WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.280 And the thing is, is you're going to hire somebody who you think is going to be 2 00:00:02.280 --> 00:00:03.840 good at marketing, and they're not going to be. 3 00:00:03.920 --> 00:00:05.320 And you got to hire another person, right? 4 00:00:05.520 --> 00:00:07.040 And if you're like, man, that sounds tiring. 5 00:00:07.160 --> 00:00:10.440 That's the reason most people who own big companies are like, it is hard to do 6 00:00:10.440 --> 00:00:11.720 this. This is not easy. 7 00:00:11.880 --> 00:00:13.000 This is not for the faint of heart. 8 00:00:13.160 --> 00:00:16.760 You must have a long term vision that you are committed to because you will burn 9 00:00:16.760 --> 00:00:18.680 out if you're only doing it for the money. 10 00:00:21.520 --> 00:00:23.600 The wealthiest people in the world see business as a game. 11 00:00:23.800 --> 00:00:26.840 This podcast, the game is my attempt at documenting the lessons I've learned on 12 00:00:26.840 --> 00:00:29.480 my way to building acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. 13 00:00:29.920 --> 00:00:32.000 But I hope is that you use the lessons to grow your business and maybe 14 00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:34.280 someday soon partner with us to get to a hundred million dollars in beyond. 15 00:00:34.520 --> 00:00:35.560 I hope you share and enjoy. 16 00:00:41.040 --> 00:00:45.560 99% of businesses end up closing down over a long enough time horizon. 17 00:00:45.720 --> 00:00:48.240 Only 1% of businesses ever get sold or train chance. 18 00:00:48.680 --> 00:00:52.200 And the reason for that is not because, you know, the, the, the, what you might 19 00:00:52.200 --> 00:00:52.920 think, right? 20 00:00:52.960 --> 00:00:55.240 You might think that it's because business owners don't know how to sell 21 00:00:55.240 --> 00:00:57.560 their business or don't know how to market the business to get sold. 22 00:00:57.880 --> 00:00:59.360 But that's actually not the real reason. 23 00:00:59.440 --> 00:01:02.880 The real reason is because most businesses are worthless. 24 00:01:02.960 --> 00:01:06.520 And so what I want to talk about today is how to go from a worthless business 25 00:01:07.080 --> 00:01:08.440 to a business that has actual value. 26 00:01:09.080 --> 00:01:09.320 Right. 27 00:01:09.320 --> 00:01:12.400 And so right now if you're a small business owner, which, you know, there's 28 00:01:12.560 --> 00:01:16.000 30 million small businesses or whatever it is, a lot, most of these businesses 29 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:16.840 don't actually have value. 30 00:01:16.920 --> 00:01:19.920 And the reason for that is because they are not businesses. 31 00:01:19.960 --> 00:01:21.320 They are jobs, right? 32 00:01:21.680 --> 00:01:26.040 And so if you remember Robert Kiyosakis is wealth quadrant, I think he goes 33 00:01:26.040 --> 00:01:29.400 employee self-employed owner and then investor, I believe that's the 34 00:01:29.400 --> 00:01:31.600 quadrant. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's what it is. 35 00:01:31.920 --> 00:01:34.160 Or at least that's how I would draw it in my head in terms of some progression. 36 00:01:34.200 --> 00:01:36.600 So most of us have, you know, most people have jobs first, right? 37 00:01:36.600 --> 00:01:37.880 And then they make a certain amount of money. 38 00:01:37.880 --> 00:01:40.200 They're relatively skilled and they think, you know, I could do something like 39 00:01:40.200 --> 00:01:41.000 this on my own, right? 40 00:01:41.000 --> 00:01:42.000 Or I could do something else on my own. 41 00:01:42.480 --> 00:01:43.880 And so then they switched to self-employed. 42 00:01:43.960 --> 00:01:47.000 And what they don't know is that switch from box one to box two is that 43 00:01:47.000 --> 00:01:48.320 you actually take a decrease in pay. 44 00:01:48.720 --> 00:01:51.800 And the reason for that is because you actually aren't that good yet. 45 00:01:51.800 --> 00:01:53.360 You know how to do one thing well here. 46 00:01:53.440 --> 00:01:56.720 And because of that, because you fit into a larger machine, you're able to earn 47 00:01:56.720 --> 00:02:01.240 higher pay because as a, as a sum of parts, you can actually provide more value, 48 00:02:01.320 --> 00:02:04.560 right? But when you actually have to be each of the parts, you're not that good 49 00:02:04.560 --> 00:02:07.160 at it yet. And so you become self-employed and you actually make 50 00:02:07.160 --> 00:02:08.600 significantly less for a long period of time. 51 00:02:08.800 --> 00:02:12.160 The thing is is that most people who are self-employed have an LLC, right? 52 00:02:12.440 --> 00:02:14.840 And so they consider themselves to be business owners, but the reality is that 53 00:02:14.840 --> 00:02:16.520 they are not business owners, they are self-employed. 54 00:02:16.840 --> 00:02:21.360 And even if you have other employees that work for you, you were still self-employed. 55 00:02:21.560 --> 00:02:22.880 Here's the litmus test for this, right? 56 00:02:23.600 --> 00:02:25.920 What happens is, and I have these conversations all the time because there's 57 00:02:26.120 --> 00:02:29.560 companies that apply to become portfolio companies with us so we can invest in 58 00:02:29.560 --> 00:02:32.040 the companies and help them help them grow consumer. 59 00:02:32.120 --> 00:02:36.000 All right, the thing that happens though is that they stop doing the actual 60 00:02:36.000 --> 00:02:38.800 fulfillment of the thing, whatever the widget is, whatever they're selling, 61 00:02:38.800 --> 00:02:41.240 whatever the service is, they're not actually doing the fulfillment. 62 00:02:41.640 --> 00:02:45.080 And so in that moment, they're like, I now own a business and I am a business owner. 63 00:02:45.440 --> 00:02:47.040 And now I can sell this business. 64 00:02:47.120 --> 00:02:50.560 And that's so far from the truth because there are so many other things that must 65 00:02:50.560 --> 00:02:53.960 happen, right, in order for a business to be sellable because for a business to 66 00:02:53.960 --> 00:02:55.840 be sellable, it must be an asset that can run without you. 67 00:02:56.080 --> 00:02:59.400 Now, you might think, again, here's the fallacy that your business can run 68 00:02:59.400 --> 00:02:59.880 without you. 69 00:03:00.280 --> 00:03:04.040 And that's because maybe you don't do the actual thing, but you're still 70 00:03:04.040 --> 00:03:06.520 involved in maybe the marketing and the sales, right? 71 00:03:06.720 --> 00:03:11.440 If you can't get someone to replace you in that, then you can't sell it. 72 00:03:11.440 --> 00:03:13.560 Now, you might think, oh, I'll just sell it and then somebody else will do that. 73 00:03:14.080 --> 00:03:15.240 It's not going to be a sellable thing. 74 00:03:15.240 --> 00:03:17.200 No one's going to do that because they're like, well, you haven't done it. 75 00:03:17.320 --> 00:03:19.560 Well, why would I believe that someone can do it besides you? 76 00:03:19.560 --> 00:03:20.400 Because you haven't proved it. 77 00:03:20.880 --> 00:03:24.800 And so what you have to do is prove to what a future buyer would be that this 78 00:03:24.800 --> 00:03:26.840 business can operate on its own without you, right? 79 00:03:27.520 --> 00:03:30.560 And so the next step, right, is that you replace the acquisition. 80 00:03:30.560 --> 00:03:32.560 So first you have the services that you're not doing. 81 00:03:32.560 --> 00:03:35.320 Then you replace the acquisition process to be something that is reliable. 82 00:03:35.880 --> 00:03:37.120 Pick one of the channels you want. 83 00:03:37.120 --> 00:03:37.920 You could pick referrals. 84 00:03:37.920 --> 00:03:38.800 You could pick affiliates. 85 00:03:38.800 --> 00:03:41.680 You could pick manual outbound, which is cold calls, cool emails, whatever. 86 00:03:41.720 --> 00:03:44.400 You could pick owned media, which is like all the people that already have 87 00:03:44.400 --> 00:03:45.520 contact with that you can message. 88 00:03:45.720 --> 00:03:48.840 You could have earned media, which is that you you start creating a channel of 89 00:03:48.840 --> 00:03:51.280 your own that that a platform would distribute your content. 90 00:03:51.280 --> 00:03:53.800 That's how you generate business or you do pay traffic, right? 91 00:03:53.800 --> 00:03:57.360 You could you could do paid media and start running ads on a consistent way to generate 92 00:03:57.360 --> 00:03:57.920 sales, right? 93 00:03:57.920 --> 00:04:00.120 No matter what it is, you have to have a consistent process where you know, 94 00:04:00.120 --> 00:04:04.520 if you put X effort or X dollars in this side, that you will get why outcome on 95 00:04:04.520 --> 00:04:05.280 the other side, right? 96 00:04:05.920 --> 00:04:07.960 And if you don't have that, then you don't have a sellable business. 97 00:04:08.120 --> 00:04:09.320 Now, here's what happens next. 98 00:04:09.640 --> 00:04:12.360 So first you, you productize your service. 99 00:04:12.360 --> 00:04:14.400 It's a consistent thing that you delivered over and over again. 100 00:04:14.400 --> 00:04:15.320 You're not custom. 101 00:04:15.320 --> 00:04:16.760 If it's custom, it's going to be terrible. 102 00:04:16.760 --> 00:04:19.280 It's going to be, it's going to evaluate as a service-based business, which is going 103 00:04:19.280 --> 00:04:20.400 to suck and you're not going to be able to sell it. 104 00:04:20.400 --> 00:04:22.600 You're going to have a massive earn out, which basically means you're going to work for 105 00:04:22.600 --> 00:04:26.320 the next five years to earn the exact same pay except you no longer own the business 106 00:04:26.320 --> 00:04:29.640 and the person who gives you the earn out has all the upside and you, you take all 107 00:04:29.640 --> 00:04:30.720 the risk and they got all the upside. 108 00:04:30.880 --> 00:04:31.920 So no one out there. 109 00:04:32.200 --> 00:04:35.360 And so you've, you've productized the service, you have a predictable acquisition 110 00:04:35.360 --> 00:04:36.000 process, right? 111 00:04:36.120 --> 00:04:37.520 And you're like, now I can sell the business. 112 00:04:37.520 --> 00:04:42.560 Oh, wait, there's more because the thing is is that you still own all the hats. 113 00:04:42.560 --> 00:04:44.280 You still might be managing the sales team. 114 00:04:44.280 --> 00:04:45.640 You're still be managing the marketing. 115 00:04:45.640 --> 00:04:47.800 You still might be, might be innovating the product. 116 00:04:47.800 --> 00:04:50.440 You still might be making all the chief decisions, right? 117 00:04:50.440 --> 00:04:54.080 You still might even be operating the business, just not actually doing any of those things. 118 00:04:54.400 --> 00:04:58.360 And so to say that like I, I'm now a business owner in this, this works without me is not 119 00:04:58.360 --> 00:05:02.360 true. You were just, you were doing higher level skills, which believe it or not are more 120 00:05:02.360 --> 00:05:04.080 expensive to replace, believe it, you know? 121 00:05:04.320 --> 00:05:08.280 And so now you have to go find someone who's going to become your VP of sales so you can 122 00:05:08.280 --> 00:05:11.520 take that hat off and who's going to become your director of marketing so you can take 123 00:05:11.520 --> 00:05:14.880 that hat off and who's going to become the chief product guy who's going to be consistently 124 00:05:14.880 --> 00:05:18.320 innovating the product and improving it so that it develops, you know, delivers excess 125 00:05:18.320 --> 00:05:19.520 value to your customers, right? 126 00:05:19.520 --> 00:05:23.280 So you have all these hats on and so the process of entrepreneurship of transitioning from 127 00:05:23.280 --> 00:05:26.240 self-employed where you literally have a hundred hats, right? 128 00:05:26.360 --> 00:05:28.920 Two transitioning to business owner where you take all the hats off your head and you 129 00:05:28.920 --> 00:05:32.000 were just a shareholder, which is that I prefer to see it is like, you have to think 130 00:05:32.000 --> 00:05:36.360 yourself not as the owner, but as the director of the board as the chief shareholder in 131 00:05:36.360 --> 00:05:39.280 the company, right, rather than the owner. 132 00:05:39.520 --> 00:05:42.080 Okay, even that change in language, I think is helpful and it was for me. 133 00:05:42.160 --> 00:05:44.880 What we have to do here, and if you're like, man, that's going to take a long time for 134 00:05:44.880 --> 00:05:47.880 to do that, duh, that's why most businesses don't get sold. 135 00:05:48.120 --> 00:05:50.920 And that's why sometimes it takes years to build something that's great, right? 136 00:05:51.040 --> 00:05:53.960 It might take you three years, it might take you five years, it might take you 10 years, 137 00:05:54.240 --> 00:05:55.600 right, to get the business at that point. 138 00:05:55.720 --> 00:05:59.560 And if you're like, man, if I only just had XYZ insert person, I could do this. 139 00:05:59.880 --> 00:06:03.280 Welcome to entrepreneurship, like the game is about people, right? 140 00:06:03.280 --> 00:06:06.120 Once you have the model and you have some of the tactics in the beginning, 141 00:06:06.120 --> 00:06:09.400 you can get some initial traction, like the rest of it is people, right? 142 00:06:09.400 --> 00:06:11.400 People are the thing that are going to run this machine for you. 143 00:06:11.560 --> 00:06:13.920 And that means that you have to learn how to recruit, have to how to hire, 144 00:06:13.920 --> 00:06:15.880 how to manage and how to lead, right? 145 00:06:15.880 --> 00:06:19.640 And those are the soft skills that are harder to, to, they're less tangible, 146 00:06:19.640 --> 00:06:22.000 but they're just as important if not more so, right? 147 00:06:22.000 --> 00:06:24.720 When you look at the, the biggest billionaires and multimillionaires author, 148 00:06:24.960 --> 00:06:27.480 they have, they keep their space around them very clean. 149 00:06:27.720 --> 00:06:29.000 They know what they stand for. 150 00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:33.440 They know and people are attracted to them because they have admirable qualities and traits. 151 00:06:33.560 --> 00:06:36.160 And that is how you get the higher level people. 152 00:06:36.160 --> 00:06:36.840 So think about this. 153 00:06:37.120 --> 00:06:40.760 So let's say that you've got somebody who's a brilliant marketer who can generate 154 00:06:40.760 --> 00:06:42.680 demand like crazy for you, right? 155 00:06:43.040 --> 00:06:48.040 Well, that person isn't going to work for someone who's lower skilled than they are, right? 156 00:06:48.240 --> 00:06:51.640 You have to have more skills to attract the type of people that you want who are 157 00:06:51.640 --> 00:06:53.840 going to help you run this business and grow it because they have to believe in 158 00:06:53.840 --> 00:06:55.320 the vision they want to do something that's meaningful. 159 00:06:55.960 --> 00:07:00.360 And so the, the journey here is understanding and this is the piece that I think 160 00:07:00.360 --> 00:07:03.880 most people miss is that they don't even know the hats that they are wearing. 161 00:07:04.160 --> 00:07:05.760 You making decisions is a hat. 162 00:07:06.280 --> 00:07:08.080 It's an important hat, right? 163 00:07:08.160 --> 00:07:11.440 And so selling it without the person who can make decisions is in a business, right? 164 00:07:11.720 --> 00:07:13.840 If you're selling it and you're still the chief marketing officer, 165 00:07:13.840 --> 00:07:17.080 you're the one who's controlling the messaging and the branding and all of those things, 166 00:07:17.680 --> 00:07:19.920 it's still like that role still exists. 167 00:07:22.400 --> 00:07:25.320 Amos and Asian quick break, just to let you know that we've been starting to post 168 00:07:25.320 --> 00:07:27.240 on LinkedIn and want to connect with you. 169 00:07:27.600 --> 00:07:27.760 All right. 170 00:07:27.760 --> 00:07:30.680 So send me a connection request and note letting me know that you listen to the show 171 00:07:30.680 --> 00:07:31.760 and I will accept it. 172 00:07:31.960 --> 00:07:33.880 There's anyone you think that we should be connected with, 173 00:07:33.880 --> 00:07:38.320 tag them in one of my or layless posts and I will give you all the love of the world. 174 00:07:38.400 --> 00:07:38.680 All right. 175 00:07:38.680 --> 00:07:39.480 So let's get back to the show. 176 00:07:42.440 --> 00:07:46.360 And so there's typically far more leadership that has to occur in order for the 177 00:07:46.360 --> 00:07:47.480 business to be sellable. 178 00:07:47.680 --> 00:07:48.520 And here's the thing. 179 00:07:49.000 --> 00:07:52.920 Now all of a sudden, all of these roles that you've been doing up to this point, 180 00:07:53.080 --> 00:07:56.680 you've been taking profit, profit, sell discretionary earns, SDE, right? 181 00:07:56.840 --> 00:08:00.840 From the business, when in reality, a lot of that profit must be allocated back to 182 00:08:00.840 --> 00:08:03.840 the roles that you're doing, but you're not choosing to pay yourself for it, right? 183 00:08:03.840 --> 00:08:08.320 What happens is a business will become more sellable as you replaced all of the pieces 184 00:08:08.320 --> 00:08:10.640 that you're doing and oftentimes the margin will drop. 185 00:08:11.080 --> 00:08:14.120 But that is okay because now you have 100% of your time back and then you are 186 00:08:14.120 --> 00:08:17.960 truly a shareholder in the company and this takes years, not months, not weeks. 187 00:08:17.960 --> 00:08:20.360 And the thing is, is you're going to hire somebody who you think is going to be good 188 00:08:20.360 --> 00:08:21.800 of marketing and they're not going to be. 189 00:08:21.840 --> 00:08:24.040 And then you have to hire another person and then you think they're going to be 190 00:08:24.040 --> 00:08:26.560 good at marketing and they're not and then you got to hire another person, right? 191 00:08:26.760 --> 00:08:28.280 And if you're like, man, that sounds tiring. 192 00:08:28.360 --> 00:08:31.960 That's the reason most people who own big companies are like, it is hard to do this. 193 00:08:32.080 --> 00:08:33.000 This is not easy. 194 00:08:33.080 --> 00:08:34.280 This is not for the faint of heart. 195 00:08:34.400 --> 00:08:37.680 You must have a long term vision that you are committed to because you will 196 00:08:37.680 --> 00:08:39.960 burn out if you're only doing it for the money. 197 00:08:40.280 --> 00:08:43.000 You will because once you've satisfied your personal needs, you'll just stop 198 00:08:43.000 --> 00:08:45.640 being, you'll stop being inspired by the reason that you're doing this, right? 199 00:08:45.840 --> 00:08:48.760 And the thing is, is your employees will be even less inspired because all 200 00:08:48.760 --> 00:08:50.600 of it starts with you and then gets diluted down. 201 00:08:50.760 --> 00:08:53.320 And so if you are not extremely potent, right? 202 00:08:53.360 --> 00:08:57.040 You are not extremely distilled down in terms of your vision of where you want to go 203 00:08:57.040 --> 00:09:00.440 and why you're doing this, why this business even exists, then other people 204 00:09:00.440 --> 00:09:03.600 be even less so and less committed to that vision and you will track lower quality 205 00:09:03.600 --> 00:09:06.840 people and they will, they will turn out and they will not be skilled, et cetera. 206 00:09:06.880 --> 00:09:10.760 What happens is the small businesses become big businesses because you need 207 00:09:10.760 --> 00:09:14.640 to slowly grow them so that you can accommodate more people, right? 208 00:09:14.640 --> 00:09:16.520 Who can actually do all of the things that you do. 209 00:09:16.680 --> 00:09:18.800 And the reality is that you're not going to find, because right now you're like, well, 210 00:09:18.800 --> 00:09:20.760 there's one of me, so I just need to hire one more person. 211 00:09:21.080 --> 00:09:23.160 But that's not, that's not reality, right? 212 00:09:23.160 --> 00:09:26.720 You might be doing six things and you might have to hire six people to do what you 213 00:09:26.720 --> 00:09:28.120 are doing. And of course you do. 214 00:09:28.120 --> 00:09:29.960 And that sounds unreasonable, but welcome to business. 215 00:09:30.160 --> 00:09:33.200 And so four businesses to be scalable, oftentimes they have to have 216 00:09:33.360 --> 00:09:38.320 significant enough gross margins and volume to be able to pay for high quality 217 00:09:38.320 --> 00:09:41.360 talent to be able to actually do these things to take decisions off your plate. 218 00:09:41.600 --> 00:09:44.040 And were you getting to the point of kind of like hyper growth and 219 00:09:44.040 --> 00:09:46.760 hyper scale where you're starting to talk 10 million, 20 million, 30 million 220 00:09:46.760 --> 00:09:48.880 plus per year, right? 221 00:09:49.200 --> 00:09:53.120 Is when you have people who come with solutions preloaded, they come with 222 00:09:53.120 --> 00:09:56.040 experience of having done the thing that you need to solve already. 223 00:09:56.200 --> 00:09:59.080 So this, like you'll notice the transition to the business owner. 224 00:09:59.080 --> 00:10:01.400 And I'll tell you this right now is that once you start crossing multiple 225 00:10:01.400 --> 00:10:05.760 eight figures, the people that you are hiring are better than you are at everything. 226 00:10:06.400 --> 00:10:08.760 And that's one of the, that's one of the, that's one of the weird things that 227 00:10:08.760 --> 00:10:11.720 happens because in the beginning, most people don't have the skills that you do, 228 00:10:11.960 --> 00:10:15.400 right? And so you have to hire people who are, who are not as good as you are, 229 00:10:15.400 --> 00:10:16.840 and then you have to train them, right? 230 00:10:17.120 --> 00:10:20.960 And then later on, you start hiring people who are okay at some things, 231 00:10:20.960 --> 00:10:22.880 you still have to train them on how you want to it done. 232 00:10:23.120 --> 00:10:26.360 So they have, they've done the type of role in the business in the past, 233 00:10:26.600 --> 00:10:28.040 but they don't know how you want it done here. 234 00:10:28.040 --> 00:10:30.760 So you have some training, but there's less than there's some experience, right? 235 00:10:31.280 --> 00:10:35.080 The level above that is when people come in, they know what to do, 236 00:10:35.080 --> 00:10:38.680 they know how to do it better, better than you for your specific business. 237 00:10:39.000 --> 00:10:43.120 And when then that happens, then you realize how, how little utility you actually 238 00:10:43.120 --> 00:10:46.640 have in the business and how you're really only role is to just recruit people, 239 00:10:46.880 --> 00:10:49.880 right? Recruit people and cast the vision of where you are, 240 00:10:49.880 --> 00:10:52.320 want to make the bet for the company of where you want it to go. 241 00:10:52.920 --> 00:10:56.480 And so anyways, the reason that most businesses are worthless is because they 242 00:10:56.480 --> 00:10:57.960 sell entirely customized things. 243 00:10:58.240 --> 00:11:00.640 They sell it to everyone, which makes it completely unscathable. 244 00:11:00.760 --> 00:11:03.520 They're the ones who are still heavily involved in the acquisition in the rainmaking. 245 00:11:03.760 --> 00:11:07.480 And so because of that, and then even then, even after they've graduated from 246 00:11:07.640 --> 00:11:09.600 getting out of the selling and getting out of the fulfillment, 247 00:11:10.120 --> 00:11:12.960 the business still doesn't have value because they might still be the talking face. 248 00:11:12.960 --> 00:11:16.600 They still may be the spokesperson, which means that the business has no value 249 00:11:16.600 --> 00:11:19.280 outside of themselves, because no one else could take it over, right? 250 00:11:19.480 --> 00:11:22.480 Unless the person agreed to a three or five year earn out, 251 00:11:22.760 --> 00:11:24.880 which then means that you transfer the ownership to someone else. 252 00:11:24.880 --> 00:11:25.840 They get all the upside. 253 00:11:25.960 --> 00:11:28.560 And if you don't hit the milestones, they get your business anyways, 254 00:11:28.720 --> 00:11:30.280 and you get none of the money, right? 255 00:11:30.480 --> 00:11:33.400 And so it may sound arduous to do this, and it is. 256 00:11:33.720 --> 00:11:36.400 But I can tell you that having now gone through this process, 257 00:11:36.640 --> 00:11:39.400 it is one of the most worthwhile things that you can do is look at the business 258 00:11:39.400 --> 00:11:43.560 as a true, sellable asset because I heard this quote from MIT, 259 00:11:43.760 --> 00:11:46.080 do you spoke from John Warlow's book? 260 00:11:46.080 --> 00:11:49.480 But anyways, he said, all of you guys are busy selling your services. 261 00:11:49.680 --> 00:11:52.240 Well, you should be doing is selling your business, right? 262 00:11:52.360 --> 00:11:55.600 You as the CEO or the owner, your job is to sell the business, 263 00:11:55.880 --> 00:11:58.960 the job of the salespeople is to sell the products, right? 264 00:11:59.000 --> 00:12:02.120 Once you can make the transition from your businesses or your products, 265 00:12:02.360 --> 00:12:05.520 rather than your services of the business or the products you look, 266 00:12:05.640 --> 00:12:09.440 you move up in a level of an order of magnitude, right? 267 00:12:10.040 --> 00:12:13.240 And so I'm not saying that you should immediately be selling your business, right? 268 00:12:13.440 --> 00:12:15.800 But you should be making your business sellable. 269 00:12:16.080 --> 00:12:18.680 And the beauty of this is that when you go through this process, 270 00:12:18.880 --> 00:12:22.680 you end up having phenomenal leverage in any kind of negotiation that you want to have in the future. 271 00:12:22.680 --> 00:12:26.840 And this is a key hack for negotiating FYI is that don't need the deal. 272 00:12:27.440 --> 00:12:29.400 The guy who needs the deal, the less is the way that you negotiate. 273 00:12:29.720 --> 00:12:32.960 Like that is like everyone wants all these tricks and tactics and things for negotiating. 274 00:12:33.440 --> 00:12:36.800 The way to have the way to have the best negotiation is to have the most leverage. 275 00:12:36.800 --> 00:12:38.480 The way to have the most leverage is to not need the deal. 276 00:12:39.200 --> 00:12:41.320 Simple, right? Simple, not easy. How about that? 277 00:12:41.640 --> 00:12:44.600 And so if you want to sell your business someday for a lot of money, 278 00:12:44.600 --> 00:12:46.080 then the business must be sellable. 279 00:12:46.440 --> 00:12:50.080 And in order for you to do that, you must get the business to the point where you don't even mind 280 00:12:50.080 --> 00:12:53.120 keeping it because it's still cash flow so much money to you and you don't do anything. 281 00:12:53.760 --> 00:12:55.600 That is the position of FU. 282 00:12:55.800 --> 00:12:59.440 That is the position where you'll get the most money because now you have something that people want. 283 00:12:59.760 --> 00:13:04.200 No one wants a business where the owner is, you know, no one wants to buy themselves a job, right? 284 00:13:04.520 --> 00:13:06.040 And they don't want to buy themselves your job. 285 00:13:06.400 --> 00:13:09.320 And so you have to think, and this is the critical self-awareness of thinking like, 286 00:13:09.320 --> 00:13:10.480 what are the actual things that I do? 287 00:13:10.480 --> 00:13:11.920 Everyone wants to think, oh, no, I don't do anything. 288 00:13:11.920 --> 00:13:15.560 This thing runs itself except if you step away and didn't answer calls for two months, 289 00:13:15.760 --> 00:13:18.240 were the business to run itself? Probably not, right? 290 00:13:18.240 --> 00:13:20.200 So then we have to look at what are we actually doing? 291 00:13:20.360 --> 00:13:23.600 And it might be little, little fractional things that we're doing all over the place, 292 00:13:23.600 --> 00:13:26.640 but we still have to quantify those things and we still have to put processes around them 293 00:13:26.640 --> 00:13:30.560 and then hand them to people and see how they do and then continue to improve them until eventually. 294 00:13:30.760 --> 00:13:35.120 You get to that promised land where you don't actually have to do anything and you can still own the business. 295 00:13:35.440 --> 00:13:39.720 And I mean, to prove this, like you can probably own shares of companies on the public traded market, 296 00:13:39.880 --> 00:13:41.360 they have figured this out, right? 297 00:13:41.520 --> 00:13:46.840 And you can own a piece and part of the upside without ever looking at what Apple is doing for their, 298 00:13:46.840 --> 00:13:47.880 for their roadmap, right? 299 00:13:48.160 --> 00:13:52.280 And so we have to get to that point as business owners in order to make the asset that we own, 300 00:13:52.600 --> 00:13:54.840 the most viable thing that we have, probably the biggest thing on our net worth, 301 00:13:54.840 --> 00:13:59.240 the balance sheet is all the equity that we have on our businesses and to increase the value of that equity, 302 00:13:59.560 --> 00:14:05.800 we have to make it so that it actually a business and we transition from employee to self-employed to owner, right? 303 00:14:05.800 --> 00:14:09.040 And then the transition there goes from owner to investor because when you make that transition, 304 00:14:09.040 --> 00:14:11.760 that is when you start seeing your business for what it is, 305 00:14:11.760 --> 00:14:14.280 which is a sellable asset that sits on your net worth balance sheet. 306 00:14:14.560 --> 00:14:18.120 All right. And so this is one of the hardest lessons that took me the longest amount of time to learn. 307 00:14:18.120 --> 00:14:21.600 I'm hopefully just translating this to you because I see so many people were like, 308 00:14:21.600 --> 00:14:25.520 I want to sell my business, but the business is not sellable and it is worthless without them. 309 00:14:25.720 --> 00:14:28.880 And so we can't just say, oh, the next person's going to figure it out because they're not going to, 310 00:14:28.880 --> 00:14:31.240 I'll tell you right now, they're not going to, you have to figure it out. 311 00:14:31.400 --> 00:14:35.560 And what most people do instead is they just start another business because they don't know how to solve a problem. 312 00:14:35.760 --> 00:14:41.080 And so we must confront the problems that we have, which is you have to articulate the thing that you don't know how to do as a problem that you can solve, 313 00:14:41.280 --> 00:14:45.560 which is I don't know how to insert, find higher direct, a marketing director. 314 00:14:45.560 --> 00:14:49.640 I do not know how to find a VP of sales and train them and manage them and grow them. 315 00:14:49.640 --> 00:14:57.200 I do not know how to find a chief, you know, product officer who's going to innovate the products on my behalf and make it better than I ever could and make a better 316 00:14:57.200 --> 00:15:01.000 product and make it better client experience around it and consistently improve it based on these metrics. 317 00:15:01.200 --> 00:15:04.800 Until we can articulate what the problems are, we cannot solve them. 318 00:15:05.000 --> 00:15:08.400 And if we consistently live in this world of like, I just want to sell my business someday, 319 00:15:08.600 --> 00:15:12.880 you're not going to be able to until you put these pieces in place so that the business is sellable. 320 00:15:12.880 --> 00:15:15.040 It actually has value in and of itself separate from you. 321 00:15:15.160 --> 00:15:19.680 And then when that happens, your net worth will skyrocket because now you have something that everyone wants, 322 00:15:19.720 --> 00:15:21.920 which is an asset that produces cash while you sleep.