The Power of Leverage: Work Once, Get Paid Forever

0:00Systems, processes, automations, checklists, technology, these things help you scale with less effort. Ultimately, the mathematical formula says divide to multiply. You get a customer once and they keep coming back forever. You know, you don't want to work harder, you want to work smarter. My first book I ever wrote, Instant Cash Flow. That thing still sells today, still makes me money today. Marketing to me is the ultimate investment. The power of leverage. Work once, paid forever. From people to systems to money. In this episode, I'll explain the four types of leverage that create exponential scale for you and your business.

0:37Do the work once, get paid forever. Yes, that is the definition of leverage. Now, it's mathematical formulas different. I'll explain that in just a moment. But my ideal understanding of how you become a$100 million entrepreneur, how you do that is through leverage. How do you do things that you do the work one time and they keep paying you back 10 years, 20 years, 30 years down the road? I still look at it and you start thinking about work that I did. My first book I ever wrote, Instant Cashflow, that thing still sells today, still makes me money today. Now, I didn't get paid a dime to write the book.

1:12My pay per hour for writing the book was$0 an hour, right? However, over the 20-something years that that book has been out there, hundreds of thousands of dollars have come in from that sales. Does that make sense? Our job as a business person is to do the work once, get paid forever. Okay, now, let's break that back down. Why is leverage the ultimate multiplier? You hear the statement of, you know, you don't want to work harder, you want to work smarter. Well, in the beginning, you got to do both. You got to work harder and smarter right in the beginning. Ultimately, you want to be just working harder, just working smarter, should I say.

1:49So there's a good Freudian slip, isn't it? And here we go down that road. $100 million companies, let me state that correctly, are not built on effort alone. They're built on leverage. So what are the formats of leverage? You can leverage through systems. You can leverage through marketing. You can leverage through finance. You can leverage through people. Getting leverage is what we're going to look at. So if you want to score yourself, what's your leverage through people? What's your leverage through marketing? What's your leverage through finance? What's your leverage through systems in your business right now?

2:21Ultimately, the mathematical formula says divide to multiply. So if you've studied my five ways formula or you've studied the ABOS system, ABOS, we break building a business down into three and a half thousand strategies. Now, you won't need all 3 ,500. When you install the Action Coach business operating system, you might use 200 of the strategies over a period of a year or two to install that and build a business that runs so you don't have to. But ultimately, what we're aiming to do, the difference between a non-leveraged business and a leveraged business is, yes, it's going to grow massive.

2:55Why? Because simple things. You get a customer once and they keep coming back forever. If you've got a business where you get a customer, you make a sale, and to make the next amount of money, you've got to get another customer, there's no leverage in that. I want to have membership subscription. I want repeat business coming into my business. So let's go back through those four types of leverage and just explain each one of them. Leverage through people. You've got to build teams. You've got to build networks. You've got to build partners, affiliates. You name it, you've got to build it. Networks who multiply your output type thing.

3:29If you build that, then you're multiplying the output of you and your business. Systems, processes, automations, checklists, technology, these things help you scale with less effort, okay? So putting the systems in place will allow you to leverage far better in the organization. Marketing leverage, everything from content that you build, everything from the brand that you build, the campaigns that keep working once you've created them. Like if you create a campaign that works and that campaign runs for six, 12, 12 months, two years, that campaign has been a phenomenal thing. You built it once, it makes you money long term or forever.

4:09That's what we got to be looking at. How do we create leverage through marketing? Marketing to me is the ultimate investment. I learned this back when I had a dog food business, right? Our average customer, yeah, we home delivered dog food and we delivered every six weeks. It was made fresh so that it was never more than six weeks old sort of thing as you're feeding it to your dog. We would do a 17-point health check on your animal when we were there. Our delivery drivers were veterinary nurses who could help administer your dogs' flea and tick and pills and you name it sort of thing every time they did the delivery.

4:40Well, here's the amazing thing. When we had a van-based business, you know, it's a delivery-based. Each van has to have this many customers per week. I had to learn out how to buy that exact number of customers per week. And so I sat down and went, hey, hang on, I got to buy this many customers. If I bought too many customers, and for each van, it was 60, right? 60 was the ideal number of new customers per week with a van on the road. If I bought 120, that meant 60 of them didn't get great service. They had to wait two weeks before they got seen for the first time. So I didn't want to buy that many.

5:13If I only bought 20, we didn't have a good finances. The finances on the van were not great. So I had to buy 60 customers each and every week. And so I had to work out the numbers. Now, in that business, we made, if I remember the numbers exactly, it was$108 was the first sale on average out of that. $38 was GP, right? Gross profit to us. So my marketing expense had to be less than$38. Now, here's the simple thing. My radio ads were$24.50. So for every$24.50 I spent in radio, I got a new customer. So if you don't know these numbers, by the way, these are great numbers to get to learn for your business.

5:54How much does it cost you to buy a customer? And this is why I say marketing leverage is amazing leverage. For me,$24.50 went out and$38 in profit came back in, in gross profit. Now, if you went to the bank and gave them$24.50 and they gave you$38 back, would you keep giving them$24.50? Of course you would. That's what marketing should be when you're testing and measuring. If you haven't studied marketing with me, my two-day course, all my books, my 30x business, do all of those things. Financial leverage, using other people's money, credit, being paid in advance. These are some of the things to fuel your exponential growth.

6:34So when you think about leverage, it's I've taught it to you as do the work once, get paid forever. Let's break that down just a little more. Employee work is do the work once, get paid once. So if you say in the plumbing business, actually cutting pipe, doing the piping, employee work, do the work once, get paid once. Managers work, do the work once, get paid long term, meaning training people, hiring people, systems, planning. These are managers jobs where you do the work one time and it pays you back over a period of time, not forever, but a period of time. Owners work, do the work once, get paid forever.

7:13You as an owner of the business have to at some point set a limit and say, okay, if I can pay someone below this hourly rate to do it, I'll never do that job again. I remember as a young man saying, okay, if I can pay someone less than$20 an hour, I'm never going to do it again. So it meant I stopped doing things like mowing the lawn and doing any housework and doing any of that sort of stuff. Because if I paid someone to do that, I could be doing A, I could have family time or B, I could be focused on the things that make a lot more than that per hour.

7:47Let me give you another example of leverage. When you think about the movie business, okay, you make a movie once, how long do you sell it for? Forever. Think of long tail really as a great way of thinking of leverage. How do I do something now that pays back forever? I'll give you an example of one of our clients in the UK. Their coach, phenomenal coach, came in, they're in the dairy business, right? They had cattle, big farm, and they sold their milk to the co-op. Well, what he taught them over a period of time was how to move from just selling the milk to adding value to it, to eventually running a program that had get customers once they stay forever.

8:27He taught them how to go from being in the milk business to being in the cheese business, to being in the cheese of the month club. Now they buy the milk from all of their local other farmers to build their cheeses to be in their cheese of the month club. They went from selling a product that they could only sell at one time to now getting customers that keep coming back forever and ever and ever. That's leverage, my friends. That's a way of changing up a business so that it moves from doing one thing. Give you another example. Jerry, he's a phenomenal example. He was in the construction business building high-end home, multi-million dollar homes in the UK.

9:01and part of his business was he would buy the land and hold the land and the way he did that is he would buy shipping containers and put storage facilities on the property well what jerry ended up working out was that there was a lot more leverage and scalability built into that shipping container business and so all of a sudden he says okay i'm going to sell the construction company and focus on this thing that is leverageable scalable and now he's building hundreds of these things around the world with, you know, puts up the right fence and the right security system and has the app built and, you know, much less employees, much more profitability type thing.

9:36Very, very powerful stuff when you start looking at real examples of people doing that stuff. I even, you know, for me, a simple example, when we have ABOS, which is our Action Coach Business Operating System, and we coach to that, now with AI, creating that in an AI platform where we go, holy heck, it's the same material, but now we can sell it in a way that democratizes coaching. It means every single person in every single company can have a coach, not just business owners and CEOs and executives, but every employee across the entire company can have a coach. Just phenomenal what we can do with that sort of stuff.

10:11So think about this in your business. Where are you getting leverage? Where are you doing the work once getting paid forever, doing the work once getting paid long-term? How can you shift more of your time into those tasks and less and less of your time in the doing the work once, getting paid once stuff. How do you keep getting paid forever rather than one at a time? Because we want you to become a$100 million entrepreneur. Thanks for joining me on the$100 million podcast. If you've got value from today's episode, make sure you've subscribed and share this with all of your friends. Never miss a strategy that could change your business and your life.

10:45And remember, the fastest way to scale is to learn from those who've done it. That's what this show is all about. See you on the next episode.