3 Stages of Building a Personal Brand | Ep 994

0:00What makes someone dangerous is not how much they work, but how much work they do. And so in this video, I'll show you the same process that I use to build our portfolio companies that generate over$250 million a year and more recently broke the world record for the fastest selling nonfiction book of all time, doing$106 million in a weekend. And so there's one main takeaway I want, which is that you don't need to do more. You need to actually get the big stuff done. And so my favorite question I asked myself at the beginning of the year is if I could make only one thing happen this year, that if it occurred, would cause the remainder of my goal is to become accomplished or relevant by consequence, what would that one thing be?

0:33And the answer to that question becomes my priority. And I'll define priority as the thing that comes before priori, right? It's from Latin, which means before. And so it has to come first. And where people make mistakes is that priorities as a plural only happened in the 1950s and beyond. So for the rest of human history, priority was only done as a singular word, but because people bastardize things and because no one can make decisions, they made it priorities. But you need a priority. And how you allocate your resources to accomplish your priority becomes your strategy. And so people fail to succeed at business because they are unwilling to make trade-offs.

1:10They're unwilling to make a priority rather than priorities. And as a result, they make the largest trade-off of all, which is they never accomplished the most important thing. And so please do not be like most business owners and heck most people and have another mediocre year ahead of you because you were unwilling to make trades. And so this year, my single largest objective is to get more brand credibility across the established legacy media channels, right? And so if that occurs, the remainder of my goals become accomplished by consequence. And so for example, my book launch, which doubled the world record, had no real press.

1:42We didn't receive a New York Times bestseller. And to be clear, I went in knowing that they wouldn't award it for that. But I use this as an example of what's missing from my brand per se. And I believe that if I make this change, many of my sub goals would get accomplished by consequence. And so this is my full focus beyond the regular blocking and tackling of business. And so what's interesting is I can look back at my career over, I guess, the last 13 years or 14 years since I've been in business. And I actually can tell you what each of my objectives was for each of those years. And I thought it would probably be pretty cool because for those of you either starting or if you're much further along, you can catch up to where I was at at your specific stage and at least see the caliber of the goals and how short they are.

2:23So let's start at the beginning, but I want to link each of these goals to the next goal. So my first goal 2010 when I was in college was to get a good consulting job. And so that was the only goal for the year. All I did was in service to that goal and I ended up getting it. And so once I got the consulting job, my next year's goal 2011 was to ace the GMAT. Why did I want to ace the GMAT? Because I thought I was going to get into business school and that's what I wanted to do. And so that was my priority. I did ace the GMAT. And then in acing the GMAT, I realized that I didn't want to get into business school to start a business.

2:52I just wanted to start a business. And so the next year's goal was to quit my job and start a fitness business. And so that's what I did. And so then once I started my business, it didn't make that much money. And so in 2013, my goal was make the gym make more money. That was it. And so then when I made the gym make more money in 2014, my goal was open a second, third locations. So once I opened my second and third locations in 2014, my goal was get to 10 locations by 2015. So in 2015, I got to six and then realized that there was a better version of the model, which was launching other people's gyms.

3:22And so that's what I decided to pivot towards. And then in 2016, my goal was launch other people's gyms and sell my own. And you might think, wait, isn't that two priorities? No, it wasn't because I had to sell my gym in order to launch other people's gyms. So that's exactly what I did. And then 2017, I now had this gym launching business, but it wasn't making the money that I thought. And I've talked about this story in life. But my objective then was, okay, fix the gym launch money model. And that was the whole goal for the year. If I could just make this thing, make money, this thing could be awesome.

3:532018 comes along and that's what I did. It was scale the gym launch to$2 million a month. That was my goal for 2018. So then we scaled the gym launch business to$2 million a month. In 2019, it was like, okay, great. We have this business. I wanted to solve revenue retention. So I thought that selling physical products through that base would do that. So I launched Prestige Labs, our supplement company. The first month we did 1.7 million a month. We kind of coasted about one and a half million a month, kind of like for the foreseeable. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10 stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1 % of companies finish.

4:24I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. and I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this and it works. And it's my gift to you, it's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com forward slash roadmap, just enter info and it'll spit it right back to you all free.

4:562020, my goal going to this is now that I had this large business, I was like, I'm gonna sell Jim Wallach Prestige Labs. And that was 100 % the goal. Then this thing called COVID happened, unfortunately, and it interfered, but my goal remained the same. So in 2021, my goal was the same goal as 2020 because I hadn't done it, sell Jim Wallach Prestige Labs. And so the end of 2021, December 24th, Christmas Eve, just got it done by the end of the year. And so 2022, I had this sale, I had this extra cash. And so I was like, okay, I need to figure out acquisition.com's investing model because I started acquisition.com the day after I sold gym lunch.

5:31Um, and so 2022 was all dedicated to figure out the model. We did a bunch of different early models of minority, majority, large minority. Like we did a bunch of different stuff to figure out our model. 2023 was build my brand on social media. 2023 was a year of just like hardcore doubling down on social and really kind of like going pro if you will. Once I did that got much bigger and I launched my first big launch book, right? I obviously published this book earlier, but the launch that year was all based on building the social media brand. And the book launch itself was in service of building the brand.

6:04I basically just gave everything away for free at my launch. And so all it did was build the brand. That was the goal. Once I had the brand, obviously a brand is thinking it's, it's, it's like a garden. You maintain it. You don't really build it and it's done, but you have to constantly maintain it. But once I had begun that process, the 2024, my goal was to launch the advisory practice. And so that's a huge undertaking, especially if you have millions and millions of people who follow and want to get work done on their business. And so that took a huge amount of infrastructure. I think right now our advisory practice has 175 employees, so pretty big.

6:35And so we launched that in 2024. In 2025, I had enough bandwidth to then say, hey, I want to have a big brand moment. And so the goal there was to break the Guinness World Record of nonfiction book sales in a weekend. and that's what I did in 2025 and 2026. I shared earlier that my goal right now is to redouble down, but specifically in a different domain around, I'll call it legacy or traditional media, because I think right now that's a, I'll take called a hole within our deficiency within our existing brand. And so I'm going to do obviously different things in order to accomplish that, but that's kind of my big, that's my big thing for the year.

7:17And I've got big clients in order to do that. So you guys will see what happens there. But I think what I want to demonstrate with each of those is that if you can't think back over the last 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, however old you are, right? 100 years, who knows? What is the one thing that if I just do that one thing, everything else gets accomplished? That will give you the focus that you need to be able to say no to everything else. Because the reality is that you have a very limited amount of resources. And so this question is arguably the most strategic question in business. And so like, what is strategy anyways, right?

7:46Strategy is the curation and prioritization of opportunities. So what does that mean? So the curation of opportunity means you have to see all the potential things you could potentially do. Then you have this big list of ideas, this stuff, and then you have to say, okay, of all of this big universe of things I could potentially do, which of these things will I actually do, which is a prioritization. And so those two activities are strategy. People try to call it all these amorphous things. They have these really cock many definitions for it, but that is all it is. And so my, my, my two cents for what it's worth, and that's probably all it's worth.

8:16You'll have some ultimate vision of what you want to happen in reality. Like what do you want to make happen long-term? But the vast majority of those things take steps and many of those steps are not clear. And so let's say we want to build the most trusted brand and business. So in order to do that, like, how am I going to become the most trusted brand and business unless I have a massive business? Like it's, you just can't, like I have to build a very large business in order to do it. Why do I, and so that you might ask the follow-up question, like, why do you even want to build the most structured branded business?

8:40Mostly because business is the thing that I enjoy doing the most. And so I also get excited by big goals, because small goals are not very energizing. And so I might as well go after something big. And I think Stephen Schwartzman, his book, he's the founder of Blackstone. He said this line that I really took to heart. He said, big goals and small goals take the same amount of work. And so it's a poor investment of resources to go after small goals, because, and Naval has a different version of this, which is like, it's just as hard to run a successful restaurant as it is to build a billion dollar startup, it's still going to take you 80 hours a week.

9:11He's like, so it's actually, it's like, it's like going all in on a vehicle, like from an investment perspective, it's like going on in a vehicle that has a very capped upside. To be fair, not to say that restaurants have a capped upside. I mean, it's significantly harder to scale. They're much more operation complex, et cetera, et cetera, but it's a poor use of resources. And so that is fundamentally strategy. And so his, his, his take of setting big goals is actually a strategic bet. And so So a different investor called Bill Gurney, he's a venture guy, said, listen, if I lose a million dollars, he said, I can only lose a million dollars once.

9:45He said, but if I don't invest in Google at their seed round, I lose the million dollars hundreds of times after that, right? And so people wildly underestimate the upside and wildly overestimate the downside when they're setting these types of goals. And so I think we need to be very big in terms of what we want to do, but in terms of how do we accomplish that thing, how far out do you look? And I think the simple answer is as far as you can see. And what I mean by that is like, if you have, let's say, let's say you have this big goal, but you still need to pay rent, right? Well, as far as you can see is until you're near your next rent check, right?

10:18So it's like, you got to get that solved before you can really think too far in advance, right? Once you get all your rent checks solved for the next six months, you can start thinking six months in advance, right? All your rent checks off for a year. And then eventually you get all your personal needs solved. Then you're like, great, now I've got my business needs. And you start solving those, which is why I'm such a big advocate. If like, You want to save aggressively, not because you don't want to live life, but because you want to make big bets. I have always lived on significantly less than I make because I want to go on offense.

10:43I want to be able to save my swing for the fat pitch that comes. I don't want to swing at every ball, so I have to save my swings. Now, obviously, that analogy breaks because you can technically swing forever in baseball. But in business and life, you only have a certain amount of years. You only have a certain amount of money. And so you want to make sure that your swings count. There is some amount of faith that you have to have in the fact that like future me is going to figure this out. And I don't know if I can transfer that well. I think that like you make that you have to make that first bet one time and then see yourself figure it out.

11:14So you can put more and more on future you of like, I don't know how I'm going to get there, but I know I'm not going to stop until I do. And I think having that level of faith does come from doing small things early that progressively get bigger and bigger bets on yourself. but a concurrent theme that I continue to hear and I would say that I believe strongly in myself is that like you need to go all in on you and because one no one else is going to and two you're going to get the highest returns that way only you know if your goals are realistic and only time will tell if you're right and so like if anyone else says like make your goals realistic I was like no no I'm not going to make them realistic for you I'm making them realistic for me and as a rule of thumb never listen to someone's advice whose dreams for your life are smaller than yours Thank you.