What It Really Takes to Grow Your Business | Ep 716

This episode explores the common misconceptions entrepreneurs have about the nature of their businesses and how recognizing the real challenges and focal points can significantly drive growth.

1. The real business challenge often lies in marketing, sales, and customer acquisition, not just the product.
2. Branding and media are crucial in shaping customer perceptions and can outweigh the actual product benefits.
3. Understanding the true nature of your business can unlock growth and scalability.
4. The importance of focusing on core business drivers rather than getting distracted by less impactful aspects.
5. Entrepreneurship involves continual learning and adaptation to real business needs.

1: Understanding Your Business

Hormozi discusses the initial misunderstandings entrepreneurs often have regarding their industries, emphasizing the importance of recognizing the core aspects of your business. Alex Hormozi: "Every business has its unique set of challenges that define its success."

2: Misconceptions in the Fitness Industry

Alex uses the gym industry as an example, explaining that success in this field is more about customer acquisition and retention than fitness itself. Alex Hormozi: "I thought it was about fitness, but it was actually about sales and marketing."

3: Insights from Supplement Business

Discussion on the supplement industry, where branding and media are more influential than the actual product contents. Alex Hormozi: "It's not about what's inside the bottle; it's about what's on the outside that counts."

4: Software Business Realities

Hormozi shares insights from entering the software industry, highlighting product delivery as the main challenge over selling the product. Alex Hormozi: "Software sells itself if it can effectively solve a problem for the customer."

5: The Big Picture in Entrepreneurship

A broader discussion on the entrepreneurial mindset required to navigate and succeed in various business landscapes. Alex Hormozi: "Entrepreneurs get paid to solve problems, the bigger the problem, the bigger the payoff."

1. Focus on understanding the core drivers of your industry.
2. Prioritize customer acquisition and retention strategies.
3. Align product branding with market expectations.
4. Continuously learn and adapt to your business's real needs.
5. Avoid distractions and focus on solving the right problems.

“All businesses have sh*t. The challenge is knowing which sh*t you're willing to deal with.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) delves into the crucial aspect of truly understanding your business's core challenges and its nature to unlock substantial growth. He emphasizes the disparity between initial expectations and the real core problem within each venture, advising entrepreneurs to focus on their business's actual challenges rather than pursuing seemingly easier opportunities, for achieving significant success.

Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.

People

Alex Hormozi

Content Warnings:

None

Auction Lizzie
Do you know the business that you're really in? I spent the vast majority of my time founding a company, getting really excited about it. And then once I actually get into it, once things actually get rolling, I think the problem that I was going to have to solve is actually not the problem that I end up having to solve. And every time I get into one, I think, oh, this one will be easier than the last one because I'll know how to solve this key problem. But that's because that business has an entirely different set of problems.

And once I realized that, I realize, oh, this is where my work begins. This is the business that I'm actually in. If you don't know me, welcome to the show. This is the game where we talk about making more money, scaling companies and business stuffs. My name is Auction Lizzie.

I'll be your host on this magic carpet ride of a day. I promise you that if you were in a business and you're trying to scale and try to make generational wealth with it, this one will be worth it. I had a, over the weekend, had a handful of kind of topics I want to talk about today, but I woke up this morning with one on my heart, and I think, I think, I think you guys will dig it. And if you don't dig it, uh, it may still make you money regardless. And so, um, what I want to title this kind of like, live podcast is, uh, do you know what business you're really in?

And I think this is super important because I have made the mistake in almost every business that I've been in, in thinking I was getting into one business, when in reality, I was getting into a very different business. And discovering the real business that you're actually in is what will unlock the amount of growth and money making that you really want to get into. It's usually the second and third level of entrepreneurship within whatever opportunity vehicle pursuing. So let me give you example. Kind of make this real.

So when I got into the gym business, I liked fitness. And so I thought that the business was going to be about like, macros and results and workouts and all of that. That's what I thought the business was going to be about. But once I got into the business, I realized it was actually just about marketing and sales. That specific business is about marketing and sales overall.

Now, when I make these generalizations, all businesses are like cars. Like, if you don't have wheels, the car's not going to move. If you don't gas, the car's not going to move. If you don't have an engine, the car's not going to move. But the question is, what is the biggest limiter?

What's the biggest thing that gives you the most return in that specific vehicle or that for specific business? And so I'm going to walk you through four or five different businesses that I've been what I thought it was versus what it really was. And then I'll turn it back to you in thinking about how you can apply that same methodology. And I'll bet you many of you, and I get this because I have a lot of conversations, business owners today, they don't know what business they're really in, all right? So I thought it was about fitness, but it was actually about sales and marketing.

If you look at the biggest fitness companies in the world, like, especially in the gym space, they're acquisition machines. That's what they are very, very good at. The actual fitness component of it is actually pretty minor, right? And I mean, I'll tell you this from talking to the franchisors who in many, many, many locations or privately owned ones, have thousand plus locations, that the fitness stuff is almost an afterthought. They're like, yeah, yeah, get people to sweat, move around, whatever.

Because the reality is that within fitness, for example, the biggest problem is that people don't show up because of other reasons. And so you have to always go get more customers. The good news is that everyone's trying to lose weight three times a year, and so there are plenty of people. So that was the first business that I misunderstood, what business I was really in. Now, thankfully, quickly I learned that, and then that became the skillset that I doubled down on.

Now, with that, I then was like, okay, well, Im going to start a self income, which was prestige labs. Now, again, I thought that business was going to be all about the product. I thought it was all going to be about the stuff thats inside of it. And so I got Doctor Kashi, my good friend, whos bio. Hes a PhD biochemist, one of the smartest human beings on earth.

And I said, hey, man, can you make the best products? I said, make a sandwich you would actually eat. Because he made all these things for Olympians, and he would put together these trash bags full of specific ingredients and specific compounds, and he's like, dude, these are going to be way too expensive. Like, it's not going to be commercially viable based on the quality of the ingredients. And I was like, dude, just make the best product.

I'll figure out how to sell it. And so um, that's. That was the focus that I had in prestige lives. But guess what? Once I got into that business, I realized that it actually had very little to do with what was in the bottle.

Because basically, anything, anything that's in a bottle that you don't taste the inside. The vast majority of products that are out there benefit off of placebo and nocebo effect. Basically, people taking something and then they feel better because they take something. I want to be. I want to be clear.

Placebo effects are real effects. So, like, I'm about the effect. Whatever works for you, works for you. And that's not really the point of this talk, but more so that I got into the business thinking that what was inside the bottle was the thing that mattered, but the reality was what was on the outside of the bottle and the thing that the bottle was next to. Meaning, it became.

What I realized almost too late, was that it's. It's a business that's based on brand, it's based on branding, and it's based on media, in terms of having tons and tons of traffic. And so I thought I was building a product based company that was going to be based on what's inside the bottle when everything that was limiting the business, what was on the outside of the bottle. And I saw the guys who are the biggest in the space, and this is the little telltale sign, by the way, if you want to hack this, is you look at the people who are the biggest in your space. So take your model, take it to its natural extreme, and look.

And I think there's a lot of wisdom that can be found from that. And trying to reverse engineer, like, what are the things that make this different? Now you might be like, and here's, this is what I used to do, all right? So, like, don't make this mistake. When I was in the gym industry, I would look like when I started, I was like, oh, my God, I can make way better workouts than those guys.

That's because those guys don't give a shit about their workouts because that's not the main thing in the business. I got into the submarine business. Like, oh, my God. Like, these guys are making hundreds of millions of dollars on this product that's just mediocre. Like, the thing is, is that most of the customers that are buying it don't even know the difference anyways, which means that your differentiator isn't actually making you different.

You're the only one who knows your differentiator, which is not good. Your customer has to realize what the differentiator is. And so the thing is, is that for most supplements, the differentiator is LeBron takes it, or so and so takes it. Or I think, this is cool, or my friend Sally likes it. Right?

Or. And I'll be clear on a consumables perspective, if it has a flavor, then the flavor becomes very important in the long run in terms of how good it tastes, because most people take ag one because they think it tastes good and because they feel good about it, not because what's inside of it. All right, so, just to be clear, I got into the gym business, and I thought it was about fitness, but it was really about marketing sales. I got into prestige labs and some business, and I thought it was about the stuff inside the bottle, when really about brand and building a big media traffic machine. And then I was like, okay, I think I'm getting the hang of this, of just making mistakes over and over again.

So then I got into the software business, and I was like, okay, I get it. Everything is about product marketing and sales. I'll be able to sell the shit out of this. And guess what? We sure as hell could, because I knew how to market and sell.

And so then I got into the software company software business, and I realized, by the way, side note, software tends to sell itself. You know why? Because if you can have technology and say, hey, there's that thing that you're doing, that this will do automatically. Not a very hard pitch, but the problem with software is actually delivering on the promise. And so it actually is a very product driven business because anyone can sell it.

The constraint like software, is not that difficult to sell. At least this is my experience with this. All right, so take that with my big himalayan size grain of salt. For me, that's when I realized that product was the main thing. And guess what?

I don't want to start it out. I outsourced the product. I had an outsourced dev team make the product for me, which I then realized was the core part of the business. It's like starting a supplement company, then trying to have an agency build yourself in company for you. If you're in the selling business or you're in the consumer product goods business, outsourcing, acquisition, outsourcing, brand outsourcing, media is like, it's.

It's. That's the business. Like, that's the business you're in. It's not the stuff inside the bottle. All right, so I'll give you another one.

So, I had a gym owner, uh, friend of mine from many, many years ago, he was in. He was in. He became a Gilmour. He was a licensee. Awesome guy.

And he started, he had a couple locations, and his wife started a cleaning business because they got into Airbnbs because he started making money in the gym. So he started investing and they realized actually liked real estate, but I think he liked the gym, which is awesome. Great. And so they started a cleaning company to clean houses for the Airbnbs. But then they realized they got in the Airbnb community, and they also got in just like, that area.

And they were like, you know what? We could probably just sell cleaning to other people. And so this was interesting. I had dinner with him and he was saying, I was like, so what's your LTV to CAc? He's like, oh, dude, Cac's like $25.

And I was like, what? He's like, oh, getting customers in cleaning, not a problem. And this is, and he was like, this is so different from the gym business because the gym business, getting the customers, getting. You have to arm wrestle Susie for an hour to get her to say, yes, she's going to stop eating crap and start coming to the gym three times a week. But if you just say, hey, I'm going to clean your stuff and you don't have to do anything.

Not a very hard sale. And so he said, the real problem that I'm having right now is actually getting people to do the cleaning. Right? Is actually getting hot. You know, people who speak English, who don't steal, who show up on time and do all that and, like, do a good job consistently.

He said, the problem, that's actually the problem in the business. And so I had this, it was this great moment for me because I love seeing, finding, finding out what is the real business behind the business. And so if you're in the cleaning business, you're not in the cleaning business. You're in the recruiting and training business. You have to learn how to get low skill labor in high volume to show up for you consistently, which is a cultural thing, it's a training thing.

And part of that has to do with brand, but a lot of it is just having the incentive system structured such that that type of person can still succeed. And he had a cool little thing that he did. He did it. He had a setup where they got paid not by hour, but by clean. And so they were actually incentivized.

And so basically, and this, by the way, big pro tip on business is you want to have paired incentives. So it's like having quality and speed. And so it's like, if you have a customer support team, you want to measure them, not just on, like, percentage of tickets that are absolutely resolved. You also want to have speed of completion. If you only have one, then you have lots of people responding as quickly as possible, but not getting it done.

And on the flip side, if you just do on whether the ticket is completely resolved, people won't move fast enough. And so it's having paired metrics. Um, Andy Grove talks about this in high output management. Really good book if you ever, like, want to learn more about ops. Pretty high level, though, just to be really honest with you.

But it's a great book. Anywho, and so the paired Mexico for him was you get. You can clean as many houses as you can in a day, and I pay you per clean. And so that drove down, uh, his costs. Right, sorry.

Drove up his productivity per employee. And so the paired metric was that if you don't do a good job, you have to go back and do it again at no cost. And so that was the deal. And that was also part of his offer for the cleaning thing, and it worked really great. And so, like, if you don't think we do a good job, we'll come back and clean your whole house again, and we'll do it for free.

And so that was the paired metric again. So he thought he was getting the acquisition business. Like, dude, I can get customers all day long in this business. And he. Cause he came from the gym world and expected it to be the same.

And so I've noticed this is this continued thing, is that what I think I'm getting into is actually not the real constraint of the business. And I'm gonna. I don't want to leapfrog ahead here, but, like, this is a little bit of foreshadowing for the woman in the red dress. All right, so I'll just leave that there. All right, so I'll give you one for the.

Anybody who's in, like, the consulting space or professional services space. If you sell to businesses, you sell how to market how to. I mean, even accounting, you sell lawyer stuff. You do consulting in general, any of that stuff. You think that you're in the marketing and sales business, because that's what people will tell you.

Right? But if you really want to play this game at a high level, now, again, it's a car. If you have no marketing sales, you're not going to have a business. Right. Duh.

But which is the things is the thing that unlocks the biggest level of growth is actually, again, look at the biggest companies in the space. You look at Ey, Ernst and young, you look at KPMG, you look at, you look at McKinsey, you look at Bain, you look at BCG, some of these big public, massive firms, multi billion dollar, 100 billion companies. What is the business they're really in? They're in the recruiting business as well, and specifically the talent management business, because different than the cleaning business. Now, structurally, it's recruiting for sure, but it's at a completely different level.

They're trying to skim the cream of the crop, because how do you scale expertise, their intelligence on demand? If you go to the bet, you go to Polson, you go to some big, big law firm, right, in Manhattan, right? Some big law firm with a Manhattan address. They have to attract the absolute best and brightest people. Otherwise the brand will degrade over time.

But how do you attract the best and brightest people? Well, that's why a lot of these professional services businesses are based on partnerships. They're limited partnerships. They're llps. All right?

And so that's because anybody, they have a track for eventual becoming an owner in the business. And most service based businesses that rely on expertise have tracks for people to have small slices of ownership, and they're willing to have a small slice of a $200 billion pie rather than start out on their own. And they also have subspecialties underneath that. You're a IP lawyer, you're a, you're a defense lawyer, whatever, they've all these different subtracts underneath of that. And so again, you get into the consulting business and people say, hey, it's about marketing and sales.

But really, if you want to scale, and again, this is the thing. If you want to scale, if you just want to make money, then sure, just market and sell and you can make a buck, right? That's not the problem. But if you want to get big, you want to build an asset. The business you get in there is on talent.

And how do you retain talent and how do you improve the value of that talent and make them look? Because otherwise, what do you do? What happens if you do a great job with talent in that business, but you don't retain them? They take your customers and they leave. They start their own shop, they hang their own schindle up.

That's the game there, right? So the gib, the figure, what you have to figure out, this is the big billion dollar problem is what you have to do. All right, now I'll leave it at that, because I think I made the point. Now, here's why this is important, is that if you know the business that you're really in, you actually can get paid to solve the right problem. All right, now, the way that I like to think about this is that, like, as entrepreneurs, we get paid to solve problems.

And the bigger the problem, the bigger the payoff. And so I like to imagine, like, I've got, I've got this big, massive wall in front of me. And the thing is, I see the wall, but I don't know how thick it is. But I have an idea that it's pretty thick because I'm like, shoot, I don't know I'm going to get through this wall, but I like to mentally envision myself that there's this big pile of money on the other side. And I remember having this conversation with the portfolio company where like, hey, we think that we need to build software into this business and actually transform this business from a media company into a software company.

And it's like, this is a big strategic bet. Like a lot of resources, a lot of time, basically a lot of, like, lost growth. Like, instead of us gassing it on this side, we're actually going to basically maintain here and then deploy a lot of resources into growing software. And so I was talking to the founder and he was like, this is really hard. This is going to be really, really hard for us to do.

And I was like, yeah, yeah, it's going to be really hard. And I said, but if we solve it, we get an extra $250 million. So does that feel worth it? And he was like, well, when you say it like that, and I was like, right, so for $250 million, would I solve it? Yeah, it feels a lot more approachable, or at least it feels worth it.

And so I'd encourage you to think, like, what is the ultimate price tag of me solving this problem worth? And then all of a sudden, you're like, okay, then you can actually appropriately allocate your personal resources to solving the problem because it really will make you a lot of money. Now, a lot of times we need to frame the problem for what we get by solving it. Otherwise we avoid solving it. And so knowing the business that you're really in isn't really what you think it is.

It's often the second or third order effect, and that's the big wall. And so you come in like my friend did, he starts acquiring customers. Like, I'm going to make so much money here. And he's like, oh, shoot, I got to hire in staff people. Boom.

He sees this big wall and he's like, oh, I'm not equipped to solve this problem. And this, here it is. This is the meat. This is the part that I've been waiting to get you and hammer you guys on is, hey, if you have entrepreneur friends or you have employees or you have teammates and you think that they need to hear this, don't be lame. Share the game.

That's how this podcast grows. It's how we can get this knowledge out there and improve the world by making private enterprise better and better. Because I believe that entrepreneurs are the only people who are going to fix this world and we need to help each other out. Don't be lame. Share the game.

Oh, and if you screenshot this and tag me on Instagram, I will definitely like it and probably respond back. But I'm also sharing as many of them as I possibly can. The woman in the red dress appears. Now, as soon as you realize the business you're really in, and you also realize that you're not equipped to solve it because you don't know what the hell you're doing and you don't know what you got into to begin with. That is when the woman in the red dress appears.

Now, if you don't know, if you're not familiar with my stuff, the woman in the red dress is any shiny object. It's the distraction. And the interesting thing about the woman in the red dress is that the better you get a business, the hotter she is. And so, like, you think you can you learn to say no to a two out of ten? Yeah.

Cause you've got some crackhead lady on the side of the street. It's like, okay. She's like, hey, let's go. I'm like, I'm good. I'd rather just not get chlamydia slash whatever you've got.

Right. Um, and so I have a feeling that a z pack is not going to fix this weekend anyways. Point is, you're like, okay, you learn how to say no there. When you make $10,000 a month, saying no to a month opportunity is not that hard. But saying no to another $10,000 opportunity, much harder.

But that never changes. At $100,000 a month, you start seeing $100,000 a month opportunities. Seven out of ten women in the red dress. When you're at a million a month and you see an eight out of ten, and then at 10 million a month, you see a nine out of ten the woman in the red dress always become more attractive because your skill continues to improve. But here's the thing, and this is why so many entrepreneurs get stuck.

And this is why I really want to make this video. And I woke up with it on my mind, is that entrepreneurs will solve the problems over and over again that they know how to solve. And so they will build a million dollar business, knowing how to market and sell, and then confronting a new, thick wall, some big problem they don't know how to solve. And then what will happen? They then say, oh, I see a shiny woman in a red dress.

And guess what? She promises you? Hey, if you do the same thing you're doing right there, but over here, you're going to make even more money than what you're currently doing. But what she doesn't tell you is that she has other crazy problems. And so you go from having your gym being like, okay, well, I learned how to market and sell.

Man, if I just marketed and sold for cleaning, I'm going to clean up, because it's going to be so easy. And so this other business doesn't have the constraint of the current business you're in. But then when you get into that business, you're like, oh, there's another big wall, another big problem I have to solve. And so this is why entrepreneurs jump from thing to thing to thing. It's because they're unwilling to figure out the new way to solve the problem, or rather an old way to solve a new problem.

Whatever way you want to say that. But the point is, is that they are not willing to confront the work that has to be done. And big part of the work is realizing that you don't know what you're doing and still being willing to try rather than get distracted by something else and then lose steam and split yourself in two or split yourself in three. I tell the story all the time, but I had. I had nine businesses at one point.

I was CEO of nine companies, right? Sounded really good on dates, sounded really bad in reality, which is that I couldn't do anything because I kept, I kept trying to. All I knew how to do was sell. That was all I knew how to do. And so I just kept trying to go into businesses.

Then as soon as I find out that there was another thing that I didn't know how to do, I'd be like, maybe this business I can just sell my way out of. But the reality is that none of them could, because the car needed all the parts. I needed wheels, I needed hubs, you know, I needed gas, I needed an engine, I needed a chassis, I needed seats, I needed all those things. And I just kept jumping from thing to thing to thing. And it's because when I got into these businesses, I didn't realize the business I was actually getting into.

All right? But the thing is, is most of the times, you don't know what business you're getting into until you get into it. And so sometimes you just got to deal with the fact that this is business is that you learn when you get into it. And so this is why people stay the same size. This is why people ask themselves whether this is the right opportunity vehicle, because they see the woman in the right dress on the side, and she promises that, hey, if you just know how to market and sell over here, you'll make ten times more.

But sure. But that's because in the gym business, getting talent's not hard. People. People will literally work for you as a trainer at the gym for free because they love fitness. Like, recruiting talent, not that hard in that business, recruiting talent for cleaning.

People are like, man, I just can't wait to clean all day. Not. Not as much. I mean, I'm sure there's some people, but most people don't. And so it becomes different, right?

And every business has shit. That was from my CFO, Suzanne Shifflet, MLA formatting. That was a quote from. She said, every. Every business has shit.

She's from southern. She's like, every business has shit. Every business has shit. Right? And the thing is, is that you just, when you get into it, you just don't.

You don't know what shit you're getting into. And so people just keep beating the same levels and the same bosses, they already know how to beat, rather than actually sticking with the one thing and realizing that when you see that big, thick wall, you just have to start taking your sledgehammer to it. And the way that you get through it is realizing how much value am I going to create in this business by actually solving this problem? And that's what gets me to stick with it. Now, the reality, and this is what I.

This is what I want to drive home, and I'll wrap this. Cause I think this is the big point, is that you have already paid down a tremendous amount of ignorance tax by being in whatever business you're in. If you've been in the business you're in for a year, two years, five years, you already have five years in. And the amount of times that I see people do this right as right as they're starting to make money, they're like, hey, now I can switch. But the reality is you actually finally figured out how to solve one of the key problems of your business.

You start making money, and then you see another opportunity and you think, oh, well, now that I know how to solve this, if I just solved it over here, I'll make ten times more. But that's not always the case. And oftentimes it's not the case at all. And so this is what I want you to do as a thought exercise. And this is a, this is a really fun one that I do honestly a lot with business owners that I talk to is that explain to me why this can't be a billion dollar company.

Tell me why lawn care, the thing that you're in, can't be a billion dollar company. Tell me why you want to switch from being a restaurateur to something else. Because you don't think it would be a billion dollar company. The reality is that it's just on what timeline? And the vast majority of the switching comes from impatience.

It comes from the fact that you think that something else is going to happen faster, when in reality it won't, because you just don't know enough yet. You're actually jumping into it as an uninformed optimist. And then as soon as you realize that, you find the wall, which is not the one you expected, which is not the one that you were equipped to solve, and then you're like, oh, crap, now what? All businesses have shit. They all have shit.

They all have a big brick wall that you have to come in contact with. And guess what? That's why you get paid to solve the fucking problem. That's why you make outsized returns, is because you have to be willing to confront with the sledgehammer in hand, not knowing how thick the wall is going to be, and start hammering away at it with the hope that when you get to the other side, it will have been worth it. And often it is.

Now I want to. I want to drive this point home. So if you have a roofing business, if you have a restaurant business, if you have a dry cleaning business, all you have to do is look at the world and see, is there any version of this business that is a billion dollar company or even a hundred million dollar company, whatever your goals are? And most times you'll find that there is that. But you'll also find that it just takes time to get there.

Because the only times I have, let's, let's say small business owners. It's actually happens a lot, right? Is, hey, I've got a roofing contracting business. Okay, cool. And they say, hey, should I jump into a different opportunity vehicle?

I'm like, well, okay, well, what are you doing? They're like, I'm doing 4 million top line. I'm doing a million bucks in bottom line. I'm. Okay, okay, well, why don't you just ten x the size of your company?

Ah. And then they say, well, I've got this big concrete wall in front of me, right? What they describe next is the real problem of that business, the business that they're really in, that they didn't know they were getting into. And I wanna be clear, this only happens at scale. All right?

So once, like all businesses, like, if you're. If you're, if you're. If you're new to entrepreneurship, you gotta figure out the basics of everything. You gotta figure out that a wheel is round. You gotta make sure that gasoline is combustible.

You gotta make sure that there's some sort of engine. It might be a sewing machine in the beginning that's. That's powering your car. It might be a remote control car that can only go, you know, 10 miles an hour, but, like, there's gotta be some engine, otherwise, you're not gonna get any movement. Right.

But when you start really wanting to achieve scale, there's going to be a big, hairy problem. There's going to be a big concrete wall in front of you that you don't know how thick it is. And that is the work. That is where the enterprise value is unlocked. And the vast majority of the time when we're investing in a company or we take over a company, we are just comfortable with the fact that there's a concrete wall, and we're just going to chip away at it.

And so a lot of the work that I do is actually expectation management with the team is saying, yeah, this is going to take two years. Yeah, this will take three years. And they're like, wait three years? I'm like, yeah, well, I'm in this for, like, I mean, let me put it this way. If in five years, we had $100 million enterprise to this business, is it worth it?

They're like, well, yeah. And I'm like, do you think we can solve it in five years? And like, well, yeah. Then guess what they don't do. Be willing to wait five years.

And so the thing is, is that sometimes it takes somebody from the outside to say, like, dude, let's zoom all the way out. If you solve this for a hundred million bucks, is it worth it? Yeah. Okay, well, it's going to take that long. Oh.

Huh. And then things start to settle and then you get this, you get less frenetic energy. The amount of wasted effort for entrepreneurs that goes into this ideation of what else they could be doing with their time or with their skill sets, honestly, it's, it's like, oh, great analogy. It's like, it's like being single versus being married. All right, hear me out.

Is that when you're single, at least for me, when I was a guy, I would say 30% of my time was, or being generate, maybe 40% of my time might've been higher. Anyways, I'm not going to answer. Was allocated to like, the idea of chasing tail. So it was like, man, what if, what if that worked out? What if that worked out?

And I'm, I'm spinning multiple plates, I'm doing lead nurture, right? I'm working the pipeline, I'm planting seeds, I'm, I'm making a quippy comment, I'm responding to a story, whatever. And so I'm working leads. And so, as I was doing this right, all my attention was going to possibility, was to potential was to what if, right. As soon as I got married, the thing, the biggest gift that marriage got me was it got me 30% to 40% of my time back was I didn't have to think about this.

Like, this part of my life was not done, but like, solved. As in, like, I'm gonna be with Layla. Cool. Great. Now, all the extra attention that used to go to, like, possibility in terms of what, who, of who else could be, goes back into the main thing, which for me was business.

Now, within the business, it works the same way, is that I think most of you guys are dating your business, but you need to get married to your business. You guys are trying to have friends with benefits with your business, trying to go on dates, maybe date a couple other businesses on the side, have some side chicks. And then you're wondering why your relationship with your business isn't that healthy. If you go all in on the business, the business will go all in on you. And I promise you, it's just that the guy who's beating you right now, he's just committed, he's just married.

He's just married to the business. He's like, I'm, I mean, if it takes me five years, it takes me five years, but like, where am I going? Like, I'm in this, I'm in it for the long haul. And he sees what the value of a 30 year marriage would be or a 50 year marriage would be with his business. And so if you know the business you're really in, which you usually find out a couple years into the business, which is once you solve the basics of business, you realize, oh, this is the big hairy problem.

And then you don't know how long it will last. But I promise you that someone else has solved it. And I promise you that they weren't super geniuses. They just were willing to commit. They were willing to swing the hammer at the wall for a very long period of time and willing to zoom out and say, I can think in five year increments.

And do I think that if I put everything I have and not get distracted with the woman in the red dress, not have the side chick, not have these, these other businesses I'm flirting with that. I'm keeping warm on the side, these networking lunches for this guy I might do a partnership with, even though it has nothing to do with this business, because he says, hey, you're good at this, I'm good at this, we could do this thing together, none of that. And just being like, no, I'm just, I'm just going to keep slamming at this wall because if, if I just get this one thing right, if I just break through this wall, I will unlock all of the wealth that I've ever wanted. But there is a big, thick, massive, gray, boring wall between there and where you want to go. And it's just who's willing to keep swinging the hammer for a long period of time without getting distracted and without thinking they're smarter than they are.

I hope this podcast helped you do two things. One is avoid the woman in the red dress because she makes you believe that she will have a different set of problems that you, she makes you believe that she doesn't have the problems that your current wife does, when in reality she's got an entirely different set of crazy problems you're going to have to deal with and you're still going to have to solve them. All businesses have shit. And number two is that I hope that this makes you go all in on the business. You have confront the big wall of concrete and realize that there is a big payday on the other side and you just have to start chipping away.