we were just talking that you for in my proportions probably equally big investment than you into school but you have also attached your whole like personal brand it right which is a a big risk a big bet yeah can you tell me what made the BET worth it so I was having this conversation with Caleb who directs our whole all of the media stuff that we do and um he was like Hey man like this is a this is a a big bet and I said you know opportunities only look like Risk today and they look like opportunities in retrospect and so like if something has risk on it that's usually why there's an opportunity because the really obvious opportunities aren't opportunities because they're already discovered once all the risks is out then usually the upsides very C because everyone can see it yeah and so for me I felt like I have number of advantages going into making an analysis of a company like that one is I do it I we invest in companies period secondly it's in right now the education space primarily and so that's a space that I know very very well and third uh what I know is how much I believe the marketplace wants something like school and the void that I believe it fits because we see the comments we see the the engagement we see the types of content that that hits and so having a simple vehicle for people that don't necessarily have to be experts who don't need to have an audience and have a super high success rate for them that's like kind of like the trifecta of a recipe for an opportunity for somebody and so I'm just basically making a big bet on the platform and that communities as Ai and other things advance that people will want to be more connected yeah in the future than they are today and um they'll want a platform that they can do it on that's so interesting I believe that I think that there's a huge tendency kind of back to personal Brands as well as AI Rises how do you see people growing businesses on school from kind of different angles because there's the goat business do you know the goat business there there's a lady and she uh has a membership around taking care of goats and that works right and there's the GIF Community um and and all these kind of um you would have never thought that Niche exists which is beautiful but then Jason Derulo I think yesterday opened up a a school there so what is kind of the spectrum of people you see using the platform for and for what reasons I think it's anyone who I mean if you think about how communities are built it's usually around some sort of shared something and so usually it's a shared I mean I was just teaching this in the community but it was like it's either some sort of pain that people have overcome or trying to overcome together it's some sort of Interest or passion that a lot of these people have that aren't as common in the their everyday like in a local area you're not going to have a lot of people who are really into like anime something right but online there might be there might be only let's say 10,000 people in the world so in your local area you'll probably not meet this person but online you could have a thriving Community around it um and then the third bucket is just skills like professional skills and so I see those as kind of like the three three major buckets that I've seen people get into and so like whether you pull one off the wall like the thing um that's probably a blend of professional skill cuz she probably does it for a living or passion you know if you see the the the paint you know there's a guy teaches watercolor right it's like okay well that's that's a passion right pretty clearly and then you've got you know teaching people to build offers like I'd consider that a profession um and teaching people professional skills and I think where the community stuff fits in is that there's like in traditional education they have to make big broad buckets but the actual real world is not big broad buckets at all it's lots of very tiny tiny tiny tiny slivers and so in a world of Education if you can just teach someone a very tiny sliver they can fill that sliver in the marketplace very quickly because they don't need to learn this big block and then narrow down they can just learn what they need to do in order to be successful for for you know shoot phone flipping you know it's a tiny little you know thing um and so I think that's that's what that's what allows it to work because as a platform it's like Wikipedia like Wikipedia is better than Encarta which was the old um like it was not the dictionary but like it's an encyclopedia right it was just where you look stuff up but but wikkipedia was able to beat them a million times over because it crowdsourced all the information and so there's no one person could ever be trying to assemble all the information in the world in one place so they just said write about whatever it is that you know and they just had a system to keep curating the content make sure that the quality was there and so by crowdsourcing they're able to keep the the platform what you know it is and so I think that school works the exact same way just around communities rather than topics that's a really good perspective um what do you think about uh kind of influencers going on the platform yeah um and then also what do you think about the personal brand being kind of the main driver because even you with the school games Community which I think is the first seven figure um Community right um per yeah technically per month on School uh it's driving off your personal brand right so what do you think uh what importance is the personal brand will every Community kind of have to have one where do you see that going um no I mean first off no I don't think every Community has to have a personal brand I think that personal Brands will occur within communities they might not be the reason for it I mean if you boil it down to what actually is required it's just you need people to find out about it so you have to advertise and so personal brands are a cheap form of advertising that people can frontload the work and then they can direct the traffic and so there's advantages there but the same thing with your career earlier with the the Amazon thing when you started running ads you can also just run ads you can also do Outreach and at each of the games there are people who've done all three and uh I I consider you know Affiliates referrals things like that they still start with you either reach out to people 10 onone you make content or you run ads like there's the only way people can find out about stuff and so any platform that sells stuff you're going to like any business you're going to have some businesses that have influencers uh so people that make content some people that uh run ads and some that do opon but all three are going to work when it comes to like somebody who is at level zero kind of skill acquisition I my assumption is always that uh from a learning curve perspective it's probably outbound personal brand ads would you agree with that yeah okay and but then they also feed into each other right so they stack I think that if if anybody hasn't not gotten their head wrapped around how much value they get in being in the school games Community just having access to the q&as or just the posts in there the posts are great like there's so many really good deep trainings on whatever you know there's there's huge outbound trainings for school there's huge ad trainings you guys put in there yeah um there's a ton of stuff that you're like you can just search whatever you want and it's there and it's already applied to the vehicle that you're looking for so yeah I mean I agree obviously I think it's like the most valuable Mastermind of ever been in and also the connections right that that arise from it um I really didn't want to like school I have to say it because I had my whole kind of membership model figured out with the you know one click upsell and I was like but sh it's so good that's why I invested in it I I mean I've been watching school for a while Sam and I talked about it in 2018 so it been a while yeah I've been watching what they were doing and you know for me to put my Brandon behind it I was like because it's a timing thing for me too because like if school gets too big then it's really hard for me to buy a big chunk but if it's too small then it's too big of a bet and so it's like really watching where I thought was like The Sweet Spot where I could Pro also me I could provide the most value to the business um and so once once I saw the compounding growth of the business and the amount of referrals that it was going um that's when I that's when I got really interested because if it can grow on its own off of Word of Mouth alone then adding all the advertising on top of it is only just going to add gas to the fire but I think that's the piece that most people Miss is that for products to really scale they have to be able to be good enough to grow on their own and then you can really add yeah I think that's what school does so well right so it sucks you in and all the functionalities um in the beginning you're like oh why is this not there why is this not there why is this not there and then you're like oh because everything I need to actually run the business in the most simple way is there right so it's almost that the the form forces the function of how you grow the business and I really had to kind of take a critical look at what I was doing and I was like I might have added some unnecessary load to what I've been doing and because of the features school offers it kind of corrected my behavior and now I need to build a business yeah so I really love that about the platform and then all the the little things that I think people don't know like the changes you made to the cancellation process recently um maybe um before we jump into how do you know what to change I would love to know I wanted to talk about the Q&A right so you get really bird eye perspective in there where I think somebody who is maybe at my stage you know I'm currently bit stagnant for a year around the 3 million Mark um you give the birds eye overview and I'm like okay I know what to do but then you also go really deep down for the beginner and you're saying for example on the last one of the last q&as you were like somebody was asking how would you pitch a guest after a podcast and you're like I wouldn't because it's icky but if I had to here's exactly what I would say and so I think that this kind of really breaking it down to exactly what you do or say and and having it on both levels is so so helpful if we're going back to this cold Outreach content ads um what should the cold Outreach person say to get someone I think I think it depends on the the stage of the person and so to Circle back to what we were saying earlier with three ways right you run ads you do appon or you make content if you think about it likeing concentric circles you start with 101 because I'm already calling it 101 but you start with appon because it's just you reach out to people you know m one to one and then the next level of Leverage is you reach out to people you know one to many which is what content is and then you reach out to people you don't know one to many which is ads and so that's just kind of like these concentric circles that expand and with each level of not knowingness basically you get more and more people in that pool and so if you were starting out the big thing I feel like I've had this theme of my month right now but it's um it's around proof and so I just did this big meta analysis of all the ads that we ran over the last however many years and 80% of the top performers were proof not even me just proof just so much proof and so the thing that beginners actually lack it's it's it's often not it's I mean it's even not the offer because you can have a terrible offer with a thousand forms of proof and you'll be more compelling that somebody has the best offer in the world and no proof like if you think about the pick right the craziest offer ever I have no testimonials it's like you just don't even believe that they can deliver on it doesn't matter what promise they make and so it's this Balancing Act between claims and evidence mhm and so the you want the evidence to support your claims and so the nice thing is that you can actually there's a bidirectional relationship here is that you can lower your claims to increase the likelihood that people believe that you can deliver on them and I think that in the space what happens and obviously I can't write a book for every single topic I'll do my best right but like I made the offers thing and a lot of people blew up their businesses by just massively improving their offer but when people who were new got into it they're like oh I just need to promise the world but they were missing the other piece which is That No One Believes you yeah like if at some point it stops being believable and so then you have the counterbalance of evidence that has to be supporting the claims that you're making and so um I just wrote a whole thing on this but um for the beginners I wouldn't even be obsessed about any of the three we just talked about with outbound content ads I would be just reaching out to people to and be honest like the thing that I think is massively understated in marketing is our number one rule of all the marketing we do is State the facts and tell the truth and I think like the more you think about it or at least The more I've had adopted that it's like the the real truth which is like I don't know what I'm doing I just started this community I want to get amazing results for people and I would like to do it for free you're still going to obviously incur the risk of me not knowing what I'm doing but I'm trying to decrease the risk as much as I can and I promise you that I'm going to work as hard as humanely possible because I have no other clients M and so you'll have my cell phone you can call me whatever you want I'm just so invested in making this win because if you don't win I'll never win mhm that's a pretty honest pitch yeah and it's also compelling it's also compelling that's true and so the thing is is that when every beginner thinks that they have a disadvantage but the reason that there's always new small businesses that emerge and there's a cycle in businesses like there's only one business in the S&P 500 that has been here a 100 years which is Ford and I think G maybe MH but like out of 500 companies there's only two over a 100y year period which means that as much as we like to think of these Behemoth as these big things is like there's disadvantages to being large yeah and so that's why there's this constant cycle of New upand Comers who swell and get bigger and bigger and then they forget what made them good and then they they go it's a cycle more than is linear and so when you are a beginner you have the advantage of no scale which makes it really compelling and saying I will give you personalized attention that's really compelling like if you're competing against an established person you say hey you're just a number to them you're personal to me yeah I'll give you my cell and if there's ever a problem I'll be there and you can obviously run better margins than they can because you don't have all the layers of management in between and so everything that you charge goes straight into your pocket so you run the most efficient business model ever and so obviously there's the swamp between 1 to three million where you just incur more operational cost as as you go up but your profit pretty much stays the same but you have to basically set that next Foundation to scale if you're doing this from a bootstrap perspective and so for the small business owner you have huge opportunities at really the small level like if you want to stay under a million dollars a year and take home income you basically don't need to hire anyone and you can do it all yourself especially with tech nowadays like you can really do it all yourself especially with school I think because it does the whole tax thing for you it does the whole membership management for it that's the $99 worth it per month post that I was I was reading because I get I got really angry at people like not see but you know it's they have not paid what I had to pay to get to do the management were solving pain they hadn't experienced yet yeah exctly I read your I read your copy and I was like this is exceptional ad copy that I wanted to run but I was like but it's for intermediates yeah like I couldn't run it like I I was telling Sam and them I was like I want to run it yeah but the thing is is that somebody who's about to start a community isn't doesn't even know that they're going to have me member management issues they don't even know that they're going to have a support team like they don't know that stuff's going to exist yeah and so I don't want to introduce objections yeah true right um but no it was a one it was a great post how I got into coaching from I was first running ads for people right and then uh when I had my son I started teaching others and the way I was getting into it I was actually trying to do a case study with a coach and she ghosted me although I was saying I was doing it I I would offer to do it for free and then I was like okay let me just turn myself into a living case study because my hypothesis was um I've been running ads for e-commerce and we have much smaller margins than the coaches and I was reviewing some ad accounts from people I saw on upwork and I was like they're burning money right so they there was no like self liquidating offers or anything and so I wanted to and they were growing groups with Bridge page pages so they would pay $10 per group lead instead of kind of using the lead generation with the with the form and so I I wanted to have a case study with her but she ghost at me and then I was like okay maybe I turn myself into this living case study and I was telling that to people I'm making a living case study and I'm showing you how I'm growing the group from zero to a thousand members with ads and then how I monetize it and basically that's how I got my client because at the end I was just saying you just saw me doing this do you want me to help you you right so uh and you that honestly always served me well but I then also um benefited from this beginner Advantage from a lot of referral and word of mouth and then I kind of blew it up because I thought I now have to build in operations and so uh now I have to um you know deliver the service more at scale and this is when I think I lost a product to Market fit which when I didn't understand that I'm a huge part of the product so now I'm back in the weats and um in that role and now my question is for the community owners on school that kind of want to do well in a sense of I want to build something bigger than myself true but I also don't want to kind of kill the a part of product to Market fit which is always me and the same goes for the school Community right you're big reason why there's so much value how do you skill but not kill the essence which is kind of you I think it's putting I think um so two things so one it's what's being promised and what's being delivered and neither of them having scope creep and so from a promising perspective you know we have the clear things that we say hey this is what I will do it's like I take one call a week and one time a month we're going to drop a big eight hour training inside of there beyond that I don't do much inside of school and that's because I have a lot of other stuff that I'm doing and I can't physically I wish I could um but then what happens is one that still stays like uh really attract like I'm not overwhelming people in terms of like I can't consume everything it's like there's one call a week and there's one big download like that's it and it's very manageable for people to consume but in the meantime you create Champions until like you're a champion in school and so there are way more flavors of people than me under the sun that other people find more attractive than me I would imagine that for mothers who are starting a digital business you'll probably be more compelling Avatar then I will like look at me right and so within your community there are those needles right um or those sers of people that can represent these tiny silos and it's really just empowering them and giving them status within the community pinning their post bringing them on doing interviews with them so that they over time can shoulder some of that burden a lot of people will do that because they make money too and their status that's associate and so I think that's fundamentally what we've tried to do with the school games was really have champions of the games and it's I will bring people in but I want it to be about them yeah and you want to have these connections I drew that picture that I don't know if you were there for this one but it was like if there's the guru model is one circle at the top and then you just have connections to every single person right and then the network model is you you can have that person bring people in but then you want as many ties between all the circles underneath which is what creates the network and so I think the objective of making something bigger than you is like you can bring the you can be the person who brings it in fine but then eventually all of the all of the activation should be geared around creating a true Community or a network of people who who give and give an exchange value with one another and then eventually you can leverage the proof from that Community to advertise the community at large and then over time that's how you can fade yourself out if if that was a desire of yours so I feel like I would always love to be connected but you know at one point you you cannot shoulder kind of all of the things um and I've tried to create some so what what works well about the school Community right it there's aligned incentive structures right so I have benefit from posting a lot in the school Community because it gives me exposure it's aligned with what I'm trying to build um when I'm now thinking of my own Community I have tried to hire coaches and give them the opportunity to build their personal brand kind of within this alignment structure um and I also have you know people who have might have similar memberships who kind of want to position them as as um subject matter experts there but I feel that the the quality isn't there is it that people in your community don't make good enough stuff that could be like you know the those kind of leaders and I do have engagement leaders who really help each other out but for example you know they they might have a parenting membership actually so um I was wondering is it that my personal brand isn't strong enough and that the opportunity that I'm offering is not big enough like it is in this in the school Community right so I want to make sure that I understand the question is that there's not enough people who who are good in your community who can also add value to the community the kind of value that they're looking for yeah which would be in the direction in which I can give advice it might be a size thing and a time thing which is that the bigger the community it's just law of large numbers like if you have 1,000 I'm not I'm just using simple math like if you had a thousand people you're going to have less Killers than 10,000 right and also if you have a community that's you know 3 years old you're going to have people who've leveled up and gained skills and love moved up uh verus one that's 6 months old and I think it's probably the combination of those I'll bet you time's actually a really big one yeah um the more you've helped people over a longer period of time like it just takes time for people to learn skills and if you're the one who's the champion of the community you're often the person who learned the fastest and so then people are like I want to learn from you because you learn so quickly and so you'll see rising stars and I would say I would identify people by their rate of progress more than their absolute start and so some people come in and they start here above other people but they don't move yeah whereas some people can start low and then very quickly ramp up like I I spent a disproportion of my time even in the business here when we have you know teammates trying to find people who grow quickly and then pouring more into them we care a lot less now about how people I mean it depends on what level we're hiring but especially at at the individual contributor level we just want people who learn quickly that makes a lot of sense and um so I think time and size time size time size and um maybe also finding finding ways to attract more people who are doing something similar than I do right rather than so kind of maybe even giving permission because I think often I have a lot of digital marketers in my community but sometimes they don't want to be very visible because they're like oh some of my clients are in here so I don't want to kind of have that I'm learning from you um or I also have some that might not be like super vocal because they're like I don't want you to feel like I'm stealing from you or something so maybe I need to kind of vocalize the I think if you tell them that that's totally fine for them to do it I think that's one thing but also just like the bigger you get cuz I think you're going to go much bigger than this honestly um the bigger you get the more comfortable they'll be being in your community right like if your brand 10x is then they don't mind being underneath of it that makes sense yeah it makes a lot of because it makes a lot of sense because I see that the relationship right so to you so that that actually gives me a really great kind of role model sague into this I looked up for the interview with Lea when was the the Facebook group of Jim Louch uh founded and it was in 2017 did you start the group or yeah um what community leadership pitfalls do you see people make did you ever have like uh any escalations in there or anything that you would have wished you knew about steering communities as they get larger as well honestly no okay um I think if we messed up because we' messed up things for sure you know launch something and something doesn't work you know whatever right um we would just immediately go on and apologize and be like that was our bad we'll make it up to you and then we just do whatever we could to make it up and so I think again I think it's the state the facts and tell the truth and this is something that you haven't asked but I want to talk about um which is about impostor syndrome oh yeah and so that was me starting out right um and I've I've never suffered from imposter syndrome and I think a big reason for that is because I try very hard to only talk about things that have already happened and so you can't feel like an imposter if you state the facts and tell the truth right the only time you feel like an imposter is as soon as you state something that might happen or will happen in the future that hasn't happened yet or you state something as though it has happened and it hasn't and so I have a lot of conversations with entrepreneurs who are like how do I get over impostor syndrome and I was like stop lying and then they like seem really jred and I was like no I was like you are posturing as though you were this big success person I had an agency owner who said hey I'm you know I'm selling my he had an agency of 150 clients B2B and now he's selling kind of like his client getting system and I said why did it end and he said I didn't know how to operate a business I just you know I just knew how to get customers in and so I said do you say that he was like No And I was like that's why you feel like a fraud because you pretend like you had this big agency and you did you just didn't say the other part of it which is that I also didn't know how to run the business and I was like I actually think it's more compelling right it's a really good book this is why you're giving it away right I'm really yeah it answers the reason why and so the crazy thing is is that truth is in my opinion always the best marketing it's just that we have these egos or the shame around whatever the thing is that we messed up like my gyms my best gym did $600,000 a year my best gym out of six but the average gym in gym launch did $600,000 a year average and so my top many of the top gem owners made more money than my top gems and so if I hid that fact then it would be like oh I have to pretend like my gyms did more and then I'd feel like a fraud but I told all of them I was like well I hope you guys do better than me I was like cuz I didn't have me I gave you all the stuff that I knew to get to hear that's your starting point now I'm going to use everything I learned from this community to help everybody get F past that that's exactly what we did was we just looked at the whole Community I found out okay because I was really good at filling gyms up I wasn't I had industry average turn I wasn't good at keeping members I was we had 10% turn which is normal um in the gym space and so but I could fill them up in a month and so that was that was what I said I was like I can fill these up and I can help you fill it up uh and then I talked to all the gyms that had really really low churn I said what are you guys doing and they made and I made this master list and then I Consolidated everything down it was like oh these five things if you do these things you can reduce term by 2/3 and so then I had 10 gyms reduce it by 2/3 using those five things and then said hey guys we did these five things in these 10 gyms and it reduced turn by 2 thirds here and so there's no if you just State the facts and tell the truth then you never have this whole impostor syndrome thing and I think that beginners especially are prone to it because they think they need to they think they need to be an authority but you don't be an authority by telling people what to do you become an authority by having proof that you have done what you claim and then people automatically Elevate you I don't need to say I'm an authority I just say like I sold my business for this this is the revenue that it did this is the profit this is the stuff that we own right now people like and then if I say so this is what I'm thinking about with communities and whatever people would probably take that as an authoritative stance they'll make their own decision about whether you're in authority and the proof gives you the evidence that you have what you say you have yeah and I think that's the big thing and so if you are beginner just focus on the proof over everything which is just help people for free and when I say help people doesn't mean go make content I mean go do client services do full stack service mhm of whatever it is that you plan to ultimately sell the highest version of whatever you want to do the Hands-On the one-on-one do it with 30 people MH and the thing is is that you're going to learn more from those 30 people you're going to get more from them than they're going to get from you and once you have that you get two things one is you're going to get proof and second is you're going to get good and then from there and if you have proof and you're good you have a far higher likelihood of making money than if you have no proof and you are no good yeah and so that's fundamentally how I think about it and I have done the free thing with every single business I've ever started at all levels at all levels including now everything that we do we do free first just because we want to get the Kinks out because I have a reputation and so I want to make sure that it's really really good before I ever charge anyone for it and that way again when you are on your 31st person and you decide this is the person I'm going to charge you say hey I took on 30 people these are the first ones I took on I didn't do as well with them these are the second ones look at the Improvement and this is the last 10 and so these guys on average did this you can see the data and if that's interesting to you I can do the same process MH that's a pretty compelling pitch and there's no lie yeah and so I think that I have leaned so hard in my sales life and marketing life on selling with logic and which is very counter the whole internet marketing world of like emotions and triggers and like whatever and I don't even know if I believe any of it to be honest with you um I think people are pretty intelligent and I think that I would just put all of my emphasis on proof which is why I was so stoked when when we just got the recent staff for school games which is more than one out of two people have a paid Community to make money mhm like wow you're familiar in the bizop world like for any kind of new thing for beginners like that's an absurd statistic it's absolutely I think on average in even in good courses it's less than 10% they don't even no yeah it's not even most most don't even measure it to be honest I love meure it no because I know and so I know this from the brick and mortar World from the franchise world everything comes down to unit economics which means how much does the franchisee make how much does the one St store that you have 100 stores fine how much does that one guy make M you can have the worst franchise model in the entire world but if your your franchisee makes money you'll be able to weather the storm you'll be able to figure it out if you have the best franchise model in the entire world but your franchisee doesn't make money it doesn't matter and so fundamentally we can adjust the monetization vehicle we can do pricing things and all that stuff but as long as people on school make money we're good and that's what I see as our future Insurance like how do we make sure the future happens is make sure that everybody succeeds mhm how how can how can you help the people that kind of because I see it in the community right that there's some people kind of coming in and they're like I just joined and I have no idea what to do and then you try to sent them to some post it's like I'm still overwhelmed and then they would have to you know work on their community and on their Val for like 3 months six months is there just a certain percentage of people that will inevitably drop out because they don't understand this or is there something you can give them to understand that that's the progression that they kind of have to go down so we'll it's something that we'll probably go through um so to answer the first question I think there will always be people who don't succeed in anything period there people who don't succeed at college and kindergarten like people who will fail but um in terms of us being able to increase the likelihood that more people succeed yeah we're going to continue to do that and so I think a big split in the road that we talked about in the very beginning that I think we might change in terms of how we're thinking about things was in the very beginning we didn't want to give any very specific instructions because we didn't want toage people in but by not giving very specific instructions saying here's all the different options that you can take some people to your point get overwhelmed and so it's kind of this balance of like I don't we didn't want to create a million schools that are the exact same thing yeah but people who are new need really Specific Instructions and so we have a plan that we're already kind of like R like we're working on right now to probably have something it's like if you are a true beginner just do this if you're everyone else hears all the different options I love that and I think it's uh potentially necessary right because you probably your first Community is a Burno Community anyways yes your first business you have noidea I mean mind you I say this with like 54.1% of people are making money on paid communities so like it's good but you know the what I guess what I'm trying to say is the First Community you'll have is not the Comm the ultimate community that you'll stick with yeah people like hey I want to I remember somebody was like I I'm starting a community about this and no one's op I think I need to approve my offer I was like I just think no one cares like there's there's these little slivers of of of community but like if no one cares about unboxing I don't know whatever something crazy then um then it doesn't matter how good the offer is no one cares and I think you know but I think many don't even come to the point where they're like I I think nobody cares but reality is like there was never any traffic they never tried yeah I would I would love for everybody to at least like say okay now that I've set up all this community let me at least put a $100 into Facebook ads and see what happens like um but that's also shift to get there um talking about the improvements that you make on the platform what are some of the um are you involved in kind of those features like the cancellation process and all of the the refinements it's more like so Sam so there's this there's this big list of like stuff that will make people money right and every one of them has a cost and a benefit and so the cost is the time that it's going to take that we can't do anything else uh from the engineering perspective to develop it and make sure it's really good MH um and the benefit is obviously how much it's going to make how much money people it's going to make and so um that list we pretty much know and we know like we kind of know what we need to do for the next two years now mind you one of the interesting things about school or any kind of platform is that if you if you change one variable it affects all the others yeah and so sometimes things that we think are going to be really really important after we fix something two steps earlier it just is no longer an issue anymore and so that list always has to be a breathing living list um but in terms of the conversation that Sam and I have that pipeline's pretty straightforward and he and I will chat about like what do you think about this feature versus this feature I'm like I would wait here like I would put more weight on this one than that one and so that's fundamentally like how we do it but Sam's really runs more of the product side um I'm Chief bring Jimmy bring people in officer okay um that's my that's my hat although you have a huge passion for product development right so but it's a divide and conquer thing like I can't get into his stuff and he doesn't he doesn't like talk to me about my content or how I'm going to do school Integrations or like ads like Sam and I don't talk actually that much at all like we talk like every week or an hour or every other week um and maybe we'll slack once or twice like it's we don't have like what's interesting is that the more proficient somebody is the less interaction they require yeah and so like I could receive the vaguest director in the world which just like go build a business and I can go do that because I have all the skills that are underneath of it and Sam has the skill set to build a business obviously but also build an amazing product and so when we were talking about doing this deal it was like hey man I will just bring the world here and he was like cool because I can't focus on that I was like great I was like but I just want to know that you're going to make this thing exceptional and I had faith that he would and so that's very much in my opinion how a good partnership should work is very clear roles and responsibilities and clear Authority which is like I own the stuff on the marketing side the messaging and how we're you know the like I mean everything that really people touch before they get into school is is I have I have a fingerprint on um once they're in school it very much goes there now we C you know we talk it's like hey if you say this in the ad it's going to affect people here or whatever like obviously we have that conversation but um it's really just having I mean that's how it should work and even within a business like when you have a really good lead of EX ideally they can do it better than you and because of that there's nothing that you really need to tell them because they're more Prof ient at it m and so the only thing you really do is just communicate how their thing affects everyone else more than you tell them what to do MH so when you have a a great business partner I want to shout out to Jessa belman who's my business partner she's like all on the graphic side and uh she was my most successful student and we we teamed up um when and we kind of also run parallel right sometimes because um we need not so much interaction but sometimes it can feel like for example now I'm focused on the podcast and and I'm doing the I'm I pre-sold on School uh a c something that I'll later sell as a course um and it it was a big kind of flounge and I'm delivering it so sometimes I can feel like you know one of us is pulling more of the load of the of the Daily Business how do you like to kind of balance it or even communicate that so you know it it feels like although we're pulling different weights we're kind of both pulling so the constraint of the business is always going to shift MH and so like Lea and I have this kind of joke which is like whenever I'm the constraint um she's relieved and then whenever she's the constraint I'm relieved and so like like right now we don't need more deal flow and acquisition. comom right but if you are interested you know go apply um but we have we have a lot of companies that are interested in in what we do and so all of what we're doing at e.com is scaling up the portfolio team scaling up C experts recruiting people that have big you know great track records and that's going to be more on her right now I have my book launch coming up so I'm I'm I'm always planning like I always like we joke is like Leela's living in the present I'm always living like six to 12 months in the future and so I just make sure that the future doesn't get too far ahead of the present um in terms of how we're talking but when it comes to a partner I think there there has to I mean over I think this develops in years not months so like Lea and I have been working together since the moment we met I think it's seven or eight whatever it is now years and um I've never once had a doubt of Leela's work ethic and so you know Warren Buffett talks about you want somebody who has really high work ethic really high integrity um and really high confidence or intelligence right and so if you trust someone's intention and you trust their work ethic then the only other variable is how confident they are and so that's something that you can know which is why you always want to I mean ideally you want to partner with someone better than you always now they're going to like so this is a good mental frame is that you want to partner with people who are better than you because if you feel like they're as good as you but they're doing something that's not your core then they're not better than you they're not even as good as you and so you want to marry up but cross functionally yeah and so if I feel like someone's way better than me they might be as good at me at their thing as I am at advertising and marketing but it'll feel because they're so much better than me at that thing that I'm that I'm marrying up or I'm partnering up and I think that's really the the perspective that is fruitful if you feel like your eye level and they're doing something that you're not good at they're probably worse than you okay and so just as a like if someone can just do is just doing things that you already know how to do and they're going to take it over for you that's not a part they need to be better than you okay uh would you proactively look for a partner or would you solo preneurship until a real opportunity emerges it depends on the size and speed that you want to go so if you want to build something really big really fast then multiple partners early on who have very different skill sets is the fastest way to do it there's a reason that why combinator which is a a fund here that specializes in start startups um doesn't even allow for solo Founders okay so just to give context there and their sweet spot they found is like three or four okay and so that's because fundamentally with three or four really really intelligent really really hardworking people that all have a stake in something the likely that that thing works is pretty high because you have three or four stallions all running in the same Direction with their P you know respective skills you've got a great Dev guy you've got a great product guy you've got a great Advertiser you got a good operator it's like you've got I mean if you had four people who are exceptional all four those things like it's tough to fail like you have a lot of things in your favor now you're splitting the P more ways but that's why those types of businesses tend to go after 10 you know 1 billion 10 Billion Dollar Plus opportunities so that even at scale the 25% or the 20% or whatever it is that that founder has is still worth you know hundreds of millions of dollars and so it really depends on how big of a business you want and how fast you want it to be there like you can be a solo owner like Sarah Blakeley for example First Banks she has to my knowledge well she just sold to Blackstone but before that she had 100% equity in the business so she never gave Equity to anybody but she's been doing it for 25 years right to slowly get it to the point that it's out now um and so you will go slower because you won't be able to take the you won't be able to take people who would only come for Equity MH um but it again it just depends on how many skills are required because the thing is is as a business gets bigger you have more cash and so you can say hey I'm not going to give you Equity but I'll pay you a million dollar a year or I'll pay you $2 million a year and so some people are like you know what that works for me and so that's the give and take with scale is when you are solar preneur like that's why you have to build the business really well and that's why long-term patience is so touted in the entrepreneurial Community like my my my hero who doesn't know me is Mr Panda he owns the building I live in um and and he's been doing it for uh 45 years I think MH he's been selling chicken okay he's been selling Chinese chicken he's worth1 billion dollar he owns all of them he has 2600 stores he owns them all wow yeah and he did it in almost 50 years it's really easy you just do one thing and you wait 50 years right yeah just had this meme about the blue button and the red button start the new business fix the current one can you talk to me about that yeah well um there's there's four problems that get most business owners paralyzed at any level and it's the most at I would say sub 10 million but it it can really happen at any level so one is they misprice or they Mis pay so they have a compensation structure in place that doesn't make sense and it's locked this is especially important with service businesses because it's like I have this whole team of talent but I give them a 50% rev share on the business it's like that's tough It's hard to scale that on the flip side you're Miss priced where it's like hey we're at full capacity but we're not making money it's like you're mispriced you need to be a like if you're at full capacity you need to have higher price you should be able to make money at that point the second problem um is overexpansion so they get they try to get too big too fast because they have some sort of ego need to like get bigger because they do that and so what happens is they don't backfill and so rather than delegate they abdicate and so the easiest litmus test of that is when you give something to somebody else does it get worse if it gets worse you abdicate it if it continues to operate and then gets better you delegate it you taught them how to do it properly but that takes work and it takes patience and most people don't have it and so they can force the growth on the sales side and then they hire bad people or they don't train the people well and then their reputation goes down because the delivery is not as good and then they have to keep selling and marketing to pay payroll but the people but they don't have time to come back and training they have to keep the lights on so they keep marketing so these are all of these are Rock and Hard Place scenarios like what do I do with the team when I overpay them but if I let them go then I'm going to start at zero so each of these has these like very hard decisions on both sides the third um big mistake that uh people make is they um they don't focus and that's the one that you're talking about which is the do I start a new business do I fix the business I'm at and the woman in the red dress is always my my joke but the new opportunity always looks more interesting which is why it's so compelling as a sales pitch is like most sales pitches are red women in the red dress and that's you do it that way because that's what convinces the most people I teach that of course that's what convinces the most people to switch opport you say if you only knew it's so much easier over here right but the reality is that all businesses have difficulty it's just what difficulty you want and so different styles of businesses have difficulties at different stages so like information businesses for example are the easiest businesses to start hardest to scale uh software businesses are the hardest businesses to SC the easiest to scale e-commerce is somewhere in the middle right you have to have Capital but then there SC they logistic supply chain issues on the back end so like there's kind of difficulties on both sides and so every type of business service for example easy to start harder to scale you can scale just takes longer because you have to train people and recruit people and people are the business and so like there's always difficulty with whatever business you have and what happens is when you switch opportunities you then start at zero you quickly get success because you pass the levels you already know but then you run into the same boss again and so what ends up happening is now you have two businesses you're CEO of because you couldn't end the other one because you still need to live and then you start this other one and so maybe this is the better opportunity but you still have this old one and then you can't give it up because you're like but I have customers and I have to keep my promises there and I what do I do about my team and there's all these questions that surround that um which is why you can own as many businesses as you want but you can only run one and that's the thing that everyone messes up and especially if you're small you don't have the resources to run to so you have to make the hard decision you have to say no I'm going to continue to fix this because it's my belief that every business can get to $100 million a year every business even s preneur yeah well I mean I wouldn't say the Sol preneur is uh an organizational structure not a business so whatever business so preneurs in if they sell wallets if they sell paintings if they I mean whatever it whatever it is that you sell you could sell $100 million worth of it for like I can't think of a business now if you're like well you can't say that for a local dry cleaners I'm like yeah then you open more but I consider that's still the same business right and so the question then remains why isn't your business a $100 million business and whatever the answer to that question is is the problem you need to solve and if you don't know how to solve it which is what most entrepreneurs are faced with they then think oh it's not me it's the business it's the industry it's the market it's the vehicle right and sometimes I regret that I talked about how switching opportunity Vehicles because like if I had played out the other alternative I probably have 200 300 gyms right now and I'd still be just as rich and so did it like maybe I make less money now than I would if I had stuck with it I don't know like and we can never know um but I can say that the equal opposite of that is if you do one thing for 50 years and you get better at it you're probably going to make a lot of money that is a great permission because I think ever since I heard you first actually talking about opportunity V vehicles I was like I might not be in the right opportunity vehicle I might like do everything wrong because I'm just might rowing in a boat and everybody it's such a compelling Visual and it's just because it speaks to the pain it's just the ultimate easy button is if I only had this other vehicle and if I were just doing the same thing I'm doing now I would get 10 times more than I'm getting or 100 times more and the thing is is that sometimes it's true but it's so attractive that nine times at of 10 it isn't true because you're it's only true when the model is the Lim mhm but most times it's not it's just it's a limiter if you if you measure on a one-year time Horizon but Mr Panda has a chicken shop he's worth 10 billion so like is that the is having a Chinese chicken store like the the best opportunity vehicle no did he make it work yes so it's just it's just expanding The Horizon of and that's why starting a business that you actually care about the customer is ultimately the thing that matters the most in the long run because if you really care about the customer and the product that you deliver then you don't do it for the opportunity vehicle reason and the making money reason and then making money occurs but because you stick with it it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger because you keep improving it because you love it it keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and you maintain your reputation because the only reason you did it to begin with is because you care that's actually the unlock I think that many people are missing it's like oh what Niche do I go in is it like start wherever one you want yeah but do the one that like it's either some pain you overcame something you're very passionate about or it's uh it's a professional skill but I I'll say this other thing that I think is worth doing is that people have this fallacy that they're they made the wrong pick like what if I pick wrong right I pick the wrong business I picked the wrong Niche the the consolation I can give you is that if you stick with it no matter what all businesses end in the same place which is you have a team of five to seven people you have a head of marketing you have a head of sales you head of IT head of legal head of Ops head of finance and they're really all competent people and they run the business and so you're actual day-to-day is the same MH whether you're selling you know shaving cream or you're selling communities or you're selling private Equity fundamentally you're going to have a team of people that those functions in the business have to occur and they're probably rolling into you and so if you think about that as the natural extreme of any business then it kind of doesn't matter what you do to get there if you like the game of business yeah and so that's kind of how I see it as like if I'm worried about picking the wrong thing it's like well no matter what I'm going to end up in the same place as long as I stick with it that's a really good perspective um how do you love how do you fall in love with the game of business like the people that are that are fighting so much and that that you know what do what do they miss or is it just a matter of like who you are yeah I don't think you keep yourself coming back I think business keeps you coming back so it's like why do you keep coming back to food It's like because it rewards you when you eat it it's not like how do I come back to it it's like it makes you come back right and so um I think that it's a skilled defici icy and so the more skilled you are at something the more ways you figured out to be rewarded by that thing M and so if I'm a really good writer then I have many different ways that writing rewards me if I'm a very bad writer there's very few and so it makes it more difficult for the for the activity to be rewarding and so the more skill like if you want to succeed in business then the goal is to pay down your ignorance as fast as humanely possible which means you need to fail a lot in the beginning and keep your eye on the bigger prize which is that if I fail and I continue and I learn and that's the thing is it's not just about doing every day you have to do but you have to get better and so if you're not taking the time to say okay well Alex I made a 100 pieces of content and no one ever says this because no one even does it but like I made 100 pieces of content in a row and you look at the videos and it's just them selfie style and they click post and they never look at any of the past videos they said see I did post it 100 times and you're like did you look at which ones did better because if you post 100 one will done better than the other 100 that's just math and so then you look at what was different about that one and you say okay how can I do more of that and what was the one that got the least amount of views okay how can I do less of that and then you do that for the next 100 now you have a feedback cycle and so fundamentally you just need to start have a feedback cycle so you get better and then not stop and if you do that on a long enough time R then you win and for communities that rep would be for the complete newbie Outreach yeah that until you have first bucket of your first five people right and then you help and you serve them for free and then you basically repeat I think that's very doable for be very doable right for yeah get five people help them for free document and if you don't feel good about how well you did with those five get another five like the thing is it's up to you you can choose whenever you want to start monetizing and if you don't feel confident about how good you are yet fine then do another five keep doing it until you get bored of getting results once you get bored of getting people results then you're probably good enough because once you are bored of getting results you will want to do it for money because you're somebody's got to pay me to do this and potentially also you have found like unique methodology right you see the patterns so I I loved what you said about sourcing kind of the the things that you have not figured out yet from the community progress um that is also really Rous if you could not start any other business you would lose it all and tomorrow you had to start over and you could only use School how would you get to that inevitable end point of you know you sitting in your office and you having that team uh so I would probably so I have no reputation either right yeah yeah so what I would do is I would reach out to whatever so if I'm allowed to have friends at this point I don't know how how little I have can I speak English okay great so if I have some of these basic things then I would reach out to people that I know and I would deliver now do I have skills that I have or no or do I know nothing not many skill it's just so I can use a computer yeah yeah so I would I would have to have lived life right at this point and so either I have gone I have something that I'm interested in I have some pain that I've overcome or I have some sort of professional skill that I've developed then I reach out to people and I say hey can I do my professional skill for you what what's the easiest professional skill to that's so when I say professional skill a lot of times it's just like most people have had a job at some point and so it's whatever job you had is usually a skill that you ended up learning M and so if I was an accountant then I would say hey can do your taxes for you and I did it for a company but now I'm going to do this on my own if I did video I would say hey I can do your video for you if I did I did shoot if I was a I don't even know a carpet layer right then I could reach out to people and say hey like I can do your carpet for you like it doesn't really like whatever thing you did the marketplace paid you to do it so there's obviously value there and that's just like an easy limus test but what I would do if I were on school is I would probably sell one times more than memberships in the beginning because can generate more cash faster and so I would do one-on-one stuff or small group stuff I would sell bundles of calls and help and I would sell them at you know 500 to 5,000 in terms of the price point and I would use that to generate cash and then I would add my continuity in and then I would use that cash to advertise to drive both and so I would drive to the continuity most likely um and then I would upsell over phones and I think the big thing that everyone's missing with not everyone but a lot of people are missing uh who are starting out it's like you have to be willing to hop on the phone yeah and they're like but that's not scalable at $10 a month I'm like dude you have no members it's completely scalable your your time is completely free like you can't be busy and broke like you can you can have time right or you can have money you can't have no time and also not have money like yeah you just trade one for the other right and so I would be hopping on the phone with people and I mean the simplest version of this is you have a free community you have the onetime upsell that's inside the community you drive people to the free thing you provide value to them in the free thing then you can upsell those people into the onetime thing and then over time eventually have the paid paid continuity that you start as your second community that is I mean the fastest weight of money is that is free community bundle of thing that is expensive and then that is a defined end thing that you sell and that would actually be able to push a button from day one because you have the um Facebook ads integration right so that's an ad setting up for complete registration Auto DM hey get a free onboarding call yeah give value in the onboarding call do you need a paid call here it is yeah so if you want more followup on this like I like here's one call I can do five more with you if you want and that should take you to this by the end of the fifth call you should have this outcome yeah that's like fairly compelling you know it's not it's not a super hard pitch to make why do you think people still don't won do it because they're afraid and they're lazy it's one of the two how do you lazy I don't know if we can help with but how can you overcome the and I'll say lazy get people get really offended by that um which good get offended do something um but it's usually just like it's it's I had this quote the other day it's um it's never been easier to start a business it's also never been easier to do nothing and so people are just distracted there's hundreds of billions of dollars that are getting pumped at us to distract us MH and so you have to have some level of basic ability to focus to say I'm not going to watch Netflix I'm not going to watch these sports games I'm not going to you know scroll in social media for eight hours a day I'm going to reach out to people and so like first level is you can actually do something and then the second one is when you start doing it being okay with getting rejected or having things not work out immediately and it really just comes down to a term that gets overused and under is overused and understood under understanded um which is motivation right if you lost everything tomorrow and you had your kids and you're the one who's surviving you probably have a tremendous motivation to to figure something out and I think a lot of people don't have huge motivation and so what I see that is rather than saying like what motivates people everything that we describe for people who are incredibly motivated usually comes from deprivation MH it's not they have this big thing they want to go after it's this thing they're usually getting away from mhm and so it's you're very motivated to eat when you're starving you're very motivated to sleep when you're sleepy right and so the question is what would make someone very motivated to make money now you'd think oh it means not having money but it's not that it's the perception of not having enough money and I think those are two very different things like I know very poor people who live paycheck to paycheck and are very comfortable doing that because they're the richest people of their friends and I know people who are you know Mega billionaires who are more deprived of money than anyone I know because they want to do bigger things and they don't have enough money to do it and so they're so motivated and work every hour of the day to do it and so I think it comes down to the discrepancy between what you want and what you have which is actually in some ways the inverse of Happiness which is like you want to have you want to want less than you have but in terms of achieving right it's you want to want way more than you have and so it's this interesting balance yeah and I think that's where the school games Community is so good because um when you get in and you get surrounded by people who are doing things right and you start to see the opportunity and you start kind of to see on what level other people perform I was never so motivated to grow on school then when I say I saw anime shreds I was like I have to figure this out U so I think it's uh you could create the deprivation by actually joining a community like the school games where you see what other people are doing yeah what we're talking about there is reference group so um Harvard did this big fancy study but basically the five people people that you compare yourself to um not necessarily that you spend the most time with but that who you compare yourself to uh has the highest predictor of your outcomes M which I think is pretty cool so the goal is to get around a whole bunch of people who are better than you and the ni thing is that if you're a beginner there's a lot of people better than you I asked Leila the same question and I would love to kind of hear your answer about comparison um because when we talk about you know getting into this field there are certain people that kind of use the comparison as fuel and then there are people that completely self-sabotage and kind of get paralyzed out of that what do you think um is happening in either or Direction and how can you better use it I I don't know about the inner workings of anyone myself included um but I think I don't think comparison is good or bad I think it's just a measurement tool they are here I am here when they post they get more views when they run things they get more than I do or they get less than I do and the part that gets people in trouble is the second part where they say and therefore I am bad or therefore I am good and so I think comparison is a very useful tool to figure out where you stand and where you can improve and I think that's all it is is so like I always want to compare myself I want to look at other people who are ahead of me and see what they're doing that I'm not doing so I can learn and if someone's behind me I don't really compare much at all because like why bother and so or if they are behind me but they're better at me at something then I want to figure out why they're better than me at that thing but that's I think that's the like that is the chief you use of comparison everything else I don't see the benefit I would love to highlight something that um I think many people don't do that you do it's like when I saw when I just said about comparison you know I think most people they don't even go a tenth as deep as you because they're like oh me or the other person but you're like what are they posting how many likes so um you're already paying attention to different criteria and you see it's so much more nuanced um and one thing that that you were shouting me out for was like go read Evelyn's post read between the lines and I know when I came to this kind of Niche that I'm in right now I was looking what do they do read between the lines and and emulate how can people start emulating more and kind of learning between the lines of what community Champions or do or what you do I think attention to detail is also a skill mhm so I think what happens is at some point you learn a detail and it works for you in anything and then you wonder how many other details are there and there's a lot of them and so then you start paying attention more to details and then all of a sudden you get rewarded again and so I would say it's a really common trade among the people that I know that are very successful is that they are very detail oriented and it's not that like there's different types of detail some people like oh I forget everything it's like yeah but like I don't do any of our scheduling now do I think I could do handle our scheduling yeah but it's just takes bandwidth that I would prefer to put to other things and so I think people give themselves these statements these I am statements like I'm not this way I'm the type of person who um and then they they box themselves in by immediately no longer trying things because they say I'm not that type of person but until I was in my early 20s I had a I am statement that I am bad at math and I think most people who watch my stuff now would be like I don't think Heros is bad at math and it because at that point I realized that I was like I've just been saying this my whole life because in eth grade I had a bad teacher or I was a bad student whatever but I didn't learn as much as I should have in eth grade and so after that point I basically learned everything till Algebra 2 and then as soon as we got into pre-calculus I had a pretty you know bad experience and so then from then on I pretty much just cheated that it's like I was behind and so that I had nothing I didn't know what we were doing and so um in my early 20s I was like I need to not make this a thing and so I decided to stop using a calculator for everything MH and so whenever could do math I just tried to do it in my head and in the be I would check with a calculator afterwards I would compare and I would see how far off I was until eventually I started getting pretty good at it and then I started just doing math in front of people because that's what I was doing for the last few years and people like dude you're so good at math and I remember the first time someone said that to me I was like huh that's weird and then um part of that led into me taking the GMAT because the gmats the like kind of the big standardized test for for business school before I decided to be an entrepreneur and math was half the test and so I was like I have to get over this belief and so so I believe that if I could if I did more math problems than anybody else before the test I'd get I'd do better and so I did 16 phone books of math problems it took me four hours a day wow um for four or five months every day for four hours I would do math problems and then by the time I had the test I got whatever above Harvard's mid score but I was this is from somebody who you know didn't get past you know pre-cat basically just cheated my way through high school um and so I say that because like everything is like if it is a skill you can learn it and you can learn it later as long as you are willing to do repetitions and look at how well you did compared to compared to the ideal and then see what the discrepancy is and it's this has been this theme that I've I want to write a big thing on it because it's like I think people over index advice and under index data and so I think a lot of people have no idea why they were successful which we were talking about earlier and so the amount of people that I see even who are successful who give what I believe to be very terrible advice I don't think they're doing it maliciously I just think they have no idea yeah and so they just answer when people ask them but it's just made up but I have at this point in my career say hey who do you learn from who's your you know whatever and honestly it's just data and so I do a ton of volume so that I have a statistically large sample size and then I look at the top 10% of whatever it is I'm doing so whether it's calls emails uh content meetings it doesn't matter what skill you want to learn you can repeat the process process 100 times look at the and record it and look at the top ones and then look at the bottom ones and see what was different between those two and then do more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff and you just and if you do that enough times you get pretty good and then people ask you how are you so good at this and you're like well I just looked at what was different between the times that worked and the times that didn't I did it enough times that I only do the things that work now then people say why do you think that works and this is where people get off- ramped they then answer the question but they have no idea I don't know why these things work I just know that they work mhm and I think that's a big thing that a lot of beginners intermediates in advance people get LED astray yeah and I try to censor myself on this stuff and I've I've really tried to cage where I say or hedge where I say you know because of this or here's why or the reason is the problem is is that those things are very compelling and so from a persuasion perspective because it's one of the most persuasive words you have and so I try to balance kind of my understanding of language now um with what I believe to be ethical yeah that's very nuanced and like you said I think that's there's Bad actors but then there's a lot of people that are be incompetent yeah I think most people I think the vast majority of people are incompetent like most people in general are incompetent and I also believe you know that most people don't make it to the data set no I most people don't make it to the taking the hundred actions yeah I was asking Lea this question from an A Q&A that you had here with people that were like at the intermediate stage like around my stage and there was uh this one lady and she asked her should I do ads or should should I do more on content and then Leila said um asked if she has maxed out she didn't so she was like bigger learning curve makes sense to invest time there and then she was like you just have to make sure that what you do actually has the effect and she's like oh yeah I know this because when I run this challenge I get like amazing results and was immediately like why are we not always doing it and I think that that is something that I also got wrong in the past and I think a lot of people get wrong it's like when something works for some reason we don't repeat it how can we uh everyone repeat what works year around in a sustainable way how would you build like let's say for example there's a a challenge or a Louch you found that works how would you set it up that you're like um so for example one thing that I found for Community works is I'm offering something for $97 like a popup um life mentoring event like it's like a workshop or for free in the community and it works I could run it on a monthly basis so how would you build it out you just run it on a monthly basis how can I kind of get to the I guess I guess it's a constraint thing because you need the warm audience yeah so you need to make sure you have enough warm audience every single month so you need to invest much more in ads than you're comfortable and have before uhuh I guess and then you need support delivering it what you let me walk you through it you just did right so the first thing that you can do is have a saying which you can repeat to yourself which is we repeat successful actions so if something is successful we repeat it if it doesn't work we try and figure out what was different about this time than last time why did it work last time and at this time because now we get closer to cause and so to your point you're like well I know that these challenges work but if I were to do them again I can't do them that frequently because and if you if your because is correct then you fix the because and then you try it again and if you were correct in what the because was then when you do the challenge again it will work and then you will have fixed it and you will have a way that you can challenges consistently if you were because was not the correct reason or you didn't fix it and then you do the challenge it won't work again and means because you got the wrong one or you you ex you didn't properly execute and so fundamentally like what we do when we buy a business is we say how can we not like it's one of the first questions I asked the founders I say how can we like why can't we do 10 times more of what we're currently doing just tell me why and so if we're doing outbound for example it would be like okay um we have how many guys we have doing outbound we have 10 guys doing okay why can't we have 100 guys sing outbound just tell me why not and sometimes it's like we just we just haven't really you know thought about it I'm like okay well what would stop me from making a post my audience getting 100 outbound guys starting in 90 days well I need the infrastructure scale yeah I got that but if we did that like is there something else that would break and if the answer is no then cool that's what we're going to do if something else would break then it's like okay so he said well we could actually get from 5 to 15 with our current infrastructure but then at that point we'd have to hire more support reps okay so we're going to triple and then we're going to start hiring for support and so because the bottleneck is always going to shift if the business is dynamic and growing and so what we just walked through was what finding a constraint of a business is which is why can't I 10x the thing if the answer is this then that this is the reason and if you're right you can 10x afterwards and if you're wrong then you got it wrong and you have to find what the actual reason is I love this so and it also kind of puts things in perspective I hope for the person listening of you know it's not like we're doing a lounge and then it failed and that means like we have to write off the business it's like oh no we have to do this thing like multiple times and it's just mainly there to actually gather the data yes I mean the thing yeah it's so a lot of entrepreneurs and this probably just comes with time or experience or reps but you have to be able to separate the business from who you are so if a business isn't working it doesn't mean that you weren't working as a human being it just means that there's something that's that's not where it should be M and being able to systematically take Peace by piece by piece and not get overly aggressive and say we're going to test six things well you're not going to know right and if it does work great but now you have to test again to figure out what the variable was and so I had dinner with a really close friend of mine who's a public CEO and I was explaining one of the one of the portfolio CS we have we're just doing this this thing every week just every single week so think about like a webinar we're doing a webinar every single week and um he like and it's like a full day thing like whole deal and he grows his publicly traded company by speaking as many events as he possibly can and speaking four or five events a week or more M and he was like they just don't get it and I was like yeah he's like they just don't get how many times we do things to get good and I was like yeah I know he's like how do you think we can like explain that because he has he has reps that are in his business and um I was like I don't know because I think at some level you see someone do it and like people can hear this podcast but you know Daniel's here and he sees you know the work that we put in and um you know we have our our our little workshop so we just started up and he saw this the guys doing their 10th or 15th or 20th run through on their presentations before they go live yeah and so people think it's like oh yeah I just made some slides I'm going to go up there it's like not on not in my company like you'll have the slides and then you're going to have an audience and we're going to say do that again say it like this go like again all right stop go back five slides do it like this again we keep going through it over and over again once they get through that one session it's like great we're going to do 20 more of these before you get get on stage and so it's that level it's a tolerance thing it's like what's your bar of excellence and if you look at Steve Jobs or you look at you know Jeff Bezos it's my fundamental belief that the person who's the highest person in the business should have the highest bar so the moment there's somebody in this business who has a higher bar for standards for how this company should run they should run it not me so the person with the highest standards should always be at the top and it's also a great way to think about for promotions within the business if you have two people you're like who here has higher standards for for what we do even if they're more Junior that's the person that should get promoted when do you when do you know it's like is it the things you select that need to have the high standard because I also see people who then pay attention to details that might not move the have a return at all sure so how do you how do you think about that or how do you identify you have to chunk it up to what's the likely that this is going to get us more customers or what is the likely that this is going to make them worth more fundamentally everything circles up to that and so if you can't make a clear argument for how this how this detail is going to get us more customers or make them worth more then it's probably not worth pursuing MH now the thing is is that takes repetition sometimes you tweak a detail and you're like I didn't think it was going to matter but it matters a ton and then sometimes you tweak a detail and doesn't do anything you're like okay well I will never tweak that detail again because that took two weeks of my life and changed nothing so it's like we don't do button color split test because I've never had one that made a difference in my life headline split test a ton of difference and so you know what I me like that's I think you you you get a chunked up pattern of what what Details Matter and what which ones don't but fundamentally within a business I would say if you are going to optimize advertising you optimize front to back if you're optimizing a model you optimize back to front can you say so basically yeah so basically if we want to take over a business tomorrow right I will usually look at the model and spend all my time on the back end and the conversion metric so that we can get as many ascensions look at the price points because that's going to make a a big difference in LTV and then we have a massive difference in LTV then that will then allow me to spend more on the front end now when I'm optimiz advertising I'm going to be optimizing from the very tip of the spear I want to optimize from the hook backwards because if I have a better hook I might be able to double or triple the amount of people who click and so if I just optimize the hooks I could triple the business if everything else to stay the same and so when I think about return on effort then if I'm like if I just get from 20% of people to 40% of people to take this upsell I double the business I just do that and if I just take the hook from a 2% CTR to a 4% CTR then I double the business is there anything else in between that's going to get me that kind of return on effort that I think I can do as quickly probably not and so that's kind of it's like almost like an accordion of like starting at each end and then working towards the middle that makes so much sense for um the kind of nasty Middle where I am right now it's like you know you're a good marketer so you scale too quickly you don't know anything about operations so you kind of messed it up then you have to go back in and and uh save the day how uh any tips for the nasty middle is it just to stick it out till you have momentum and can give it another shot the the the tough part about the middle is that you don't know what good looks like yet for each of the roles and so that's the pattern recognition where you have to hire somebody and you have to pour as much as you can into them and they work out or they don't and then you hire somebody else and then you try to do the same thing again and then when on your third try that took you a year to get that that role finally placed you're like that is what this role looks like and from that point going forward you don't make the mistake you're you you figure it out quicker if you make a mistake and you usually place them correctly the first time uh so you have fewer mistakes and when you do make mistakes they're smaller in the beginning the mistakes are just so much bigger because both of you don't know what you're doing true and so that's what takes so long in entrepreneurship which is why your second business always goes faster than your first your third goes faster than your second and it always gets faster because I know how to fill all the roles all the way up and then once we're at you know once we try to go from 200 million a year to to a billion dollars year it's like there's a whole bunch of stuff I don't know and so I'm going to have to try and find really high level people that I'm like I think this is what it looks like and I just make my best bet and so it's just how quickly you can go through that those cycles of people who have talent and assess whether they're good or not but the I mean the very beginning of it is making sure that they agree with you on what the metric they're supposed to be driving is and so if you ask a customer sport rep like what do you do in this business and you say how do you make this business money it's a great test yeah because if they can't answer that question question then I can guarantee you that they're probably not going to do it right true right like if you ask a sales director how do you make this business more money and they say uh I'm gonna you know we're going to close more sales like but you're not going to close any sales because you're the sales director so how are you going to make this business more money you watch people melt in front of you but a good sales director be like oh well I'm going to make sure that we increase the average closure of the team I'll be able to uh train new guys up and recruit them so that they can have a faster on-ramp and so if I can increase the average uh close percentage of the team and double the size of the team while maintaining that percentage will'll make more money and I'll be like yes because if they answer like that they understand the role and so asking the question just like simply like tell me how what you do every day makes us more money got it that's a really good I think test as well you ask a finance person how do you make us more money how do you making spreadsheets make us more money it's like well they might be like well I can help you know allocate things correctly for taxes so we can have some savings there I can also every quarter look at all the expenses and see what we can cut because we're always going to you know have things that you know software subscriptions things like that that get loed on um and to put budgets for each of the Departments to make sure that they don't go over and um I'm going to give you real-time data on customer metrics so that you can make informed decisions so that you can grow the company faster and I'd be like those are great reasons when you start to kind of build up so the way I I did it I think was wrong was smaller hours right for kind of what I perceived as experts all so I did not you know measure I was seeing okay this this experience looks like a great fit and they have been part of the community Etc um so I believe that I should have had fewer people maybe just one role to kind of take off load from me is that the right approach I think fundamentally the entrepreneur Journey because at the very beginning you do everything mhm there's just not a lot there's a lot there's a tiny amount of lots of different types of things mhm and as you scale there's more and more work of each of those types of things until eventually it's a full person's role yeah and so the job of the entrepreneur is looking at your calendar and allocating time like time is the one resource that all entrepreneurs are giving equally and so we have to see where are we investing our time that gets us the highest return and so if we look at our schedules and say okay two-thirds of my time is going to this one task that I think I can hire out competently at this rate and I can replace that with more of the one-third that makes us all this money that's what you do and you basically do that on a consistent basis MH and so sometimes it's work that you're not doing which is like you weren't operating right because that work starts to exist because when it was just you there was Zero operations you communicate with yourself pretty easily right but as soon as you had five employees then all of a sudden you like need to manage people and make sure that they're you know they have clear communication and they have objectives they need to meet every week and S like oo this is this new job that either I'm not doing or I'm doing poorly well I should bring someone in who can do that and so I think most business businesses typically have something that you know Lea and I've called the first follower but it's it's somebody who's like who becomes your right hand um and ideally it's like that partner thing which is like you want somebody who's better at that thing than you like Lila is better at running the team than I am she's a better leader than I am especially internally you know and so she's exceptional at it and because of that you know we both talk about she's like I could never do what you do I just like it it' be such a learning curve I'd have to spend I was like you'd have to spend 13 years doing it all day every day to get as good as I am and I'm like man thank God you're here because I could not run this business without you and she's like yeah because you spent the last 13 years doing advertising marketing and sales and I spent all this time you know learning how to onboard people and learning how to recruit and learning how to cast an internal vision and build out career paths and compensation structures and all of that stuff and so the better and better we get at it the more difficult it would be to replace one another because you just get more and more experience and I think that just Happ that just consistently happens but when you're in the 1 to three million you you just want to have somebody who's smarter than you like and that's the hard part is that when you're hiring especially as you scale and it just it's true all the way through is that I had um we had somebody that I mean I interview people plenty but we had a recent interview that I took where um we passed on the candidate and my head of recruiting was like can you just give me some feedback on like what was wrong with this guy and the thing is is that the guy had the experience um nice guy I think he would work fine on the team um I just said I think he was just okay MH and if I look at the team that he's about to enter he's the worst person on the team he's not going to raise the bar of the team he's certainly not at the bar of the team and he was like yeah I think you're right I was like right so when you're going to pass me another candidate look at the team is this person better if yes pass them if they're not better than the team I'm just going to say no because as a company expands it tends to dilute people hire people worse than them because they feel comfortable with that yeah when they hire people as good or better they get threatened so it's job security but that's what keeps that's what makes businesses worse and so the rule of just saying whoever comes in has to be better than everyone else at that level I'm not saying that Frontline customer support has to be better than the CFO right but then all the other support reps you want them to be better yeah and so they have to be better than their peers when they walk in the door and if they have that then the company will continue to improve that makes so much sense um just quickly want to Circle back to school as well because know that many will be interested in that um what's kind of the vision for the games will you that's kind of your monthly um our challenge right we somehow we do it we work the first time and so we continue to do it yeah um and it will there any new weapons or anything you can already tease there's there's tons of new weapons that are going to be coming out I mean we're we're focused on um people have been pretty clear I mean I think we said it at the one day it's like people want free trials people want I one time corbs which we which we rolled out um and then people want Affiliates and so we have heard and that is what we are working on super cool yeah and we put the cancellation thing in there that reduced turn like there's a whole bunch of other things that are like things that we do to make people more money that they don't have to do anything with and so it's more like there are weapons being like landmines being installed if you want to use the weapons analogy that we're putting on the field that just make everyone more money but you don't have to do anything and so we're installing a bunch of things like that because that's ideal that's honestly the the best things it CS no effort on everyone's part and there's like a lot of those that are rolling out but no one has to do anything you just make more money I think I'm so excited about the churn also very there's so many things there's like there's some really big ones with churn that no one has to do anything for like really big ones um I think Sam talked to me about um you know how somebody for example disputes payment or something and he can just solve it in the background like magic and that's one of them there's like there's bigger ones than that one and that's huge maybe one last word for the person listening that now feels really intimidated by the level you're at and the conversation that was going that can kind of um get them back to a place of I might be able to do this you know growing growing a massive platform is very different than starting a your first business this is not my first business it's not my second it's not my third it's not my fourth it's not my fifth like it's I've had a lot of businesses and I still do and I will continue to um but you have to have the balls to start the brains to learn and the harp to keep going and the good news is that you have all three and as long as you don't stop you can't lose and so fundamentally from a business perspective you just have to let people know about the stuff you have and when you start you let them know and then give it to them for free you keep getting better until people are like man I would pay you for this and then you start charging for it and when you realize that there's a really sexy new thing that you could do you ignore that and you keep getting better at the thing that you just spent all of this time getting to this point on which is you're already making money doing it and you understand that the natural extreme of every business is you running a team of a handful of very smart people helping you accomplish something that helps a lot of customers live a better life and if you just stay focused on that you'll be very successful thank you so much that drives it all home call to action where where do we send people oh uh well we talked about school so go to school.com games and you can see Evelyn and myself inside the games we have all the things to help you succeed tools training Community weekly calls monthly downloads where I put eight hours of this type of stuff but just specific to school much more tactical um in there so it's all there most people charge $100,000 a year for stuff like that and it's free with the platform thank you so much no you thank you