I Made $31,714,980 in 2020 (Here’s What I Learned)

Summary

• Scaling a business often requires pursuing larger markets; I learned this from observing successful people at the 500 Million Dollar Mastermind.
• Expanding to new markets might require different advertising methods and evaluating what's holding me back.
• Learned the importance of hiring quality talent over adding more people; focus more on "who" than "what."
• The niche you start with can initially boost growth but can also limit it, so assess if it's the niche or your business model that's restricting expansion.
• Alternative acquisition channels, like developing outbound channels, can be key to growth; hiring skilled people can lead to success in these endeavors.
• Transitioning to an owner/investor role from a CEO role can benefit the business, giving leaders space to operate effectively.
• Aim to build teams with people who come with "pre-loaded" solutions – those with experience and a track record of solving similar problems.
• A business can sometimes grow after downsizing, indicating that fewer, more productive employees can be more beneficial than a large workforce.
• Good data management with tools like a robust CRM system is crucial; investing in the right systems early can save a lot of money and aid growth.
• Simplifying the product and focusing on key priorities helps to provide more value to customers and makes execution more manageable.
• Reflecting on making the wrong decisions that turn out right, and vice versa, highlighted the importance of not unlearning good habits despite outcomes.
• Setting an expanded time horizon for goals allows for more strategic, steady growth with reduced risk.
• Knowing how to invest money and manage wealth beyond just earning it in a business is essential for sustained growth and security.
• Having a bigger purpose beyond financial success adds fulfillment and direction to your work and life.
• The realization that contentment can come from action and progress, rather than constantly seeking happiness, has been personally valuable.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest going after larger markets to scale the business. This might mean learning new ways to reach potential customers beyond what you've tried before.

A good way to expand is by focusing on hiring quality talent. It's not about adding more people, but about finding the right "who" with the experience to solve problems. This can be more efficient than just increasing the workforce.

Evaluate if the niche you started in is holding you back or if it's your business model that needs adjusting. Consider alternative acquisition channels, like developing outbound channels, which can tap into new customer bases.

If you're in a leader role, think about transitioning to an owner/investor role to give your teams space to operate effectively. Build teams with people who have "pre-loaded" solutions — those with a track record of solving similar problems.

Consider downsizing if it may help your business grow. Sometimes having fewer, more productive employees can make your business leaner and more effective.

Invest in good data management tools like CRM systems early on. This saves money over time and supports growth by helping manage customer relationships and tracking sales.

Simplify your product offering. Focus on key priorities that really matter to customers, which makes execution easier and can provide more value.

Reflect on your decisions critically, whether they turned out right or wrong. Don't unlearn good habits just because an outcome was not as expected.

Set longer-term goals to allow for more strategic growth with less risk. Be patient and persistent in growing your business, avoiding the desire for instant success.

Learn how to invest and manage wealth, not just earn it. This can secure sustained growth and security for your personal and business finances.

Finally, find a bigger purpose beyond financial success. It brings contentment from progress and action, which adds fulfillment and direction to professional and personal life.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"The only reason that you were upset right now is because of a fictitious expectation that you arbitrarily made up in your mind that you are not reaching"

– Alex Hormozi

"If you can expand your time horizon beyond months and even a year or two you will be so much better off"

– Alex Hormozi

"I would rather get rich for sure than get rich fast and lose it"

– Alex Hormozi

"One A player literally does more work than 5 B players"

– Alex Hormozi

"Invest early in really good data systems"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

what's going on everyone uh happy tuesday um i hope you're having a phenomenal day whatever day it is that you're listening to this um i had a lot of requests um from instagram and dms and thank you for those uh for the 2020 lessons and failures uh so this will be a sequel to my 2019 lessons and failures which if you haven't listened to that one i think uh my my year-long recaps are i think some of my better ones um but it's obviously up to you so this one will probably a little longer than what you're used to um and that's because trying to summarize what i learned in a year is hard in one episode and so for those who don't know uh i i keep an ongoing email thread to myself um consistently consolidating uh 2020 lessons and failures so you can well maybe you can't see it on the thing but it's there all right and so i have this big thread that i just continue to email myself whenever i feel like i learn a lesson and so i will do my very best to tell you each of the lessons that i learned and how i learned it and 2020 was a was a packed year of lessons for me and so uh where to start um where okay well from the 500 you know million dollar mastermind i learned a lot um from there i really learned about scale and seeing the people that were doing more than me all were going after bigger markets so there's really two options for me to do that within the context of gym launch one is go after find alternative and additional channels uh to grow the business because you know it's not like we've sold 100 of gyms and so that means that i have to find new ways to reach them so if my traditional advertising methods obviously you know you can exhaust a platform especially if there's a niche it's usually much bigger than you think it is but you may you may not have reached every single person on that platform but you may have reached every person that you could reach on that platform profitably um so that's kind of the the differentiation and so uh for me seeing all these people who are doing more than me and i was you know providing value to them in a lot of ways and i it's always like it's been a consistent effort of mine to try and understand if there's anyone who makes more money than me what it is that they have or what it is that i have that they do not have um because sometimes the question is not this is an interesting one for you that i've learned also is it's not always good to say uh what does this person have that i don't sometimes it's what do they lack that i have and i think oftentimes it's more frequently the case which is why it's always backwards which is why i think the learning process is interesting and so uh you know champions beat normal people at their endeavor not because they have something the other person doesn't but because they lack the ability to stop working they black the off switch and so i think sometimes not only thinking what do they have but what do i have that's limiting me rather than what do they have that's giving them an advantage over me so first off just even switching my thought process to thinking that way has been a lesson of 2020 um for me from an entrepreneurial perspective before i go any further i'll just say this so that you know i'm supposed to keep things interesting during these podcasts so we hit our 100 million dollar amount in 2020 which is kind of weird so just to clarify this for anyone the reasons i didn't put it on this award yet is because uh i'm not very handy with things and i'll probably mess it up so i'll have someone else do it um but just for transparency that means i've done 100 million in total sales in the last three and a half years um and so we did we did 30 we did 28 million and we did 7 million in in in 2016 we did 28 million in 2017 in 20 2018. we did uh 37 million in 2019 and uh in 2020 i think we finished at 31. uh we're still getting the final books for this year um but yeah so that was you know that's the that's the deal that's how we we hit 100 million so it's not like i did 100 million in 2020 just for full transparency because i think some people thought that that's not what it was um but i made a podcast about how uh i i've been stuck at 30-ish million for three years and i finally figured out what i need to do to fix it and among those is hiring really good talent uh that is one another one and that sounds like so like duh alex but i feel like it's so many times the lessons that i learn are not like nothing's novel like nothing's novel it's just at what point does we call them singed moments but at what point does something that you've heard your whole life become real for you you know um for some of us it's like be kind to others or something you hear your whole life but maybe some moment or some event triggers that for you and you're like maybe i should be kind to people and then you start changing the way you live um and so for me uh you know i've always heard niche down i think it's important to niche especially when you're starting um but you will eventually be constrained by that niche uh but that being said if you're like i get this one all the time from our clients which is like man i got my niche is too small and like homies doing like 500 grand a year i'm like your niche is a six billion dollar industry and you think that you doing half a million dollars a year somehow tapped that niche you just have such a poor business model that your lifetime value of a customer is so low that you can only profitably reach a half i mean like a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a percent of your market so it's really important to delineate between am i capping my niche or are the economics behind my business model stifling my ability to scale and grow profitably i think those are two very different things and everyone just likes to say likes to point outwardly because it's easier to say oh my niche is small rather than saying saying no my my business model sucks and i have no way of profitably reaching these people which either means you need to fix your business model or you need to find alternative or additional acquisition channels and so for us i think we have a we have a i don't know of a lot of businesses that have higher ltv from from you know micro gym owners than us and that's candidly because we provide more value than everyone else does in the marketplace that is why you get rewarded and so uh i mean i always i'm trying to expand ltv provide more value find ways that we can you know solve problems um and i i will always continue to do that but given the numbers that we have um the le one of the lessons of 2020 is expanding additional acquisition channels and so we were able to build an outbound acquisition channel in 2020 so that was um uh really cool and the additional part of what made that cool for me was that i actually had someone else own the entire process and end so when i talk about hiring high level talent it's really for me transitioning from the what to the who and you've probably heard that before but on some level it became real for me and the obsessive nature of the entrepreneur of wanting to learn how to do everything is absolutely required in the beginning but as you scale up it is more about finding the who but the thing is is that in the beginning you think too soon you need to find the who when in reality you still need to learn the things that make the business work and so i think that's why context and timing is so hard with these things because we have to find like when i'm trying to give you know advice it's you know you have to take it within like your current paradigm and i understand that that's difficult and that's why sometimes it's hard listening to billionaires because it's like their paradigm of of what's happening what is what are the successful actions for them right now in their in their current chapter is different than somebody who's at zero or at a hundred thousand dollars a year and so i'm going to try and cater this as broadly as i can with as much you know contextual points as possible so uh number one adding additional channels number two focusing on who not what and specifically high value who and my picker my ability to judge the quality of talent has increased i think i've gotten better at it i was not nearly as good at it years ago and i don't know how you learned that without experience so that is that is something um try and find people with pre-loaded solutions so as a caveat to that that's one of my lessons which is like i've i've now found people who come pre-loaded with solutions they come batteries included you know i'm like hey here's my problem i can point them at it and they're like oh this is all the things we need to do because i've already done this three times i'm like got it yes please go do that and you know as a as a correlator to that my role within the company i would say in 2020 transitioned from being a ceo to being investor slash owner slash stakeholder shareholder whatever way you want to say it but really i would say for the first time in 2020 i really transitioned to being above the business um not in like a weird arrogant way just like not truly being out of it and so i think there's definitely levels to being out of it you know first you're uh you own your own job right you're self-employed and that's just you doing things for other people for money you just someone else is paying you and you're doing stuff you know above that you start becoming a manager and managing other people right and then above that you become a leader and then above that in my opinion you become an executive right which is like leading organizational change in departmental change around objectives that are going to protect the business or grow the business right and i think the level above that is where i i feel like this year i was able to get to i could be wrong we'll find out in 2021 lessons and failures but i right now i'm not i don't actually do anything um in the business besides meet with two leaders a week um and really advise on the ways that we can strategically improve the business and provide more value and so that's really the majority of my time is like looking at the overall marketplace and thinking like how can we provide more value in a strategic way to everyone right and what are of the many ways what is the one thing that we're going to focus on and so i think 2020 was also a really uh humbling year for me because uh we got to refocus on the few things that provide the most value and so for us it's we need to get jim's leads because that's what everyone wants uh we need to make gyms more money because that's what everyone wants and that's about it you know pretty much any other you know endeavors that are not focused on those things uh are kind of a waste uh as much as you know people may need to have better retention tactics better um you know better profit margins and we talk a lot about that whenever we do talk about that we lose people who lose interest because entrepreneurials most entrepreneurs that i serve um only think about revenue right the only thing about growth um rather than what am i taking home you know how much risk am i exposed to that kind of stuff and i think that just comes with time but i will practice what i preach and not sell what i want to sell i will sell what they want to buy and so that is uh how you know we've we've cut a ton of excess out in 2020 in the business and so uh really focusing on a handful of key priorities um has been really useful and interestingly i think the business has actually improved since i've moved further away from it because i tend to break things a lot because i want to fix it till it's broken if you know what i mean and so giving our leadership space to just transact you know run the business has been um really valuable and i think it's actually been i think it's been better for the business overall so uh those are some of uh my my initial list i've got a whole bunch so i'm just gonna keep going through this so one of the next ones was um i was talking to brooke castillo she is an amazing business uh good friend of mine uh if you've heard of her life coach school podcast uh check her out she's an amazing pod she's a huge following um and she didn't say this directly but like the the term that came into my mind was scale skill zero and simple scales and or zero scales i'll have to come up with something catchy for that but basically the reason that i had to be get into the you know quote in investor or owner type role i believe is because if i am involved in any really day-to-day activity i will become the bottleneck right and it's not a bottleneck of communication which is what happens when you are the manager as a bottleneck but as as as somebody who even provides value in any way if it requires you to be there to provide the value then as soon as the team grows outside of you providing that value if it cannot grow without you providing whatever that value is then it will stop there and so i think that's 2020 was really my transition of of moving above that and so i think that was kind of the win for the year um and so that was kind of one of the lessons that i learned is is you have to scale zero like i have to get myself to doing nothing and still have the company make money and grow and be profitable etc in order for us to be able to grow beyond where we're at and i think that's much easier said than done especially because a lot of companies start because the entrepreneur is skilled in a certain way or has a variety of skills which is usually what happens we have a stack of skills which is why you know why we start growing and then somehow you have to in the beginning inextricably you know or intrinsically link yourself to every aspect of the business is what makes it grow and then piece by piece peel off each of these skills and traits and and things that you don't even know you do in the business to keep it moving and that's taken time and it's and it's taken trial and error and it's been uh difficult but ultimately rewarding um because now right now it's i would say like one day a week is focused on all my leadership meetings um and that's it and then beyond that it's just strategic insight on monthly and quarterlys so um that's given me a lot more time to really focus on the industry and how we can and help overall rather than being kind of like in the in the tactics um next one um i have this belief and it just continues to be reinforced that see if you can just keep growing and not hire people um we have had uh i mean all you gotta do is look at our our atrocious glass door reviews um which stock uh to know that like we have we hire fast um we've had a tendency to hire fast and fire fast so we have followed that mantra um but i and the thing is is part of the difficulty of having a business that that grows quickly is um or has any level of volatility month to month is that you have these waxing and waning demands for labor right and so it's like you need five people and then the next month you don't need the five people anymore and uh you know i'm not saying we hire five people and then let them go it's more that like that consistent variability uh can be annoying from uh from a payroll and labor standpoint and what's unfortunately happened many many times is we'll bring people on we will solve the problem and then they won't and it really should be like you know for defined periods of time you know like project based and whatnot um the problem will be solved and after we let the people go the business grows more and that's kind of weird and backwards for me as an entrepreneur and so i'm going to just try and make sense of it out loud with you um but i kind of have this belief that only one out of five employees in a company is providing value like i i actually like kind of believe that uh kind of the 80 20 people are fractal um i just can't like i just the amount of times that we've literally gotten rid of like a department because it's just like we we created a department for example to solve a problem let's say it was churn and provide value in all these ways to solve churn and then after scaling that after six months realizing that churn is completely unaffected and we just took 20 more employees on and then having just be like well guys you didn't solve the problem and as much as you're doing stuff it doesn't it's not doing anything right and so then we have to you know let people go because it is a business and um and then and and then just realizing that the business literally doesn't change at all like revenue doesn't change return doesn't change profit doesn't change well profit goes up and that's it and it's just like it's mind-blowing to me it's like there are so many people especially as your organization grows that you're like this person was totally unnecessary and that's crazy because from the employee perspective it's like how can you do that and i understand that perspective but on the flip side as the owner you're like man this this person was 90 000 a year like people are afraid of signing up for a mastermind and yet will or hire an employee for 50 000 a year without even thinking about it and it's just like which of these things is providing more value you know what i mean and so that's that's something that's been like mind-blowing to me is is seeing a company grow after shrinking it's like it's crazy and it's happened so many times and it happened twice in 2020 for us where i would get rid of a key team or a key you know series of individuals who are doing a role that we we were tracking metrics on and we kind of implemented it into to provide a solution and then it and then disappeared right and because the solution like it did not solve the problem and therefore was not providing the value that it was supposed to and so people were essentially cutting grass with scissors which doesn't they're doing stuff but it doesn't mean it's for it's being valuable right and so um i am now really trying to add the constraints to i want to see if we can grow with no people like how can we look at berkshire hathaway right how can we look at warren buffett who has 19 employees and runs a gigantor you know company how can we find fewer smarter people that are pre-loaded with solutions like i said earlier but it's like i'm just trying to hit this in multiple ways because it's it's really ingrained in me this year how important having an a player is compare like one a player literally does more work than 5b players it's crazy like most people actually do nothing like it's it's it's crazy like most people don't do anything and and and that's why they can't progress i mean like as a tangential side story you know i i there's a guy that i've seen in a mastermind this is an entrepreneur right and he's uh you know he's like hey you know and this is three years ago when i met him he was like yeah i'm gonna start running facebook ads and i was like awesome fantastic like that's a great idea and because his biggest issue was that he couldn't get legion right sorted and i saw him at an event three years later and i was like hey man how's it going you know how's the business whatever and uh he was like yeah just you know we're gonna start we're gonna we're definitely gonna start facebook ads soon and i was just like bro it's been three years like what are you doing you're like what are you like what are you doing you know what i mean like you it's just it you know what i mean there's different it's different for me if someone's like trying to figure out what the obstacle is versus knowing what the obstacle is and not doing anything about it that's that's the one that kind of drives me nuts and so i was like dude if you literally spent one day and just googled how to run a facebook ad you would be able to run a facebook ad by the end of the day like this is not a quarter-long solution like do it you know what i mean and so i say that to say a lot of people think they're productive when in fact they are busy and actually do nothing um and i don't know if it's it's their fault or whatever but um that is just an observation that i've had and seeing the company become more profitable and grow even while we contracted resources is um sadly uh reassuring or reaffirming and so it's just like you probably know if you're in a company of any size that like there's like a handful of people that you know that everybody knows because those are the people who move right like they're people in our company that i don't know who they are and i don't know their names and i'm like whoop they're like oh we let go of kelsey and i'm like who's kelsey and then now i've kind of been like well if i don't know their name that's why they got let go because if you're doing something i will hear about you they're like oh yeah this new girl in blah blah is killing it right i'll hear about it but if i'd never hear your name it's because you're not doing anything so anywho that's uh that's another one of the lessons i told you this would be a longer one and probably more encapsulated ah okay next one oh my god data management is has been the biggest mistake or has been has been the thing that i messed up the most in the last three years which is having a really good erp or crm that i run everything dude as properly set up and i this has plagued my business for three and a half years and i think it's actually been one of the things that has kept us um at 30-ish you know a million a year and we we just got hubspot it's expensive i think we pay 36 000 a year for it um but it's worth every penny it's just it's just worth every penny it's it's so funny because we were like man that's so expensive for crm i'm like do you think that the entire system and all the data of everything that you have is worth more than a frontline employee just one do you think it could provide value to everyone in the company disproportionately to one frontline employee well yeah it's like well like think you know think in relative terms um but now we finally are able to track from click to close which has been gosh the hardest thing in the world and if i could start all over again so if you are you know listening to this like invest early in really good data systems like it it will make your life so much easier and like i i genuinely conservatively can say that we've we've left 30 probably 30 million dollars on the table over the last three and a half years because of such poor data management and because of our tit systems have been literally the bane of my existence and so now when i start new things or i talk to new companies the first thing i'm looking at is what are using track data what's your crm you know are you on a google sheet you know czar is that how you're running everything great let's put the whole system in place so that's just a huge one that i feel like i now i got the i got the success from that and i've learned from three years of failures and so that was a a really big win for us um next one is uh three businesses you know i uh i shouldn't have three businesses that's uh continued to be a lesson of mine uh because we have prestige labs jim launch and allen it's been very hard for me not from a time perspective but from an attention perspective to split my attention like that um and so i think part of it is this was like a paired lesson in failure is that i think the decision was incorrect but i think that the lesson that i learned from it was it forced me to get out of ceo and into investor owner role and i think that was that was the gift of the curse the curse is that like i now know that i shouldn't do that in the future and so now i'm trying to figure out really how to run these as portfolio companies if that makes sense so that's that's been the hard part um and the thing is you can't like undo something like that you know what i mean i've got i've got you know 100 employees like i can't you know what i mean so that's uh those are those are mistakes that are uh you know jeff bezos says when i'm making a decision there's there's reversible decisions and irreversible decisions starting a company is in some ways an irreversible decision and so um it's not completely reversible but it does you know it it it's it's long and difficult you know what i mean if you want to try and undo that um which is either through a sale or you know whatever um or just winding it down we're trying to like somehow sustain it and systemizes so it stays at a certain level and doesn't require attention is also hard and so anyways that's kind of actually a lot of what i would say i struggled with in 2020 um that i've you know actively been putting solutions together for 2021 i'll let you know how that goes um this is a big one know what your game beyond the game is uh this is a really big one that i've learned in 2020 which is uh you know we've you know my wife and i have made a lot of money uh over the last three and a half years we took 35 36 million dollars out of the business just in direct distributions so that doesn't include like the actual value of the companies um and you have to know what to do with the money and i and i actively i'll tell you the thought process i had behind this which was uh my second year so in 2018 we took home 17 4 in profit uh so it's two years ago and while at that point i said well if i were to get 20 return on my money i would make 3.4 million dollars on the 17 right um so me working on my business makes me 17. so i should just keep working my business and ignore the money but at a certain point the kind of the lost compounding becomes big enough that that it can surpass your regular income and so you know if you look at what twenty percent of you know if if for example i had actively managed it and had thirty million dollars and done twenty percent growth it'd be 30 goes to 36 36 goes to 42 and at that point you're making eight million dollars a year and that's two years three years later right and so uh at some point you have to the opportunity cost of not managing the money becomes bigger um and so and it actually starts to take attention like a lot of my attention is getting drained on the fact that just this gigantic big stack of money that i was like what am i going to do with this thing right i don't want to learn the real estate game i don't want to learn the the you know hard money lending game i don't like there's so many different games for money i don't want to learn the private equity game so i spent probably 30 percent of my year this year on figuring out how to allocate money and i try to allocate them within our companies because those are things i have direct control over and i'll get disproportionate returns on which is you know candidly why i started prestige labs is because i had all this money from gym launch and i was like well what's an ancillary business to what i currently have that can provide value to my customers that i can use the same you know distribution based and shared services on that i can make you know that i can get a disproportionate return on and that's what started prestige labs and now you know two years or two and a half years later prestige labs is a good business it's a it's a real it's a very good business it provides a lot of value we paid over 10 million in commissions um so that's been really good um but it i i don't think it was the correct decision at the time but now that i have it um i am grateful that we have it so that's kind of the long and short of that one um but knowing your game beyond the game because it will it will distract you because what ends up happening is like once you start getting into that world you get sucked into it and then your actual business starts losing your attention that's where your highest return on attention is is inside of your business right is your income and growing it right because both your net worth and the cash flow from your business both of them like it's one of the it's one of the cool things about being an entrepreneur is like the net worth that you have in the equity of your business is usually larger than what you have pulled out of your business actually most times it's larger when you pull out your business and so um that's that's kind of you know interesting uh and so for me uh trying to figure out how to allocate those things has been a priority so before i get the question i'll just tell you this is this is what i have uh invested my money in uh this year uh first we have a a whole life insurance policy cat high catch value up front you have to be really careful about the people that you work with this because they can totally screw you and they are incentivized to screw you and most insurance agents will not want to hear that but they the the commission structure that they have for these policies is insane um it destroys the the cash value that you earn from these things so uh if you decide to set up a whole whole value whole vet cash value whatever insurance policy uh one go with the big four so that's uh guardian new york life northwestern mutual and uh umass or mass mutual excuse me so there's the big four they've been all around for over 100 years you know new york life's been around for 183 years they predate the tax code the reason i did that is because it it basically creates a bank account for you that you can use you obviously pay costs in the beginning but you can basically loan against the the cash value of the insurance um and the cash flow guarantee is you know it's guaranteed growth at about four percent a year and so if you just compare that to a traditional bank account where you're losing money um this at least uh covers for inflation right and so uh that allows you to at least park the money in a way that's not devaluing itself and if you do see opportunities you can loan against it and invest in those things so that's the first thing that we did if you ever do one of those you should be able to break even by year three to five at most if it's designed properly they'll tell you that no that's gonna it's gonna sacrifice the long term blah blah of the of the thing i think that's horse when you when you compare it to the present-day cash like the value of having your money available to co-invest at the same time is it's not even an argument in my opinion uh it's also how corporations and banks uh and fortune 500 companies structure it so ask so look into coley and boli which is corporate owned life insurance and bank owned life insurance if you want to see how they structure it because they know what they're doing and so that is how we structured it so that's number one number two uh we are investing in b and c class multi-family uh apartment units syndication so that's big apartment buildings the reason for that is because i think i think single family might get hit hard in the next few years because i'm looking at like you know seven-year timelines i actually think that i mean who knows i won't even make my prediction because it's there's no point um but i think that that asset class has outperformed other asset classes and if people downgrade their living standards because of some kind of recession because i'm really much more about downside mitigation than i am about getting the upside uh because my upside's in my business so it's really like where can i park money that i know it's not going to go anywhere and so i take inferior returns to know that i have no downside or less downside and so uh parking money in b and c class real estate has been um one of those those places uh through syndicated deals um the third place is uh i have index funds so uh that's uh indexes of the entire market because again this is one of those things that i don't want to think about and i'm not trying to stock pick uh because this is not how i make income like this is not this is the thing that everyone is like man i could get better yeah sure you get better returns if you're a daily trader but you also have a business so are you going to learn that game and be better than the biggest institutions in the world that have you know zillions of dollars to literally destroy you maybe but probably not and so what you can do is be really good at your business and provide good service and probably good value and make more money that way and then be willing to take the non-premium return you know of active management and basically make money on your on yourself twice because you're making money on income doing your thing and you get passive uh from your investments um i have a five percent uh hedge uh in crypto i don't really like speculative things but the only reason i have that is because uh if for some reason the dollar gets devalued and for some reason we lose the world currency that would uh probably greatly appreciate in value and would the reason it's a hedge is that i'm not trying to make money on it i'm only saying that i'm putting five percent there so that if that happens that will probably 5x if that were to occur which would offset the losses i would have in basically the majority of my investments and so um that is my that is the conclusion of my investment strategy um and what i am focused on um outside of just value creation the business because that's actually the fastest way for me to increase my net worth okay uh next one if you are financially done you must have a bigger purpose so that was one that i learned this year is like um you're like i mean i shared my numbers transparently with everyone um i we need to um like it you have to you have to sound stupid you have to really like what you're doing um and have a purpose beyond it otherwise like the money starts being meaningless and it like it just it doesn't incrementally change my life in any way you know like think think about it like i know this sounds crazy but just like imagine if buying a lamborghini for example was one week's paycheck well what do you do after you buy lamborghini the next week right and let's say you buy a crazy house and that's like five weeks of paycheck well then what do you do with the other 40 you know five weeks of the year's paycheck right like it you know a steak dinner you know like is is not that expensive in the relative term of things like if i ate a steak dinner two times a day or you know went to capitol grill and spent 200 at three meals a day even right that's 200 000 a year um and that is crazy for sure but it's also like within the relative scheme and this is where like uh this is where the ultra wealth part starts to get weird is that like if you have 10 million dollars and you grow by 15 that's a million and a half dollars a year and it gets bigger and that's what's like it's you can't eat it you can't like i still eat chicken and rice like it's not you know be like nothing i eat bagels and i eat the the cheap deli meat from the supermarket like my life hasn't really changed you know i have a nicer camera now there's a thousand dollar camera you know but um you really have to find something that that i'll put it this way i have found that i must do work that i find meaningful and that is what gives me purpose in life is that what i do i find the pursuit of that endeavor meaningful um and the actual process itself enjoyable and so that is one of my my bigger takeaways from 2020. laila and i spent more time together this year than we ever have and man it was um the best thing about this year was my marriage got a lot better not that it was bad but it just like we're just really good and the whole year has been great um which was definitely offset by the craziness of the of the world and i think maybe that's maybe that's why we came even closer together um but really focusing on the marriage has just made my life more enjoyable um even though we actually made less profit this year than we did the last two years um and so yeah that's that's that one um i did make one good decision this year um we actually developed a whole crm for gyms for the same reason bringing up is that you need to have good data management um and i spent a million bucks on this thing and uh i realized that i couldn't have four businesses uh and so i pretty much just killed the project and i just wasted a million dollars so uh i make lots of mistakes just so you're aware uh lots and lots of mistakes um but that was a good that was a good decision the starting it was not a good decision but not doing the business after i had made it uh was a good decision even with the sunk cost which was hard another one is entrepreneurship comes in cycles and seasons there are seasons of heavy work and there are seasons of there's seasons of reaping and seasons of sowing and i think recognizing that there are cycles is really important um and there's even seasonal cycles which sounds crazy but now this is like the fourth year uh for our fifth year you know that we're going into for us and every year i'm always like i feel like january through june i'm like we're on fire you know what i mean and then like by december i'm like we suck and we shouldn't be in business and we're horrible you know what i mean and then like january comes again and then it's like everything explodes and so uh i you know i've now i come to recognize it and i prepare the team for it and i think now that this is like my fourth or fifth cycle through it um i'm more steady and so that's been um i think a lesson in seasonality i was talking to brandon from weighty uh weedy loss ladyboss uh weight loss and he talked about the same thing is that he he and i started around the same time and he realized the same thing is like doesn't matter what we do we are somehow also subject to the cycles of seasonality uh and they always have their you know q1 is always the strongest quarter uh why because people are more motivated in weight loss when they're going into summer going to spring and just started you know i just had valentine's day and new year's eve so there's like all the reasons are all right there um you know once once it's august you know or july it's not usually a huge you know fitness month and you know a lot of my business is correlated to fitness and weight loss so that was that one um ah three year life cycle of products so the average product or service has like a three year life cycle and um you know jim launch has had to innovate it's i would say product suite twice uh so we started with kind of like the whole six week challenge thing um and then we transitioned to kind of higher ticket hybrid bootcamp packages um and right now we actually sell the same packages but the acquisition system is different it's all outbound based uh because that's actually where the biggest arbitrage is right now meaning we can buy leads and get sales basically our roi on time is highest there and so we just continue to see the cycle of you know and you kind of get into these transition points where like a new opportunity opens there's another one's closing and then you kind of have to like readjust the product and jump and that's always just focusing on like what's working best right now another one is having multiple acquisition channels and streams is really valuable now that we have outbound you know like i teach the gyms what i'm doing with my own business uh having outbound has been really nice uh it's it's stable it's much more reliable it's slower for sure to grow it took 90 days to really get it right for us um it definitely doesn't take nearly as i mean for gyms like we already have the whole system but for us to start from scratch and build the whole team and figure out how to find the data because like it's not just trying to find weight loss like a lot of people are overweight not a lot of people are gym owners so there's you know it's different um it's b to c versus b to b but we had to figure out okay where do we find the data how do we clean the data how do we create these lists you know what software do we use to cold call what's the script what's the hook what do we say on the opener how do we train the team where do we recruit from how do we compensate these people how do we set up the sales process is it a two-step or a three-step like all those things are things that we had to figure out from scratch um and it took us about 90 days to figure it out so but now that we have it it's actually really great um and it's just really cool having two things that are really firing side by side between inbound and outbound um i wrote this one again but simple scales and so simple like really trying to figure out at all levels the simplest solution not like oftentimes the best solution is not the best solution because it is more complex and the simplest solution though it might not be the best solution becomes the best solution because it is actually able to be realized and so that is a lesson that i have learned in 2020 more so than any year is like we have made our product suites simpler and more digestible and immediately actionable and we're getting better client results now than even when there was like crazy facebook arbitrage and that took time you know what i mean to just learn that because i would say like a year and a half ago we had so much stuff inside of our product that's like it it could be so perfectly customized the thing is is that it was overwhelming for the majority of clients and so trying to to to rectify the complexity versus simplicity equation uh you know you kind of have to find the the middle ground and the sweet spot for what's going to serve the most people at the highest level and so that was just reinforced this year and honestly right now we're doing we're i'm i'm more proud of the jim launch product now than i've ever been which is pretty cool for me um another one is that you can make the right decisions and be wrong and you can make the wrong decisions and be right and so this is really hard from a learning perspective because let's say for example i bet my life savings on uh black at the at the at the casino right if it hits black was it the right decision probably not and so i may be rewarded for poor decision just like i could make a strategic bet in business that for all reasons was the right call and then covet hits right and then all of a sudden that's not the that wasn't the quote right bet but it was the right decision given the information available and so uh things change there are market dynamics and so i instead of beating myself up over decisions i think if all i had was the the decision-making criteria that i had available to me at the time the information available to me at the time was the decision that i made the best decision and what i don't want to do is unlearn good habits right because we're constantly you know evolving and growing as entrepreneurs and so not unlearning good habits um and and not reinforcing bad habits that have good outcomes uh is is is something that i have focused on a lot this year and so sometimes there are short-term trades that have long-term uh outcomes and i think this year was actually much more of a long-term focused year for us ironically with all the craziness that was going on um we put a lot of foundational stuff in place that i think is really setting the stage for 2021 so pump for that um and i would say my there's there's more to this but i'll i'll probably end on this note which is um understanding an expanded time horizon has been immeasurably valuable for me and this is one of those things where you hear it all the time right um but it doesn't become real for you and i feel like it became real for me this year which was i'm independently wealthy i don't need any more money for the rest of my life if we grow our current net worth at 10 a year will be worth 700 million dollars half a billion dollars by the time i'm 60. and so that probably means i won't need anything i could stop working now right and that allows me to think from a slightly different perspective but the thing is is that i think the reason that the rich get richer is because it allows them to think from this perspective and so the hardest thing is trying to get yourself into this and so i'm making like this is if there's anything that you listen to in this entire video it is what i'm about to tell you if you can expand your time horizon beyond months and even a year or two you will be so much better off if you expand your time horizon beyond just a month or a year and actually start thinking in five year and ten year terms you will be so much better off and i think there's there's so many reasons for that one is when you bet on long enough time horizons you can virtually get rid of risk and if you can make risk fee risk-free guaranteed upside then why would you not make those bets the reason warren buffett said this he said no one wants to get rich slow right but i would rather get rich for sure than get rich fast and lose it right or or more realistically for many try and get rich fast for my entire life rather than just saying well if i just did this for 10 years i'd be guaranteed to be a millionaire and i think that is the issue and i think that's the problem that the world has and that's why most people will never become wealthy is because they cannot delay their impatience they cannot delay their gratification and so for me when i'm thinking about our businesses i'm now really thinking like do i think and this is because i've been reading a lot about investor stuff and i'm like you know private equity firms will come in and their goal will be to double a company you know uh in in five years right double a company in five years and i think about that with like gym launch and there's so many times where i'm like oh we got a double this year why didn't we double but if i'd said like we just got a double in five and made the plan for that the plan would look so much different and also so realistically attainable that i think we'd probably over perform that but what it would do is eliminate the needless frenetic energy of of oh we gotta do this now we gotta uh you know like craziness of the shifts and the turns and and like sure there's always things that you have to adapt in the marketplace but it just gives you this steadiness as a leader and when you can look at a five-year goal but like i've never even believed in five year goals as a from a goal perspective but i think of it in terms of a timeline perspective of like how am i measuring myself like when i think about where i was five years ago it's it's not it's like not even comprehensible and so i mean i hope to have that kind of difference five years from now we'll see but i think that if i can take a more steady approach a more disciplined approach to growth and to value creation within the company everything that i've read about you know value-based investing um and how you know companies do turnarounds which is really valuable if you ever want to get into a reading topic look at you know by buying and buying and flipping businesses because you look at what they're looking at in the business is what they can do to improve and so you can basically come in with fresh eyes to your own business and think like what would i do if i were buying my business fresh from day one today which is actually a really good thought exercise and so i've kind of walked through that process and the things that i would do are different than what i'm actually doing and so by expanding it to an investor's time horizon i feel like i'm making much better decisions and i have much better perspective and um it's been it's just incredibly calming because i think the reason that entrepreneurs you know the double-edged sword of us is that we're emotional people we you know we ah get so excited and then we have all these ideas and we want to do all of them and the reality is that you can't you just can't you can't even do you can't even do most of them you can do a very very very small percentage of them and when a private equity buyer for example comes in to try and buy a business and improve it they will i'll tell you actually you know i'll tell you what this has been really enlightening for you so i'll tell you what what they do so the first thing to do is to create a hundred day plan um and the objective that hundred day plan is to align uh the economic interest of the management with the fund who and the investor who's buying it right and the way they do that is they first figure out what their uh primary two to three kpis are going to be that's it two to three and then they figure out how to accurately and meticulously track those things so typically you know uh investors are known for you know cutting costs and increasing profits that's like a standard thing that they'll do um but they increased the cost on it and reporting and diligence and so for me thinking about that it's like okay that just really shows how important the data and reporting is which is kind of what i was alluding to earlier and so they implement a lot of erps and crm systems that they already have you know test and whatnot to get the tracking in real time around their kpis now the number one kpi that they track which i found incredibly interesting which we don't track which is wild is excess cash flow and it's crazy because that's the thing i care the most about us as the owner is what am i depositing my bank out every month but uh as financials become more sophisticated you look at your profit and your ebitda and like all the you know your p l and you have to offset revenue based on contract terms blah blah blah blah right but all i care about is excess cash flow and it was ironic to me that the most sophisticated investors you know in the world some of them right uh the thing that they care about is the thing that i care about which is just how much cash we putting off you know and they have different reasons for that because they can serve a step better they can get better leverage which means they can get better multiples and blah blah blah and they get better returns um but for me thinking about that is something that i'm going to be reorganizing our business around which is how can we and aligning the incentive of the management team around that that kpi and so that's what they do in their first hundred days and then after that they only create two to three focused task forces right small teams that can be held accountable to um big domino operational objectives that will provide the most value in the the that have high probability of success they'll provide the most value to the business and so that is it and that's what they do and they just ruthless ruthlessly manage around those metrics and i think about that and what that means is they allow the management and leadership team to run the business rather than metal and i think that i definitely have a tendency to meddle because i like doing things my way and i want things to sound a certain way and blah blah the same things all of us do and um and it's not it's not been it actually hurts the business and so um because it removes consistency and so if we can create consistency of operations it creates it creates less waste right so you can be more efficient it creates a more consistent experience for the customers and so it allows us to make more profit from less waste it gives like i said more value and it allows us to just focus on a couple of things without feeling the constant overwhelm so i actually think that our team etc itself would be happier um with this type of approach and so that is how i'm kind of shifting my my perspective on our our businesses now because we have three of them um uh in doing that and so that's been really cool um i've also uh taken on um a number of small companies that i'm working with so companies that are doing one to five million dollars a year um that are uh either uh you know consulting service uh knowledge education based businesses or uh niche brick and mortar businesses um that you know have the desire to like franchise or scale uh nationally and so those are it's just because that's that's the businesses that i know intimately um and so i'm actually working with some companies there um and that's crazy for me because if you think about from an investor standpoint um i have a company that um i just recently um became an advisor to and uh they'd been at half a million dollars a year for two years i think um and now we're doing uh 150 000 a week uh six months later right so that's from five hundred dollar fifty thousand dollars a month to six hundred thousand dollars a month right wild uh so pretty pretty cool um very exciting um and uh i'm just i'm just pumped pumped about the future i think 2021's gonna be a good year um i think there's a lot of cash on the sidelines uh uh savings across the entire united states like went up a ton uh which means they're printing money and people are holding on to it which means that when people start spending that money we should see a a boom overall um i do think that you know as we have an entirely democratic uh president you know all three houses or whatever uh branches the government are all democratic i don't think they're want to not look good and so i think that they're going to pump the economy as much as they can which will be good in the short term and we'll see in the long term as much as everyone's really worried about the inflationary effects which is definitely a concern there's also really strong deflationary effects going on right now too uh so i also think that the people who who are running monetary policy are probably more knowledgeable than we are it's literally what they do uh for a living full-time um so just something to consider there uh but yeah that was uh 2020. i have um i've i've i've had a i hope you enjoyed this is different than the normal types of podcasts that i make this is kind of the the top of mind the things that have been most meaningful for me um and i'm i think i'm in the best mental place i've ever been um which is cool for me i'm not a particularly i would never have described myself as a particularly happy person um but i'm i'm i'm pretty close to happy um i don't really like the word very much um because i think it's it's really misleading but i'm i'm really i'm really i'm pretty fulfilled uh i really like what i do um i think i'm good at it so i find that fulfilling i find it challenging i love the game of entrepreneurship and i'm very grateful to to be able to play you know i really am and um i'm going to leave you with one thing uh that i so i talked to my 18 year old neighbor right and uh he's having a hard time uh he's got more stuff that's happened since the last time you've heard a podcast from me just personal stuff and you know he's he's having trouble with the sacrifices that are required for entrepreneurship you know he's young he wants to have fun and and and the thing is there's nothing wrong with that it's just the question is how bad do you want what you claim to want you know everybody wants a six-pack it's just that they want donuts more right they actually want donuts they they claim to want a six-pack but they want donuts more right and i think that that you know analogy is the same for business like he wants to be an entrepreneur but it's hard to see your friends partying and having fun and living you know their their youth youthful lives without you and it's easy to rationalize and say like well i should enjoy my youth and i'm not saying you shouldn't i'm really not um i just know that if you you know the sooner you start investing in skills and i'm not saying he's gonna like investing in skills is the thing right what he does to invest in the skills is irrelevant but investing in skills is how he gets there and putting a disproportionate amount of time towards developing those skills will allow him to you know outpace the competition being you know everyone else right and i said something that when i was 19 was a huge epiphany for me so i'm just going to share it with you um i was dating a girl for two years uh in college and she was very very obsessed with happiness it was like it was her major it was positive psychology as her major and she was really obsessed with happiness and she ended up being um an amazing person you know what i mean but i think at the base um a relatively sad person and um and i know that when we split up and during that time because you know people rub off on you i i had become really really interested in happiness how do i optimize for happiness every does this make me happy like all this stuff and i think happy's a horrible term i think it's a horrible term i think it poisons so many people you know um and i remember you know because you you're kind of emotional when you're younger and uh probably we're emotional or older which is better hiding it but uh when we split up uh she and i and i and i had these habits of you know reading all this positivity stuff and blah blah and and i just remember going to this place where i was just like happiness i'm just gonna win and that became my new kind of operating standard i was like happiness like i'm just gonna move i'm gonna take so much action that i don't have to think about it i don't have to think i have to be alone with my thoughts right i'm just going to keep moving and i'm just going to keep getting better and i'm going to keep making progress i don't care if i'm happy and a weird thing happened um once i stopped obsessing about happiness i actually think that i became more content because the thing is is i was constantly measuring myself before that to this what i would say you know what consider an unrealistic expectation of the human existence and uh always finding myself deficient and so the desire for happiness creates an unfulfilled expectation that makes me unhappy and disregarding happiness gives me permission to not give a and if i happen to be happy or enjoy a moment or or find fulfillment in my work then it becomes above my expectation and so i have a positive experience and so uh one of the biggest things that i have worked on and this is what i was talking to my 18 year old neighbor about was the only reason that you were upset right now is because of a fictitious expectation that you arbitrarily made up in your mind that you are not reaching that you made up it's like if i said i wanted to gain 20 pounds of muscle in seven days and then was upset that i didn't gain 20 pounds of muscle in seven days because i worked out hard it's the same thing right i was like you want to be a millionaire and you're 19. i was like do you feel like it's reasonable that you think that after two months of beginning your entrepreneurial journey that you don't earn above the top one percent in the united states like do you feel like it's reasonable that after eight weeks of not being in school that you are not in the top one percent it was like when you say it like that and i was like right but that's what you're thinking you're thinking like that right and so this kind of goes full circle with what i was saying earlier about having the extended time horizon if we can extend our horizons then we decrease our own expectations and by doing so we increase our fulfillment by default because we expect less or nothing and while we increase our fulfillment during the process we actually get better faster and that was um what i have him having him focus on is like why don't we say what's a five-year goal that we believe is reasonable and let's make it action based all right so instead of i want to make 400 000 a year in five years why don't we say what skills will i need to have that would allow me to make 400 000 a year and then what actions would i need to take to acquire those skills that would be reasonable even with poor talent that i would achieve that and so for example we determined that lead generation and sales if he wants to be an entrepreneur would be valuable skills and so i said okay how do you think that we can go about guaranteeing virtually that you will have those skills he's like well you know reps and i was like right so how do we get reps in and how many reps do we feel like are reasonable right i was like if you make 25 000 calls this year which is 100 calls a day um it's just 500 calls times 52 weeks right you think you make 25 000 calls would be you'll be able to prospect and get business he's like yeah i think after 25 000 calls that would be reasonable like cool great so that's one year next year what do we do do you think after if you took you know you know 20 20 high ticket you know calls a week over 52 weeks you know a thousand high ticket phone call closes you would be able to be at least proficient in sales he's like yeah i think i could do that like okay we still have three years left on this on this timeline but i can tell you right now if you can generate leads and you can prospect for your own thing and you can sell at high ticket amounts you can make 400 000 a year no problem but we're only two years in what else we're going to need he's like well i don't know what i'm selling i'm like that's great so then we have to develop a skill that's valuable right and so at that point i was like i'm not going to make that goal right now we're going to develop these first two and then after that we're going to go develop the other ones and so um i hope these kind of anecdotes about my my 18 year old neighbor are are useful for you um it's really it's honestly been one of the it's honestly been one of the most rewarding things for me um because i feel like i get to live i can i can help someone not you know suffer as much as i did during that process and really shortcut the the whole path to success um anyways i love you guys for listening um this is i you know i appreciate those of you who find this valuable uh this is really just my mental diary for myself so that i can look back you know and maybe maybe hopefully you know in in decades to come i'll i'll be among the billionaire bros who donates their their life life's net worth to some meaningful cause uh and they'll be like dude you gotta listen to her moses old stuff um and so hopefully that's what these are so anyways um i appreciate you all uh i'm focusing on simple i'm focusing on longer time horizons i'm focusing on finding good people i'm focusing on getting them focused on just a handful of things and just driving those and doing living a boring but steady business life and trying to come into it with no expectations and and being pleasantly surprised about anything that happens and so that is that is my outlook and i know that the world has been rough uh my recommendation is to turn off all media um it i turned off i removed all the media from my phone uh because i thought it was especially overwhelming and i realized that my life was really the same without all of the news so uh hopefully that's valuable for you and i know that the news does not make me more money and i also know that the news does not help me prepare for what is to come independently because i think to myself well what would i do differently than i'm currently doing if these things were to happen and the answer is nothing which means it's not really providing me value and if it's like well i need to stay informed if there's anything major i'll find out i don't need to go surf the news to go do that so anyways 2021 i think it's gonna be a good year for a lot of us i think a lot of people grew a lot in 2020 and so as a result their businesses will grow in 2021 like they personally grew i personally grew more in 2020 than i did in any other year um and i think that we're gonna we're gonna i think the result of that is going to show um in 2021 so uh keeping amazing and uh keeping awesome lots of love and i will catch you guys in the next vid bye [Music] [Music] [Applause] you