Lead Gen vs. Closing: Which One’s Broken? | Ep 878

In this Q&A episode, Alex (@AlexHormozi) answers real questions from business owners about pricing high-ticket offers, balancing brand-building with monetization, and optimizing what happens after someone says “yes.” Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast, you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth. Wanna scale your business? Click here. Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition Mentioned in this episode: Get access to the free $100M Scaling Roadmap at www.acquisition.com/roadmap

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  But there's probably a hundred things that I want to improve about it. But every time I want to go improve one of those things, four others drop and it's not worth the cost of change. And so, most of us just don't factor in the guaranteed 20% decrease for the potential. But then after it's all said and done, it's five. Was that worth it? No.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  My name is Ricky. We have a bar cocktail mix that we sell to B2B.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Country clubs, resorts.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  Park of Ben Potts, who's on the Cash Guns.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do 3.5 last year in revenue. And our biggest thing that's stopping us was my father. He was the man salesman that had a position. He's doing this full time as well as trying to focus on whether we should try to grow the business awareness, just because a lot of people don't know about it unless they know us or referrals, or just try to just get more.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  You speak a little bit more about the product?

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a pina colada, strawberry daiquiri, margarita, stuff like that. It's mainly, it's a frozen product. I've done frozen last two years, once you thought it lasts a week. But it's mainly for people who are high volume. So you can spread out.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  Like brew shifts and things like that.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, mainly like a frozen drink machine or like a blender.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  So, got it. Okay, and so the question is whether you should focus on awareness?

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Oh, like growing the brand because it's like, that republic is only mainly people that know us, who talk about it, or just people who guess are like, this is amazing.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  Are they currently all word of mouth?

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Okay, so you have, well, you have your father who's, who does sales.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  And how does he do sales?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Previous relationships from being in the industry for over 20 years.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  Outbound?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  Okay, so what stops you from mechanizing, is existing outbound motion? And then getting like 10 guys to do it?

• 1:55Speaker 01

  We haven't done it. It's just, you know.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  So like, I mean, if I had to pick between more of that thing, right? And this brand new thing that you've never done, I definitely would mechanize the existing thing.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  So yeah, it's going to be a conversation that you're going to have with your father. Obviously, we can help. But like breaking down like, okay, let's take this thing and break into 50 pieces. Because it's not like, hey, how do you do outbound? Like, that doesn't work.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  It's like, okay, what's initial contact look like? What's first message? What's second message? What's the script? What's the opener? What's the offer to get them kind of enticed? Once we have that conversation, what's the thing that we can increase the pain between where they're at? And where they want to go so we can insert ourselves?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of the biggest things at least is with getting them to actually try the product. Cause it's like, or it's like, oh, it's just, it's another mix. So once they taste it, it's different. But you know, getting to that person to decision is, yeah, hardest thing.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  There are so many ways to do that.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  But yeah, I mean, you, you need an outbound motion. There's probably a combination of conference slash trade show. That would work really well too, especially because you are a Pete, like literally tasted.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  And it would probably crush in that setting. Probably be very sell.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  I just don't, I don't think you should go brand now, especially since you built the whole business off B2B.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  I would just do more of that for now to start.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, it works.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Uh, my name is Sam Tierling. Cause I sell a service. I own a transportation company.

• 3:07Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  We, uh, deliver chemicals to the fracking companies, last mile transportation. Revenue wise, we did 10 million last year. Year before that was seven. Year before that was five.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  And it just kept growing.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  Awesome.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  And this year, decided to slow it down a little bit, not like get myself out of the day to day.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  And it's worked. While, while doing that, I realized that can make more money taking and selling to customers that my customers don't sell to, the same product that we're transporting.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Say that last part again.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  All right. So I'm more of a specific type of person. I transport polymers, virtual producers. SNF is one of the biggest. They make it. There's 40% of customers they won't deal with. That want to deal with me that want to buy from us.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  My struggle is, is I figured out how to continue to replicate the trucking and like trucks and grow that. So do I keep focusing on that, which is a very cash intensive business? I can actually put a lot of money up front. Or do I use my trucks to sell the product to the end user? But I also struggle with that because how do I balance the two? So if I like, I'm regularly floating a million and a half, two million in receivables for BKT.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  And I want to start buying the product while I have to pay in 30 days, not going to get paid.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  So basically, if you're buying the stuff that you're going to sell to the end users, like you're going to add cash constraint to the business.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  Right?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  So then they would further constrain, it would basically pile on these constraints.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  So said differently, why do it versus just doubling the existing business? Cause like the way that I'll explain where my thinking is. So I had a good friend of mine from high school, actually. That's a strong statement, an acquaintance of mine from high school, who had a, had a general contracting business. And in his general contracting business, he realized he was, he was pretty good at roofs. And so he started doing roofs. And I called him up and I was like, hey, how's the business going? And he's like, ah, we're growing. It's great. And so he was explaining, so he's like, so we, you do roofs primarily. I was like, okay. And he's like, we also do, you know, some contracting work. And I was like, okay, that's another thing. He's like, we also kind of buy and flip houses. I was like, okay. He's like, but that's, he's like, I didn't want to leave money on the table, which is like my favorite entrepreneur statement ever.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  And I was like, so what stops you from being a billion dollar a year roofing company? And the answer is the general contracting and the real estate flipping. I was like, well, what stops you from being a billion dollar a year real estate flipper? Answers the roofing and the general contracting. And so basically, if you already have a winning model, to me, I'm like, there's no reason to not just become even better at this thing that you're currently doing and compound the competitive advantage that you have. There's always going to be better, there's always going to be opportunities.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  I guess I looked at it as more of a control thing because there's, for the most part, our customers, we've started with, have been with us for six or seven years.

• 5:53Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. On the trucking side.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Yes, on the trucking side.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  But they also do dictate the rates. Like I can, you know, continue to raise my prices and eliminate customers, which we have done, but they're only wanting to pay so much. And it's like, well, if I'm selling the chemical, I'm still going to get what I want for transporting it. And then you're getting paid to sell it too.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  The only reason I hesitate is, is like, it's adding, it adds complexity to the business. Again, Given the limited context that I have, five minutes of hearing about the business, like it's a huge decision. But from my personal experience, when I had gym launch in Prestige Labs, I basically said, oh, I've got this distribution base of gyms. And so why don't I just sell supplements through my distribution base, which on the service level seems like a smart idea. But what it ended up doing is that it completely slowed down the growth of my main business, which was the licensing business. And so it felt like, oh, there's this big pot of gold right here. But if I took all the attention that I put into starting this supplement company

• 6:52Speaker 00

  and manufacturing it and distributing it and, you know, testing it and the flavors and the marketing and all that stuff and the support team that I had to do for the product, I could have taken all of that energy and just gone double down into the thing that I should have done. It was one of the bigger mistakes that I've made. And so if you already have a business that's gone from five to seven to 10, I'm like, well, maybe next year you're at 13, year after that, you're at 17. That sounds like a pretty good business.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Guess it was more of what I wanted to do.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  If you want to do it, that's a life question, more than a business question. Yeah.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  How do I make sense to not screw my first business up?

• 7:24Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, that's always the, I mean, like, there's always opportunities and the thing is, is the bigger distribution base is, which it will continue to grow, the more enticing the other opportunity will be, right? The woman in the red dress, she just always is more and more attractive, the more distribution you build, the more skills you have and the more opportunities you see. Like, believe me, the amount of opportunities that I have to turn down now is sickening. But it's just like, taking to the natural extreme, can I build a hundred million dollar per year trucking business? If the answer is yes, then what risks that? Everything that isn't that.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  That's fair.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  I mean, it seems like a simplistic way of viewing the world, but it's also really hard. But I also think it's probably the right call.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Yes, I was more or less thinking of it in transportation, most of the time for hazmat companies, once you get to where you do 15 to 20 million revenue, you get bought out. Like Quantix, NF Dana.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Do you not want to get bought out?

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Now I started this because a lot of

• 8:18Speaker 00

  You could always just keep owning it because they can't force you to get, they can't force the money down your throat. No, I'm just being real like, I mean, a lot of people take the exit then because at that point they probably have, you know, between, I know, what are margins? Okay. Yeah. So 20, you got four million in EBITDA, maybe five, right? And so at that point they maybe give you eight or 10 on it. And so most people are like, okay, well, for 40 million bucks, I'll walk away. And that's why a lot of people like usually that's, I mean, I think part of the reason that institutional investors come in at that five-ish million is that at that point is where most business owners are like, okay, this is enough for me to be done forever. And that's probably why there's a ton of M and A activity. This is me just speaking speculatively. So I don't think there's anything inherently like, okay, if a lot of people get bought out at 20, like, fine, but there's also companies that get to 100. And it's usually just a more stubborn founder who does it for different reasons, which I actually think is a good thing.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Okay. No, that gives me peace of mind. Thank you.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, you bet.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  Uh, my name's Chase. I own an exhausted cleaning business in San Diego. So we sell like

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Exhausted?

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Exhausted cleaning.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  So we do like grease remover from ducks, fans, hoods in restaurants in San Diego.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Where we're at right now, just hit month six.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  Is that like 18 millers, like semis that you do that on? What is that?

• 9:23Speaker 03

  We just have like a van with a hot water pressure washer, chemical roll in the restaurants.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  Got water and truck. Okay. Oh, so restaurants, restaurant. Okay, got it.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  So like in all the restaurants, there's a hood system above where they cook.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  Very to go in there. It's like a fire hazard. So everyone has to legally do it.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a great business. It was described to me differently in a different setting. So yeah, it's

• 9:41Speaker 03

  Okay, that's why I kind of put in there else people are like, the hell are you talking about?

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  So we just hit month six. We're doing like six K a month right now.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  But we have people on, it's a subscription based business. So our book right now for like yearly recurring revenue is like right around 100K.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  I think what's stopping us right now is just like not a clear offer.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Because I deal with restaurant owners who only care about their bottom line.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  A money thing.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Those business owners.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, true. They're like, well, if you can give me a better price, I'll give you a shot. And right now I'm just like the hungry kid that's like, yeah, I'll beat your price easy. Right? So I think what's stopping us is figuring out pricing and offer with a service that more or less is the same, no matter who you go with, but we have added value adders with like customer portal, streamlining, backend support, things like that.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  So you say that to the business owner?

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Say that to the business owner.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  How so? There's good, fast, cheap. Pick two.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  And so the problem is you can have somebody else who can do this like to your point like you started with the premise that this is a commoditized service. I would just erase that from your memory. Because at the end of the day, like you have to believe before anybody else that it's not a commoditized service. And so I would say, what are all the reasons that somebody who sucks at this sucks? And let's fix all of those things. And so what's really interesting about good, like what does good even mean? Right? So good is basically the absence of hard. Right? And so I think about this when I'm creating a product or service, and this has actually been really helpful for me in terms of like how you operationalize value in terms of quality. Is you think, what are all the things that suck about the existing services? What, what, what makes it hard? And so a lot of people use the term friction. Right?

• 11:22Speaker 00

  And so something that is easy, you can't make something easy. You can only make it not hard. Right? Like if I said, make it easy, it's like, when something's easy, all the hard vanishes and all this left is the outcome. Right? And so if we want to make our products or services easier, which then means more valuable, we have to remove all of the elements that make it sucky.

• 11:41Alex Hormozi?

  Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Leila 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, 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. 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.

• 12:27Alex Hormozi?

  And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com forward slash roadmap. R O A D map roadmap.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  And so if we're thinking about the competition they're competing against, like maybe a lot of them are, you know, not that personable. Maybe terrible service. Maybe they don't do a complete job. Maybe they're not willing to come back if something happens. Is there like, what risks does the restaurant incur if it's a shoddy job? Is there a cadence that they have to like, maybe we can treat it in a way that allows us to come half as frequently. So we're more per cleaning, but they, they don't have to pay it as often, right? So we've hired gross margins and that actually works fine for us and it's less for them. Like you're going with this.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  And then from an economies of scale perspective, it's like, how can we increase? Now you're super early on this, but like over time it'll be, how can we increase route density? So that like, we don't waste as much time. And so we get more efficient with the routes. And we can ultimately make more than our competitors, or at least increase our gross margins, even if we keep our price fixed.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Right. No, that makes sense. One more question. So everybody has to get it done at least twice a year. So we're signing people a year agreement, anywhere from twice a year. Some people do quarterly, some people do like three times a year. So based on what you just said, would you recommend potentially going more towards just pushing semi annually? But keeping price higher so that they feel like they're paying less over the year.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would look at my gross margin. I mean, real real, I'd rather sell someone more.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Start at four, down sell to two as you can, and then probably play with payment terms. Which is like, can I stack more of that cash upfront?

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  Versus getting paid quarterly.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  High end flow up from it.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  Gosh, cool. But big picture, I mean, I like, if I'm you, I'm putting all my effort into trying to figure out how to de-commoditize my service. Because it is probably the most important thing. Otherwise you're right, you will just consistently be dealing with. If you are the same to the customers, the first chapter of offers, right? Like you're the same thing to the customer, these two things are about the same, I'll buy the cheaper one. It's the worst comparison. It's not the fight you want to fight. So it's like, I put all my effort, whenever I start any business or any product line into like, why is this different? Like that's my full, like, I don't even think about pricing. I don't think about anything until I answer that question. And I have to at least be able to articulate it to them really simply, which is like, here's the five things that happen that suck. Here's how we don't have any of those five. And for that, in exchange, instead of paying this, you pay this. But this is why it's worth it.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  Right. And then in that, our only form of out right now is just like door to door knocking restaurants and then cold email. So then building that offer out with the decom- de-commoditized, that's even a freaking word. And then put that into the offers, the emails, the texts, the cold outreach, basically, and just sell the shit out of it. Sell the shit out of it. Heck yeah.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  Thanks, dude. Kyle, I sell outdoor lighting to homeowners. We do eight hundred and eighty thousand revenue. About forty percent is in the holiday season. Doing Christmas lights. The problem is, we don't have enough leads in the not holiday light time of year. So the first half until basically now. I've fixed this business so many times. So I'll just walk you through it. Yeah. Okay, cool. So basically, you have, you have one kind of existential decision that you need to make, which is, are we going to be full-time lighting? Which there's nothing wrong with that. Look, the Halloween store, like, they're open two months a year and they just murder it and that's all they do, right? The alternative is that you basically have a home team that goes from lawn care and other home services to, you know, lighting.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  The lawn care guys have the equal opposite issue. They're like, okay, well, there's grass that's growing nine months of the year and then it's holiday season. And what do my guys do for three months or four months, depending on whatever geographic area you're in, right? And so I tell you which one I prefer. I prefer the keeping the holiday season business year round. And I'll explain why, but either option works. I just want to be really clear about that. I like thinking about it. How many months of the year are you doing the lights? Three? Yeah, forty-five days. Perfect. So the way I think about it is, how can I take, how can I equip my existing team with as many skills as possible? So that the other ten months of the year, all they're doing is getting business. And so like the perfect business in the world is you sell all year and then you have to deliver for this much. It's an amazing business. You just collect cash all day long. Collect cash, collect minutes, collect cash, collect minutes all year round.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  And then you, boom, you basically earn the living over the next forty-five or sixty days and then you go back into the sale cycle. And so that's one way of doing it. I like that because it's such a simple, like, you just have to think about one thing for ten months, which is marketing and sales. And that gets pretty nasty and the cash flow is really good. The alternative obviously is you're like, okay, well, these guys don't have these skills, which then begs the next question is what type of talent would I need to facilitate model A versus model B? Right? If you have model B, which is maybe maybe you have lower skilled people who work for you right now. Then it's like, okay, can I buy some lawn mowers? Can I buy some landscaping stuff so that I can give them something to do for the other nine months of the year?

• 17:08Speaker 05

  Yeah. So we were doing lawn care and picked up Christmas lights to fill that gap. Well, where I live in October, you have to do both. So I got rid of the lawn care.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 17:17Speaker 05

  Well, just do just Christmas.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  And you made better margins.

• 17:20Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that was awesome. So what we're doing now is project based permanent lighting jobs with the exact same team. So we can literally just shut it down as soon as Christmas time starts.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 17:31Speaker 05

  So I guess from what you're saying would be just sell Christmas all year, which is like really hard to sell this time of year, really like super easy to get leads in Christmas.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:42Speaker 05

  So my thought was sell permanent lights. And then also 50% of them still get Christmas lights, but.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Why not do that?

• 17:50Speaker 05

  That is what I'm doing.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Well, great.

• 17:51Speaker 05

  Well, so the problem is the leads problem.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 17:54Speaker 05

  So I'm running out of Christmas light customers to sell landscape lights to because that was a natural first, like easy to get them. Well, I'm running meta ads.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  So lead gen for permanent lights?

• 18:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. Is the problem. So what I'm trying to figure out is the problem like lead magnet issues or landing pages issues are where I'm at.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Right. So now we're now we're.

• 18:10Speaker 05

  You needed it. Right?

• 18:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Uh, no, I'll bet you that the crate is probably not that good because I think it's a pretty easy thing to sell.

• 18:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  The permanent lighting, like you show a house before and after you show the dark before and after like, oh, look, lights. I think it's very visual.

• 18:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  I think that I actually think that the ads is probably the issue. What's the lead magnet you're offering right now?

• 18:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. We come to your house to do a free demo so you can see how it looks.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. I'd probably try and enhance that offer. Um, then I think is in local markets, it's very offer driven. I'd have to think more than three minutes, you know, two seconds about it. Cause it'll be the front end of the whole business, but it would probably be some element of some amount of lights that come for free. So like, like, I think something that would murder would be like, can I light someone's like, not their deck, but like maybe their side, like from the sidewalk to the house. Or can I just light the driveway, like some small element? So we talked about in the, in the leads book, a lead magnet can either be a trial of something. It could be one part of a multi-step process or it can be a third thing. But for yours, I think the one step into a multi-step process is my, I wrote it down, so I don't remember it.

• 19:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  Because like, I'll prefer to start with a banger offer and then add friction. Because the thing is, is like, you could say, I'm gonna give this away, but you don't have to give it away to everybody. You can say, I only give it away to houses that are over X. And you can have people put their address in and then run an API to Zillow, look at home value, and then rank order the leads based on value of home. And then basically prioritize those leads ahead of time. And so you can go to those, you know, those houses first and probably sell much bigger, bigger packages overall. But I think if I'm struggling to get leads, I just need them to say they want lighting. I don't really care how they say they want lighting.

• 19:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  I actually need them to say they want it, and then the sales process takes care of the rest.

• 19:51Speaker 05

  Mm hmm. Cool.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Do you like that?

• 19:56Speaker 05

  I'm just trying to process, yeah, yeah, like how that would go. I mean, you're a hundred percent right. That's the problem is people, once they say they want lighting, selling it is easy.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:03Speaker 05

  So I just gotta get them to say it and put their phone number on those.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  So give them a crazy, so give them a much better offer than, I'll give you a free sales pitch. No, I'm just being real, like, yes. So brutally, that's it. So I think you say like, we'll, we'll do the install for free. You just cover the cost of the lights for this tiny amount. See how I'm developing. I like it. All right. Now you put the markup on the lights and put zero on the labor. It doesn't matter either way. You just basically mix and match how you're showing the money. And that way you'll still break even on that first thing. And you'll just know that one out of two, or whatever it is, who buy the first thing, buy the 10x bigger package. And then that's just math.

• 20:35Speaker 05

  Cool. That's it. I like that.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  I like that.

• 20:37Speaker 05

  Awesome. Thanks.

• 20:39Speaker 06

  So my name is Kira Brynton.

• 20:40Speaker 05

  Embrace my salt.

• 20:42Speaker 06

  We're like gonna clean out my closet for a minute. Okay. So last year, my company made a million. I've already made a million this year, so I think I'm on track for four, but I hope to hit 10. So here's the deal, is that I get really bored.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:56Speaker 06

  And so I'm also really amazing visionary. And so I've built a lot of different things. And what I'm needing right now is I need clarity. Okay. And I need you to, I would love for you to help me focus. Okay. So I'm gonna share with you, I'm gonna share with you what I've done. I'm gonna share with you what I have. And then I would love for you to show me is how do I get clarity?

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Okay. What do you sell?

• 21:20Speaker 06

  Yeah. So I have a publishing house. Okay. But really what I've sold is that I take people on these five day adventures, like luxury adventures, and I can help people channel their books in five days. And that's what's filled my pocket.

• 21:33Speaker 05

  Cool.

• 21:33Speaker 06

  But it's also just not scalable. And so

• 21:36Speaker 00

  Not skilled.

• 21:38Speaker 06

  Well, because I one week a month, I'm on these adventures and I love it, but it's like, there's like a ceiling. And so then I like rented this island in the middle of the British Virgin Islands. I took fifteen people there. We all write their books for five days. And so that was like scalable, which that landed me a TV show. So now I have like this TV show, but then I have like, like their publishing house. And then like I have this business school for women. Yeah. And then like, I'm also like a single mom of five kids. Also, I like to write books on the corner. Also, I did a live event in January and closed 1.25 million in five minutes to a crowd of thirty. So it's like, I have all these things. I just like.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, you gotta pick. You gotta pick one of your five kids.

• 22:24Speaker 06

  The ten year old all day.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  There you go. So you just gotta, you gotta think about which one's the ten year old of your business. It's just like the roofing thing that I said. The thing is, is the more talented you are, the more opportunities you know you could crush, which just means more things you have to save. And it's just like, it's the reality of it. I mean, the thing is, is there's a price to that, which is, if you continue to do what you're currently doing, you pay a price on either side. On if you continue, you pay the price of how big the impact you want to have and how big of a business you ultimately built. That's the price. What you get for that trade is you get to have novelty and the excitement of new things happening all the time. On the other side, you build something really big that has teams and systems and it just, you know, grows really large, probably maybe not bigger than your vision,

• 23:10Speaker 00

  but large, much larger than what you have right now. Uh, and what you give up for that is all the novelty that's associated with doing your thing.

• 23:17Speaker 06

  Yeah. So which one?

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Well, it sounds like you know it's one you should do and want to do something different.

• 23:26Speaker 06

  I feel like when I, when I've been looking at like, well, what has brought people to me? It's always the books and I keep trying to get out of it because there's so many people and there's so many things and all these systems in publishing. And I'm like, but if I just ran the business school, like I don't have to have all these like editors and formatters and book covers and right? But then I look at like, well, what do people always come to me for? It's always books.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  So you run the business school, right?

• 23:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  So imagine I come to you and I'm saying, hey, I've got this business that everybody wants to buy from me. It has good margins. I sell it like crazy. But I have four other businesses that I want to start. They don't grow as quickly as this other one. What should I do?

• 24:06Speaker 06

  Weird. Sounds so easy when you say it. Yeah, obviously. Right, right, right.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, okay.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  No, I mean, like, that's the, I mean, the thing that we, what you're encountering is, is a problem. I think everybody in this room has dealt with, right? It sucks, but like you have to realize that like you can't pursue every opportunity. Not only can you approach every opportunity, you basically have to say no to every opportunity to be able to make one opportunity worth pursuing.

• 24:32Speaker 06

  If my TV show is on Amazon Prime and I'm helping people write books. And then I'm like, but I'm pushing my business school. Like that doesn't even make sense.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wouldn't push the business school. Just have the media asset of Prime that pushes you writing books and then help people write more books and then have a second season of Amazon Prime helping you, you know, people writing books and then sell more people writing books.

• 24:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. All right. That's my financial advisor in the front shaking her head. We got this, Julia?

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, Julia's like, I've seen the financials on the book. Do more of that, right? I want to hit on this one because I think I, I'm not really talking to you. I'm talking through to everybody else. I've stayed, I stayed, I had these, these massive multi-year plateaus where I just stayed stuck because I wanted to pursue every single thing.

• 25:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  And so you have to trade novelty for loyalty. And so it's like you become loyal to the business. I also think that occurs with relationships. It's like you make the trade, the new person every long, you know, every week, every month, every whatever, for somebody that you know that you've built something meaningful, that's deeper. It's kind of like, I think business in a lot of ways is like a fine wine where like you understand it at a different level. As the years go by and you go through different seasons, and I think that you miss out on that opportunity. If you're going after, you know, one night stands and flings from a business perspective. No, but like I, I'm, I'm keeping you.

• 25:49Speaker 06

  I feel that. This is helpful. Thank you.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, you have to. Life will not give you what you want if you want everything.

• 25:55Speaker 06

  Ah, damn.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  Like we have to make trades, but we get nothing. And it's tough. And I think there's a big, at a big realization, I want to say a few years back. Where, once I realized how much work it takes to make something truly great and something big. I had this moment of like deep sadness where I realized that I could only do a few things throughout the rest of my life. I was like, oh, I only have like two, maybe three entrepreneurial seasons left in me.

• 26:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  Just kind of like crazy to think about. It's like, I only get two or three more big swings. That's it. And the real real is that if the swing just keeps going, which is what I plan on doing acquisition.com. It's like, this is it. I'm going to do this until I get too old to do it and that's it.

• 26:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  That's all it is. Now, what I want to do is give you something tactical, right? Cause it's, this is, we were all the way up here. So, um, I'm going to make a, a video on this because I think it's really helpful. Which is that you have to take your creative energy and I have a lot of that too. And you have to channel it into something that is accretive to the business, something that adds value rather than something that attracts value. And so what are the components of the business that need novelty on a regular basis?

• 26:56Speaker 06

  I think.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  I can give you a hint.

• 26:58Speaker 06

  What?

• 26:59Speaker 00

  Marketing.

• 26:59Speaker 06

  Marketing. I was just going to say sales and marketing. Yeah.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  So if you want to build and you want to create, I have the same pitch.

• 27:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  I put all of my ADD into content. I've become a significantly better entrepreneur by making content because it distracts me from fucking up my business.

• 27:16Speaker 06

  This is legit. I just wrote a book about this.

• 27:20Speaker 06

  I just wrote a book about when leaders get bored, they just fuck it all up and burn it in the city.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 06

  And I just keep doing it over and over.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  So instead, just like, just paint the city.

• 27:29Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  Just paint it. Don't destroy it. Just paint it a different color.

• 27:32Speaker 06

  Got it.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  And so that, like, and that goes for everyone. Like, my ADD, like, I put it into ads. I put it into, like, the reason I write books is mostly for me. Like, Leila's like, can you just write another book? Because she's like, you're just getting into all of these things that you should just not get into, right? And so the thing is, is that when I am in writing mode, the business does exceptionally well because I do so little.

• 27:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  Right?

• 27:52Speaker 06

  Feel this.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. I don't normally talk about this, but I think this feels incredibly relevant.

• 27:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  This is gonna feel real for you.

• 27:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  And everyone else. So let's imagine the business, like, everyone's revenue here represents this, like, this line, your revenue, not aggregate, like, this is, that's your business, that's normal business. What I realized, this is me, so this is anecdotal, is that whenever I decide to make a change in the business, I see about a 20% decrement or decrease in performance from whatever that changes. So I change the sales process, I change the leadership process, I change the onboarding process, I change something that I have to train people up on something new. Now, even if that change is something that I think is superior, I'm still going to have an immediate decrease in performance. Now, if I assume this to be true, which in my experience, it's been about 20%, so if you're like, what's the data research behind it? It's Alex doing this, right?

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Now, if I think that this improvement is gonna make, let's say, a 5% improvement in the business, like, I think it'll, you know, improve our, our closing rate by 5% or something like that, then I'm gonna take a guaranteed 20% loss for a potential 5% increase. Bad trade. Now, how many months is it gonna take me in order to make up for the 20, you know, 20%? It's gonna take four or five months, right? And it's gonna, now, here's the really fun thing, is that on an alternate timeline, you have this thing, but when you leave people alone, they tend to just get better at their jobs. So you'll get the 5% improvement. And so what's happened is that I've actually created this rule, which is that if I don't see an adjusted, a risk-adjusted 20% improvement, so let me explain what I mean by that,

• 29:23Speaker 00

  which is, I need to see a 40% improvement that I think is a 50/50 shot at happening for me to make any change at all.

• 29:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  And so I have a list right now. It's Alex's big list of ideas.

• 29:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Which I encourage you to have.

• 29:35Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  And I have it. It's on my phone, where every time I think of something else that we could do to improve this business, instead of messaging the team and saying, hey, guys, emergency meeting, we're gonna do this, this is such a great idea.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  I just write it down.

• 29:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  And I just keep living my life.

• 29:53Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  And every once in a while, I'll have one where I'm like, this is actually a forty, fifty percent, you know, potential move. Then I'll go to the team and say, here's my reasoning behind this. And then they'll say, cool, you have four other fifty percent return moves that you've told us about in the last thirty days? Is this better than those ones? And then I'll look at it and be like, no, that's not better than those ones. And so then I'll keep it on my list. And in the event that the entire team is bandwidth and they're all breathing a little too easy, then I can go destroy their worlds.

• 30:26Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  But what's ended up happening is that my businesses have improved so dramatically by me just saying, let's just let people do their jobs. And so I'm going to be crude yet again, just to emphasize this point, which is that I have grown to accept that some shit stays fucked.

• 30:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  And so there are tons of things about the experience that you guys went through today. Hopefully it's been really positive between yesterday and today. I hope it has been. The team was great, but there's probably a hundred things that I want to improve about it. But every time I want to go improve one of those things, four others drop. And it's not worth the cost of change. And so most of us just don't factor in the guaranteed twenty percent decrease for the potential, which we're usually overly optimistic on. I think this will be forty percent, but then after it's all said and done, it's five. Was that worth it? No.

• 31:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  And so hopefully this is not, you know, this is not, I'm not just talking to you. There are actually a lot of dead stuff. This has been one of the most useful razors that I've used as an entrepreneur and it's made all of my business significantly better. And so tactical takeaway for you is number one, channel your ADD into the stuff that benefits the business by being creative.

• 31:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  Number two, make a list of all your crazy ideas when they come up and don't tell anyone about them. And if it seasons for two or four weeks and you still think about it, it's like maybe when you go to the store, you're like, maybe I'll buy this dress. And then you decide not to. And it's like, if you still think about the dress a month later, then go back and buy it.

• 31:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  But in the moment, if you buy it, then it's usually a terrible decision. And so it's the same thing with this. Put the list down, sleep on it. If you're still thinking about that idea a month later, it probably has some legs.

• 32:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Right? And then number three, if I am going to pull something off of my big list of crazy ideas, it better be worth it because I'm going to absolutely detonate a bomb in my business and it better be worth what's going to happen when the dust settles.

• 32:15Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 32:17Speaker 06

  This was hard for me to hear. And like, everything I needed. Thank you. Cool.

• 32:27Speaker 06

  Thank you guys.