Throwback: Most Business Owners Have a Focus Problem | Ep 934

0:00The biggest mistake that I have done in my entrepreneurial career, I'm going to walk through and then I'll explain kind of the meta concept that I think is why we are doing better now than we've ever done before. The very beginning of my business, I started an online fitness coaching business called the Free Training Project, which then flipped to for-profit. I then started a gym. Now, I did a smart move and said I'm going to focus on only one of them, which was the gym, and the gym grew. I kept doing this gym thing because that kept working, and then all of a sudden, as I kept opening locations, I was like, man, I'm pretty good at this marketing and sales stuff.

0:30Then all these people started being like, hey, can I give you money to do other stuff? And I can do other things. So that sounds great. Within the next 12 months, I had a dental agency, a chiro agency, and a business that was the turnaround business, which was me flying out to gyms. And so I tried to grow four businesses at the same time where I was CEO of all of them. It took me getting into a head-on collision in a DUI where I had a mentor of mine, whatever you want to call it, who was like, your lack of ability to make decisions will kill you. After that, over the next seven days, I broke up with, which is probably the best term because some of You guys are in terrible partnerships and won't admit it.

1:03I broke up with my partner that I had with a couple of gyms, not all of them, but a couple of them. I broke up with a partner I had for dental. I broke up with a partner I had for Cairo and then broke up with another business that was related to tangentially with the launch thing. And it sucked. But finally, after all of those conversations, I was able to just do the turnaround business. And then within the next however many months, you guys know that story, it exploded. We made a whole bunch of money. And then we switched to licensing and then we did three something, then 480, then 780, then a million, then one two, then one five, then two.

1:35And then we kept going straight line all the way to four. At that point, I was like, huh, you know what we could do? Start another business. That was when I started Prestige and Prestige obviously helped the top line and the bottom line as well. But the day that I started Prestige was the day that Jim Lynch stopped growing. So Jim Lynch maintained and then I grew Prestige because then Prestige got all my reign. Then I was like, okay, well, I split my attention. We went up in revenue. Well, I'm going to create this ecosystem for gyms. And so then I started Allen. And so I'm now here with three companies.

2:09I just have more money to do things now. And so I'm CEO of Allen, CEO of Prestige Labs, and CEO of Gym Launch. And as soon as that happened, Prestige Labs went down slowly, and Gym Launch went down very, very, very slowly. and that continued until I sold Allen and then after I sold Allen, gym launch straight line up and that was what allowed us to actually eventually exit the company. I bring this up because it's been the hardest lesson of my entrepreneurial career. You have to learn to say no and I actually think focus just comes down to saying no to everything that is not what you said you would do.

2:55That's it. That's all it is. And so if we want to be focused, then you can run that filter through your brain, which is, this is something that is not what I said I would do. Which means if I want to be focused, the answer is no. Now, how focused you are determines the extent to which and across domains that you say no to. So on one level, you say no to business opportunities. Even more focused to be a person who says no to business opportunities and new friend opportunities. Even more focused to be somebody who does no new friend opportunities, no new business opportunities, no networking opportunities.

3:32And the list can keep going, right? If somebody did literally nothing else, then they'd be the most focused person. And so it's not a, am I focused or not? It's how focused are you? There's this quote that I heard from Justine Musk, which is Elon Musk's like seventh wife removed or whatever. Elon, if you ever see this, I love you. She said, he said no in a way that protected his resources so that he could channel them towards his own goal. And I realized that behind every no is a deeper yes to whatever it is that you do. And so I just think about it that way, which is like the focus feels bad on the outside because no one likes saying no, but what it really is is saying yes again to the thing you said you would do.

4:18And the reason this is so near and dear to my heart is because it's been the struggle of my life. It's been so hard for me. And the opportunities that I get presented now are insane. They're nuts. And I recently had to turn down an opportunity that was absolutely absurd. And now the opportunities are all billion dollar opportunities. Everything's a billion now, which is cool. But I also have acquisition.com, which will for sure be a billion dollar plus company in the next 36 months. Like we will be there. That's like, we need to, we didn't, we need to not do anything else. I can just not mess it up and it's still hard.

4:51And so I gave myself this saying, which was, and you can scale it up or down, whatever you want, which is, I'm not going to sacrifice my first billion for my second. And so right now, some of you have your first million or 10 million or a hundred million or whatever the number is for you. And you get excited about your second hundred million or your second 10 million or your second million. And you forget to make your first one. And I'm, I'm keep, I have so much content on this specific topic because it's something I struggle with so much. And that's why I wanted to hit on this. So you're going to hear another quote.

5:23So you guys can tell me who this is. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you focus on. You've got to focus on, but that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to a hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things. Steve Jobs. You've got to say no, no, no. And when you say no, you piss people off. Also Steve Jobs. I was listening to an interview from one of his executives when they were building the, I can't remember if it was the iPod or the iPhone.

5:54and so they were like so what was it like to work with Steve and he said Steve would start meetings and just say what have you said no to lately you just start with that because he figured out that that's what focus really meant is what you say no to and he said I would sometimes like have some nose ready for the meeting so I could like throw them out but he's like he wouldn't be satisfied if I gave him like obvious nose he said it had to be no to something that you deeply wanted It had to be like a juicy no. And some of you guys right now have juicy no's that are sitting there, and you just have to get the credit from Steve Jobs for saying a real no.

6:29Because the other no's aren't actually no's. They're obvious no's. And if you actually pursued them, you'd be an idiot. The ones that really are the meaningful ones that propel you in your career are also these sacrifices that you put on the altar of the success that you want to have. And so in some ways, it's like it's all the opportunities that you turn away because you really thought about the one thing that meant the most to you. And so I got this from a mentor. He said, if you don't say no to good opportunities, you'll never have the time to pursue the great opportunities. And once in a lifetime opportunities come about twice a year.

7:03So let me explain why this concept matters and why it's going to make you more money and why I think it's the greatest superpower of entrepreneurs. So fundamentally, you can do more stuff or get more for the stuff you do. That's it, which is fundamentally volume times leverage. And within the context of a business, it's the amount of stuff you do and what you get for every repetition, which yields your ultimate output. So in the beginning, when you're really shitty at making cold calls, you have to do a lot of them to get, and you don't have a lot of leverage because you're bad at it, to get some level of output.

7:37But here's the really interesting thing about leverage and volume. The more you do, the better you get at doing. I've told this story before and there's a lot of different analogies for it, but two classes start in university for pottery making. One class, the professor says, you have to make the perfect pot by the end of the semester. It's the only assignment. You make one pot and at the end I'll grade you on how good that pot is. The other group, he said, I don't care how good the pots are, make as many pots as you possibly can. And I'm just going to measure it. And the pot has to be round and it has to be able to hold water.

8:13And that's it. Those are the requirements of the pot, as many as you can. And at the end of the semester, everyone assumed that the person who had the quality pot was going to be one of them who had the best pot and the volume pots had the most volume pots. But something interesting happened, which is... 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.

8:50And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It'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.