How to Price High-Ticket Without Fear | Ep 903

0:01I am a big believer in having like almost the same size recruiting team as I do sales team. And so that was also one of the big ways that we were able to basically fill in exec teams and leader teams within these portfolio companies. We bring them in. It's like there's only two winners. Either we can pull the winners out or we can put three more winners in and now we have a full company.

0:21Pest control,$8 million, pacing$12 million this year, running really good margins. Yep. Yes, sir. Biggest constraint we have now, we have a marketing agency. We're paying about$100 ,000 a year. Okay. We want to pull all that marketing in-house, but we don't want to lose performance. What would you do if you were in my shoes? why i just feel like there's a disconnect there somewhere were they performing it seems to be doing all right yeah but why is that the most important thing uh i just feel like we can get a better ltv like in this like i just don't know if we're getting a lot a lot of quality leads why not just start marketing and not cancel them could do that too yeah like we do a lot of uh online social media stuff now we have a youtube channel big tiktok yeah i'll give this as a rule of thumb in general for me, I will typically never stop flows.

1:09I'll just add flows. So it's like, okay, we've got this marketing agency. It's like, cool, we can hire two more marketing agencies and they can all market for me. I'll probably not make less money. And then like, we also want to build it in-house. Cool. We'll also build it in-house. Like more promotion almost never makes you less money provided you have a product that has gross margin and makes sense. So yeah, I would not, I basically will never sacrifice the thing that puts food on the table. right even if it's not as efficient as i want i'm not going to risk i'm not going to risk the whole business just because i want to gain efficiency so i'll add so i would suggest adding not canceling now if the added thing then crushes it and it's like makes the other thing superfluous i still am like well we're paying these guys 100 and we're making you know a million we're making 500 if somebody gave me an investment that i put you know you know 100 grand in and make 500 back i'd still I'll probably say yes.

1:56So just more. Smart. Fast. Pretty straight. Easy. That was an easy one. It's usually not like that. It's usually like, I've got this partner and they're not here. They don't, they don't spoil me. What's up, man? Nate, I'm a deck builder in East Tennessee. Yeah, you've niched down. Decks, niched down. Made more money. Do about three mil. I'd like to get to the point where we're above 10. I think the biggest thing that's stopping us is, really me, first of all, I was here a couple years ago and learned how to one call close from a gentleman. And I overcomplicated that whole thing. And now I can't train and sell it to the people that are working for me because they don't have what I have.

2:35So I've kind of come to the point where I think the pitch is the offer is a little too much. And I want to kind of. Too much as in what? As in like it's kind of slimy. It's it's called an ambassador program. and basically the month that I'm building your deck, rather than me spend a bunch of money on advertising, I'd rather partner with you in exchange for a few things. So for instance, I spend quite a bit on an ad spend. I'd rather spend that in your deck, make your backyard look like my billboard and you be my radio ad, my spokesperson, in exchange for that Google review, that kind of thing.

3:13So I'll cut the bill down quite a bit. And people seem to kind of think that that's a little pressure sale and then we don't really get anything from it. When I did it, it worked well. My guys are getting feedback that it's just not a good fit. Do you have any recordings? Vague, no. Yeah, that's it, man. I guarantee if you heard them say it, you'd be like, God, dude, no, you're just, ah. There's no like, I think it's, dude, they're sucking ass at it. That's all it is. It's all it is. By the way, if anyone here doesn't record their sales calls, listen to them for the first time and you will want to kill yourself.

3:49Um, so no, I don't think like if you had the offer that already worked really well, they're just phrasing it wrong or they're presenting it wrong. So I think you just need to get, you need to get sales recording. So it's like, how do I do that? It's like, you can have them put their phone in their pockets. You sell in person, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's at their house. Oh yeah. Yeah. So you can just record it. And then based on laws of that area, you can let them know they're being recorded. That's what you should do. Okay. Disclaimer. I got you. Just want to be clear. Sounds good. Thank you. but you'll be able to get that feedback.

4:19I guarantee you, as soon as you listen to it, you'll hear it in two seconds. Like rather, like, actually, this is a really good one. So many times we want to change our entire business because of something that's just like, oh my gosh, like I have, I just haven't heard the sales calls. So like record the sales calls, listen to the sales calls, see what the problem is and like not change my offer, my pricing, my marketing, like all of that because we just had to avoid like, okay, I don't have any visibility. So if we're actually looking at which one this one was, it was a data one. The data was that you didn't have the calls.

4:48man these were these are these are light these are light there's normally not like this hello uh thomas i buy equity from business owners buy equity from business owners i run a private equity phone okay cool so um we're doing about 25 million across the group we want to get to you know over a billion ev do you have lps or is it you uh that is family office money yeah okay so it's you yeah yeah so we can scale through institutions of family office lps we need to but so you don't syndicate anything it's just all uh we do deal by deal we'll go to family officer institutions if we need it got it okay got it and what's stopping me really is this scaled like institutional quality capability a bit like you guys have to say like i can go into portfolio companies do a roll up scale it take it public oh essentially but uh what we want to do is obviously build out a capability so that we have lots of assassins going out and doing it so how did you do it a lot of money and a lot of time yeah i mean to be like so the like phase by phase what i'm if you go from where you guys started through the phases of now getting to more of an institutional scale so i would say that do you feel like you can't generate alpha in bigger companies no no we've done i've done big we've done like a few hundred million companies so then i think that i think i mean you're you're you're rather than reinventing the wheel I think you're running into the issue that everyone runs into, which is like we did just for, I mean, for your sake, like we did 24 deals in 24 months from let's say 2021 to 2020, end of 23, somewhere in there.

6:26And so during that process, we quickly were like, wow, this is taking up a lot of bandwidth. And a lot of these are just not worth it. and so uh the you know the star performers in the portfolio so much outperformed everyone else that i actually just gave people their equity back i was like you can keep the money and the equity i just would rather not talk to you um

6:56um some people took it well i mean we've done a similar thing too right it's just like this is just not worth the time right and so i think the the point that i'm making here is that almost every part of your firm just ends up raising more and more money and doing the same number of deals that they have bandwidth for and just doing fewer bigger deals and so it's like that's why i asked like do you feel like you can still generate alpha with the bigger deals if so awesome and i brought that up just because if you look at um constellation you familiar with them yeah yeah it's like their they know their alpha is just going after you know three million dollar deals and doing 600 deals a year and that's their that's their whole thesis and so they have to build a whole model around that but if you're like i can go bigger than it's like maybe you do keep the few assassins and you slowly acquire people um through the process and one of the one of the interesting tricks is like sometimes you find you know you you look at a company that the company sucks but there's like a really fucking good marketer in there or there's a really good sales leader or whatever and it's like hey um maybe you should we just pull you into hold co and then we can get so much more return on this person's skill set across the whole portfolio than just in in this one small deal and And so in a lot of ways, it's like there's usually, especially in the small businesses, only like one or two people are good.

8:07And then it's just like finding who those key drivers are. And then just the rest of it. It's like almost more valuable to just pull out the diamonds, forget the business, and then put it into a better business vehicle. So to answer the question of like, how did we do this? It's just like we are always looking for talent. And I would say that as a company, like internally, we're in the talent business. People like we're like, we're in the talent business, 100%. And so I am always hiring and always willing to overpay. So we pay 90th percentile, which is pretty high for all of our roles because I just want the best.

8:41And we get so much more alpha return by being willing to pay significantly above market. it's just like for everybody i would strongly encourage you if let's say market for a sales director is two hundred thousand dollars a year if you have a sales director that you think is an absolute savage and they want four hundred thousand dollars a year you will make four million dollars a year extra by getting the savage and so thank you that's a little like amen um uh so so i think um from a from a from a you have your core team you have these deals i would start basically divesting time into the deals that are small.

9:18And then I'd see if I can pick off people from those portfolio companies, pull them into Holdco. That's going to start bolstering up Holdco. That might help you identify better opportunities that are bigger. If I can raise more capital, then I'll still do that. And then ongoing, I don't know who you have at your at holding company, but having a director of talent who's experienced with executive recruiting. So like the core function that we ran as basically almost our primary value driver in the very beginning of acquisition.com was recruiting we're just very good at it and so by the way that's how you scale stuff uh and so we had to get really good talent in and so i i'm a big believer in having like almost the same size recruiting team as i do sales team and so that was also one of the big ways that we were able to basically fill in exec teams and leader teams within these portfolio companies we bring them in it's like there's only two winners either we can pull the winners out or we can put three more winners in and now we have a full company is that up yeah yeah cool so go bigger and get better talent yeah cool just only the unsurprising very painful reality thank you alex yeah you bet this solar sales driving around yeah just did in 10 months you did 500 000 yep all right and we need to get more sales people in the business and the biggest lever would be selling remotely but we're not ready for that yet because we need to get more cash flow so let's just do more of what we're currently doing which means we'd have to put in a center table shoot yeah yeah my name is anthony uh we sell uh solar to homeowners uh but yeah about 500 000 in revenue um but we're operating around 78 profit so you know doing pretty well we'd like to be at uh three million um and i think the biggest things that's stopping us is bdr our bdr team's performance okay and retention yeah what's compensation for the bdr sdrs yeah so we do a super small base 500 bucks every two weeks so i think we need to change that uh but we do the still uncapped commission so our industry is usually doorknockers yeah which which has just commission only yeah so we thought we were being competitive with the 500 every two weeks but yeah Are those guys door knocking?

11:29No, these guys are virtual all over the world. We've tried different people from different places. I think US base is going to be the best with just a higher base, just not really sure how to structure it. One thing you can do is do like a try before you buy type situation, which is like, we're going to make you a contractor for 30 days. And then if you pass the, you know, pass the KPIs, then we'll roll you in. That way, it's way less of a like, hey, higher and fire, higher and fire. But then that way, it's like an after 30 days, we'll lock in your base. so letting them like work for 30 days for kind of like a slightly adjusted lower base just to try it out yeah okay or you could just pay full and just say you have 30 days to prove it okay i mean let's we have to think about like what are you going to lose money on you're going to lose money on but like typically they're super padded on the upside so the base of if you pay somebody like forty thousand dollars a year in terms of what you'd actually pay them call it 50 for simple math so it's a thousand bucks a week if you pay someone for two weeks and you don't think they're good you lost two grand like you're running 75 80 you know net margins maybe give up some margins so that you can scale and just get better people and again like the star bdrs are going to probably want some base when they come in because they're like well i'm gonna build i gotta build pipeline and so it's like how reasonable is it for them to just immediately i don't know but like typically pipeline starts to build up usually within you know especially for a transactional cell like in 14 to 30 days anyways yeah would you say the comp plan is is the biggest lever for this yeah i mean you're doing remote strs they're like you're like we're being competitive it's like but you're not the remote strs that are potentially working for you are comparing your opportunity not to other solar opportunities but to all other opportunities and so getting 500 every two weeks is like yeah 100 you know tough yeah so fix the comp plan i would probably drive the comp first so I think for you, it's like fix the comp that gets the better SDRs in SDRs, increase sales, increase sales, increase cashflow, increase cashflow.

13:25Then we can start investing the extra time into getting the virtual, uh, sales so that you can go from doing, you know, four or five of consults a day to 20 plus. And then you can start duplicating that sales process to somebody else. But like that gets us to like, let's just do that first. All right. Thank you. Yeah, you bet. Appreciate it. Um, my name is Sam Coleman, uh, sell luxury real estate here in Vegas. Oh, sweet. Revenue, last year I did$1.3 million. This year I'm on track to do$1.5 million. Amazing. I would like to get to, ideally in my world, about$10 million. And what's stopping me is focus, apparently.

14:03The ascension plan for most successful people in real estate is by rentals, whatever. So right now, I started to fund a lot of my clients who have cash. Yeah. have just given me cash because they believe in it and I want to be a developer as my end game so my question is you know and I also started doing paid ads I know the answer I started doing paid ads for more what do you think I'm gonna say I started doing paid ads for my real estate business and then I started paid ads for as an agency of course teaching agent why wouldn't you You don't want to leave money on the table. Yeah. Right? Do you want to, we should draw out this org chart, shall we?

14:49So we've got, hold on, we've got, this will be fun. So we've got, we've got the, your realtor, right? So we've got this business. And then we've got agency, right? Yeah. Over here. And then we've got fund over here. And then your goal is to be a developer. Over here. Yeah. okay cool they're all in real estate yeah all of my businesses are are businesses and that like same same i hear you trying to make myself feel better no no no as long as you feel better and like let's play hold on i'm gonna play a fun game and you have one person on your team who's kind of like your right hand you underpay her but you're gonna pay her a little bit more because she's great and then you have like two other people who are irrelevant and you do most to this yourself i got rid of the other two but so just you and your right hand and i have two showing agents that show all of my listings um and admin staff okay the other two that were irrelevant i got rid of those okay okay i was trying to replace myself so i can like go do the other things yeah and then i was losing clients so yeah with low school labor you're like yeah what i do so easy i can train somebody who gets paid nothing to do it to these luxury people who would be like, why would I go for this person?

16:1050 % of a lot is a lot. 50 % of zero is zero. Correct.

16:19So you've got one business per person who works for you right now, roughly. So what do you want to do, man? Like this makes you money, right? And this is a distraction, obviously. But you have to figure that out. But what do you want to do? My end game is to be a developer. the challenge that i'm having now is focus the amount of focus that is required to get into development and all the systems and processes and people and we're going to actually raise money it would take me away from my every day that actually makes me money and to go raise capital and schmooze and do all this stuff is what i do now for my current business so i thought originally that like oh i can just do both yeah but um but i'm not able to do both so you want to do fund into development right that's what you want to do correct you might have a lifestyle issue like you make a million plus a year right so like you could stop doing that and then hit your base up and say this is what i'm doing now give me money i'm gonna go develop properties now yeah so you could just do that so why don't you do that golden handcuffs i guess lifestyle yeah yeah so i mean it's just how bad do you want it do you want it enough that you would live in a different neighborhood drive different car sure okay well then do that i don't have i don't have any payments i think i don't have any payments yeah i mean like it's a light it's a like you you can't you're like basically i'll if i stop being a realtor i'm gonna stop making money being a realtor it's like yeah yeah but you'll do the other thing that makes you more money long term yeah so then you have to give up short term for long term correct and so we have to give up short term for long term i'm married she's gotta go dude i get it i get it also best response of the day which is right it's awesome yeah um honestly it's a it's a conversation yeah it's like sweetie i know you love all this stuff.

18:19What if we had 10 times more stuff in like five years?

18:26I can take your number. Yeah. No, but that's it. That's the rock and hard place. I got to give up this to get that. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all eight functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you've got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, you've got HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level.

19:02It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com forward slash roadmap, R-O-A-D map, roadmap. These are fun. These are good ones. Hello. Yes, ma 'am. My name is Laura Roeder. I sell industry vertical software to coaches like executive coaches, life coaches.

19:41You sell software to coaches. Yeah. So it's an industry vertical run your business tool, payments, scheduling, client calls. CRM. Yeah. Yeah. And we make a website for them also as part of it. So a theme that came up a lot this morning was how to scale low ticket SaaS because it has been a struggle. And I thought you might have some relevant experience with school. So our price point is about$50 a month. We don't have anything higher or lower at this point. our ad payback period is 12 months which is impossible right impossible and terrible what has worked for scaling school it's your viral so what's your viral coefficient um i mean coaches you know no other coaches hire other coaches so how many how many how many customers come to you every day and sign up for zero dollars for zero dollars we have about like 2 ,000 free trials a month, about like 6 ,000 leads a month.

20:41That with no marketing? No, no. We do lots of marketing. Okay. So if you did no marketing, how many customers would sign up? About half. Okay. Yeah. So then your payback period on those is immediate. Mm-hmm. So basically, if you want to scale a low-ticket software, it's all about virality. It has to be able to compound on its own based on word of mouth, based on quality of the product, and based on the growth vectors that you'll put into the actual software customer experience. So like school obviously has ones like you start a school community, then you invite 200 people. And then of those 200 people, a couple of those people start school communities and they've invited 200 people.

21:15And then it kind of continues onwards. And so that is what you have to solve for. So, yeah, how do you do that? It's like we're doing that very slowly. How do you do that? How do you make that happen faster? It's a data question. Okay. So basically what you do is you look at something called M12 retention. So month 12, right? So you're like, okay, let's look at all of the people who have stayed for 12 months. Now, let's reverse that to the present. What did these people do? Actions. And then what do they look like? Demographics. That increase the likelihood that that M12 retention occurs. And so when you do this correctly, you'll say, okay, if someone gets their site live, that 4X is the likelihood they make it to M12.

22:01If they add a custom URL to their site, it edXes the likelihood they get to M12. So you'll basically rank order all of the things as they correlate to M12 retention. And then you'll say, cool, how do I build this into the front end onboarding flow so that I increase the likelihood these things occur? And then it's like, okay, how do I decrease friction for each of these steps? And so this data problem first, and then it becomes an engineering issue for how you do onboarding. once you do that then basically the people who are coming in then it's like great now that we're not we're losing people now we can look at the basically virality of it which is how can we encourage people to you know bring more friends so like for facebook like growth in sass looks like this 100 people sign up that's what growth looks like you're like how does that look like growth these 50 people never leave and then you just can't stop growing that's how that's how actually looks for growth.

22:57So would you reallocate? So now we're spending 30k a month on, you know, our super long payback period ads. Would you reallocate that to onboarding engineering? I actually don't think this is a money thing. Okay. This is a, I have to do the math and have a good data engineer who can basically plot out looking at all customers and software. So you should be able to see what actions they're taking within the software. If you don't have that, then you have to get the tracking in place so that you can basically make the correlations based on the actions they've taken on the way in to M12. And if you're like, man, this sounds complex.

23:27It's like, there's a reason that billion dollar companies don't get shit out of the sky. Yeah. It's hard. Yeah. But that's the reality of it. That's the real answer. And how do you think about, so I imagine it would be similar with school. Most of our turn is just people being like, I didn't make any money coaching. I'm not coaching anymore. Should I think of that as a problem to be solved or something that's out of my control? Part of that's marketing. Okay. If you frame it as, if you use your R-star for you when to make money, you will get people who if they don't make money they will think that your software failed if you say this is the thing that helps you build communities and you can build a community for free then they were successful if they got 20 friends to do skateboarding in a online community yeah yeah okay thank you yeah congrats on the business uh my name is jack i sell tiktok shop agency services to econ brands uh we do two and a half million in revenue i'd like to be at 12 and what's stopping me is a woman in the red dress who's with me today yeah she's there she is stunning um so i started at the same time hedging my bets i came out of a very sour partnership and both have grown really nicely in them since since last year um i'm very good at growing the business like kind of both sides fio is there's a supplements brand just for a bit of background supplements brand growing like crazy on tiktok shop obviously the agency kind of services the growth which is great um and fio is great with content and product knowledge right um i can't do both because obviously now we've hit a point with the agency service where we're bringing on like a lower ticket um and i also kind of want to and you're probably gonna i know you're gonna say but um on the higher ticket or like done for you service that you know our kind of main sell to for the agency um econ brands that what size it's a tough one because like the top two brands we have are completely different avatars uh and hence is why a reason we also wanted to bring in a lower level service because like we don't know what they're going to be like till we get them the other side um hence why we can kind of like incubate them for a lower level service and cherry pick hopefully econ brands have a good appetite for risk and throw money it so it works so the question is the question is um i want to so i know typically it's like one or the other i kind of want to merge it because we can also invest in these brands that look good at the third business look good we could solve our two business problem by adding another one and investing on yeah yeah well that's that's the thing like we have opportunities daily coming to me like saying right you know i've got this brand jump in and i'm like we could smash it I just need like that extra little department to clean up the brand and then it becomes a good client for the agency.

26:04Yeah. And then it's, yeah, that's the two places making most money. One with a big brand, so a whale and one with the brand we own, which is also the next whale, which is why it's like, it's fucking 50-50. I don't know which way to go. I'll tell you this. First off, there's, there's no right answer. It's going to be what you want to do. Um, second thing though, is that I like to, I like to think about things from like, what's the end state going to look like? And then kind of reversed into the present. And so the end state of your TikTok agency, there's going to be two, there's two issues with your existing model that will decrease the likelihood that you have a very big agency.

26:33Number one is that you service small customers. Small customers are inherently volatile. Their volatility will relate back to your volatility as a business will make your business unsellable or not valuable and definitely not very fun to run. Problem number one. Problem number two is that TikTok shop for now is a hot arbitrage opportunity and will not be here forever. And so in three years, the likelihood that it has the same returns is low. And so you basically have, again, an arbitrage opportunity that exists. There's two kind of big long-term issues there. You're selling to the wrong people and you're selling to short-term people or short-term opportunity.

27:07So it doesn't build a long-term business. What I do like is that you have this good infrastructure for marketing. I don't think the idea of the whole merging thing is as, I think there's a tweak on it that would make it better. so if I were you I would take my existing very large infrastructure on the agency side cut all my clients and then take all that marketing horsepower and put it towards Theo and then own a big ass brand I see what stops you from doing that? it's volatile it's TikTok shop only that brand we're slow on meta etc we're getting there we've got an agency on board we're going for it so that's the only reason I would say like not sure Theo's volatile?

27:43no he gives Moody vibes Theo's great it's cool careful um no no no i'm business um no no it's good and i love the agency side and i think okay i love it but also i do see a huge opportunity in the info product model with it because it doesn't exist in the uk and a lot of people would buy it well yeah but what do you want what do you want to have happen so i would like that to go i would like the info you said you want to get to 12 million either of those could get to 12 million coaching business gets 12 million you can sell socks and gets a 12 million so what do you want to do okay well i want to prefer to be an agency owner yeah yeah i would what i would like to do is bring in a big hit up to make sure that that that the growth and stability of that side can go so if you can keep marketing the fuck out of it that'd be great and then agency side i would love the the lower ticket like 3k learn it all etc and buy pieces of the agency model whereas and when you kind of need to it's much more scalable for us and rather than doing like everything sell that to masses and then cherry pick like the ideal clients out of that when we see them performing in an ideal world of course yeah ideal world where great people fall out of the sky and immediately know what to do and just run everything for you for a fraction of the compensation oh so you're 50 50 on this brand yeah okay and it would be so elegant if you were like you know what i'm just gonna go all in on this df thing that's so nice um but you're like no i want to be an agency owner uh it's it's it's really just it's it's limited by your ambition so if you want to do 12 million dollars a year literally any of those things will be 12 million which actually doesn't serve as a really good filter if you were like i want to build a 100 million dollar thing then i would say it's going to either well i mean you could your existing agency model wouldn't get you there you'd have to serve as higher-end customers you find like hex clad and you know whatever you know fly yay that's the yogurt brand whatever just naming consumer brands and you find big brands and then you probably wouldn't sell tiktok shop for yogurt but you get the idea right you'd find those big brands and be like okay we're gonna build this whole thing out for you we'll do some sort of rev share on it and i think rather than trying to invest in the brands just do a revenue share it'll be much easier it'll be much cleaner and most of these brands will never sell anyway so you might as well just like get the cash because that's the only thing they're really going to produce makes sense yeah that's that's the model now we so our main dumb for you service on the agency side is like we rev share and fix costs um but you sell to small businesses yeah you sell bigger businesses a mixture stop selling to small businesses and you'll build a bigger business so would it be would it be reasonable to say like okay so main service that takes a lot of a manpower like big businesses only price raise high ticket and then the the info product a lot of people might be interested in you can just sell that and then yeah or you could just not sell it you just you could just live your life and just service the high-end customers and make more money cool you like it so last year was the first year that i noticed in my life that i didn't have fomo it was weird it's been a lot of years that i've had fomo where i'd see somebody doing something really cool and i'm like man i really want to do that i should stop what i'm doing and i should do that um i don't i don't know what happened where fomo disappeared for me.

30:52Um, but I can tell you that it is the worst is the worst, um, drive as an entrepreneur. It's really fear is the driver, the first letter. And so it's this fear of missing out or like, and so there will, you, there will always be more opportunities than you can possibly do. It's just the nature of life, life short. And you'd like, and the more skilled you are, the more amazing opportunities you have to say no to in order to do one opportunity all the way. because if you just do one thing really well for the rest of your life it'll get really big but if you do two things for the rest of your life you won't either do either really well and neither will get big and so it's like you have to just learn to sing now and so you're like but there's also this other it's like you know what i also thinking like all these small guys they also need a little software and we could i could put this together it's like to stop like why not sell them newspapers right want some orange juice they drink orange juice i mean you know like like what are we doing right so like there's always something else you can sell especially if you know how to sell and promote.

31:47This is a discipline thing. You have to learn how to say no. And you have to think about what's the most valuable version of this business. The most valuable version of this business is going to be big brands who you have big rev shares with, and you're just their TikTok guy. They don't even think about it. You send them a check every month, they're happy. Those are the right customers. Everybody's like, hey, do you think you can make it big for me? Wrong avatar. They're going to churn out and you're going to be their savior, which also means that you're their villain the moment it doesn't work.

32:11It makes sense. Right? And there's volatility and you have an arbitrage opportunity does not make it a very stable business so go big go big companies make your rates appropriate change the marketing the brand like i'm saying you wanted to have a big agency that's what a big agency looks like yeah if you're like you know what i have this skill set of knowing how to do these things then you can build a big brand and you'd be like fuck the agency i'm really good at this okay but you but like you can also ignore my advice entirely and make a few hundred thousand dollars a month and like and feel cool makes sense appreciate just being real no no i hear it thank you appreciate it they're more like that that's usually how it is just whelmed you know like just hard it's a hard decision yes ma 'am hi alex my name is gree i'm from norway i sell three different products to three different uh clients and i've been telling myself this isn't pokemon i don't have to get them all you know what i mean so my issue is focus uh i am at the revenue at your over expanded focus and avatar okay got it exactly yeah and probably under price but we're gonna find out keep going i have a business that's been making a million the last 10 years okay and revenue about 500 that will be sorry 500 yeah yeah so 50 50 percent i put that uh revenue into another business which is airbnb business so now i have four different avatars okay yeah and um what's that so the issue is that i want to grow my business and i've been at a million for the last 10 years i wanted to grow it the last four years so that's what's stopping me i need to focus and i don't know which product to focus on because I tell myself that Norway is the smallest market in the world, only 5 million people.

34:09Okay. So it is a small market. Do you speak Norwegian to your customers? Yes, of course. You speak English great. That's why I ask. You could still to Americans if you wanted to. Yeah, that's what somebody told me. And then I'm like, yes, I want to do that. But that would be a fifth one. Fifth business. Yeah. Why not? I want to do that too. Why not? But then again, I like to take a day off once in a while. not like you so i'm going to introduce this because um this already came up i think that entrepreneurs need to think about investing differently than most people do and i this is called a barbell strike i'll move this way so you guys can see it there we go so this is called a barbell strategy which is basically you have your business which then produces cash which then so this is active and this is passive and this is you know gets your 10 per year whatever whatever you want here.

35:05I'll just whatever you want that to be. The problem is that we, because we know how to do business, we know how to sell stuff. We're like, man, I could get such a better return if I did this other thing, which is just starting another business. And so the highest returns you're going to get is if you can find ways to actually take money in your existing business and reinvest it. That's the best case scenario. Like if there's another building that's across the street, so we're buying the building across the street because it came up and it didn't really come up. I went to the guy that said, I'll give you a million above.

35:33And then he said, fine. but I'm buying that building across the street because my team's growing. Right. And so like, that's a phenomenal return. Now I just overpaid for real estate, but I'm going to make a hell of a lot more on being able to have more of my team in person than if I didn't have that. And so that's going to be a really good return, but I have to analyze it differently because that's going to be in my active income. If after you've reinvested every dollar you possibly can in the thing that you control, that you know better than anyone else, which is your business. If you still have extra cash, Then you put it into something that doesn't take any of your time at all.

36:03Zero. And you have to accept the fact that you're not going to get a better return on that than you are over here. But the key is it has to be passive. And it's not like, well, it's sort of, as soon as you start hedging, it's not passive. It's not passive. Yeah. Like if you can't forget about it for a year or two, year or two, then it's not passive. So that being said, you have this business that does a million dollars a year,$500 ,000 in profit. You want to grow the business. What are the, so you name, so what do you sell? I have a marketing course for those who hate their jobs and want to start their own business.