way.
But if you looked at it, two months in,
it's like, you know, a heart surgery looks like murder
to somebody from the outside who doesn't understand the milestones.
As you master something, if you don't know why something's not working,
look closer.
Look for the smaller attributes that you can actually zoom in on and say,
okay, well, we'll get a sale eventually
if we just keep moving in this direction.
And so look for directional correctness
rather than binary.
And so this is a perfect example
of masters have more leading indicators to success
than beginners to.
Beginners typically look at purely the lagging indicator.
They just say, churn is up.
Sales are down, revenues down,
cash collectors down.
Those are all lagging indicators.
You can't, if I looked at you and said,
increase revenue, you can't do anything.
If I said decrease churn,
you can't do anything with that.
You would then have to do something else
and then the result would be a decrease in turn.
The result would be more,
revenue the result would be more sales we have to identify what all those steps are
that are high correlates or increase the likelihood is that that ultimate outcome occurs
