Scaling Your Business: Leveraging Traffic, Conversion, Price, and Churn

Focusing on the four main business levers - traffic, conversion, price, and churn - is crucial for growth and scaling.

### Scaling Business Growth: Leveraging Traffic, Conversion, Price, and Churn
* 🚀 To grow a business, focus on four main levers: **traffic, conversion, price, and churn**.
* 🎯 Prioritize these levers based on the **biggest constraint in the business**: traffic, conversion, price, or churn.
* 📊 Start by **maximizing traffic and acquiring customers**, then **optimize conversion rates** to ensure efficient customer acquisition.
* 💰 Adjust pricing based on customer feedback and market analysis to **increase revenue**.
* 🔄 Address churn by identifying and **fixing issues that cause customers to leave** the business.
* 🔁 Continuously iterate and improve by **doing more of what works, doing it better**, and **trying new strategies when necessary**.
* 📈 Focus on consumption to ensure customers are getting **value from the product or service**.
* 🔍 Use **data-driven insights and customer feedback** to identify and solve complex problems, and continuously **test and iterate** to improve business performance.

### Building a Successful Business: Lessons on Content, Hiring, and Leadership
* 📊 Initially, the speaker's content covered a wide range of topics, but he realized that his audience growth was attracting the wrong people, so he refocused **100% on business content**, leading to **improved metrics across the board**.
* 💼 When it comes to hiring, the key is to find people who can **fit their dreams within the vision of the business**, as the best talent has many opportunities and needs to **believe in the company's potential**.
* 💡 The process of acquiring talent should mirror the customer acquisition process, with the **inflow of talent matching the inflow of customers**, and brand reputation playing a **crucial role in attracting top talent**.
* 👥 Good communication is essential, but with the right people, **clear and minimal communication** is often enough to get great results, as demonstrated by a story from Google's early days.
* 🏆 The most challenging aspect of entrepreneurship is figuring out what "**good**" looks like at each level, both in general and for specific roles, and this pattern recognition is the key to **rapid progress**.
* 💰 The speaker shared a personal example of how hiring the right person (**his wife**) significantly increased the business's income, highlighting the **importance of having the right people in key positions**.
* 🎯 The ultimate goal is to build a company that people love working at every day, and this vision needs to align with the company's overall mission to **attract and retain top talent**.
* 🚀 The speaker emphasized that every skill is trainable, but the **return on effort and resources** to train someone in a specific skill should be **carefully evaluated**.

there are four big levers in your business that could be messed up. I'll show you how to figure out which one it is and how to fix it so you can scale your business. We had those four levers that I had earlier. We've got traffic, we've got conversion, we've got price, and then we've got churn. So those are the big four things, and so if we want to grow the business, those levers have to change or the business will not grow. And so for many of you, it might just be you need more traffic, like the business model is fine, the economics are fine, and you need more traffic. And so basically, at least my thought process that I have with this is I try and scale as much as I possibly can until something breaks, and then when it breaks, we fix that thing and then go back to scaling the [ __ ] out of it again. I mean, fundamentally, that's what we do. And um, I mean, I teach this at for for businesses, but I'll I'll walk you

through it. What is going to go to these four levers that we talked about earlier, right? Which is going to be your traffic, your two FS there, whatever conversion, which is you tweaking your about page, making a VSL that's better, adding Carousel images, tweaking the bullets that you have on your landing page. Uh, you've got the price, which you can test, and then you've got churn, right, which has a big list of things that you can do. So these are the four levers. The things that you're doing have to lead up to one of these four. If it doesn't lead up to one of these four things, why are you doing it, all right? So like if we were to translate your objective with the free group, you would have to say, okay, I think that reactivating the free group will increase traffic. That's fundamentally what you do it. You want this traffic source to make you more money from your to towards your ticket high ticket thing. And you say, okay, how much work will it take me to reactivate this group? Okay, is there

anything else that could get me more traffic than reactivating the group of the things that I have available. So right now could me just spending more money on ads or making better ads make us more than me spending the time to reactivate the group. If so, forget reactivating the group, make better ads or spend more money on ads. Does that make sense? So once you figure out and when we're picking which of these three things, four things that you're doing, the thought process is what, which of these is the biggest constraint in the business. And so if conversion rate, let's say for example, on the landing page is super low, then it might mean like, hey, before getting more traffic, I'm going to, I think I can double my conversion on this page because I haven't really spent any time on it at all. Okay, well then it makes sense to spend a day or two like, can I really clean this up and make it as crisp as humanely possible with the language that I use? Can I grab screenshots that are

more meaningful. That, like, you probably had more testimonials, things like that. You haven't updated. Like, can I put that on there? Can I make an actual 3-minute VSSL that is more compelling than the one that I just like tossed up there? Okay, that's probably a day of work. Well, it's probably high leverage because I can double the growth of the business by just improving this conversion metric. Pricing, like, well, if everybody just pays you more, we already went through that example over here. Um, this could obviously make you more money. And then you have your big list of things that you're doing for turn and so cool. Which of these is the biggest, uh, thing that's going training the business? You pick the one that you're working on. And then for me, I tend to think through this more better new. And I tend to do it in this order most of the time. So like, I will just ask one of our portfolio is like, why can we not just do more of what we're currently doing? Like, whatever we're doing, why can't we just

do more so you'd have to make an argument to me that we should reactivate this group, rather than just spending more money on ads. And you have to make an argument that it's easier and it will make us more money than spending more money on ads. And if you came with the argument that'd be like, well then forget about it. If we can't do anymore for whatever reason, we have some limitation like we can't post more than twice a day on Instagram, like we just can't, or we can. It just like we've seen that when we post three times, it doesn't, doesn't yield the same performance. So two is kind of the sweet spot. Fine, all right then, what can we do to make it better, right? Okay, because if we can make those two posts just higher quality overall, can we like really think through the hooks, can we make sure that they're tight, that they appeal ideally to the audience that we're looking for? If we do better, then the quality of the traffic will go up, the more views will go up. Does that make

sense now if we can't do any more any better, then we need to try something new. And you notice that most of the times you can do more of what you're doing, you can do what you're doing better, which is why I so rarely do new things. Once you have something that works, that's the hard part. Once it works, it's like, how do we scale the living crap out of it? And the reason that most entrepreneurs, in my opinion, especially small ones, get stuck is that they find something that works and they stop doing it. And then they get distracted by six other new things, and they get completely spread thin. And it's like what's ironic is that the small business owner is the one who has the least amount of leverage, and you have the basically your contribution, your time contribution to the income of the business is more direct than anybody else's, especially at this level. And so like you like saying, okay, I'm going to take a third of my time that might just be like

decreasing your business by a third. Um, and so you have to have a very strong argument for why that's going to make sense. And then for who. Once you have a team, then that becomes the next thing. It's like, okay, we know we going to increase traffic. The way that we're going to do that is like we can't do more posts on Instagram. So we're going to make them better. And this is the process that we're going to focus on getting better, which means that, uh, once a week, I'm going to take three hours and I'm going to script out. I'm going to look at other people's, you know, content that have really good hooks. I'm going to write down all the hooks. And then I'm going to make content that I think is going to appeal to my demographic in a better way. Cool. Now who's going to be, you know, if it's you, then you're the who in a lot of these. If the business gets bigger, then it's like, okay, Jeremy, you're

running this and then we just measure to make sure Jeremy does his job. That makes sense in terms of thinking through this. And so we just want to make sure that what you are doing is going to map to what's going to drive growth within the business. And I swear to God, so many times people are just doing [ __ ] that does not map to this. Okay, Red's over one quick question on that. The first four is there like a certain priority that you would recommend for like I'm a solo operator. I'm doing like 50 a month P Toc offer. Is there like one of those big four that you would recommend prioritizing first start here okay because this is how you have lifeblood in the business. So you have to promote. You have to acquire customers. Once this is relatively consistent even at a low level, I then. This is me how I think through this. Now not when I was younger. Normally I would just be like just do as much of this as you can for everything else. Now it's do enough of

this so that we can keep working on how do we how do we find the things that people actually want versus what we think they want. And then there's the things that we can remove like how can we delete things, how can we make this simpler, how can we make it more elegant, how can we shorten the models that we have. I mean we're hiding classroom for new people like think about this like we remov three calls a week like we're trying to take things away not because we don't want to add it's easy for us to add the value it's but we want we want them to consume it. And so consumption should be the highest priority for everybody here in terms of making like how do they get value they have to consume value right so consumption should be the highest priority. And so um we start here until you have enough flow going through the system that we can see what they really want. And a lot of times these simple things like the last semester I think we went through a ton of depth of all the

things that you can do to reduce turn right. It's like so you experiment with that. And this might be months while you're doing this. I mean for context school didn't hit like a like. Let's go hyperscale until like recently. And this was years right of getting the product right. Like obviously like there's people coming in every day. And there was enough promotion that we basically we could test and keep learning. But it wasn't like we don't want the world to find out about it yet. Because we want to get all these pieces right. Once these pieces are right enough. Then you go back here you scale living hell out of it boom. Yeah it's great. So right now the question for you is if you have really low turn. I don't know if you do. But from what you were saying it sounds like you have low turn. Then then yeah do more traffic. Yeah do more do better of what you're currently doing. So you're are you running ads. Yeah so you spend more spend more and Mak them better top 20% of my best customers.

targeted towards them. Now that I have that insight, and then just keep making that better, and then just more, more better, and then just spend 400 Grand a month on ads. Yeah, sure. I mean, it's like an inside joke in my business. Like, he's just going to say more better. It's like, why? That's what we're going to do this quarter, just like we did last quarter, just like we did the cor before. We're going to do more, we're going to do better, and if we do both of those things, we'll probably make more money. And then if there's something that prevents us from doing more or better, then we fix that, and then we go back to more better. Does anyone have questions about what they need to do for this? Like, like you need, you're like, Okay, am I should I be spending more money? Well, if your LTV is good in terms, and your and your and your CAC is low, then yeah, I just keep spending, I guess. For like low ticket communities, you know, recently you had a video where

you went like seven things like handwritten letters on boarding exit interviews. Yeah, for communities on school like which one of these would you go after the first kirby. I feel like you have even more insight with you. The price sounds like the thing that's moving at say again the price. Okay because you've already experienced what that's doing right. You know the average is around 20. You probably want to be on the good side of that. So figure out why you're not. Like I would talk to your customers first. Like why did you cancel. You want to talk to the people that cancelled. You want to talk to the people that stayed. And you want to figure out what differences they have. And then if you find the people that stayed did these things, emphasize those things. If you find the people that left did other things, remove those. And so it might not be price. I'm just yeah it but you told us so um maybe it's price. So like balance that. And then you know with your traffic, you can

drive more of that, and then you can play with about page conversion. You can play with that, and then when you're bored of those, go back to retention. I know I can drive like easily way more traffic. It's just that I have a leaky bucket, so I want to fix it. So I'm wondering if I should add the onboarding or, you know, EV onboarding. I think for sure is a good idea and how would you execute that for low tickets? You do a group onboarding, and everybody who signs up gets one group on onboarding that you attend. You do it once a week. I think people throw a lot of [ __ ] in their community, and then they just keep adding, and then they think they need to keep adding to make it better, but it's not true. Like overwhelm is the main cause of churn. Think about the experience. So how many things in the classroom would you say is like The Sweet Spot? 'Cause like right now I have like eight, maybe the honestly the hardest part

found when improving anything is to figure out what's actually wrong with it. That I've been working on the school games funnel recently. By the way, homos will be happy about this. Um, I figured out like what the problem to try to figure out what the problem was was actually quite difficult. But in the was my it was this guy I knew from New Zealand who's a complete stoner that had text me when hosi when hosi launched the games. He couldn't understand what it was and I was not going to try to explain it to him. But when we came back to making this improving it, I was like it turned out that he was the best signal for it actually. What the [ __ ] is the school games. I wrote it down that was the problem. If you didn't know what school was, you have and you see an ad from homos and he's talking about the school games and some leaderboards and coming to Vegas. People don't know what the [ __ ] that is. So I wrote down what

the [___] is the school games, and I was like, that is the problem. So, but that took me a lot of research to, to like, mind, right? I was talking to a lot of people. I was doing this with Kirby. It's quite an interesting process, right? And then we were like, okay, well, how do we describe this damn thing in a way that is make sense to like a stoner dude? Um, because it helps to use extreme cases like Steve Jobs tested products on children because like if they could understand it, anyone could understand it, right? So like defining the problem and then coming up with different ways you could solve it. I've been doing this with goose and Kirby in the office all week. We probably designed, we came up with many different ways to describe what it is, many different landing pages, many different bullets, and we just kept talking to users, getting feedback, and kept iterating it. We probably made 30 versions. Some of them were so wrong. It was, I wondered what kind of tangent you'll never see it, but you know, we actually at the end.

of about one week, we landed on something, and um, and now everyone we show it to instantly gets it. It's like we don't actually have to fully launch to find out. When you learn how you can use everyone to get like feedback and talk to people and show it to people and get their reactions, you can do a lot of fast iteration cycles without the harshness of like reality. Then when you launch it into reality, you have a way better chance, right? Um, so that's how you improve anything like that. That's not the games, but that's what we were doing to the games recently. We Kirby was doing interviews with all of the winners. That was overwhelming. Not many people were showing up, so we cut that. We just did one hosy Q&A a week, right? Attendance is up, every viewing is up. People are now saying that it's way more valuable, and you know, so it's we were unlocking the one day recordings after you got three customers. We like, why are we making it hard to get the

most valuable thing. Now you just need three members. They can be free, right? So like what do people value? How do we make more people experience that? What do people not value? Take it out. What do people not understand? Reword it. You see, it's all the same but I will emphasize what Sam is saying is that there's so much more work than you expect it to be, and everyone wants like the one silver bullet that you're going to magically fall on it. But if it were obvious, you would have already done it, and so it's like it's disguised. And that's what I mean. This is literally what makes business hard. And so I'll have a business owner on a Q&A call say like, What should my price be? And I'm like, I don't know. I'll walk you through the process of how I'd figure it out, but I don't know your avatar. I don't know your traffic source. I don't know the value prop of your community. And even if I did.

I would say I'll start here, and I'm going to do the math, and I'll move it, and I'll do the math. I mean with the portfolio, same thing. It's like we tested 50, 35, 25, 15. We just tested it. I was like, I don't know, we'll find out. And then they were all the same. And then I was like, okay, well, which business would I prefer? And then we go into that, right? And so just, just in terms of thinking through things like the amount of effort that goes into it, that most, I would say that like as I've gone, as I've moved up in business, the my understanding of the level of effort that's required to solve complex problems has gone up 100x. It's just significantly harder to solve more complex problems. And that's also why the biggest paydays are on the other side of those problems, because if they were really easy to solve, everyone would have already solved it. So it's like four hours, in a cup of coffee, and a bunch of data, and you're

like all right, let's try this. There's a quote I learned from the software engineers at school. They say you have to make every detail perfect, but the only way you can do that is to limit the amount of details that you have. So inside of the school games, we have eight videos. All of them together are less than 45 minutes. One call per week, and that's it. And once a month, you get a download from here, the Mastermind. That's it. Very easy to explain to someone. One call, one course, one Mastermind a month. And there's 13,000 people in there, each paying 99 a month, and they get the school [Music] software. I have a question. Yeah, so there's a fine balance between because if you're a leader of a big community, right, if you're showing up too much, you kind of almost lose your power, right? And if you do Q&A every single day, nobody want it's not special. So how would you balance Q&A calls, making posts inside of the community, and just showing up

like giving people attention like that. I'm sure there's a data answer for this rather than me just guessing. We can probably find it out of like what the best, you know, Cadence is. I'll tell you, I personally, I think post twice a month in school that's not planned. I just, I just kind of poke around and I see what people are struggling with. I made that Niche post because I was really tired of people be like what's my Niche going to be about and I was like here's how you find your Niche and so it's just like I just listened to what was the like there's you probably noticed this in your community it's probably like a pro like a problem dour it's like people just kind of glob onto a single problem all of a sudden and like I felt like I was seeing more and more of that so I was like all right I'm going to try and answer this and so then you make that and then it's like hope and if it does if you put the thing in

and then that problem still exists. Then you didn't do it right. So it's like you have to do it again. You have to make it simple. You have to make it easier. Whatever it is, you keep doing it until that one goes away. And then like the next problem will occur. And the good news is that your customers will always have problems. Yeah. And so you just solve them. I can tell you a good thing that works for me. Um, so I spend a lot of my time reading what people are saying. Like I'm trying to understand what things people are struggling with. So I'm not in there just posting a lot. I'm in there listening the most, more than anything else. Most, it would be like 90%. It would be like a lot of time is spent listening, trying to figure out what is going on, what should I improve, what problems is the community facing right then. When I'm pretty sure I've got those problems, I'll even talk to some pal users and I'll validate, do you think these are actually problems, right? And then I'll make sure.

I'm clear on the problems. First, okay, now if I spend now prioritize them, what's the most? What is the most pressing problem? Okay, number one. Now just focus on that. At least I know if I just fix that, I'll add some value, right? Yeah, so now I'll try to fix that, and I will try to fix that by research, experimentation, etc. And then I'll come back to my community and say, Hey, I saw all you guys were facing this. It sucks. I fixed it. Here you go. [Music] And that's how I like. That's how you add value, seriously. No, like I have this little template on my wall for emails, which is, Hey, I made this thing for you. Here's what it does. Good afternoon. Enjoy. Like CTA. Like that's my email template. Like it just makes it really simple. Like, Hey, you guys were struggling with this thing. I made this for you. Here's why it's important. Goodbye. The hard part is finding the thing. Yeah, like I said, how

do we make the school games funnel better well what's the problem with it that's the real question and it was some Stoner dude who had the answer yeah so you wouldn't have a schedule of like posting daily or second like every second day or definitely not that's like a Henry Ford production line for Community like we're not trying to pump out posts fast that's not what makes a robot it's not that's not a good Community a good Community is something that under stands your pain and experience and delivers Solutions and is fun yeah you right yeah and isn't overwhelming and doesn't make me read five articles a day right like value Post Yeah cuz I don't want to read a bloody article that's a pain in the ass like I want a solution or I want to laugh one of them yeah I'm doing 17 lives a a week in my paid at the moment so but my my feelings telling me to put it in the free community but I mean that might be stupid because I'm trying to

listen to what you guys are saying. You're saying no, we're just doing one now, and it's like, so I'm a bit, you know, I think if you want to use all that, like all that. So last, last games, a ton of people, I think it was last games, it was like, it was like the lives games, it like everybody was doing like Instagram lives, might have been maybe two ago. Um, and that the thing is, is like we have to separate promotion from, so from a promotion perspective, you're doing lots and lots of lives, you're making lots of posts, you're making all this stuff. Oh, no, I understand, I got you. And so my point is, is like I would take all that energy and put it into promotion so you get way more people into your community. And then the thing is, is that you, if you do 17 lives a week externally, it's okay that people don't consume all of them because if they consume one of them, then they might buy. Whereas if you're inside of the

community. And you're doing 17, they might be like, Oh, I'm missing out on 16 out of the 17. I'm not getting the value. If it's free, your cost is time. And so, as long as you deliver a return on the time that they spend consuming your content, then they have a positive exchange with you. And so, basically, it's like you can never promote too much. You can put too much inside of the community. And so, I would take some of that Juju and put it externally to drive more through the box. I think H actually did like the opposite, like when he increased the daily coffee to like nearly every day, oh, his churn reduced massively. So, I have no idea, oh, he's messing me like every day and trying to figure out like all kinds of things around churn at the moment. Um, my answer to him, he kept coming up with ideas. My answer to him was talk to your customers. I recently was pretty public about this is that like I widened my

content for I think either 3 or six months. I like started sprinkling in some other other pieces. I talked about how I eat and like Lea you know how Lea and I run you know being married and things like that. And the the the problem is that you do get positive reinforcement from it. And so it's like he made some stuff on relationships and then people were like oh this is awesome. But the thing is is like the wrong people were saying it was awesome. And so what was happening is my audience was growing but it was growing with the wrong people. And so I had I mean I had this moment where like sometimes you have these like I had a a friend of mine come into a friend acquaintance I would say flew in and was like um he probably does 10 million bucks a year and uh and he was was like yeah you know um yeah I don't I don't listen to too much of your stuff anymore. And he's like yeah I was Hardcore for

like six years um, and then I I just kind of um, I guess it didn't really apply to me anymore. He's like, I guess I'm not really like your avatar, and I was like, you're 100% Avatar. Like you are exactly who I'm going after. And then I was like, oh, I'm a [__], and I just basically it's like you, you get, you get, it's a balance. Like you want to listen to customers, but you also want to make sure you're listening to the right customers. And so um, I reoriented all my, my content, which maybe some of you guys have seen, and it's been 100% back to business. Has been the, the theme that we have internally. My guys now, um, is that if it's not business, we don't make it. Just very straightforward. Like it can be business adjacent. So like if I talk about, you know, prioritizing like tasks in my day, that can have some element of productivity into it, but it's like all

my examples are going to be business related. And so, but by doing that, when I looked objectively across metrics for site conversion, opt-in, Book Sales applications to the portfolio, all of those metrics went up. Even though the average view per video went down. And so, it's like I'm not in this to get famous, I'm in this to make money. Cool question, um, I wonder if anybody has. This might be for everybody, but like has anybody done anything to when they do have a turned customer to get them back into being a customer or send a funny gift. You just send a funny gift in a DM. Ask credit P, you have you seen him, yeah, ask him for his message. He's apparently got some message he DMS people with a funny gift and it gets people to reactivate. Just say it's like something like leaving so soon is kind of like the vibe is kind of yeah, but you want to get the funny gift of course, yeah. And it's just within school, yeah, okay. So no email, SMS or anything like

that our sales team has that for uh ghosted leads. They have a Kevin Hart meme that's like, I think that might be it. I think that's what he's using. Yeah, and uh, yeah, it gets higher response rates than any message. This is kind of for both of you, probably you say as well. Definitely some, um, but I guess like when you're building, you know, a startup, um, obviously, you know, you might have sometimes, you might have a little bit lack of capital. A little lack of resources, I guess. How do you get a players to work for you and with you and how do you like structure comp structures and all that. So it like the vision for the business has to be big enough that smart people can fit their dreams inside of it. And so if you want brains, then you need people who like, they need to be able to believe that their dreams come true within your vision. If it's again, if it's like, Yeah, we've just got a couple groups that we're running and we're making money.

then it's like that doesn't like really get me motivated. If I'm intelligent, I'm because like the best people have. There's no lack of opportunity for best people. They have tons like you have to think about this. It's a totally different game. Like you're if you're accustomed to taking people who are like I really want a job, all of those people are irrelevant. You have to be people who are like in some ways you're competing for them. So the more you're competing for a prospect like selling them and so if you feel like, like, like. I'll tell you the funny one is like if you're interviewing people where you're like sell me on why I should take you. If you say that to somebody who's actually really talented, they'll be like I'm good. They just like they just don't like. I you have to respond to this offer within 12 hours. It's like, okay, I think you hit the nail right there for me. Like their Vision has to be our vision needs.

to be big enough for their dreams to fit into it, you have to be able to say, like, what we want to do is we want to make music money into the standard for this, and then they have to believe with a decent amount of certainty that it's possible. And so, like, how you guys present, like you are absolutely selling them. And so, like, I think Drew this about on a past one, but everybody here understands, you know, lead generation, lead nurture, sales, onboarding, and then, you know, retention, Ascension, right? That's the how you do with customers, right? This is the exact same process for an employee. You generate applications, you nurture applications, the sale is the interview, you onboard the employee, and then either retain them or Ascend them. It's the same thing. And so you basically have to understand the acquis. Like, this is when we get into scaling, everyone's like two, three people are like, What's scaling? It's just where the inflow of talent into the business matches the inflow of customers into the business.

and you have to have an exceptional conversion process for attracting Talent. This is where brand counts double. It counts once on the front end for customers, and again on the back end for talent. And it becomes either a virtuous cycle or a vicious cycle. Either destroys your business. You have a bad brand because what do you think, like what, um, like great talent will look at your reviews and be like, Oh, this is, yeah, never mind, I wouldn't work at a good place. So I guess, and last question, I guess, what would be the best way to acquire Talent? Is it just building a person or brand like in our field of work? 'Cause I don't think it's necessarily like I can't, I don't feel like I can find the right people on LinkedIn or something like that, you know, for what we're trying to do. It needs to be people who are kind of like already kind of entrepreneurs or people who are in more of like the sales or manager field. It really depends on what role you're looking for, but I can promise you that

very smart people are on LinkedIn. Do you know how I, um, I, I looked, I got invited to speak at something, and I looked at who else was speaking there, and I saw Hor Mosy was speaking there, and I was like, All right, there's my opportunity. That was the first time we met in person. Yeah, honestly, so cool. How long ago was that? One year before. I spoke about doing a deal, but you have to, like, be strategic sometimes. Yeah, and then, so you have to kind of do this old-school networking thing, which I [ __ ] hate, because that's like the only time I've ever done that, the whole deal was like the one deal to never do that again, um, but yeah, you kind of have to do that. I had to start going to, like, these software things. I had to start to meet some software engineers. I had to learn about their world. I had to ask people about why does what do you hate as a software engineer, what do you like, what makes a good company, what makes a bad

Company. You have to, like, learn everything about it and network and do that. It really sucks, honestly, but if you're serious about it, I knew there was no way I could build school without this person, so I delayed starting it by a year just to find the person. Yeah, so I was like, I'm not even going to start until I find them. Like, that's how essential I knew they were. That's why I tell everyone to not do software. It's just because the scale of how difficult it is to actually do it right is so hard that like no one, basically no one, does it right. Even when you know what you're doing, most people can't do it. And most people who are, quote, in the info world are like, Oh, my info thing is INS salable, so I'm going to build software. And they just think that like white labeling go high level means they own a software company. Um, like, but I mean, right? And or they create some widget that someone else can duplicate in 5 seconds that they did off.

with an offshore developer that like if it actually did work then that developer would hold you ransom, and then what like they just don't play it out two steps and the code [ __ ] anyways, and it's all it all sucks like yeah, don't do it, yeah, and some were like you're just you don't want us to succeed that's why because you're you're doing so I was like no man I saw that Sam I put 5 years in it I was like great okay I saw the metrics I was like okay this is legit I SP all my money and it's still wasn't enough yeah I had to spend like twice that again yeah you guys for that too by the way that that's going to help a lot apprciate this for yeah I mean the personal brand thing is just good for recr like if you have one it's great it helps a lot um but at the end of the day if the if the if the business that you're trying to build solves a real

problem, and you really genuinely care about the problem. If you find someone else who also cares about that problem, they will be more likely to work with you. Like, that's fundamentally it. What do you, sorry, last question. What do you think about creating an offer to train people to do what you are trying to eventually staff for, like how I'm growing? Like, you know, like in, yeah, you know, training. There was a point, there was a point in time I had a closer program. I was training closers and I was staffing them, you know what I mean? And then I was, I stopped doing that 'cause there's so many closer training programs. But right now, I really need growth partners, people who can lead and manage our clients and kind of oversee everything. What do you think about, like, I know there's a growth operator thing, but they're not, you know, like in my mind, like they don't have all the skill sets necessary. What if someone, you know, created a program to train people? I don't think you create another business.

to software role. Okay, depends if it's like, I know with a software engineer, no one's going to be any decent in 10 years, maybe a prodigy in six or seven, but like there's just no shortcutting that. Like, I mean, my co-founder done 20, so the years matter. And the same is true with a lot of things. Like, there's just years. So, like, but some other things might be different, like setting. Okay, yeah, you can teach that. Closing? Yeah, you can probably teach that. But these more high-level strategic things? Yeah, that ain't happening. Like, it took me [ __ ] 10 years. Like, so are you going to wait 10 years? No. Yeah, it's fundamentally every skill is trainable. The question is whether it's worth the return on effort and the resources to train someone with it. If you break things down enough, you can train someone to do anything. It's just that if someone lacks has zero meta skills, they don't know how to read, they don't know how to write, they don't know

how to talk. You could teach someone to do all that stuff. It's just why bother. So I'd rather take someone who's already here and then just nudge them if I can with, you know, proper training that just bridges the gap between all the skills they come in with and then applying that to my business. You got it. Cool, appreciate it. Yeah, I mean the people's the reason that most internet marketers in general can't make money. I'm sorry, they make money but they don't make like big money is that they just can't. They can't. They don't know how to operate people. And that's usually because they need like a right hand, a true right hand who can who's as good as them and like Lea will never get the credit that she deserves and that's fine but like the reason that all of our stuff is so big is because she's so good at building like she's an unbelievable Builder and so like the culture of the team is rockid. I mean the

guys will tell you like Lea really runs the like. Lea runs acquisition. comom like I I really like. She really does. She does likea runs everything like I. I mean. I told you. I have an empty calendar. I can't have an empty calendar. And and also have a business that's running unless someone else is actually doing it. Lila takes 15 meetings a day. She operates. She's she's coordinating things between different departments. She's checking on portfolio company. She's having you know. One want the people who having some sort of emotional breakdown about some craziness whatever um. She handles all that with a smile. You know what I mean. And so but like I. I. I was. We were talking earlier like I capped at $3 million a year. And then when Leela came in 24 months later. I took home 17 million in income net. And so the difference was that she liked people. And I tried to avoid them. And that was the problem. And so she. Her Leila's genuine Vision in life is to

build a company that people love working at. That's her whole, like the whole reason that she gets up. Like, her internal mission is to build a company that people love being at every day. And so, her vision just fits within my vision. And so, I recruited her to do it. But like, if we didn't do stuff that she liked, we, like, she wouldn't build it. So, I very much, like, especially the more talented the people that you bring on, the more you, like, they don't need pushing. Like, they know what they're doing. You just need to make sure that they're doing it in the right direction. And you kind of do this, yeah. The amount of training that you have to give some was is inversely proportional to the skills that they come in with. So, the more, basically, the less skilled the person, the more specific the instructions. Sam could basically just be like, Hey, can you just promote school a lot? And I'd be like, Yeah. He's not like, Hey, could you make these posts and write.

this copy and send these emails and run ads and make the hooks like this. Like that exchange has literally never occurred. Like I don't even know if Sam sees the ads before before they go out. He takes me the he was like when does the activation stuff come out and I said last Thursday. No like for real like I already did it. And then he was like I've seen this and I was like yeah I've already been thinking about that. We've got something coming. Yeah like we don't even. I've already thought about the next four things and we've got things ready so by the time we has the idea I'm like yeah we got it don't worry do your thing. And then I'm like cool let me tell you what what I'm doing on the media side. It's like oh [ __ ] great like these are all the things that I'm ramping up this the system we're putting in place like we changed our Cadence like things like that it's like oh dope I don't even want

to think about YouTube so like if I had to tell him stuff oh my God like yeah but it's good to divide it like that cuz I can just focus on this stuff. He can focus on that stuff. Kirby can focus on his stuff. We have very very good like division like that. Yeah the amount of Direction you need to give someone is inversely proportional to the skill they have. Yeah someone could just be like hey can you build this company and be like sure. People will complain like if people it's always a sign of notice when people complain there's no communication. Have you has anyone had this as an issue um like with teams maybe a lot of you don't have teams yet but bad communication communication sometimes it's always the complaint. Yeah found it's interesting that one because you don't really need to communicate a whole lot when you get the right people like well mosy said like a couple of words and I was like don't worry I got it like what happen like right but sometimes if you hire the

wrong person. There's no amount of communication that can ever make it work, and it's exhausting, and it just still doesn't work. I think I understood this. I think I told this at one of the previous ones, but how you know what a good culture is, is this story of Google in the early days. So Larry Page searched for something, and the ads that showed up were not relevant to the words he typed in. He took a screenshot, he printed it off, he got a red marker, and he wrote, These ads suck. He walked over to the engineers, and he pinned it up on the wall, and he tapped it, and one of them walked over and picked it off the wall, stayed up all night that night, and invented AdSense, which has made them hundreds of billions. So he didn't sit down with him and be like, Look, I think you need to do this and this and this and maybe this. He just said, These ads suck, right? Is that clear communication? I mean, to him, it was no

but that's what good talent is. You can just be like this thing, yeah do this, yeah. You don't even have to say do this, you can say this sucks, sort it out like, and then they'll, they'll be on it. Or they might have already preempted what sucks 'cause they've already been thinking about it. So I always remember that when people say, Oh, like, you need more meetings or more communication. Like, there wasn't a meeting, first of all, right? There was slapping something on the wall. Yeah, one of the most difficult things, this is like, I think this from an entrepreneurship perspective in terms of development, is like, has anyone here had another business before this? Yes, okay. Did you achieve in this business what you achieved in your last business? Like, in like, from how long it took you to get to that level in your the business before versus how long it took you to get to that level with this business. Was it way faster? And so a lot of the reasons is because you already beat the bosses up.

to that level. So it's kind of like you're quickly retracing your steps, and then you get to a level that you don't to your level of incompetence. The difficulty, the thing that takes the longest in entrepreneurship, is figuring out what good looks like at each level. And it's one of those things that's really hard to translate. Like you see the billionaires on stage, and they're just like, I, you know, get great people, and you're like, Sure. But the thing is, is that connecting what great people to them looks like in their mind and what you think great people are, that is an ocean apart. And so, I mean, I tell this story, and Sam, when I was talking about this last time, but like, when we started meeting with private equity firms to look at transacting with Gym Lodge, we'd have these super long tables that were these boardrooms, and I'd see their team all the way on this side. I saw my team all the way on this side, and I would just kind of sit

there and listen to like the questions that they were asking, and the responses that my team had. To be fair, the team that we had had built a $100 million-plus company pre-covid. Obviously, I sold during Co, which actually hurt my valuation, but not the point. Um, so they built a $100 million company, which is cool, but when I saw this, the talent on this side, I was like, Oh, that's why these guys are going to make $3 billion over the next five years. This team, and it was such a stark contrast in terms of the level of talent. Again, not disrespecting my team, it was just such a difference that it was literally like after that, immediately I was like, my whole bar was just reset in terms of the caliber of the people that even existed in the world. And everything was like, how on Earth do I get those people to work for me? And so like right now, some of you have like one person who's like, Man, I couldn't live without that person. There's somebody who's literally 10

times better than that person that exists right now. And it's just trying to figure out what you need to do to get them on your team. But the problem that takes so long is looking at what good talent in general looks like. But even when it gets role specific like Sam had to do all this research to figure out like how do good software engineers talk, like what do they like, what do they want. And so some of you guys are at a point where you need to start hiring a sales director or something like that. Like what happens is like this is the entrepreneur on know it looks like you bring someone on, you talk to a bunch of people, and then you're like I think this guy's good. You bring him in and he sucks, and that takes six months away from the growth that you would have had because your sales team and this guy sucked. You put bad processes in, then you got to fix the process, you got to fire the people that guy hired 'cause he sucked anyways, and then you're like shoot I'm

going to try again. You bring the next guy in and then sometimes it happens again, and you're like, Wow, this sucked. And then the third time, and sometimes this takes a year or two years, and then you're like, I now know. And you get lucky, and you get one who actually works, and you're like, Oh, this is what a great sales director looks like. And so the next time you go through your entrepreneur journey, like you go right to there, and then you're like, Shoot, I don't know what a good customer success person looks like. And then you try again. And so it's like, however quick you can work through that so you can start recognizing the pattern of what good looks like in general, and then what good looks like for a specific role. That's how quickly you move through the levels. That's been my experience with this, and I wish I try and do everything I can to try and translate that into the stories that I tell with the content. But sometimes it's really tough because

people like nod but like that is that is the secret sauce. Like that is it. It is being able to recognize like what a good growth partner looks like, what a good even a good agency. I've have good, I have good agencies that we work with, with now vast majority of them, 95% of them are dog [ __ ]. Some of you guys run them. So like that's, that's, that's, that's the pattern recognition. That's the highest value thing that you end up learning as an entrepreneur is what what good looks like.

4 Steps to Unf*** Your Business

Day Job: I invest and scale companies at Acquisition.com | Co-Owner, Skool.
Side Hustle: I make free content showing how we do it 


Alex Hormozi

Scaling Your Business: Understanding the Four Key Levers

Identify the four main levers in your business: traffic, conversion, price, and churn.

Determine which lever is the biggest constraint in your business and focus on that.

Prioritize scaling what is already working before trying new things, and make a strong argument for any changes to where time is allocated.

Prioritize promoting and acquiring customers to establish consistent flow in the business.

The highest priority for everyone should be to focus on the consumption of value by the customers.

Experiment with different strategies to reduce churn and prioritize fixing any issues that prevent growth.

Overcoming Challenges in Improving the School Games

Identifying the problem of the School Games' unclear description was a challenging but crucial step in the improvement process.

The team went through multiple iterations and user feedback to finally create a clear and understandable concept.

By putting in a significant amount of effort and research, they were able to streamline the School Games' offering and achieve a better understanding of the complexity of solving business problems.

Effective Strategies for Building Community Engagement

Listening to the community and understanding their problems is crucial for providing valuable solutions.

Prioritizing the most pressing issues and addressing them through research and experimentation adds significant value to the community.

Balancing the frequency of internal engagement activities with external promotion can help drive more traffic and reduce the fear of missing out for community members.

Reorienting Content for the Right Audience

After realizing that the wrong audience was growing, the speaker shifted their content focus exclusively to business, resulting in increased metrics across the board.

The key to re-engaging turned customers is to present a vision big enough for their dreams to fit into, using the same process as customer management.

Scaling occurs when the inflow of talent into the business matches the inflow of customers.

The Importance of Branding in Talent Acquisition

Branding is crucial for attracting talent, as it impacts both customer perception and the interest of potential employees.

Networking and old-school tactics are still effective for finding the right people, especially in entrepreneurial, sales, or managerial roles.

While personal branding is valuable, ultimately, finding people who are passionate about the company's mission and vision is key for successful recruitment.

The Impact of Effective Leadership on Business Success

A strong right-hand person with excellent people skills significantly contributed to a business's tremendous growth, increasing its income from $3 million to $17 million in just 24 months.

The key to success lies in hiring the right people with the necessary skills, reducing the need for extensive direction and communication.

Clear and concise communication, along with having the right people in place, is crucial for a company's success and growth.

The Key to Entrepreneurial Success: Recognizing Good Talent

Experienced entrepreneurs can quickly progress by recognizing and attracting top talent to their teams.

The process of identifying good talent, both in general and for specific roles, is crucial for entrepreneurial growth.

This ability to recognize and onboard high-quality team members significantly accelerates the entrepreneurial journey.