How to Get Ahead of 99% of People

one in every 250 businesses does over 10 million dollars a year in sales and that means that 99 of entrepreneurs never hit it every business that I've started since I was 25 has crossed 10 million B2B services with Jim launch b2c consumer products with Prestige Labs or supplement company Allen our B2B software and acquisition.com which is an investment firm for all of the money that we made during those businesses to invest in other ones I feel really confident that I can talk to the points of helping you go from zero to a million a million to 10 million and Beyond and so this is just a visual put this in context ninety percent of businesses

never hit a million dollars a year in sales 90 doesn't look that way on Instagram but this is the this is the vast majority of businesses right now nine percent of businesses cross this million dollar threshold right and then only point four percent which is one in 250 do 10 million plus it's so rare and so the nice thing is that success does leave Clues I want to kind of separate this into two major categories one is the entrepreneur and the other is the opportunity vehicle they're pursuing you'll notice I said leverage rather than opportunity vehicle but

fundamentally leverages the difference between what you put in and what you get out and so you want to have the best entrepreneur getting the most out of what they put in and so if you have those two things together then you create a 10 million dollar plus business and if you've consumed any of my other content I used to talk about how entrepreneurs does three main things you've got skills you've got character traits you've got beliefs I've thought about this more and I've actually simplified it to one degree which is I think you just have skills and beliefs character traits if you think about this you're like I want to

become patient patient is just a general term for lots of little skills and so if you want to become more patient you want to do things that patient people do and that means that if I can train someone to become more patient then patience is a skill and so as a total side quest on this what's interesting about this is that you've probably heard people say soft skills and like hard skills in my opinion hard skills are just skills that are easy to measure soft skills are just hard to measure but they're both 100 skills that you can train and improve and so if we say man I wish that guy had better people skills what we mean is a hundred micro skills that are like I

wish you would smile when someone walked in the room can I train someone to do that absolutely if I said hey I wish you would greet someone by their first name immediately every time they walk in the door right boom that's trainable I wish someone wouldn't interrupt it's like okay well we can just give someone a cookie every time they don't interrupt someone and let someone finish their statement and then we train them and so all of these soft skills are just soft because they're hard to measure doesn't mean that they're not skills or they're not important and oftentimes most of us know that like within an organization like the way that you gain influences

these soft skills that are hard to measure but incredibly important so if we're talking about how do we make the highest leverage entrepreneur we want somebody who has lots and lots of skills and really it's about beliefs that don't limit them if someone had no limits in terms of what they believed they could achieve then the only thing that would limit them was their skills but most of the times the beliefs that we have are things that just decrease our potential and it's not really our fault because most the people that were around us we grew up just by statistics were poorer than you might want to be and so they told you how they see the

world if there's ever something that's going to be on my Tombstone it's this quote which is we question all of our beliefs except for those that we truly believe and those who never think to question and so like the things that you actually believe they're so invisible to you because that's just your lens The Roots you see the world whereas when you're like I want to debate this point it's like you don't really believe that you just have an opinion on it or you have some assumptions that you're willing to back right but the true beliefs of like well no one would be willing to pay for something like that or like that doesn't

exist I didn't know that was possible you don't even question those things because they weren't even in your mind to begin with it's the unknown unknowns that are the things that limit us the question is how do we up level someone's beliefs so let me give you a a quick example here so there was an entrepreneur that I know who had a fitness app he was a super high level CrossFit games competitor and he started this app and he didn't want to tell anybody about it because he never plays top three he plays fourth place in multiple competitions which is insane um but he had a belief that if he wasn't the winner he didn't deserve to have an

app like think about how crazy it is but he he didn't question that that was just what he believed reality to be like well of course of course I wouldn't want it and so he built this app for himself and just the members of his gym but the app was so good that people started sharing it and finally a client of his was a marketer and said you need to start marketing this you need to start posting about it and he wouldn't post and finally she convinced him to just make one post and he like doubled his Revenue he'd gone from like 20 000 a month to a hundred thousand dollars a month with his app simply because he changed his beliefs and so like fundamentally he had

all the skills like he was already a really good CrossFit games competitor he already had the product that was really good and he already had the skills to be able to Market it he was just choosing not to unchaining an entrepreneur is figuring out the reasons they give for why they can't do something those are known limits right well I can't do it because of X that's the things that you know because you can even explain it I can't do it because I'm not number one I can't do it because I'm not in good enough shape I can't do it because the app doesn't load well enough I can't do it because it's only on one platform I

can't do it because insert whatever right now the dangerous ones are the unknown unknowns all right that's an N my whole goal when I started my chain of gyms was that I wanted to be America's next gym so I bought the trademark United Fitness I was really proud of it I had six locations I joined this group of Internet entrepreneurs now mind you this reason I think this is funny is because I was sold by the sales guy that there was other gym owners in the room and they were all like doing well and doing stuff uh on the internet too got in the room not only were there no gym owners there weren't even any brick and mortar business owners in the

room and so I was like wow this is a shock and so everybody's going up there explaining their like ads and their funnels and their upsell prices and all this stuff and I get up there and I'm like I own six gyms and I was like but these are the ads I run to get members into my gyms the thing is I gave this whole breakdown of everything I did and how open every location at full capacity on the first day without taking cash out of pocket all the stuff and I remember the uh the guy who's running the the whole the whole group and I really looked up to this guy at that time because he was the first person who's like way more successful

than me that I actually had access to and so I think at that point he was doing a million dollars a month and I remember thinking like whoa like and so I go through this whole presentation I'm talking as fast as I can explaining all the stuff that I do and uh he stops and he's like Alex um I don't think you should be in the gym business and I remember hearing that it was like time slowed down because I felt like you like punched me in the gut because this was like my whole plan my whole dream this is what I was going towards um but I like paused and just like hurt him out he said

you have a level 10 skill set and a level two opportunity I don't think you should be running gyms I think you should be teaching people how to do what you just walked through and I had to believe and I still do that if someone's further along in the game of business you always have things that you can learn from them and if I paid to be in this room if I don't take the advice it's the closest thing to me burning all the money that I paid to be here and so when he told me that to me that was an unknown unknown I didn't know that there was another opportunity vehicle outside of me just owning gyms like I didn't

know it was possible so I hadn't thought like I didn't know how franchises worked I didn't know how licensing worked I didn't know how how any of I didn't know how to B2B National any of that stuff worked now there were some skills that I would have to learn in order to enable it but I couldn't even start on that skill path or see the deficiency of skills that I had because I didn't even think I could pursue it and so these are the ones that in my opinion are the most powerful to overcome it's the things that you didn't know were possible I'll give you a different example in Chain of fairies which is one of our portfolio company's amazing business super

successful single location and the founder had an agency when he approached me saying like hey I want to do what you did with Jim launchpot with photography studios and so we talked and we talked and we talked and his model was so good I was like I don't know man I think like one of the things that I didn't have with Jim launches they're like I couldn't control delivery with photography you can control delivery and so that means that we could actually centralize a lot of stuff I was like what if we just owned all of them with like a hybrid model we actually took the agency from what it was doing which for most people watching this would be a

very good business for you to zero to start this next thing we had such good rapport that he's like if you really think so and we walk through the math and he's like I mean this makes sense but like I'm going to kill something that makes a lot of money I was like yeah but I think it's going to be for something that's going to make way more and then for the next six months we worked and tweaked the original model to get this new model off the ground and 30 months later that business is two and a half million a month with 30 plus locations because I said let's just Own It All he didn't think that that was a

model that was really available and then as soon as we made that switch everything took off even in my own personal story when I switched from having my gyms to doing a done for you fly around the country model that took the same skills that I had as an entrepreneur and put them in a better vehicle and then even from doing the gym turnaround business for two years I accidentally fell into the licensing model because I didn't want to fly out somebody asked me if I could show them all the stuff that I did so they could do it for themselves and then at that point he bought it and it was all margin and I was like holy cow this is insane

that's when everything took off like a rocket and so I had my brick and mortar gyms and then I scaled to a done-for-you turn around business and then I scaled to licensing and each of those were higher leverage opportunities and it was because I didn't know it was possible and so once I learned that it was possible that unlocked all of the potential value that my skills could have because fundamentally in every one of those examples I knew how to do the same stuff I knew how to Market and sell for a local gym I knew how to build them more profitably create the workouts the meal plans all that kind of stuff that got people results that's what I knew

how to do but at each level when I went from gyms to turnarounds The Leverage increased from each of these things and so the same skill set put into a new bucket or a new vehicle unlocked huge value and that's why a lot of entrepreneurs don't get past a million or even get to 10 million that they're in the wrong vehicle so I talk about leverage a lot and it's actually one of the Core Concepts in our logo so we have a supply demand curve and then we have the fulcrum which is the acquisition.com logo and it's because it's cord everything we do if you think about

Leverage you've ever heard Archimedes you said give me a long enough lever and I can move the world this is our lever and we'll put our little our little hand here that's my arm if we grab the lever here we have the most leverage on something that is here if we grab the lever here we still have the most leverage on something here but we have less leverage overall compared to how much we have on this side and the main difference here is how much force goes up the other side all right and so Leverage is the difference between what you put in

and what you get out that's it so let me give you an example in the real world if you are really skilled at cold calling skill itself is leverage because if somebody who doesn't have the skill makes 100 phone calls that's their input and somebody who does have the skill puts a hundred calls down and the guy who has doesn't have the skill gets zero appointment set and the guy who's amazing at it gets 10 appointments set he has well let's just say the first guy had one for sake of math he has 10 times The Leverage on that skill compared to the Newbie getting and acquiring skills gives you more leverage because it gets

you more for what you put in and so if you're more skilled entrepreneur being a skilled entrepreneur is a is a big bucket for hundreds of smaller skills underneath of it because it means that you know how to prioritize what to do next and so one of my favorite quotes about leverage comes from Warren Buffett Uncle Warren he and one of his closest friends graduated Columbia business school at the same time same year and he said that guy was smarter and harder working than him now they then went their separate ways Warren ended up getting into investing with Ben Graham and his friend goes into the steel business because that was back in the

day when like American Steel was like a thing which it really no longer is what he learned from that experience is that you fast forward 30 40 50 years and he said his friend you know did okay and he said mind you this is a guy who was smarter and harder working than him he said he did okay he did pretty well but not close to what Warren did and he said his biggest lesson from that was it's not about how hard you row it's about What boat you're in and I love that because it really encompasses the concept of Leverage which is Warren got more out for what he put in than his buddy in the steel business because the steel

business had a lot of headwinds a lot of things going against them they had globalizations that started started happening you had other imported steel that was cheaper from China blah blah and so those forces he had to grow harder Against the Wind than Warren did while riding one of the best growth curves of the US economy overall and so he got higher returns and so over my career I make more now than I did before because I've moved further back along this lever so I have more leverage now on what I put in than what I did before when I was selling one-on-one in person and I was doing 20 consoles a day I was working more hours probably than I do

now but I get so much more for what I put in so I'm going to show you two triangles that show increasing amounts of Leverage all right now one of these I have stolen ruthlessly from Naval ravacon all right and so he talks about the four types of Leverage I've renamed them so they're C's and it's mostly just so I remember them more easily but but you've got collaboration which just means other people working for you all right then you've got Capital which means other people worked for you and gave you the fruit of their work so that you can invest it on their behalf so for example if I get people to give me a billion dollars which I could do just

raise the money and then I invest that money and I say I get 20 of the gain I didn't have to work all the time to make a billion dollars but I still get 20 of it right that's the idea of using leverage of other people's money so Capital so you've got collaboration Capital you've got code and content if I'm a genius coder and I could build one piece of software I can build it once and people a million people can use that same piece of software with content Joe Rogan can make one podcast episode and millions of people can listen to it and so he gets more for what he puts in right so if you think about each of these things it's like you have the

influence on someone else I trade me selling for 40 hours a week to me managing a Salesman for two hours who then sells for two for 40 hours a week or higher leverage I spend a week or two weeks recruiting the best sales recruiter and then I do that one time in my life for two weeks and then that sales recruiter Works 40 hours a week to get new sales people in every single week on my behalf and then those sales people on my behalf then sell every single day and so I did two weeks of work for a hundred sales people over the lifetime of that one hire more leverage I get more for what I put in compare that to me taking 20 consults a day

higher leverage skill but same concept done at scale Capital we went over code content those are the four types of Leverage now this is where this gets interesting because like once I learned this I was able to put words to what I kind of knew intrinsically and I can now explain it so if you look at my career trajectory see if I can draw a triangle here all right and one of the key points here is that you can actually just max out one of these things so you don't need to have all four now if you have all four cool but if you think about what leverages in general it's just you get more for what you put in and so if you

get a thousand X on any of these it's still a thousand X so somebody can just be an amazing private Equity guy or amazing at raising money and become a billionaire they don't need to do any of these other things right so it could be amazing at galvanizing people and creating movements and they wouldn't need any of these other things if someone's amazing at writing software they don't need anyone else's capital and the software does the collaboration on their behalf right and so all of these things like even though they're structured like this you don't have to have all of them if you do have all of them well you look at Facebook that is

code about content you raise other people's money and you have people working for it but let me show you how this changed for me so in the beginning it was dark I was an employee right and I made four figures a month then I became self-employed I gained a little bit of Leverage just over my own time so I went from having someone else control my time to me controlling my time which was leverage all right I got more for what I put in and I went to five figures a month all right then I went to employing other people right which is then I would say the

first level is me now having the first level of Leverage so into six figures a month all right and this is right as I I would say first when I started my my gyms and I had multiple gyms and then when I transitioned that to turnarounds I still stayed at six figures a month but fundamentally because I actually didn't change leverage I changed how I was structuring it but fundamentally like it was people doing the same work so this was both me being a gym owner with six locations and me doing the turnaround business with other people you're like how do you go from six figures a month to seven figures a month

then you started licensing now what is that I made content fundamentally and then I made it once and then many people could have access to it and so when I did that I went to seven figures a month now the question is how do I get from Seven figures a month today figures a month because that's what we have at acquisition.com what did I add into it capital so now we buy into companies that have other people working for them I use content to attract those businesses now I don't have any code right now I have

one software investment maybe two I think that are major Investments but the rest of my stuff really if we're talking about it is that I made content I had capital from the things that I'd done before and we had the ability to get other people to help us get our get to our goals and so this is acquisition.com and that's eight figures a month now what do I need to do to get to nine figures a month I may just need to add time to the existing thing that I'm doing key point is that Leverage is about getting more for what you put in people who move faster in life don't

actually move faster they get more for their inputs they get more for every step right I'm not like frenetically moving to move faster you just get more out of every move and so that means that if you're getting more out of every move it's a function of time and so if I had for example maybe some code that was implemented within everything that I do at acquisition.com I might be able to get to nine figures a month faster than I currently am but I feel confident with these three that we'll get to nine figures a month eventually and so you might say Alex that might be a limiting belief it might be but that's

that's kind of how I'm choosing to play it and so and let me let me like reverse the clock here if I had just kept my gyms from the time I started my gyms until now I might have a hundred locations and I might also already be doing nine figure not nine figure I'd probably be doing eight figures a month from the gyms and so you're like well wait a second so was it the best move I can't go back and replay time I don't know but that's where to me this is why the game gets interesting is that every time you switch vehicles you start at zero again so the pace that the leverage affords you for each step you take has

to be disproportionate because you're four of a business you'll typically grow more than year one of a new business and so that's we're doing the same thing for a longer and longer period of time you still get more leverage the guy who owns Panda Express opens 600 new locations this year because he he has done this because now he has enough Capital he has enough collaboration that he's Max no he doesn't do any content and he doesn't have any code right but he has these two at such a high degree that when he adds 600 locations and each location does three million dollars a year right or it might even be I don't know it's a lot and just to give you context Panda

Express in 2021 to 3.7 billion in Top Line Sales and he owns 100 of it no outside investors with his wife Peggy and they took home 27 net margins on brick and mortar food all right so let's do the math that's 935 million in income like that was his distributions from owning this thing now if you're like wait but did he pay taxes on it sure didn't why because he owns all the land in the dirt for most of the locations that he had that are freestanding so you'd appreciated all of that against his income so you took all of that tax-free so point being he did this and you're like well how did he do it he's

been making chicken and orange chicken and kung pao chicken for 45 years so even though he might not have been in the highest leverage vehicle he was able to stick with that vehicle for 45 years and being able to stick with something for 45 years makes it really hard to suck and when you do that you start unlocking multipliers on The Leverage you have rather than thinking I need more leverage in terms of more types of Leverage maybe you just need more of the one that you've been using since you started with remember I gave the little phone call example of like two people doing the same thing one person has more

leverage well each of these things are big buckets with many smaller skills underneath of it so collaboration is I have to know how to recruit talent I have to know how to recognize talent I have to know how to onboard I have to know how to train I have to know how to manage I have to know how to grow talent and I have to know how to run meetings and I have to know how to have one-on-ones and I have to like you know what I'm saying here like all of those micro skills chunk up to collaboration for Capital it's like you have to be good at math being bad at math is probably not like it'd be tough to raise Capital if you really can't do math

right it's like okay well that's a skill you need to know well what else do you need to know it's like well you need to be able to reach out to people and get rejected why because when you try and raise Capital you get rejected a lot more times than you get checks right from there it's like you also probably have to have an understanding of legal because you have to learn how to set up a fun structure you also have to know how to negotiate because every single person writes your check is going to want different terms you then have to structure it in a way and negotiate so that you can get mutually beneficial terms for both parties so these are all

other skills that go into raising Capital right making content it's like you have to understand the different platforms you have to understand how to sell stories you have to understand how to have I mean and even understanding here it's just like you might even have to just do the work to have credibility to make the content about whatever you're making it on and you know what I'm gonna side quest this real quick a lot of people make content right now and they're trying to hit it big but what they do is like in my opinion you've got entertainers and you've got educators the thing is is that a lot of people who haven't done [ __ ] are trying to educate

on things they haven't done and so they have no credibility and so the thing is is that like the reason Mr Beast was able to get so big is that when he was 15 years old he wasn't teaching people about business he was being funny and being cool people are like oh I want to be like him and so then they say oh I'm going to educate people on house flipping but they're 22 years old and they haven't flipped that many houses and so they have no credibility in their content and so in my opinion when you're doing this content thing if you're gonna do it then make sure that you have the backing of experience and proof because

then I promise you like when you get [ __ ] on from the public because you will because they don't know who you are and most people are lying you'll be able to know that what you're saying is true because you lived it and so then you won't second guess yourself the people who like tank and self-employed because they're like they can't handle the hate is because on some level they believe it so if you want to be an educator then I think that the middle ground the pre-education stage is the documentation stage where you just say this is what I'm doing now check it out like right now I can't educate really on nine figure not really excuse me I can't

educate on nine figures a month haven't been there I know what eight figures a month is don't know how to get to nine figures a month I have my theory which is that I just have to add time to this equation the math spells that out but I just gotta wait once I get there then I can talk about how to build a billion dollar portfolio and you can imagine how my content might change right and so if you're making six figures a year and trying to talk about how to make seven you've never made seven then you're full of [ __ ] and you right Felicia get the hate that you do right and so these are skills that you have to

learn how to acquire to make content and to make code you have to learn how to go code and this is how little I know about coding this is it so I would even give you examples of micro skills but like you have to learn HTML and JavaScript and Ruby and python that's about it that's all I know and data architecture and uh yep that's it that's all I got and so you have to learn these these these smaller skills to then say I'm very excellent at code so that I can then have more leverage on the things that I do and then you can walk yourself up this income ladder with more leverage right and again Leverage is about speed

any of these vehicles that I had done if I had done it for 45 years like Mr panda you could get there because my n on input is so high if I spend 45 years doing something I might not have the strongest arm but I've done it 45 times more so I still get more out than the guy that's over here that does it two times this is where strategy comes into play is making sure that you're picking the right vehicle Chris for example made less money in the first nine months scaling Enchanted ferries than he did before but at month 10 he matched it at month 24. it was it was like so small in comparison that didn't even matter but I

can tell you this really easy to say this really hard to do that for nine months eat [ __ ] and feel like you're losing and always knowing that you could always go back and that's the hard part go back to what you were doing before that was comfortable and made you X versus staying the path and I can tell you it was I mean it's hard for me I mean my team does that like going from making what I was making a gym launch to doing acquisition.com the first year I was like this sucks like I'm used to being able to run any personal expense for this business and not even blink I'm like I actually have

to look at cash flow right and so like these are things that you have to like take in but I do believe genuinely year 10 of acquisition.com I think is bigger than your 15 of gym launch to make the Apples to Apples comparison because the thing is is that you actually never get an Apples to Apples comparison because you can't go back in time and so you have to look at what your ten of one business is compared to your three of another and so if you're at your sixth year maybe you should just keep writing it out because whatever you started with is the thing that you have the longest lever on number of times that you got

reps in and people want to change Industries and I'll give you a little tidbit from y combinator one is they don't take solo Founders as a side note now mind you they're only interested in billion dollar companies so if that's not you then you could totally be a single founder but it's just harder to be successful with one person skills versus three the second interesting thing that they have they have many things they select for but one of them is industry experience and so if someone says Hey I want to get into this industry if you don't have any experience in that industry and then second to that is

personal experience like you suffered from whatever problem you're trying to solve then they're not interested and so you might have six years of experience in the mortgage business I wouldn't recommend getting into weight loss I would say maybe you take a half pivot so you're in the same industry because it's so hard to make up those six years this hopefully gives you more nuanced view to making the right picks to making the most money by the way if you guys like the Whiteboard and me drawing on uh with markers this is a throwback to what I used to do I finally got another board because uh I love

these things uh but if you like this style like let me know I love this style but I just try and do the things that that the data suggests that you like the most I'll do what you guys want so that I can hopefully transfer the skills that I have to you faster I said earlier that the unknown unknowns are the most expensive thing in business right because you don't know what you don't know and so I want to give you a quantifiable example I remember the first time I heard this it changed my life and so it was actually a whiteboard just like this so you get to like I'm getting Goosebumps you'll you'll have the same experience I did so a guy was

on stage and gave this whole presentation about about learning skills and about how you have to invest in yourself to get better right and he called somebody in the audience and he said ma'am and as he's saying this he's doing what I'm doing he says ma'am how much money do you make right now per year she stood up and she said fifty thousand dollars a year he was like okay so what would be the the main reason that you wouldn't want to invest today right so he was closing this is actually a close but as a side note I think the reason I like sales so much is because many of the obstacle overcomes that you learn to overcome are actually self

[ __ ] and so in a way like learning how to sell other people for me was learning how to sell myself because I had so much head trash of like why I couldn't do things or why it shouldn't start now or why I had to think about or why I needed permission from someone else or why the universe was stacked against me to be successful like these are all things that I had to learn the arguments against to convince myself to do stuff and so he asked the lady he says okay so what would make you not want to invest in this and she says well I don't have the money and he said well it's probably you probably don't

have the money because you've been paying a really expensive bill every single year and she's like what do you mean he's like well right now you've been paying 950 000 a year not knowing how to make a million dollars he said this is the cost of your ignorance this is the debt that you carry for the rest of your life until you learn how to make a million dollars and so the reason I'm so heavy on learning skills and becoming educated is that right now I'm paying down ignorance debt I'm tamed down

950 million dollars a year not knowing how to make a billion it's dead I'm paying right like we all paying her instead and so the idea is how quickly can I pay this down so that I can have more cash flow to continue to pay this down faster now strategy like I said earlier is about how you allocate limited resources against unlimited options that's the fancy word of just saying prioritizing all right and so right now you have limited resources you have time and you have money now you might have more time than money but either way you have some limit on what you have and so for you to move faster you have to identify prioritize the

thing that you're going to allocate your time and money towards right and you want the thing that gets you the most for it remember the input output that we had over really The Leverage so you want the thing that gives you the most leverage now one of the one of the the tough Parts about reality is that the things that you have access to when you have fewer resources are less than the things you have access to when you have more resources like Mr Panda can go buy a building for a billion dollars and flip it for two billion dollars in a year or two and make a billion dollars because he has more resources than you do and you

can't do that right not right now but you do have things that could get you there which is why Charlie Munger talks about how do whatever you can do big borrow steel eat ramen walk with your lunch pail both directions do whatever you have to do to make your first hundred thousand it's because he understands and mind you him saying a hundred thousand is probably like a million dollars today because he knows that once you get that you can actually get a little bit more leverage in terms you get way more for what you put in because you can't only put your time in because it's so limited in terms of how much you can do all right so

this is why I talk about having investing in the SME 500 more than the S P 500 so if you don't know this is standard and Poor 500 companies uh on the stock exchange it's probably like the gold standard index that we track how the US economy is doing it's really just the stock market in general is doing all right and so if you dollar cost average in the S P 500 you'd get nine to ten percent a year for for life at least that's what it's done historically all right so the question is rather than investing in this we just have to say can we do anything that gets us more than ten percent back

great now we can quantify this and so if I have let's say a thousand dollars right and here's the magic of this is that when you invest a thousand dollars into the s p you have no you have nothing else that you add to that thousand like you can't juice the Thousand you bind the same valuation that every other investor Buys in at and so I'll tell you one of the magic so I'm going to open open up the curtain here for a second one of the magic what we do at acquisition.com is that we pair Capital with know-how and so we can buy a company at a decent valuation and have a big margin of safety because of our skill set so we

know that we can triple or 10x the business when we invest in it so we don't have to pick amazingly like Warren Buffett the better picker always will be than I am right at picking businesses but Warren Buffett doesn't work in the business right so that's the advance that's my advantage over Warren Buffett right now mind you he has way more advantages over me I made 90 billion on his Apple trade but but this is the game that I'm supposed to play right now because here's the leverage that I have on him I have 60 more years of life than he does right he's 93 I'm 33. so I have a lot

more of these left on my on my move set okay now we have our thousand dollars we get 10 meaning at the end of the year we're at 1100 roughly okay or let's say you buy a sales training course they teach you how to sell and you get implementation from that where they review some of your calls so that you can improve and all of a sudden you take your income from forty thousand a year to 220 000 a year okay what does that mean that means that that thousand think about this return all right in scenario one you have eleven hundred dollars in scenario two and here's the crazy part you have an

extra 180 000 all right so compare this to that but here's the crazy part this is every year because once you have the skill you only get better from there and so one of the things my dad used to tell me that um when I was growing up was that he was always really big on education because he came here a thousand dollars didn't speak the language and he learned English like that was a skill he didn't have like we take so many skills for granted like the man didn't he couldn't even speak the language of the country right in a

thousand bucks and he was able to take his medical school education and apply it here in the U.S because he fled during the revolution in Iran and he said the one thing that no government can take from you and no wife can steal from you in a divorce and you can't get sued out of is your education they can't take it from you and he had relatives who actually really well off who actually owned the lottery in Iran so he was a private company so they made a lot of money but they were like second third generation and they hadn't learned the skills and so when they fled during the revolution

they could only take what they could carry because all of their assets got seized by the government and they never were able to go back to what they had because they didn't have the skills because the government could take their assets but they didn't have the education right and the guys who were who were businessmen from Iran straight to La became businessmen in in LA and crushed it there too because they understood the game right and so this is why like if you think about it from actually an investment perspective like education can't go down it can't be taxed it can't be taken from you and only gets better over time right and it

compounds unto itself because when you learn the next skill so let's say this is this is what the lift we got from from sales then you learn lead gen and then all of a sudden this because then you 5x the demand on your sales skills [Applause] and you just paid down your ignorance debt with two Investments and so like is that worth it more than putting the money in the s p in my opinion every [ __ ] time is going from 40 to 220 realistic if you're a killer and you're part of Mosey Nation absolute [ __ ] luly if you do

it the way we tell you to do it which is you look at the top guy on whatever company whatever team and you do twice what they do because you know why because they're going to be better than you and so you've got to make up with you got to make it up in inputs it's like but Alex does that mean I'm going to have to work harder in longer hours you bet welcome to the world like because think about it if you work the same hours as that guy that guy always has the advantage because he's already better than you and so if he puts a month in and you put a month and he's gonna get further ahead than you because he

already has skills through which to to judge his own performance and improve and so you have to put way more inputs in to get the same output than that guy and so that's why Kobe spent five Summers doing two days when everyone else was doing one a day because he knew he had to make up for the guys who were way better than him naturally and so like I would like to think everybody knows the nation as many black mambas from that perspective is that we're willing to put in twice the work three times to work four times the work despite the natural Talent deficiencies to make up for it because on a five year or a 10 year or 25 year timeline you

become unbeatable do I think you can get to 220 hell yeah but if you were to just look at average which I don't want you to be but if you were to look at average you might make a hundred a year or 120 a year it would still triple what you were making before and if you don't adjust your living from what you're making at 40 Mr Smart Cookie then now you have even at 120 if this was 120. you have 80k a year extra that you can then invest in more skills to pay down your ignorance debt a key Point here is I said that there was an advantage that I have for Warren

Buffett which is I got money and time slash effort right if you go spend the money but you don't put this in then you lose your advantage and so it's not just about spending the money because here's an interesting fact to it for you when you sell someone you understand that the moment someone buys they actually feel like they've solved the problem emotionally and so you can sell that because you learn how to sell but the reality is that that just gives them the license to begin solving the problem of whatever it is especially if

it's a skill or it's education based here's my ask for you guys one of the beliefs that I think has served me well is that whenever I joined a group or I joined a community or a free or paid or otherwise I always want to become number one and the way that I thought about that was and I always wanted to join groups of people who are all ahead of me like when I joined the internet group that I was talking about earlier everybody there was making more money than me how do I get status in this group and the way I did that was like be good you know I mean make more money and so what I did was I talked to every single person in

the group and I had only my small skill set and I gave it to them for free and I want to [ __ ] hit on this because I get DMS every day about this guy this morning even said it he said Alex I want to make you a hundred videos for free if you're willing to employ me the amount of times that I get this request whether it's I want to make you this website in exchange for a job the point of mosination the point of everything they do acquisition.com that I hope to live by example is that you give first without asking you're doing it wrong right you think

because like in the prayers like hey in the spirit of monster it's like you're not doing in the spirit motivation you're doing the spirit of John are you doing the spirit of you the way that you do it is that you give and then you give and then you give and then you give and you keep on giving until that person is like dude what can I do for you and then you make your ask like whenever I get frustrated and I think like why do I even bother doing this like I think about giving up I just think this is where most people stop and this is why they don't win it transitions into one of my my most

used sayings to myself I don't say a lot out loud but to myself it's like I won't do my best I'll do what's required and so right now what is required for you to win or get a job or get the skill might be better than your best and so it just means that your best just needs to get better all right so you might be riled up and be like I'm gonna go do this and take over the world and make all the money so but you're like [ __ ] I got to pay bills so how do we take this and then put it into reality number one is like and this is how you transfer any skills in general by the way a little sneak peek from the book that's coming up all right

coming soon is it you have the person who's teaching you documents the skill that's step one step two is that they do it in front of you so they demonstrate it and the third piece is duplicate you do it in front of them so document demonstrate duplicate now I can do this and I can do this but you have to do this I can't duplicate it for you you have to take the stuff and actually execute on it and so if you're like okay Alex what does that actually look like in my life I'm actually a big big proponent of having jobs and I think that's probably

taboo nowadays but uh yeah why not get paid to learn [ __ ] and if you're like well the place that I work at doesn't teach me anything then you should absolutely go apply for other jobs like change your conditions all right so I'm all about get paid to learn and as an aside the reason that keeping your living expenses low is so important is because if let's say you make a hundred thousand dollars a year now you're like Alex I got a pretty good white collar job right now but I really want to get into this then it might mean that you have to go from a hundred

thousand dollars a year to thirty thousand dollars a year to learn the skill because right now you go from earning to learning all right and like I want to I want to tell you like I walk this walk so I was a Management Consultant at a boutique strategy firm in DC like we did like I had a top secret clearance I was 20 like I did I did [ __ ] that people could brag about all right and then I went and became a personal trainer at a gym for 14 an hour think about that I went from a high-rise condo that I owned to renting someone's bedroom for 400 a month in their house all right and I went from having you know Hugo Boss suits to wearing beast

mode engaged t-shirts all right and showing up at 4am like ready to teach Nancy how to lose the last five you know what I mean and so like I had to swallow my pride on this because I wanted to I wanted to get learned all right and so you have to be willing to relinquish getting paid for getting learned all right once you get yourself in an environment where you actually have a business that is investing in you and it doesn't mean that they actually have to write checks to be clear now if you have a company that's willing to do that awesome level one is you communicate to them this is the

skill that I would like to learn upon working for you and so you're like these are the skills that I bring to the table this is what I would like to learn is this a place that I can do that any business owner loves clear communication it's like if you want to learn that and if they're a good business owner they'll be like let me help you support now if they're like my job isn't to teach you wrong place and I'll be real a lot of business owners are like that and so if you're like well how man it's not fair it's like well I mean getting paid to learn is a pretty good deal it's just that that's not always what happens and so I would say

switch your conditions but let's say you finally get into a business that teaches you stuff and you feel like you're getting better you're moving faster I'd say once you feel like and this is a big caveat this is like [ __ ] caveat once you have nothing left to learn from the current position you communicate to them that you feel like you're learning is slowed down and then they may give you another opportunity to learn more and if they feel like they can't actually teach you internally they might say I'll pay ten thousand dollars a year for you to go through these programs or workshops or seminars or whatever so you can wear

certifications so you can continue to level up your skill a good employer will do that and if you look at big Corporate America as much people should own them they usually have pretty strong corporate reinvestment programs like they why because they want their their human capital to appreciate and so if you can pay ten thousand dollars because they do the same SME 500 except the snu 500 right they invest in you ten thousand dollars and they get a three times more valuable person like one of the biggest Arbitrage opportunities I know this is me talking to business owners that's out there in the marketplace is that you can pay 25 more

for an a player versus a b player and you get five times the output so like you think about value Arbitrage like instead of paying 100 a year if that's the market pay 125 and get five times the output why would you never make that trade once you've done this here are the three steps that you can transition from getting learned back to getting paid all right number one is that you live below your needs the less risk you take in your personal life the more risks you take in your business life let's say that I own a business that does 10 million dollars a year in profit okay if my living expenses are eight hundred thousand

dollars a month then I'm not leaving much for the business to weather a storm and let's say that it's all fixed it's like mortgages and cars and jets and all the other stuff that I do well if there's a hiccup the business might go under but if I live on 400 000 a year then I have 9.6 million every year that I can go on the offensive and I can take huge swings I can be like I want to buy this company even though it's risky but it might 10x right and that offense is what you have to do as an entrepreneur because you have to take calculated risk but you don't want to introduce multiple risks if you can control it and this is

controllable risk okay so you live below your mean so you can stack cash okay level two is that you take this cash and I want to be clear I'm actually kind of against side hustles as a long-term thing I'm Pro them as a way to transition again this is how I play the game I'm a maximizer like I want to win big and so I think if you follow my stuff that you probably wouldn't win big too and so if you're doing a side hustle it's because you want it to eventually become your main hustle not because you're just looking for side income I'm just not that guy there's other guys who will talk about that it's just not me all right and so you stack the cash you

can start your side hustle and you keep doing this until you have uh matched your income so you start your side hustle and you keep doing it until you match your current income and if you're like wait a second for me to match my current income I'm gonna have to work 40 hours a week in my job and then work another 40 hours a week at this thing yep and the thing is and this is just you know one man's caveat there's many different different takes on this if you're not making more money on 40 hours a week of the new thing you're still not doing it right remember I went from employed to self-employed

you have a level of Leverage so those 40 hours you have more leverage than the 40 hours that you're working for someone else and if you're not making more there then you're like you still need to keep doing it until you've matched at least at least matched your income and then once you've matched the income I would say sustain it for six months two reasons one is because now you're going to be making double time you're gonna be making money on the job you're gonna be making up money on earnings you're going to be doubling your actual income which means you might be like three or four x in your savings and the second is so that you don't just quit on the one good

month you had because you sent out three clients okay we want to make sure that it's not seasonal we want to make sure that we can like it's not just normal volatility because really small businesses super volatile right if you're selling two customers a month if all of a sudden you sell zero your income goes to zero right unless you retain the people et cetera et cetera and then cut bait cut the cord and go out on your own spread those wings get a beautiful butterfly and a lot of people look at this thing the side hustle and they're like but this isn't Facebook like this isn't sure it's not but I think a lot of

people put undue pressure on themselves by expecting their next thing to be a trillion dollar company and the likely that it happens super super super super super super small but again it's like what are your goals if your goals are just like get out of poverty get above the middle class get above get into the upper class like a lot of businesses can get you there if you want to be a trillionaire there's only a few and also what we don't see is the zillions of not zuckerbergs who put everything into their social media thing and it didn't work I'm a big fan of service businesses because it costs you nothing to start it's just your time you have no overhead

in the beginning those ones are harder to scale but you'll usually learn a lot of other skills during that part like I learned more from running a gym that allowed me to do gym launch like if I hadn't run the gyms I don't think I would have been able to do gym launch and so think of whatever this is is as the stepping stone and again we're still trying to get learned like that doesn't change we're just going to also get paid as we do it and that's one of the beautiful things about entrepreneurship is that like once you get past a certain level you get to get paid to learn more and I think that's like for me why I love the game so much is that you just

keep getting better and get paid to get better don't judge yourself on the side hustle and especially don't listen to other people's judgment on your side hustle you many people like I was like Vanderbilt magna [ __ ] laude you know white collar consultant job like head up above Harvard you know GMAT score say like and you want to become a trainer like the amount of people that like I used to compete against Frenemies whatever you want to call it they were like oh great he's he's out of the race you know what I mean like he's he's doing stuff to make himself happy right you know I was younger and I probably

had more [ __ ] up [ __ ] in my head than I do now but like I used to just think about them all the time when I'd be sleeping on the floor and I'd be selling I was like they're not willing to do this they're not willing to do this they're not willing to do this and then you come from behind right and you do Kobe and you work twice a day and while they're working their job and they have their 3 Series BMW and they're you know going out to dinner and they have the the football on the weekends in their fantasy league and you have none of that just know that you're doing your two days during the summer or your three

days during the summer but because your rate of input is so much higher than theirs is you will catch up and you will surpass them and that's if you want to compare and the main reason I don't think you should judge yourself on whatever you do is because in my opinion like I'm married to the game right more than anything like I'm going to keep playing the game because I love the game and so if you want to play the game a long time then it's the game itself that you want to stick with rather than the vehicle you're in right most entrepreneurs start more than one business over their career you are above the business the problem

is that people identify so closely like their identity is their business but you have to just think about it and this is me just trying to give you like a you know Big Brother what do you want to call it piece of advice but like the further you can separate your identity and your self-worth from the worth of the business the better off you'll be as an entrepreneur because you also start to see as an asset that can be sold can create value in the asset you can make hard decisions whereas if it's you you're like what will people think it's like I made a decision about a business that I own that's okay Simon to neck is a great

piece on this but when I learned the difference between infinite and finite games it really changed my perspective the infinite frame will always beat the finite frame and there are finite games within every infinite game and so you have quarters you have years you have goals these are all fine games that we play in an infinite game and so when the US invaded Vietnam we lost why did we lose we lost a war of attrition which was that they were willing to play the game longer than we were all right and so the difference between a finite infinite game is that a finite game has known players agreed upon rules and an outcome

and an end that's why it's finite an infant game has known and unknown players has no agreed-upon rules and the point of the game is to keep the game going and so the problem that most entrepreneurs have is they approach an infinite game with a finite frame they are the United States trying to invade Vietnam and you will lose every time because there will be players who are playing with an infinite frame and so let me give you two more examples of this if you want to get healthy right you don't win at Health there's no end goal to being held you're like okay I'm done working out I did it I've achieved it right of course not right same thing

with marriage right like you're not the point isn't to uh get married the point is to stay married the point is to stay in the game to keep the game going most of the game's worth playing are infinite games not finite games which means the point is to just play and so business you don't win the point isn't to finish because even if you're trying to say Finish First it's like by what metric on what time period is there anyone who's been the richest man in the world for all time no of course not which means that anybody who would try to do that is is coming from a finite frame and so but there have been people

who've won the game of business in my perspective because they played their whole lives if you want to be a stronger player and be somebody who can succeed as an entrepreneur then the day you start playing is the day you win and the day you stop playing is the day you lose and so the goal is to find games that you don't want to quit that's where learning what you are into from executing is the the mega win here so for me I found out that I actually liked business more than I liked Fitness which was crazy because I loved Fitness getting into fitness but like the day I started my gym was the day my love for business outpace my love for Fitness I

was like this is amazing this is so cool and so you have to find whatever that thing is and I'll be clear like business sucks all the time but it's just that if you're willing to play and like there's plenty of times marriage sucks there's plenty of time you don't want to work out but it doesn't mean that I'm going to stop working out doesn't mean I'm going to stop being married doesn't mean I'm gonna stop being in business and so I think if you can unlock that frame that you want to play until the day you die even if the vehicle changes even the players that you're playing with on the court change

then you'll be the guy who stays on the court the longest you might think oh I don't like video editing or oh I don't like you know dry cleaning or I don't like mowing lawns I don't like washing cars or whatever it is right but the higher up you get in business the more all businesses are the same right you're going to have marketing you're gonna have sales you're going to have product you're gonna have customer success or customer support you're gonna have it you're gonna have Finance you're gonna have legal like all these departments are gonna these functions will more or less exist in every business and so my advice is like a lot of people

quit Industries when they really actually just quit a function of a job and so like they're like oh entertainment wasn't for me it's like do you know how many jobs there are in entertainment like you might love sales like sales in entertainment and you were in enter the actual like product side right or the production side or the support side and so again remember I said earlier that like if you stay in the same game longer you'll you'll be likely to get more reps in and you'll do better well then maybe stay in the same industry but switch roles now in a micro business like your side hustle you'll get to taste all the roles and you'll

find out the things that you like more and that's where you can shift some of your attention there and then you backfill people who are because you have a little bit of context good enough to do what you do better you demonstrate sorry you document you demonstrate you duplicate they duplicate and then they run with it right and so today for example my what I do looks very different than what I did 10 years ago right like what I did 10 years ago was the highest value skill I had done which was just closing that's all I did I had consults all day because I got trainers to train for me I knew how to

run the ads and that didn't take me that long took me two three hours a week to run the ads make make them and manage them the rest of my time was sitting in appointments and closing and I had somebody else make the phone calls and text for me so I would just sit there and close because that was the highest value thing I could do at the time but the thing is is that your Baseline skill will continue to level up if I lost everything then like if I lost everything I knew that I would sell cars during the day and I would strip at night right once I had that skill before I had the skill of sales I would drive Uber during the day and strip at night

because I had the skill be in shape right and so your Baseline continues to grow like being the best car sales when you make 400 500 maybe even a million a year at some of the best dealerships like if you're an absolute Savage and I would consider myself an absolute Savage if I was going to do that right if I lost it all I'd be there 12 hours a day for sure and then once I learned how to Market marketing and sales together my new minimum was a million bucks a year because I knew that I could sit in front of any brick and mortar business and I could get him leads and I could close them once you have that you can make a million two million three like I can't

go below that because I have skills that are above that right you keep learning these skills as you keep doing your business and you might you'll start ping-ponging in different directions until you hone in on the things that you're best at and so I think if you can find that game make it the metascale of continuing to learn then you won't stop and then at that point it means you win by default so we talked about a lot of stuff right but the question is like what's the next thing you're going to do and so I'm just going to give you advice that I followed which is like what was the first thing I did to get myself out of this million

dollar or below million dollar category to the above million dollar category and then to eventually the point four percent 10 million category and it was actually just learning how to sell because if you can't sell anything you can't make money it's the first part of the equation number of sales times if you have no sales doesn't matter how good the lifetime values if no one buys it zero so I have what we call the best sales training on the Internet it's a long keynote that I did that people really dig and I think you'll hopefully like it and get as much from it as it took me years to consolidate it for you it's a good bargain on your time to get