How to Think Like the Top 1% | Ep 996

0:00You're making mistakes in entrepreneurship because of patterns you have yet to recognize. And those happen because the solutions to your sticking point are counterintuitive. And don't confuse that with psychological versus logical solutions, which is like, for example, if I wanted to get my neighbor to stop having their dog shit on my lawn, you can't hurt the dog because then you'd get arrested. You can't steal the dog. You'd also get arrested. And you could ask the neighbor nicely, but they might not give a shit. So what do you do in that situation? It's actually really tough. You could try and go to court, but it still probably wouldn't stick because there's really no ramifications.

0:34And even then it would just be a ticket that the other person would pay and the dog could still shoot on your lawn. So it's like a real predicament. So what would you do? Now you could say, okay, I could try and build a fence and that's a potential solution, but I'll tell you the cheapest one that you could do, which is just get a motion activated sprinkler installed on your property. And then whenever anything comes onto the grass, it squirts them and then the dog would not do it anymore. And so that is an example of a psychological versus logical solution. The types of solutions I'm talking about are intuitive versus counterintuitive.

1:04And so an intuitive solution would be what you would naturally think would be the thing to do. And what I have noticed that as an entrepreneurship is that we get stuck at the counterintuitive solutions because we almost always start with the intuitive one, right? You do the one that you think would make the most sense. But, and to be very clear, the intuitive solution usually is the correct solution in the majority of situations because you have a problem, you have intuitive solution. You do the intuitive solution, the problem goes away, and you don't get stuck. You move on with life and you solve problems every day.

1:32But some larger problems in business have counterintuitive solutions. And I thought I would note down, call it the top 10 that I have seen get entrepreneurs stuck. And this is at every level. So this is at 1 million, 10 million, 30 million, 100 million. And so let's start with number one, which is that if your labor costs you too much, it's probably because you're paying them too little. Counterintuitive. So what does that mean? If you pay above market rates, you will get above market talent and the value of above market talent is in excess of above market rates. So Henry Ford figured this out years ago, he had, he paid people above his competition.

2:17And as a result, he was able to suck up the best talent in the marketplace. And then his people did two, three times the output that call it B players, would. And so an A player might be priced at 25 to 50 % above what a B player might be, but one A player is worth three to five B players. And so it's counterintuitive to think, wait, in order for me to save on my labor costs, I should increase how much I'm paying. And to be clear, if you tomorrow just increase how much you're paying all your people, you're not going to all of a sudden get a talent. The point of increasing how much you pay so that you can attract a talent because a certain level of compensation that they're going to expect in order for them to even consider your kind of job opportunity.

2:55And to be clear, this is horizontally as in, you know, plumbers versus plumbers or accountants versus accountants, not a C-level versus a front, a frontline employee, right? Competition is horizontal, not vertical. So that's number one. Here's the second kind of counterintuitive problem that people have. They think that in order to make more money, and this is super common for people who have an existing audience, but is that they need to sell more products to make more money. When the counterintuitive solution is that you need to sell fewer products to make more money. So how does that even happen?

3:27Well, the reality is, if you have fewer products to sell, then you will be able to make those products better. You'll be clear about the avatars that you're trying to serve. You'll be clear on the messaging that you can put out in your advertising. And so you think that, oh, I'm going to sell more stuff so that I can sell more stuff, but you end up selling less stuff and having more things to maintain. And that applies to both services and products. Here's a third counterintuitive one. In order for me to grow my business, I should be broader in terms of who I'm selling to, right? So I'm going to, instead of niching down, I'm going to go broader.

4:05So instead of selling just to gym owners, I'm going to sell to any fitness professional, right? Or even wider, any business owner. And so I can talk to this because I've gone through this experience, which is that first off, if you ever are going to go broader, which I'll make my cautionary tearful why it's probably not a good idea, is you need to earn the right to go broad, right? It's like, first, I started with weight loss. And then I started with gym owners specifically. And then it only then I talked to people who sold to niche lead gen, which was in Allen, which was that business, the software company.

4:33And then it only then after we had the exit, we then talk about business in general, because at that point, I'd already scaled an e commerce business to$20 million plus I'd scaled brick and mortar to, you know, six plus locations on my own, they were probably held I had the B2B consulting side in gym launch that it's killed nationally. And so it's like I had these different examples. And we had Allen, which was an agency related business, which was SaaS. And so these very disparate examples that allowed me to have credibility to then speak more broadly. It is very difficult to just say, oh, I'll just talk broadly.

5:00Because what ends up happening is you talk to no one. And I can say this firsthand, it is much more difficult to be able to go deep on many different subjects, which is something that I'd say I've been able to do relatively disproportionately well to the market, which is why, you know, we have the audience we do. I'm saying, so I think that it is much easier to win in a narrow pond. Now there are significant benefits to this counterintuitive solution. So in order to make more money, you get narrower. Why would you get narrower? Because when you get narrower, you can sell the same thing for more money.

5:28Hear me out. So a classic example that I love that I took from Dan Kennedy a few years ago is if you had a time management course, right? You could sell time management. That's selling to everybody. That's maybe a$19 or$100 thing at most. If I sold time management to sales reps, maybe it's a few hundred dollar thing, right? If I sell time management to outbound sales reps, now it's maybe a thousand or several thousand dollar thing. If I sell time management to outbound sales reps who sell power tools and garden materials, then I could probably charge $10 ,000 for that, right? And the idea is that as you go narrower, the relevance to the prospect goes up.

6:10And so the perceived value also goes up too. And so we think about the value equation of we've got dream outcome, we've got perceived likelihood of achievement. When you niche down, you jack up the value and perceived likelihood of achievement, the likelihood that they believe that your thing is going to help them goes through the roof when you're only talking about their specific problems and their specific benefits. All right, that's the jam. So you want to sell fewer products rather than more to make more money. You want to niche down rather than broadening in order to make more money. Now, here's one that obviously I will speak from the soul on this, which is that in order to make more money and specifically more profit, you need to hear no more than you need to hear yes.

6:51And so many times people think, okay, I'm closing at 50 % in order for me to make more money. If I can close at 80%, I should do that. If you're closing at 80%, you should raise your prices. And so counterintuitively, if you're at that percentage, you should actually raise your prices to hear no more to make more money. I know, counterintuitive. And so if you're listening to this, you're like, wow, these are all probably not the decision I would make. And to be clear, these are all mistakes that I made at each of these situations and done it multiple times and only through saying, listen, I tried every intuitive solution up to this point, and none of them have made me more money.

7:24Why don't I just try something and totally different then and only then I would have this breakthrough and then all of a sudden we're making more money. And so we have to be willing. And again, a lot of these things, because they're counterintuitive, is because they're anti some sort of human emotion. We don't want to hear no. And so we don't want to raise price. But when you do the math, if you can double the prices and your close rate cuts by 25%, you make more money for two reasons. One, every customer is paying you more money. But number two, your cost basis should go down by at least 25 % because you have 25 % fewer customers to service.

7:55So margins expand double because of that. And so this is why pricing is by far the strongest lever. But it is a counterintuitive thing. That's why most business owners don't do it. They haven't revisited their pricing in a long time. By the way, there's a direct correlation to how often you test price in a business and the overall profitability of the business. Kind of interesting. So there's a great chart that ProfitWell produced where basically people who never look at price, least profitable. The people who test price annually, more profitable. The people who test price quarterly and then the people who test price in real time and have pricing committees that full time are dedicated to figure out what they should charge.

8:29Right. I mean, it's literally the amount of money that you get for the thing. And it's for some reason the thing that people think about least often. All right. Another counterintuitive one. In order for me to grow, I should do something different than I am right now. I should do something new. Now, to be clear, earlier I talked about products in terms of I should sell more products. This also applies from an advertising and acquisition perspective. So it's saying I'm doing outbound and to get customers, and so I should start making content. Now, to be clear, I think the more people find out about your stuff in general, the better.

9:03But in terms of a focus of the limited resources you have as a business owner, it is more uncomfortable to ask the question, what do I need to do to make this go up? What do I need to do to do more of the thing that is already working? Because more is the highest risk adjusted return move that you can make in a business. Why? Because there's so many things that you can do in a business that do not make you more money. And the thing that you are doing is actually working. and so it makes more sense to find ways like to do more rather than try to do different or new and this concept is again counterintuitive we think okay well i'm doing this current level of thing and i would encourage you to think with zeros when you think about more so when i say more a lot of people think in terms of doubles and it's normal to think in terms of doubles because it's very human you're like okay well if i work twice as hard i work twice the minute of hours you can get there right and so you actually don't need any creativity but when you add a zero you think an order of magnitude increase in terms of how much volume you need to do, you have to solve the problem differently.

10:00Now, maybe it means that you need to get higher 10 times the guys and that's fine. But you also need to solve the problem differently. It's like, I wonder if I could cut a, I could remove a step from this process. I wonder if I could, you know, this is where like maybe there's a, there's a hook or a messaging change that needs to happen. Maybe there's a step in the funnel or step in the sales process that I can remove, or maybe I can, um, well, I'm about to give the next counterintuitive one away, but each of those, I would encourage you before you do something new from an acquisition perspective.

10:23And mind you, this is somebody who comes from like, I fucking love selling shit, right? I love building out sales motions. I love building out acquisition channels. I named the company acquisition.com. I like it. But I've had to learn this the hard way, which is that whenever I want to do something new, I think to myself, is there a way that I could do this and not do something new? And have I truly exhausted more and almost never in my life have I truly exhausted more to the scale that exists. So I'll give you one little image for this to give you an idea. A lot of people think that they have saturated their existing channel of getting customers.

10:50All right. So they're like, well, I'm, I'm running ads in my local area on, you know, PPC, Google PPC. And you're like, okay, fine. And then all of a sudden somebody else runs ads for their plumbing business in the local area too. And they're like, oh my God, the pie is now cut in half. But it's such a fallacious way of thinking. It's incorrect because the amount of aggregate attention that exists in your area is the total pie. Right now we're talking about one keyword strain or string on one specific platform as your way of getting customers. It's like, you're, you're not, you haven't, you haven't cut the pie in half by having another competitor.

11:27You've got one crumb of a hundred crumbs. And that one crumb, you're a 25 % owner of that one crumb. The pie is gigantic. It's like, we haven't done radio. We haven't done direct mail. We haven't done email. We haven't done outbound. We haven't done DMs. We haven't done making content. We haven't done making content on SEO. We haven't done AEO. We haven't done content for Instagram. We haven't done content for Facebook or meta. We haven't done content on YouTube. We haven't done content on TikTok. We haven't done content on school. Like there's all these different platforms that exist. And so you're running Google PPC and you're thinking, oh my God, I've saturated my market.

12:00It's like, bro, no one even knows you exist. You're inconsequential. The thing, your biggest, your biggest competitor is irrelevance. Is that no one knows who you are. And so that is a counterintuitive solution is that when you get to those situations, normally your intuition is I should do something different. When the much more painful thing that is the correct answer is that you should do more. Thank you.