How to Unf*ck Your Business | Ep 750

0:00There are four big levers in your business that could be messed up. I'll show you how to figure out which one it is and how to fix it so you can scale your business. Most small businesses or even mid-sized businesses don't grow as fast as they could because they spend their time doing the wrong things. There's a lot of things that can make the business more money. The question is just which of these things will make it the most money. And so by doing that, we have to verse back into, we had those four levers that I had earlier. We've got traffic, we've got conversion, we've got price, and then we've got churn.

0:28So those are the big four things. And so if we want to grow the business, those levers have to change or the business will not grow. And so for many of you, it might just be you need more traffic. Like the business model is fine, the economics are fine, and you need more traffic. And so basically, at least my thought process that I have with this is I try and scale as much as I possibly can until something breaks. And then when it breaks, we fix that thing and then go back to scaling the shit out of it again. I mean, fundamentally, that's what we do. And I mean, I teach this for businesses, but I'll walk you through it.

1:07What is going to go to these four levers that we talked about earlier, right? Which is going to be your traffic, your two Fs there, whatever conversion, which is you tweaking your about page, making a VSL that's better, adding carousel images, tweaking the bullets that you have on your landing page. You've got the price, which you can test. And then you've got churn, right? Which has a big list of things that you can do. So these are the four levers. The things that you're doing have to ladder up to one of these four. If it doesn't ladder up to one of these four things, why are you doing it? All right.

1:36So like if we were to translate your objective with the free group, you would have to say, okay, I think that us reactivating the free group will increase traffic. That's fundamentally what you're doing. You want this traffic source to make you more money from your, towards your ticket, high ticket thing. And you say, okay, how much work will it take me to reactivate this group? Okay. Is there anything else that could get me more traffic than reactivating the group of the things that I have available? So right now, could me just spending more money on ads or making better ads make us more than me spending the time to reactivate the group?

2:07If so, forget reactivating the group, make better ads or spend more money on ads. Does that make sense? So once you figure out, and when we're picking which of these three things or four things that you're doing, the thought process is what, which of these is the biggest constraint in the business. And so if conversion rate, let's say, for example, on the, on the landing page is super low, then it might mean like, Hey, before getting more traffic, I'm going to, I think I can double my conversion on this page. Cause I haven't really spent any time on it at all. Okay. Well then it makes sense to spend a day or two.

2:36Like, can I really clean this up and make it as crisp as you only possible with the language that I use? Can I grab screenshots that are more meaningful that like you probably had more testimonials, things like that. You haven't updated. Like, can I put that on there? Can I make an actual three minute VSL that, that is more compelling than the one that I just like tossed up there. Okay. That's probably a day of work. Well, it's probably high leverage because I can double the growth of the business by just improving this conversion metric. Pricing, like, well, if everybody just pays you more, we already went through that example over here.

3:04This could obviously make you more money. And then you have your big list of things that you're doing for churn. And so cool. Which of these is the biggest thing that's containing the business? You pick the one that you're working on. And then for me, I tend to think through this more, better, new. And I tend to do it in this order most of the time. So like, I will just ask one of our portfolio CEOs like, why can we not just do more of what we're currently doing? Like whatever we're doing, why can't we just do more? So you'd have to make an argument to me that we should reactivate this group rather than just spending more money on ads.

3:39You have to make an argument that it's easier and it will make us more money than spending more money on ads. And if you came back to the argument, I'd be like, well, then forget about it. If we can't do any more for whatever reason, we have some limitation. Like we can't post more than twice a day on Instagram. Like we just can't, or we can. It just like, we've seen that when we post three times, it doesn't, doesn't heal the same performance. So two is kind of the sweet spot. Fine. All right. Then what can we do to make it better? Right. Okay. Cause if we can make those two posts just higher quality overall, can we like really think through the hooks?

4:05Can we make sure that they're tight, that they appeal ideally to the audience that we're looking for? If we do better, then the quality of the traffic will go up, the more views will go up. Does that make sense? Now, if we can't do any more, any better, then we need to try something new. And you notice that most of the times you can do more of what you're doing, you can do what you're doing better, which is why I so rarely do new things. Once you have something that works, that's the hard part. Once it works, it's like, how do we scale the living crap out of it? And the reason that most entrepreneurs, in my opinion, especially small ones get stuck is that they find something that works and then they stop doing it.

4:34And then they get distracted by six other new things. and they get completely spread thin. And it's been like, what's ironic is that the small business owner is the one who has the least amount of leverage. And you have the, basically your, your contribution, your time contribution to the income of the business is more direct than anybody else's, especially at this level. And so like you like saying, okay, I'm going to take a third of my time. That might just be like decreasing your business by a third. Um, and so you have to have a very strong argument for why that's going to make sense. And then for who, once you have a team, then that becomes the next thing.

5:05It's like, okay, we know we aren't increased traffic. The way that we're going to do that is like, we can't do more posts on Instagram, so we're going to make them better. And this is the process that we're going to focus on getting better, which means that once a week, I'm going to take three hours and I'm going to script out. I'm going to look at other people's content that have really good hooks. I'm going to write down all the hooks and then I'm going to make content that I think is going to appeal to my demographic in a better way. Cool. Now who's going to be, you know, if it's you, then you're the who in a lot of these.

5:30If the business gets bigger, then it's like, okay, Jeremy, you're running this and then we just measure to make sure jammie does the job that makes sense in terms of thinking through this and so we just want to make sure that what you are doing is going to map to what's going to drive growth within the business and i swear to god so many times people are just doing shit that does not map to this okay red's over one quick question on that the the first four is there like a certain priority that you would recommend for like i'm a solo operator, I'm doing like 50 a month B2C offer. Is there like one of those big four that you would recommend prioritizing first?

6:07Start here because this is how you have lifeblood in the business. So you have to promote, you have to acquire customers. Once this is relatively consistent, even at a low level, I then, this is me, how I think through this now, not when I was younger, normally I would just be like, just do as much of this as you can forget everything else. Now it's do enough of this so that we can keep working on how do we find the things that people actually want versus what we think they want. And then there's the things that we can remove. Like how can we delete things? How can we make this simpler? How can we make it more elegant?

6:39How can we shorten the models that we have? I mean, we're hiding classroom for new people. Like think about this. Like we've removed three calls a week. Like we're trying to take things away. Not because we don't want to add value. It's easy for us to add the value. It's, but we want, we want them to consume it. And so consumption should be the highest priority for everybody here in terms of making like, how do they get value? They have to consume value, right? So consumption should be the highest priority. And so we start here until you have enough flow going through the system that we can see what they really want.

7:08And a lot of times these simple things, like the last mastermind, I think we went through a ton of depth of all the things that you can do to reduce churn, right? It's like, so you experiment with that and this might be months while you're doing this. I didn't hit like a, like, let's go hyperscale until like recently. And this was years, right. Of getting the product right. Like, obviously like there's people coming in every day and there was enough promotion that we basically, we could test and keep learning, but it wasn't like, we don't want the world to find out about it yet because we want to get all these pieces right.

7:38Once these pieces are right enough, then you go back here and you scale a living hell out of it. Boom. Yeah. That's great. So right now the question for you is, if you have really low churn, I don't know if you do, but from what you were saying, it sounds like you have low churn, then yeah, do more. Do more, do better of what you're currently doing. So are you running ads? Yeah. So you spend more. Spend more and make them better. Top 20 % of my best customers targeted towards them. Now that I have that insight and then just keep making that better and then just more. More better. And then just spend 400 grand a month on ads.

8:14Yeah, sure. i mean it's like an inside joke in my business like he's just gonna say more better so yep that's we're gonna do this quarter just like we did last quarter just like we did the quarter before we're gonna do more we're gonna do better and if we do both those things we'll probably make more money and then if there's something that prevents us from doing more better then we fix that and then we go back to more better does anyone have questions about what they need to do for this like like you need you're like okay am i should i be spending more money well if you're if your ltv is good in terms of and your and your and your cac is low then yeah i just keep spending i guess for like low ticket communities you know recently you had a video where you went like seven things like a hundred letters onboarding exigent reviews yeah for communities on school like which one of these would you go after at the first kirby i feel like you have even more insight with you the price sounds like the thing that's moving at the second the price okay because you've already experienced what that's doing all right you know the average is around 20 you probably want to be on the good side of that so figure out why you're not like i would talk to your customers first like why did you cancel you want to talk to the people that canceled you want to talk to the people that stayed and you want to figure out what differences they have and then if you find the people that stayed did these things emphasize those things if you find the people that left did other things remove those and so it might not be price i'm just yeah it but you told us so um maybe it's price so like balance that and then you know with your traffic you're you can drive more of that and then you can play with about page conversion you can play with that and then when you're bored of those go back to retention yeah i know i can drive like easily way more traffic it's just that i have a leaky bucket yeah so i want to fix it so i'm wondering if i should add the onboarding or you know onboarding i think for sure is a good idea and how would you execute that for low ticket you do a group onboarding and everybody who signs up gets one group onboarding then you attend you do it once a week i think people throw a lot of shit in their community and then they just keep adding and then they think they need to keep adding to make it better but it's not true like overwhelm is the main cause of churn think about the experience so how many things in the classroom would you say is like the sweet spot because like right now i have like eight maybe honestly the hardest part i found when improving anything is to figure out what's actually wrong with it that well i've been working on the school games funnel recently by the way almost you'll be happy about this um i figured out like what the problem to try to figure out what the problem was was actually quite difficult but in the was my it was this guy i knew from new zealand who's a complete stoner that had texted me when homosey when homosey launched the games he couldn't understand what it was and i was not going to try to explain it to him but when we came back to making this improving it i was like it turned out that he was the best signal for it actually what the fuck is the school games i wrote it down that was the problem if you didn't know what school was you have and you see an ad from homo's and he's talking about the school games and some leaderboards and coming to vegas people don't know what the fuck that is so i wrote down what the fuck is the school games and i was like that is the problem so but that took me a lot of research to like find right i was talking to a lot of people i was doing this with kirby it's quite an interesting process right and then we were like okay well how do we describe this damn thing in a way that is makes sense to like a stoner dude um because it helps to use extreme cases like steve jobs tested products on children because like if they could understand it anyone could understand it right so like defining the problem and then coming up with different ways you could solve it.

12:17I've been doing this with Goose and Kirby in the office all week. We came out with many different ways to describe what it is, many different landing pages, many different bullets, and we just kept talking to users, getting feedback, and kept iterating it. We probably made 30 versions. Some of them were so wrong, I wondered what kind of tangent. You'll never see it. but you know we actually at the end of about one week we landed on something and i'm and now everyone we show it to instantly gets it it's like we don't actually have to fully launch to find out when you learn how you can use everyone to get like feedback and talk to people and show it to people and get their reactions you can do a lot of fast iteration cycles without the harshness of like reality then when you launch it into reality you have a way better chance right um so that's how you improve anything like that that's not the games but that's what we were doing to the games recently we kirby was doing interviews with all of the winners that was overwhelming not many people were showing up so we cut that we just did one homo zq and a a week right attendance is up every viewing is up people are now saying that it's way more valuable and you know so it's we were unlocking the one-day recordings after you got three customers we're like why are we making it hard to get the most valuable thing now you just need three members they can be free right so like what do people value how do we make more people experience that what do people not value take it out what do people not understand reword it do you see it's all the same but i will i will i will emphasize what sam's saying is that there's a it's so much more work than you expect it to be and everyone wants like the one silver bullet that you're going to magically fall on it but if it were obvious you would have already done it and so it's like it's disguised and that's what i mean this is literally what makes business hard and so i'll have a business owner on a q a call say like what should my price be and i'm like i don't know i'll walk you through the process of how i'd figure it out but i don't know your avatar I don't know your traffic scores.

14:35I don't know the value prop of your community. And even if I did, I would say, I'll start here and I'm going to do the math and I'll move it and I'll do the math. I mean, with a portfolio, same thing I was talking. It was like, we tested 50, 35, 25, 15. We just tested it. I was like, I don't know. We'll find out. And then they were all the same. And then I was like, okay, well, which business would I prefer? And then we go into that. Right. And so just, just in terms of thinking through things, like the amount of effort that goes into it that most i would say that like as i've gone as i've got moved up in business the my understanding of the level of effort that's required to solve complex problems has gone up 100x it's just it's significantly harder to solve more complex problems and that's also why the biggest paydays are on the other side of those problems because if they're really easy to solve everyone i've already solved it so it's like four hours and a cup of coffee and a bunch of data and you're like, all right, let's try this.

15:28There's a quote I learned from the software engineers at school. They say you have to make every detail perfect, but the only way you can do that is to limit the amount of details that you have. So inside of the school games, we have eight videos. All of them together are less than 45 minutes. One course. We do one call per week and that's it. and once a month you get a download from here a mastermind that's it very easy to explain to someone one call one course one mastermind a month and there's 13 000 people in there each paying 99 a month and they get the school software i have a question yeah so there's a fine balance between because if you're a leader of a big community right if you're showing up too much you kind of almost lose your power, right?

16:21And if you do Q &As every single day, nobody wants, it's not special. So how would you balance Q &A calls, making posts inside of the community and just showing up and like giving people attention like that? Sure, there's a data answer for this rather than me just guessing. We can probably find it out like what the best cadence is. I'll tell you, I personally, I think post twice a month in school. That's not planned. I just, I just kind of poke around and I see what people are struggling with. I made that niche post because I was really tired of people being like, what's my niche going to be about?

16:56And I was like, here's how you find your niche. And so it's just like, I just listened to what was the, like, there's, you probably noticed this in your community. It's probably like a, like a problem du jour. It's like people just kind of glob onto a single problem all of a sudden. And like, I felt like I was seeing more and more of that. So I was like, all right, I'm going to try and answer this. And so then you make that. And then it's like, hopefully, and if it does, if you put the thing in and then that problem still exists then you didn't do it right so it's like you have to do it again you have to make it simple you have to make it easier whatever it is you keep doing it until that one goes away and then like the next problem will occur and the good news is that your customers will always have problems yeah and so you just solve them i can tell you a good thing that works for me um so i spend a lot of my time reading what people are saying like i'm trying to understand what things people are struggling with so i'm not in there just posting a lot i'm in they're listening the most more than anything else most it would be like 90 it would be like a lot of time is spent listening trying to figure out what is going on what should i improve what problems is the community facing right then when i'm pretty sure i've got those problems i'll even talk to some power users and i'll validate do you think these are actually problems right and then i'll make sure i'm clear on the problems first okay now if i spend now prioritize them what's the most what is the most pressing problem okay number one now just focus on that at least i know if i just fix that i'll add some value right yeah so now i'll try to fix that and i will try to fix that by research experimentation etc and then i'll come back to my community and say hey i saw all you guys were facing this it sucks i fixed it here you go and that's how i like that's how you add value seriously no like i have this little template on my wall for emails which is uh hey i made this thing for you here's what it does enjoy like cta like that's like that's my email template it just makes it really simple like hey you guys were struggling with this thing i made this for you here's why it's important goodbye the hard part is finding the thing yeah like i said how do we make the school games funnel better well what's the problem with it that's the real question and it was some stoner dude who had the answer yeah so you wouldn't have a schedule of like posting daily or second like every second definitely not yeah that's like a henry ford production line for community like we're not trying to pump out posts fast that's not what makes it but it's not that's not a good community a good community is something that understands your pain and experience and delivers solutions and is fun yeah you're right yeah and isn't overwhelming and doesn't make me read five articles a day right like value post yeah because i don't want to read a bloody article that's a pain in the ass like i want a solution or i want to laugh one of them yeah i'm doing 17 lives a week in my paid at the moment so yeah but my my feelings telling me to put it in the free community but i mean that might be stupid because i'm trying to list all you guys are saying you're saying no we're just doing one now and it's like so i'm a bit the fuck you know i think if you want to use all that like all that so last last games a ton of people i think it was last games that was like it was like the lives games it was like everybody was doing like instagram lives might have been maybe two ago.

20:42And the thing is, is like, we have to separate promotion from delivery. So from a promotion perspective, you're doing lots and lots of lives, you're making lots of posts, you're making all this stuff. I know, I understand. I got you. And so my point is, is like, I would take all that energy and put it into promotion. So you get way more people into your community. And then the thing is, is that you if you do 17 lives a week, externally, it's okay that people don't consume all of them, because if they consume one of them, than they might buy. Whereas if you're inside of the community and you're doing 17, they might be like, oh, I'm missing out on 16 out of the 17.

21:17I'm not getting the value. If it's free, your cost is time. And so as long as you deliver a return on the time that they spend consuming your content, then they have a positive exchange with you. And so basically it's like you can never promote too much. You can't put too much inside of the community. And so I would take some of that juju and put it externally to drive more through the box. I think Hamza actually did like the opposite like when he increased the daily coffee to like nearly every day um his churn like reduced massively so I have no idea oh he's messaging me like every day and trying to figure out like all kinds of things around churn at the moment um I have my answer to him he kept coming up with ideas my answer to him was talk to your customers I recently was pretty public about this is that like I widened my content for I think either three or six months.

22:08I like started sprinkling in some other other pieces. I talked about how I eat like Layla, you know, how Layla and I run, you know, being married and things like that. And the problem is that you do get positive reinforcement from it. And so it's like he made some stuff on relationships and then people were like, oh, this is awesome. But the thing is, is like the wrong people were saying it was awesome. And so what was happening is my audience was growing, but it was growing with the wrong people. and so i had i mean i had this moment where like sometimes you have these like i had a a friend of mine come into a friend acquaintance i'd say flew in and was like um he probably does 10 million bucks a year and uh and he was like yeah you know um yeah i don't i don't listen to too much of your stuff anymore and he's like yeah i was hardcore for like six years um and then i i just kind of um i guess it didn't really apply to me anymore he's like because i'm not really like your avatar and I was like, you're 100 % of us fucking avatar.

22:59Like you are exactly who I'm going after. And then I was like, Oh, I'm a moron. And I just basically, it's like you, you get, you get, it's a balance. Like you want to listen to customers, but you also want to make sure you're listening to the right customers. And so, um, I reoriented all my, my content, which maybe some of you guys have seen. Um, and it's been a hundred percent back to business has been the theme that we have internally. My guys now, um, is that if it's not business, we don't make it just very straightforward. it. Like it can be business adjacent. So like, if I talk about, you know, prioritizing like tasks in my day that can have some element of productivity into it, but it's like, all my examples are gonna be business related.

23:33And so, but by doing that, when I looked objectively across metrics for site conversion, opt-in book sales, applications, the portfolio, all of those metrics went up, even though the average view per video went down. And so it's like, I'm not in this to get famous i'm in this to make money that's a quick question um i wonder if anybody has i mean this might be for everybody but like has anybody done anything to when they do have a churned customer to get them back into being a customer or send a funny gif or just send a funny gif and a dm ask creditpreneur have you seen him yeah ask him for his message he's apparently got some message he dms people with a funny gif and it gets people to reactivate he says it's like something like leaving so soon is kind of like the vibe is kind of yeah but you want to get the funny gift of course okay yeah and it's just within school yeah okay so no email sms or anything like that our sales team has that for uh ghosted leads they have a kevin hart uh meme that's like i think that might be it yeah i think that's what he's using yeah and uh yeah it like it gets higher response rates than any any message this is kind of for both of you probably you sam as well definitely some um but i guess like when you're building you know a startup um obviously you know you might have sometimes you might have a little bit lack of capital a little lack of resources i guess how do you get a players to work for you and with you and how do you like structure comp structures and all that so like the vision for the business has to be big enough that smart people can fit their dreams inside of it and so if you want brains then you need people who like they need to be able to believe that their dreams can come true within your vision if it's again if it's like yeah we've just got a couple groups that we're running and we're making money then it's like that doesn't like really get me motivated if i'm intelligent i'm because like the best people have there's no lack of opportunity for best people they have tons like you have to think about this is it's a totally different game like you're if you're accustomed to taking people who are like i really want a job all of those people are irrelevant you have to be people who are like in some ways you're competing for them.

25:41So the more you're competing for a prospect, like selling them. And so if you feel like, like, I'll tell you the funny one is like, if you're interviewing people where you're like, sell me on why I should take you. If you say that to somebody who's actually really talented, they'll be like, I'm good. Like they just like, they just don't like, I, you have to respond to this offer within 12 hours. It's like, okay. Well, I think you hit the nail right there for me like their vision has to be our vision needs to be big enough for their dreams to fit into it you have to be able to say like what we want to do is we want to make music money into the standard for this and then they have to believe with a decent amount of certainty that it's possible and so like how you guys present like you are absolutely selling them and so like i think drew this about on a past one but everybody here understands you know lead generation lead nurture sales onboarding and then you know retention ascension right that's the how you do with customers, right?

26:37This is the exact same process for an employer. You generate applications, you nurture applications, the sale is the interview, you onboard the employee, and then either retain them or send them. It's the same thing. And so you basically have to understand the acquisition. Like this is when we get into scaling because everyone's like two or three people are like, what's scaling? It's just where the inflow of talent in the business matches the inflow of customers into the business. And you have to have an exceptional conversion process for attracting talent. This is where brand counts double. It counts once on the front end for customers and again on the back end for talent.

27:10And it becomes either a virtuous cycle or a vicious cycle. Either destroys your business, you have a bad brand. Because what do you think, like great talent will look at your reviews and be like, oh, never mind. It wouldn't work at a good place. So I guess, and last question, I guess what would be the best way to like acquire talent? Is it just building a personal brand? like in our field of work because i don't think it's necessarily like i can't i don't feel like i can find the right people on linkedin or something like that you know for what we're trying to do it needs to be people who are kind of like already kind of entrepreneurs or people who are in more of like the sales or manager manager field it really depends on what role you're looking for but i can promise you that very smart people are on linkedin do you know how i um i i looked i got invited to speak at something i looked at who else was speaking there and i saw Hormozy was speaking there and I was like all right that's my opportunity that's the first time we met in person yeah honestly so cool how long ago was that one year before I spoke about doing a deal but you have to like be strategic sometimes yeah and then so you have to kind of do this old school networking thing which I fucking hate because that's like the only time I've ever done that the whole mostly deal was like the one deal to never do that again um but yeah you kind of have to do that i had to start going to like these software things i had to start to meet some software engineers i had to learn about their world i had to ask people about why does what do you hate as a software engineer what do you like what makes a good company what makes a bad company you have to like learn everything about it and network and do that it really sucks honestly but if you're serious about it i knew there was no way i could build school without this person so i delayed starting it by a year just to find the person yeah so i'm not even going to start until i find them like that's how essential i knew they were that's why i tell everyone to not do software it's just because the scale of how difficult it is to actually do it right is so hard that like no basically no one does it right even when you know even if you know what you're doing most people can't do it and most people who are quote in the info world are like oh my info thing is insoluble so i'm going to build software and they just think that like white labeling go high level means they have a software company um like but i mean right or they create some widget that someone else can duplicate in five seconds that they did off with an offshore developer that like if it actually did work then that developer would hold you ransom and then what like they just don't play it out two steps and the code shit anyways and it's all it all sucks like yeah don't do it yeah and someone like you're just you don't want us to succeed that's what because you're you're doing so i was like no man i saw this sam put five years in i was like great okay i saw the metrics i was like okay this is legit i spent all my money and it still wasn't enough yeah I had to spend like twice that again.

30:21Thank you guys for that too, by the way. That's going to help a lot. I'm going to keep this real. Yeah. I mean, the personal brand thing is just good for recruiters. Like if you have one, it's great. It helps a lot. But at the end of the day, if the business that you're trying to build solves a real problem and you really genuinely care about the problem, if you find someone else who also cares about that problem, they will be more likely to work with you. Like that's fundamentally it. what do you sorry last question fun what do you think about creating a an offer to train people to do what you are trying to eventually staff for like i'm growing yeah like you know like in yeah you know like there was a point there was a point in time i had a closer program i was training closers and i was staffing them you know what i mean and then i was i stopped at night because there's so many closer training programs but right now i really need growth partners people who can lead and manage our clients and kind of oversee everything.

31:14What do you think about like, I know there's a growth operator thing, but they're not, you know, like in my mind, like they don't have all the skill sets necessarily. What if someone, you know, created a program to train people? I don't think you create another business to solve a rule. Okay. Depends if it's like, I know with a software engineer, no one's going to be any decent in 10 years. Maybe a prodigy in six or seven, but like there's just no shortcutting that. like i mean my co-founder's done 20 so the years matter and the same is true with a lot of things like there's just years so like but some other things might be different like setting okay you can teach that closing yeah you can probably teach that but these more high level strategic things yeah that ain't happening like it took me fucking 10 years like so are you gonna wait 10 years?

32:10No. Yeah, so it's like fundamentally every skill is trainable. The question is whether it's worth the return on effort and the resources to train someone with it. If you break things down enough, you can train someone to do anything. It's just that if someone has zero meta skills, they don't know how to read, they don't know how to write, they don't know how to talk, you could teach someone to do all that stuff. It's just, why bother? So I'd rather take someone who's already here and then just nudge them if I can with proper training that just bridges the gap between all the skills they come in with and then applying that to my business you got it cool appreciate it yeah always i mean the people is the reason that most internet marketers in general can't make money i'm sorry they make money but they don't make like big money is that they just can't they can't they don't know how to operate people and that's usually because they need like a right hand a true right hand who can who's as good as them and like layla will never get the credit that she deserves and that's fine um but like the reason that all of our stuff is so big is because she's so good at at building like she's an unbelievable builder and so like the culture of the team is rock solid i mean the guys will tell you like layla really runs the like layla runs acquisition.com like i i really like she really does she does not like layla runs everything like i i mean i told you i have an empty calendar i can't have an empty calendar and and also have a business that's running unless someone else is actually doing it.

33:35Layla takes 15 meetings a day. She operates. She's coordinating things between different departments. She's checking on portfolio companies. She's having, you know, one-on-ones with people who are having some sort of emotional breakdown about some craziness, whatever. She handles all that with a smile. You know what I mean? And so, but like, I was, when we were talking earlier, like I capped at$3 million a year. And then when Layla came in 24 months later, I took home$17 million in income. net. And so the difference was that she liked people and I tried to avoid them. And that was the problem.

34:12And so she, her, like Layla's genuine vision in life is to build a company that people love working at. That's her whole, like the whole reason that she, like, she gets up, like her internal mission is to build a company that people love being at every day. And so her vision just fits within my vision. And so I recruited her. to do it. But like, if we didn't do stuff that she liked, we'd like, she wouldn't build it. So I very much like, especially the more talented the people that you bring on, the more you like, like they don't need pushing. Like they know what they're doing. You just need to make sure that they're doing it in the direction and you kind of do this.

34:50Yeah. The amount of training that you have to give someone is inversely proportional to the skills that they come in with. So the more specific, basically the less skilled, the person, the more specific, the instructions sam could basically just be like hey can you just promote school a lot and i'd be like yeah he's not like hey could you make these posts and write this copy and send these emails and run ads and make the hooks like this like that exchange has literally never occurred like i don't even know if sam sees the ads before before they they go out almost he texted me the other day he was like when does the activation stuff come out and i said last thursday no like for real like i already did it and then he was like oh i've seen this and i was like yeah i've already been thinking about that we've got something coming yeah like we don't even i've already thought about the next four things and we've got things ready so by the time almost he has the idea i'm like yeah we got it don't worry yeah do your thing and then i'm like cool let me tell you what i'm doing on the media side it's like oh shit great like these are all the things that I'm ramping up.

35:54This is the system we're putting in place. Like we changed our cadence, like things like that. It's like, oh, dope. I don't even want to think about YouTube. So like if I had to tell him stuff, oh my God. Like, yeah, but it's good to divide it like that. Cause I can just focus on this stuff. He can focus on that stuff. Right. Kirby can focus on his stuff. We have very good, like division like that. Yeah. The amount of direction you need to give someone is inversely proportional to the skill they have. Yeah. Like if someone could just be like, hey can you build this company and be like sure people will complain like if people it's always a sign of notice when people complain there's no communication have you has anyone had this as an issue like with teams maybe a lot of you don't have teams yet but bad communication communication sometimes it's always the complaint yeah i found it's interesting that one because you don't really need to communicate a whole lot when you get the right people like homozy said like a couple of words and i was like don't worry i got it like already happened like right but sometimes if you hire the wrong person there's no amount of communication that can ever make it work and it's exhausting and it just still doesn't work and i think i understood this i think i told this at one of the previous ones but how you know what a good culture is is this story of Google in the early days.

37:17So Larry Page searched for something and the ads that showed up were not relevant to the words he typed in. He took a screenshot, he printed it off, he got a red marker and he wrote, these ads suck. He walked over to the engineers and he pinned it up on the wall and he tapped it. And one of them walked over and picked it off the wall, stayed up all night that night and invented AdSense. which has made them hundreds of billions. So he didn't sit down with them and be like, look, I think you need to do this and this and this and maybe this. He just said these ads suck. Right? Is that clear communication?

38:00I mean, to him it was. No, but that's what good talent is. You can just be like this thing. Yeah, do this. Yeah. You don't even have to say do this. You can say this sucks. Sort it out. like and then they'll they'll be on it or they might have already preempted what sucks because they've already been thinking about it so i always remember that when people say oh like you need more meetings or more communication like that wasn't a meeting first of all right there was there was slapping something on the wall yeah one of the most difficult things this is like i think this from an entrepreneurship perspective in terms of development is like has anyone here had another business before this?

38:42Yes. Okay. Did you achieve in this business, what you achieved in your last business? Like in like from how long it took you to get to that level in your, the business before versus how long it took you to get to that level with this business? Was it way faster? And so a lot of the reasons is because you already beat the bosses up to that level. So it's kind of like you're quickly retracing your steps and then you get to a level that you don't, you're to your level of incompetence. The difficulty, the thing that takes the longest in entrepreneurship is figuring out what good looks like at each level.