The EXACT FRAMEWORK I used to grow a $46.2M business in 3 years….in 70 minutes

Summary

• To scale a high-performance sales team, focus on recruiting, hiring, managing, incentivizing, and driving high performance, leveraging experiences from inbound and outbound sales strategies.
• A business needs to become independent from the personal brand of its owner to become a sellable asset and reduce channel dependency by utilizing avenues like outbound sales.
• When selling a company, consider the reality versus expectations in terms of reputation, money, energy, and headspace; often, life post-sale may not drastically change and the perceived freedom may lead back to the desire to work or create.
• Develop an org chart for sales with clear career progression to reduce turnover and boost motivation, with roles such as BDRs (Business Development Representatives), SDSs (Sales Development Specialists), and BCs (Business Consultants), organized in a hierarchical model with advancement based on performance.
• When attracting sales talent, provide clear paths for advancement with the opportunity for significant income based on merit, highlighting the potential for rapid growth in earnings.
• Implement a beta process for product development by identifying common customer problems, collaborating with top customers for solutions, testing with lower-performing customers, and reporting results to drive innovation.
• Transitioning from active CEO to a business owner involves giving up control in stages:
  • From $0 to $1 million, give up fulfillment and customer service roles to focus on growth.
  • From $1 to $10 million, stop being the primary salesperson and build a sales team.
  • From $10 to $30 million, relinquish direct control of marketing efforts.
  • Beyond $30 million, move from leading to decision-making, allowing others to lead while providing resources, capital, and networks.
• If stuck at a current revenue level, identify what control or roles you're holding onto that need to be delegated to enable scaling.
• Understand that as you move from being the CEO towards the role of an owner or advisor, each stage requires a shedding of direct responsibilities and transitioning to guiding and supporting leadership in charge of various business functions.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest focusing on the key roles that need to be delegated to scale a business. When you're trying to grow from $0 to $1 million, prioritize stepping away from order fulfillment and customer service. This move allows you to concentrate on bringing in new customers and growing the business.

If you’re aiming for the $1 to $10 million mark, it’s time to build a sales team. Stop being the main salesperson and learn how to recruit, train, and manage others to take over sales roles. This way, the business isn’t dependent on just you for revenue.

For businesses looking to grow from $10 to $30 million, relinquish your role in direct marketing. Find experts who can innovate and execute successful marketing strategies without your constant oversight.

Beyond $30 million, transition from leading day-to-day to advising and decision-making. Allow others to lead while providing them with resources, capital, and connections to thrive.

If you feel stuck at any revenue level, reflect on which responsibilities you're holding onto and need to pass on to someone else. Identify which stage you’re at and focus on giving up control in that specific area.

A good way to apply these insights is to create an org chart that outlines career progression for your team members. This can help reduce turnover and keep your team motivated by showing them a clear path forward.

When attracting sales talent, highlight opportunities for significant income based on merit to lure ambitious individuals who can drive sales without your involvement.

Implement a beta testing process for product development. Gather common customer problems, collaborate with top customers for solutions, test with lower-performing customers, and report the results. This approach not only fosters innovation but also enables the business to run independently of your direct input.

Always keep in mind, the goal is to create a business that can function as an independent asset, adding value to your net worth while generating stable cash flow.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"Operators get burned out, business owners get rich"

– Alex Hormozi

"We buy and we build and then we refinance"

– Alex Hormozi

"You only have one outcome: You have to sell the business"

– Alex Hormozi

"You have to give up the leading which is difficult"

– Alex Hormozi

"You have to learn how to close, you got to learn how to teach other people to close"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

85 million a year and i was recently invited to taki moore's masterminded keynote for his eight figure and up group and it was a really fun discussion and presentation that i was able to give i was very humbled to have been invited and we talked about two main things that those business owners wanted to know so if you're not at that level this may not be for you but we talked about two things the first was how to scale a high performance sales team so among our portfolio companies i think the biggest team we have in those companies is a 26 person sales team so we know what it looks like to recruit hire manage incentivize and drive high performance sales we've done that before with inbound and outbound sales meaning cold calls versus taking you know phone funnel type type inbound leads through applications so we've done both of those and the other was more high level so the conversation is kind of split into two pieces one is focused very very sales focused and the second is focused on what i would consider high-level observations of entrepreneurship of things that we've learned lessons beliefs that have served us well um in creating the portfolio company that we have so uh if you don't know who i am i'm alex mozy i own acquisition.com i hope you enjoyed the video uh so this is alex and layla power team uh they run a portfolio of companies uh probably many of you guys know them from their gym launch days and times uh team what i'd love to chat with you about is scaling legion with um with outbound uh and then uh let's talk about uh scaling and exiting dude can we talk about outbound because a while ago like when we first met you were like the king of the ads right yeah and then you then you weren't and the ads kind of disappeared and i want to know kind of what i don't want too many people to know that though are we allowed to know that or you don't no no no no we're we're cool everybody here we're under a friendly a that's my understanding right friendy a yes 100 for india if you're cool with that can you type friend da into the chat it means everybody's officially signed so um i think i think it would it would serve everyone to do a little bit of backstory in terms of why like why would you even start something like this right because you're like i'm already killing it on facebook and going on tick-tock i've got youtube guides going et cetera i will say that i'll tell you why i started which will probably lead into the second half of this story which is what um i i told taki was like i want you to talk about this and i was like i really want to talk about this and he was like okay well how about we talk about my thing first and then we start with your thing yeah so um uh two years ago legal and i uh you know we were we were you know the we at that time only had two businesses we had gym launching prestige labs one is the supplement company one is a gym licensing company and the company at that time was doing about a million a week and we just finished our best month ever and we're walking outside and she looks at me and she's like i don't do this anymore she's like let's shut it down and i was like well uh okay uh maybe um let's you know let's see if we can get anything for this right so i just immediately was like i just agreed i was cool i was in tons of pain as an entrepreneur just you know doing all the things and um anyways i called up a friend of mine who was in space and he was an investment banker he had sold similar companies and i was like hey these are our numbers like what do you think we can get for this and he was like holy he's like you get like 250 million if you just finish the next 12 months at this rate and i was like 250 million with an m he was like yeah you did 17 million profit your second year like yes i can yes we could do that so look at later i was like well you got 12 months in and she was like i got 12 months for 250. i was like okay let's do this right and so that began what became a two and a half year journey um that eventually uh resolved in us selling the business and so i want to walk through kind of that process and the first year of that was us realizing that we didn't actually have a business we had a big guru brand right um at the end of the day i was at the events i was the one who made the products i was the one who did the coaching calls every week probably something that some in a similar spot that some of you guys are in and so um the the biggest kind of weakness was that i was inextricably linked with the brains that was number one number two and this is what i'm going to focus on first and this i'll hopefully tie both these stories together is that we were we were channel dependent all right and so we were selling uh gym owners right so business owners so we're not in like the online fitness space we're hardcore brick and mortar the i talked to a couple of bankers a couple private equity firms people that i knew through the network asked them for people and i was like what do you see as the weaknesses in our business like how can we make this better and the two big the three big things they said were churn uh in terms of how long customers stayed they said my name being the brand and the fact that we were channel depend on instagram and facebook and that was it and that was 100 of our of our sales sales point and so we kind of set out to to fix that and so um i'll just talk about outbound since that was the channel that we chose to be our next thing and it was because i could never get youtube to work in my niche um you know if you're a little more mass i think it's maybe i'm a it's very possible but i couldn't get it to work um we have seen tiktok working as a side note but for today we'll talk about outbound so the outbound process takes significantly longer than most people expect that being said it's part of the reason that private equity and potential acquirers will value it is because it is this sturdy machine because if tomorrow facebook ads shut me down it doesn't matter because if i literally have a phone we can make money like a phone which is crazy like the concept is still foreign to me and so i want to tell you the sales numbers so that you can have perspective in terms of how long this took so the first month we made one sale the second month we made two sales the third month we made four sales i like whether the and mind you this is months so you're like 90 days in at this point you're like we've been putting effort towards this etcetera right and so one of the key differences to note with manual outbound whether you're doing cold calls cold emails cold text whatever it doesn't matter which like the primary way of doing it we do a combo and i'll get to that in a second um is that every aspect of the funnel that we do digitally is the same except it's purely manual so you have human variables that contribute to every step in the pipeline right so we did two we did four uh the next month we did uh i think it was six or eight uh and then we jumped to uh 12 and then we jump to 16 and then we jump to and you'll notice that this isn't uh quadratic so it's not exponential what you will see there is that it's more linear in nature it's because we continue to add so our price point is between right now 20 000 is the cheapest thing we sell which is a great point bill so thank you for bringing this up if you want to do outbound your ticket has to be at least 15 000. like the the the uni economics don't really work i guess they do i just prefer to have lots of margins but in theory it should be 15 times a 15k or more right and so for us our lcv is 40 000 at current right now it's gone up but when we started this the ltd was 40k because i started this in corona for brick and mortar jibs because we're brilliant right so if you continue this thing out um it took so we're now we passed we're at month 14 from when we started and now uh 14 months in uh it does about 45 sales a month which for us is roughly 60 of our sales volume so we we we hit the halfway point and now we're a little more than half um in that industry yeah it's probably better than me pretending to draw i'll get to my drawing thing in a second or you'll be able to do it better so i i wanted to set this as a precedent because i had two different times where my leaders came to me and were like dude should continue to do this and i just remember looking at them and i was like this is why no one will remember your name um i'm kidding i didn't actually say that um but but i was like guys as long as we are seeing progress through the funnel we have to continue because the end goal is i either have to own this thing for the rest of my life which is okay or and i need to do it without it being dependent on a single channel which i should do as an owner regardless and that'll feed into the second part of the story or or we'll never will never be able to get out of this or or exit it either way because you have to exit right every you know we have to sell and we're either selling it from our old self to our new self we're selling it from our old selves to a new acquirer but either way we have to get out of it um the channel dependency at a certain point if you're below 10 million i don't think you need to worry about this but once you're you know once you're at 10 million i think adding the second channel is important in terms of the uh tactics around this understanding the organizational chart which creates the sale and the actual process of the sale is kind of where we should start so there are three different roles in our sales system all right the first is we have we you know different there's sdr bdr the whole point is that it's the cult it's the first touch point it's the outbound person sdrs and bdrs i think we call them what do we call them little bdrs i remember whatever yeah yeah i think we call them bdrs so and this is an important point for everyone it's good that you leave this this three the three lines because this is cool because there's going to be more detail in each of them so we've got bdrs as level one level two we've got sds which is sales development specialist these guys qualify the leads and provide the value that the original person was promising the third person is what we call bc so business consultants and these are the closers right we technically have a fourth for we have another team that does all of our ascensions um that sells the the 40k product but this is uh and it looks like a christmas tree if you were to look at the org chart like this right you got the base of bdrs who feed half as many uh sds you then feed half as many uh bcs in this model if you replace a bdr mentally with what an advertisement used to do that's exactly how this functions the exception to this process compared to your uh uh inbound efforts are there's usually one additional call typically so what we do is that you we scrape lists off of google we have vas in the philippines enrich the data which just means that they make sure that these are real real gym owners that have actual facilities and these numbers work and these emails are verified um the actual like what software they use i honestly have no idea because the person who manages that team is too substantive for me but that's what they do from there bdr team calls this list through phone murder so phone burner is the tool we use we really like it it's it's been exceptional i highly recommend it those bdrs are required to make 100 calls a day the way that we structure this is that they get four hours to work per day all right and we purposely set it up that way so that we can have good sales people who want to who want a moonlight so they've got extra hours and they do call blocks the other reason is because the sales manager that i hired to build this entire team his experience was that people cannot be productive for eight hours straight cold calling he said if you give him eight hours of pay he's like they'll do five and a half hours of calls he's like so you might as well do four hours of pay and get three and a half and so that was an efficiency thing they are still expected to make 100 calls a day from those hundred calls they are expected to have two appointments that show now we have been doing this a long time now and each of these steps took like each one of the things that i just mentioned probably took two to four weeks to figure out where do we scrape the data how do we how do we enrich it because we're calling all these bad numbers right now that we're getting people to uh pick up which by the way phone burner wraps it with a local area code if you don't have that feature there's no point in using it like you need to wrap in a little gear code or your picker braids can be all right so from there you'll get your 100 dials you'll get 20 to pick up so it's 120 from the 20 we will have two who schedule and show i only know the two because that's the only thing we compensate them on all right and so the expectation is that they get two in the beginning it'll be one yes all right uh 100 to 20 to two what's the uh dumb question what's the 20 what's the two 20 is 20 uh pickups so 100 dials 20 pick up hello of the 20 to pick up we get one to two uh to to show uh and that's to show for the sds yep exactly now this is a good thing for you guys too is that every once in a while you'll get you'll get a savage and you'll know because they'll set five of them because if you guys picked up the phone and do it you could set five points if someone picked up you could probably set it up right but somebody who's newer the nice thing with the bdrs is it takes two days to ramp them up it's not a hard position to teach yes here's the list here's the phone say these words the phone calls are like five to ten minutes like they're not hard to train and if you have a big repertoire of existing calls which you will uh it's easy to just have them listen to those so uh can we can i be a gym for a second yeah oh i've never done the calls i have no idea do you have a rough idea what they say what it's about so our our whole pitch is basically like hey we've been calling some gyms in the area um they've been struggling with xyz you know biggest concern one two and three and so what we're doing is like if gyms don't exist our company doesn't exist and so we'd like to just give you some of the stuff that's working well for them is that okay this is from our private client thing which normally we charge for but we just want to help jim's out cool okay so what i'll do is i'll set you up with an appointment uh with sean tomorrow and he'll run through each of these systems for your gym uh so that you can insert dream outcome that you want which is get more leads make more sales charge more for it yeah awesome okay that's super helpful yeah right right and the bdrs will typically uh if they're good they'll look up the gym before they make the call um and so they can be like hey saw that you posted that thing yeah i'm calling you know from gymlodge don't worry like just want to help you guys out we're talking a lot of gyms in the area like tonality matters right like that's the stuff that the manager will teach them um but it's like this is a good well play for us it's like we just wanna help you out we're gonna give you some stuff no no strings attached they say cool and then they show up for the sds right now getting getting them to show for the sds it's like you got to get them to show sooner we need to make sure that the thing that you were giving them they truly perceive is valuable and this is probably one of the biggest things that i can that i can if i can this one took us longer to figure out is and i don't think like lead magnets and stuff like that is valuable like it's got to be like it has to be something that people really want in your space so even if it's something that's unscalable do it unscalable and then figure out a system to scale it once you get the um once you get the flow going right because in the beginning you're gonna have one or two callers it's not going to be a ton of volume i promise you um and then you'll you'll be able to figure out what's the thing that gets them to show up that they really want right can you get on i mean back in the day seo is sorry yes sorry dude can you give us an example of what a valuable not lead magnet useful thing might be i think we walk them through uh how to set up their sales room and the scripting that they use that that we get you know double the amount of people who sign up or whatever so it's a really valuable thing right and then it's like yeah you'll walk him through he can show you around blah blah blah blah and then amazing yeah the cool thing and they can sell the benefits like if you had twice as many people signed up and nothing else changed in your life would that be cool cool all right he's going to show you how we do it because this is what the top one percentage you're doing we should help you out okay loving the script we just want to help you out high valuable thing old school telemarketing rob nixon you love this sharon says stud so once we uh once we get them to the sds the sds's full requirement um is that they provide value crazy as i know is that you actually deliver the thing that they think is really cool now here's the key point is that we want to show expertise so the sds for us almost exclusively is ex-clients now we may be in a situation where you know our clients are able to do that like you have to show some domain expertise especially around this thing and the idea is if we can show a couple of like really in-depth nuggets that are like i didn't think about that while they're going through the process they're like these guys know what they're talking about and so what happens is we we terminate the uh the the value delivery and we purposely leave about 15 minutes at the end you know of dead time that we would transition to getting them set up on another call how long is this call i think it's 45. so it's 30 to do the thing 15 to set the next uh deal perfect the the sds is like hey you know i couldn't can i can i switch hats for a second i know i'm just here to help you out but and we purposely make that to change the the frame right we're trying to make a little little frame shift which is like i couldn't help it here when you were saying some of these things i couldn't like this this stood out to me this stood out to me this have you thought about these things because honestly i just showed you this little thing but that's like one percent of actually the amount of juice you could squeeze at your gym because like if we just did the thing that we just talked about you double your business but but like what about orders of magnitude what we can get to like 5x the business because right now you're running 10 margins and if we can get you to 35 we just three and a half extra take home income only by changing the way you price would that be valuable okay cool so do you know what we do because at this point we haven't talked about us at all so think about it first call all about them value second call providing value second half of that call couldn't help without xyz i don't normally do this blah blah do you know what we actually do and they're like no i was like oh shoot i i feel so stupid yeah so we literally help people just like you fix the thing that you just said you want with the thing you know by overcoming your biggest insecurity and fear and they're like oh my god that's awesome it's like you know we actually do this 100 gyms a month like we can we can walk like this is our bread and butter i didn't know you actually needed this i just wanted to provide this for you to help you out oh wow well okay let me see here hold on let me check with one of the one of our guys you got 15 minutes okay cool we're good um you're a business owner why don't we see if we can um uh set this up for you right now right let's be efficient with your time hold on one second so then we call the closer yeah we call the closer live and then they have a dialogue that's scripted but it's speakerphone yeah the person who's on zoom right now doesn't know that this conversation is scripted but they can hear both sides and this guy's like dude i'm super busy i got so many gyms i got to talk to um i got a hard stop and 15. i can maybe hop on um okay no this guy's really awesome he's he's a qualified gym no he's legit he's big enough for us okay okay you got to make sure he's the right size and that he's got the that he understands what we do oh yeah no no it's all good right okay cool then i got i can hop on for 15 minutes guy hops into the zoom makes the introduction and the goal here is not to sell them the goal is just to connect them and build rapport that's all it is because we could not get the s and this took us like two months to figure out we could not get the sds to show for the close calls like those the qualified appointments we couldn't get them they would set it but they wouldn't show up and so we tried doing three-way text we tried like we tried a bunch of things but if you do the face-to-face where they hop on the call then they're like yeah perfect well i gotta go in five but i've got you down for tomorrow four we're good to go and rock and roll right and just to be clear like this is no longer us giving you thing i'm going to explain how our services work our pricing and see if it's a good fit right and so they clearly set the expectation that this is a sales call and that i will be trying to close it and we're very clear about that yeah and it's cool because we just had two calls we provided value at this point we transition they show up the next day and it's and it's just like your inbound closing dude so here's the advantage to this there's so much more so here's the advantage to this model so four callers sorry sorry uh uh if you're looking at appointments right yep for us we close uh 10 of of scheduled sds so if there's two of these right two of those we close ten percent of those of showed uh set calls we closed ten percent so we closed point two uh in that example right yeah exactly and so for us the cost uh to acquire a customer from an advertising i'll use cold calling as the advertising here is they get they get uh they get 50 bucks for every show so it's 500 right so it's 500 bucks in in bdrs per close which for a 40 000 ltv is pretty cool and so that works out pretty well for us and so the beautiful part about this model is that it takes so the downsides are the upsides with this it takes a long time to build and it's and it also is impossible to break yes and i can tell you i sleep so much better as a business owner knowing that no matter what happens tomorrow we're going to close deals so this is the part that i think everyone needs to uh if you want to scroll up on this is the this is the the more genius you'll need a fresh page so i got you so this is a key point that is sexy as all right um who here would love to have a sales team system a farm for building sales people so we so my ceo uh was an ex-pro baseball player so we used the pro baseball player analogy a lot so right there in front of you you've and we even used that we even used the terms right so we've got double a we've got aaa and we've got the bigs right and so double a is the bdrs uh aaa is the sds's and then the biggs is like the big leagues right and so the key point here and this is like for those of you guys who are building 30 million like 50 like this is where this gets interesting for everyone right is that the the human resource training system itself becomes an asset to the business because we know that when someone works their way up from being a bdr all the way to a bc they know how to close because these people were never spoiled with inbound leads they got hung up on and cussed at and so you guys want to know an interesting stat our inbound closing percentage and we were considered pretty good at sales before this went from 20 20 to 25 to 60 yeah wow because they were they cut their teeth at the bottom yeah they're like this person knows who we are asked for help and wants more information they're like for real and so here's here's why this is important to titles so bdr there's four levels of bdrs you've got junior bdrs you got associate bdrs you've got bdr and you've got senior bdr and that same four step system applies to all of the levels give me the junior junior yep associate yeah the name and then uh was the top thing i just said um senior yeah so think about your highest churn positions right the reason that the positions are high turn is because they cannot see progress people lose hope when they run out of future right i think i dim or telstra that i really like that so they run out of future so what we need to do is create yeah we need to create future for them and so it's my belief that a sales person has like six to eight weeks of steam in them before they start getting disheartened and so what we did is that we created milestones which are those qualifiers on the right where if you hit a an objective qualifier you move up and so if as a junior it would probably be 50 showed appointments which will take you about eight weeks after that would be a hundred and then it and each one of these increases and you'll know for your business it might be a little different but the point is that you want to pace it so it's about eight weeks of production between each one now each one of these gives them a bump in title and a bump in pay the pay bump is virtually inconsequential we go from 50 bucks to like 55 bucks like it's not a huge deal but to them they feel like they're making progress in both status and they have an objective measure of their of how well they're doing now once they move their way through this and then imagine this you're a new employee you're getting trained up and then boom eight weeks in you get a promotion you're like oh nice i'm doing well this is good and then they gain some steam and then boom dude eight weeks later they're like hey i'm a full bdr you know i mean like this is great i got another raise once they get to the top of this ladder this is the key key nuance you don't get promoted you get the ability to be promoted yeah this is when you get to here senior yeah yeah once you're a senior bdr you now have the ability to be promoted the benefit of this is it also eliminates all the hr conversations for i want more money we're like here's the path that's it this is the career path it also helps people become career sales people for you so if you have issues of churn for your sales team this gives them a like this is what my career path is here's an important point you probably heard what i said about the bdrs they do not get paid very much they don't they're they're on target earnings if they hit all the commissions is 40 grand yeah right now how do you attract someone who can do this job well for 40 000 you don't you attract them because they know that the guys who win the lottery make 200 grand a year [Music] and they know because they have a clear career path in front of them that if they hit their metrics they could get there in nine to 12 months yeah so i'm like what job in the world can you go from zero to two hundred thousand a year in nine to twelve months with no degree here you can because we're pure meritocracy and the numbers don't lie and so at the sds level it's the same exact thing jumer sds uh uh associate the just the word and then senior right so we have each of these levels and there's tiny bumps in comp for each of those and they really should just be almost symbolic more than they are significant because like the title is more important than the cash but the cash just goes okay and because you yeah yeah exactly yeah honestly you could probably get away with this without even changing anything but i like i like to give a little something and then they feel like there's there's some stuff ricky's got a question if someone's level if someone's results stopped or their levels dropped yes okay so you can go for something associate or whatever you have to you have to continue to earn your position if you if you drop below qualifiers you drop down you go back to aaa just like baseball you go back down yeah yeah they get relegated exactly it's exactly that and the nice thing is because of this everyone knows where they stand so it cuts down some of the useless communication of like pay and what am i doing and how well i'm it's like dude it's right here everybody can see it right and it's built like this christmas tree because they see the top closure and they see their checks they're like that could be me right and they know they get they're counting the weeks until they can get there now when we start scaling because we add more bdrs it trickles up the tree and we're going to need another uh closer and so we look at the guys who are who are qualified to be promoted and we pick the one that we think is going to be the best fit and they get bumped they get bumped up to the bigs and then they and then it's it's tried out like they've got two weeks to show us if they can close if they can't close in two weeks they drop back down they get 10 deals everyone's curious you get 10 deals to try you don't close one out of 10 you're out realistically should close more but their first ten they gotta close them yep and the reasoning behind that is i i've run and trained and scaled a lot of sales teams i have yet to find a killer who doesn't close in the first two weeks yeah not once yeah tons of guys who start hot and then fizzle but no one who starts cold and then gets good what are your uh qualifiers for sds and well bc's clearly say you know deals done sds is just bc it's it's qualified shows yeah so they have to they have to qualify them and they have to get them to show that's that's really it yep because for example in that call if they can't get the person to be like yeah tell me more about that and they're like nah i'm good then they missed it right and so that's why the domain expertise for the sds like lots of really cool little like if you have two or three really good nuggets that you always know are awesome weave it into that conversation and they're like and you're like dude this is like this much this is like my fingernail of how big this is like you should like the fact that you didn't know this it both worries me and excites me for the opportunity that i think you have in front of you and honestly i'm not qualified to talk about it but this guy who's got a dick bigger than shaq and you know cured cancer by age six and help 5000 people just like you be better than who you are like he can help you let me see if he's available he really never is he's always booked let me check and then and then he does the thing yeah i love it so we've talked about uh we've talked about this we've talked about that yep uh bc call um my hunch is it's closer framework yeah can you just give us like those yeah yeah so um we use i i like to teach a really simple simple acronym both most you guys on here already know how to close so you know i won't bore you with it but yeah you could use your own or if you don't have one you could model from this there might be something you could steal yeah so we make sure that every script follows close receive points um it's always a question-based framework so we like questions because people can just like say get off into jupiter and you just ask them another question that brings them back um each of these is kind of a milestone along the path so c is clarify why they're there right it sounds obvious right but it's like hey so i know you you know you wanted some help with the sales thing i know that provided some value to you i know you talked to john and he showed you a couple more things so like why did you decide to take all this time like what's what's important to you about this like why are you not getting what you want like why'd you even take the time to show up this fall right and then they're like well they're like well i wanted more information it's like you just get information all day you're trying to solve some of the information you know because that would be that would be a smoke screen right like right so as soon as we get it then we nail them down and we label it which is l so it's like okay so i hear what you're saying this is the reason you show up for the call so i just want to be clear that if we achieve this outcome for you you would be happy right you would be like you guys rock i love you awesome you can imagine that okay great okay so you've wanted this so we go to oh which is overview your past pain right we call this the pain cycle so we're like okay so you've wanted this for however long and what have you done so far to try because you seem like a pretty you know well-to-do person you seem like you've got some work ethic so i'm sure this isn't the first thing you know first phone call you've hopped on so like what have you done so far they go through it we said got it how'd that work for you what was good what was bad whenever they say something good we say totally and we agree with it if they say something was bad we're like oh that's terrible and we disagree unless there's a limiting belief that we need to pop before we get into the close yep then we go right back to the beginning we say what else have you done and we keep going until there's nothing left or like god i can totally understand why you'd be frustrated at this point because it seems like you've done a lot so i feel like you've got a lot of pieces because the goal here is to make them feel like they're six inches away and they need one link to be successful totally right yeah dude you've got all these right things in place you're so close i mean gosh i feel like like you've got you're this close to hitting your goal so you've done all this stuff this is what you want this is why you're here do you want to hear like i think you'd be a good fit for the program how it works and they say yes we get permission and then we go into s which is sell the vacation so the reason we call cell vacation is that a lot of most people here already know this but a lot of sales people will sell your program right which is the plane flight they're selling tsa airbags take your shoes off weigh your mass get vaccinated don't get vaccinated you know sit next to the person who fires you on the plane you're going to get terrible peanuts all of that and they're like yeah but then you're going to get them out and people were like it's like you got to sell them out you got to be talking about the trees and the wind and what it's going to be like to feel and experience that the status increase they will have amongst their peers as a result of this this decision they're like got it okay and when we do the solid vacation we typically will limit it to three main points and i think it's just consuming attention span isn't that good so you probably do tons of stuff we do tons of stuff we only talk about three things right talk about get more customers how to make it worth more how to get them buy more times that's it right and these are the things that we're gonna help them do and we give a relevant analogy to those things so uh you know we just you wanna have a quick anecdote that's 30 seconds or less so if i was selling a a coaching program for whatever accountability might be one of my three things and i'd be like okay well and this would tie to whatever the thing they struggled with in the past it's like you know i signed for stuff but i didn't really get it going or i was struggling to like do it whatever like totally understand it's reasonable what do they do to hold you down when they're like well nothing it's like well then that's not your fault they didn't want you accountable of course you weren't successful that's not that's not you right so let me ask you a question when you were a kid did you uh did you love brushing your teeth at night and they were like no like did you go like oh my god you know they drag you out of bed you brush your teeth right and they kept doing that over and over every night you gotta keep doing that could you do that do you brush your teeth now as an adult they're like well i mean yeah not a disgusting you're like yeah so what that was an example of is you could have external accountability that turned into internal motivation and that's exactly what we're going to do with you here in this program does that make sense great we don't talk about zoom calls we don't talk about support we don't talk about power like don't talk any of that because that doesn't matter they just want to know that something external is going to get them to do something internal forever so we give them an anecdote about that and so this is important because this is the only thing the sales guys have to memorize besides obstacle overcomes the rest of this is is questions that they can always refer back to all right so for ramping up sales guys faster question-based framework not scripting this has just been my experience it's easier to teach people i i haven't found in my experience the super scripted stuff is best for like 20 minutes super high transactional sales like 200 sales and less but that's probably not what anyone here is selling so for everyone else question-based framework kind of a diagnostic approach we follow this e is explaining with their concerns which is like got it this is the thing that makes sense would you be would you be opposed to moving forward today because it sounds like a good fit um then they're like well i wouldn't be a pleasure before today you're like great and if for some reason they say yes what we do is we do the exact same thing every time which was we make some sort of concession which is a bonus and then we say fair enough because all we're doing is concession reciprocity fair enough and people don't like to feel like they are not being fair it's a very human thing is reciprocity's super deep in us and so if someone's like i don't know if i can do this like how about i throw this in yeah three times like okay it's got to be fair enough by now right and so we explain with our concerns which you guys probably already know you've got spouse slash decision maker you've got price and you've got uh delay which is i need to think about it i need more information i got to sleep on it whatever and so for each of those rather than give you the things that we would drill our sales teams on uh a decision maker close is going to adhere to the principles behind getting someone to understand past agreements which is does your spouse or business partner know that you are struggling with this yes do they want you to continue to struggle with this no why would they be against you fixing something they already know you're struggling with and they don't want you to keep struggling with so we're relying on the past agreements to go into the present and then we they're like i guess you're right and then we usually will tag in hey sometimes you better ask for forgiveness information fair enough right and then we will close them that would be for a decision maker for a um for a uh if it's by the way if it's b to c you can usually get away with uh what if they say no and honestly you'd be i'd still blows my mind you were like i'd probably do it anyways you're like then let's do it so you know so it's rock and roll like but if it's if it's b to b you probably going past your grades and then uh and then usually if you have some sort of guarantee or some sort out clause of like three days or five days if you you know get back and your business partners and usually we'll make a joke here hey you get back your best partner says hey man i want you to be poor i want your kids not to have anything i want you to live in the worst neighborhoods i don't want you to have generational wealth i want you to just pass on a spirit of poverty to all of the things that spring you know fruit from your loins if that's if that's what your business partner says like totally understand and we'll just tear this up but if he's like nah man that sounds good then we'll rock and roll right and if he does say that first thing you get have him give me a call and i'll talk to him fair enough great there we go so decision maker we've got price which is always anchored around value this is usually more that you actually have to close on the sales guys not the prospects i'm gonna be really real with you we don't drill price stuff that much we drill the sales team on their conviction so has anyone here ever had like a client event and had all these people there and get testimonials and like your sales team was there yesterday right well i'll bet you for the next couple weeks your closing percentage is going to be sky high i could tell you that when i had my brick and mortar gyms i would do weigh out days which is like when challenges and stuff would end and people would be losing weight and crying and all that stuff i would stack as many sales appointments as i possibly could while the layouts were happening yeah because my sales team was just watching people just hit their goal and hit their goal and they're like dude just sign up like they would even go through a pitch they're like i mean what do you have to like just sign up like it yeah and they reeked of conviction and the funniest thing in the world for everybody here is like understanding the theory behind sales is that you have a person who has conviction and then you have another person who has no conviction and everyone knows that sales is a transference of conviction right it's a transference of belief and the bridge of that is trust right and so the real intention is that we must make sure that a salesperson actually believes and you'd be amazed at how many times they don't really believe in the product yeah and one of the things that is important to understand is it's not a binary it's not do my sales guys believe in my product how much do they believe in my product hey alex yeah this is epic okay and you know what i love uh i said i'd like you to talk about this and you said no i want to talk about that and i said well let's do both you've done a really good job of doing what i wanted to talk about so um i like talking about sales no i get it uh in a minute what i'd love to do let's just do the third objection to kind of close the triangle here and then let's do a quick q a and then let's talk about scaling and selling is that cool yeah um so last ones uh i need to think about it and so for most people they don't know how to make a good decision they're afraid of making a mistake and so we like to be as direct as possible which is like let's toss best best case worst case this is what happens this is what happens because tell me what your deepest darkest fear is right is that i take your money and xyz that you think is gonna happen is it gonna happen but not only that let's be real your husband thinks you're a failure because you spent money again right your friends are like oh here she is again you know or here he is making another business program thinking he's going to make money right that's what the real pain is right it's not the money i mean sure but the thing is that the money's going to come back right because you're not going to go homeless and even if you do go homeless i've got guys who've lived outside my building for 25 years not starving still good so you really have nothing to worry about right but the real thing here is that we need to make this decision so do you know how to make the we have a decision-making framework here can we can i share with you sure so first question yes or no do you think that we can help you solve this problem yes cool do you like me or do you want to work with us as a company yes cool do you have access to the amount of money that is required to start yes or no if it's yes yes yes let's rock and roll because the end of the day you don't need more time you need more information to make a decision and i'm your source of information and i can do this all day feels like you've done this once or twice this is i'm making this a good uh okay sheila just wants to know the r in closer is just reinforce their decision that's a great one so close was actually my my acronym for like two years when i was teaching and then after really looking at it as the beginning of the customer journey yeah uh we transition to having instead of a hand off it is a handshake between sales and customer success and so the point here is that the moment they close the moment the card goes through they're going to have immediate remorse and so our goal is to totally reinforce the decision personalize video from the next person be like hey just got off the phones john i hear it and this is an important point from an operational standpoint it's like hey i heard you're trying to retire your wife i think that's amazing i heard they were trying to get to ten thousand dollars a month i think you're gonna blow that away you're gonna do such a good job so just to give you a heads up tomorrow it's me tammy forgot to introduce myself and we're gonna be walking through xyz so that we can help you get your your wife retired as fast as possible cool really excited to see you i sent you an email with all the details too see you tomorrow right and so now they're like okay this is a legit company i just got you know i just got off the phone you know the phone thing and an hour later i get this thing i'm like okay this is cool i feel good about this decision and that's what we want them to think i feel good about this decision and we're like great and then it decreases the the the cold feet and walkouts and backups and all that good job tammy i'd love to know one thing you learned one thing you loved any follow-up questions let's do it right now and then we're going to switch gears so one thing you want to kind of nugget you stole and any questions you've got lots of exploding head emojis uh what's the comp at each level well let's scroll up here for a second i wouldn't i wouldn't give you hard and fast what i'll give you is ote which is on target earnings cool uh and that's what that's also what we present the sales guys so this is the number of opportunities if you're getting if you're doing 100 and the nice thing is that here's the cool thing with outbound is that it's reliable ads you've got some days you've got more somebody's got less maybe this campaign maybe it's not outbound it starts with a constant you make 100 calls yeah and everything after that is is just formula right 100 calls means means we should get two people to show two people show we should get uh five of those iterations to get one deal and so forth and so if you're getting this many appointments per week this is relatively the amount that you should be closing by percentage right if you close less than this so if somebody's closing let's say 25 or less they get up they get bumped down right and so for us the the guys who are the bigs they make the on the on like if they're doing great they make like 225. yeah they are target earnings range breach that's probably yeah 150 to say 120 to 220 is the range there for a triple a or at the sds they make 60ish and that's a much tighter range probably like 55 to 70 you know i mean like but i don't think anyone said this it's like 55 to 65. it's a 10k range and then uh and then the uh the bdrs are like around 40 grand helpful so you can see how they're shooting for that yeah yeah yeah see it and what they're like how long does it take the answer is right in front of them on the right that's all it takes yeah what i love about this is you're thinking in uh quick achievable win levels and um maria just said love eight weeks probably the same for our clients something to think about yeah uh jackson says where are you finding these people the homeless guys out the back that he talked about before yeah a candidly uh one of the big bottlenecks in the business was finding that and i found out it took me i made a whole youtube video about this but uh basically my team was screening way too hard um for bdrs and my sales manager didn't know and so we're like no no just let them all in and we'll see how they do because the cost because it takes two days to ramp them up and we don't really have any cost per lead yeah i mean besides the data scraping which is not that hard and so we just let them prove themselves because it doesn't really cost us anything to have them work leads yeah love it uh yuri's asking did you consider cold outbound email instead of called calls yeah i'm pretty sure phone burner has a follow-up email uh and text thing that goes with it but i'll be honest with you guys like the phones are the thing that that drive it 75 of it comes from the phones yeah i love it okay so alex when i said hey could you do a thing about a thing and you said yes uh you said i'd rather talk about what i thought i would share with you guys if that's okay with you is a couple of the kind of key lessons i've learned in this process so i started this process because i was in a tremendous amount of pain right and i and i i ran out of future i couldn't see uh a world where i'd want to continue to do this for the long haul right and i think i heard this from sharon and i love it is that operators get burned out business owners get rich and i was still ceo and that was the thing is that as much as i felt like i wasn't doing anything now two years ago i was 100 doing things but this year uh as we transitioned out i went from just making decisions to not really make just to just reviewing decisions which is kind of what we're doing now and so the reason that we got the offers that we did in my opinion um is because we fixed the house and when you fix the house that you're trying to sell does anyone ever try to sell a house and like you fix all the things that they say are wrong with it and you look at the astral like why are we leaving this place this place is awesome have you ever done that yeah well the the biggest lesson that i feel like i've taken from this and i have i have two pages of lessons that i took i documented through this process um is that you only have one outcome you have to sell the business but it doesn't mean you have to have another acquirer you can sell the business from yourself to yourself yeah your own self to your new self and i also got a greater understanding of how the debt system works so if someone's going to buy your business for a big amount of money they're not actually going to pay for your business right they're going to put 30 down like you do for a house and then they're going to get a bank to finance the rest right you have a house that you own 100 in cash you can go to the bank and get the 70 mortgage on your house and just take the money in the us at least tax-free jackson's nodding he would know the aussie so he's nodding he's like yes affirmative and so the point is is that in my mind two and a half years ago the only possible outcome that i could do to get out of pain was to sell and the thing that i had to sell was unsellable and so the thing that we build has to be sellable that's just my conclusion it has to be sellable or you'll eventually burn out and so if you make it sellable then it actually sits as an asset on your personal net worth balance sheet and it continues to provide cash flow um i had so many stories that i would you know that like the story of the sale for me was like i need a big sale to to be legit some of you guys may laugh at that you're like you're doing 85 million here but in my head i was like well and then i had a friend was like dude you've already sold six companies i was like yeah but they weren't like as big as this he's like you really think that matters i was like huh and then it was like what about the what about the story of of the money right about the increase in net worth well here's here's an interesting one for you say you have 100 million dollar sale right everyone talks about it it's so amazing well most of the times it's not 100 million right what it is is they'll probably give you you know 60 million up front and then you'll have a 10 million dollar seller note that you finance for five years and then you'll have uh you'll have a earn out right for another 20 million uh that if you hit y and z over the next year or two right or earn outs can be as long as they want right um and uh you're gonna roll another 10 in equity right and so all of a sudden this 100 becomes 60. but wait there's more so now we've got 60 million well you probably have some bonuses that you want to give to your staff you're gonna have a broker that you'll probably have to pay three or four percent to so let's let's do it so four percent of 60 now we're down to 57 right uh and i'll just wrap in some of the bonuses on top of that uh depending on how your your equity structure if you're 100 whatever then you have your capital gains tax you have an escrow fee so capital gains for us in the states at least is 20. so now we have 20 off of the you know let's say 55 after the escrow that would be actually a size that big would probably be more like 50 after escrow uh 20 that would be 40 million so now your 100 million dollar sale is 40 million bucks it's not as cool right at least for me like hearing how how it would break down and so i try to be as transparent as possible because like there's the there's the story of the sale that we tell ourselves and there's the reality of the sale because here's the second part of it i talked about the money side but what about the attention headspace energy side because that was another story i was like well if i sell then i'll be able to go do stuff that i really you know i'll get all this attention back and all the stuff right well one the amount of stuff they want you to do is gonna be directly proportional how much stuff you're doing now so if you want to sell the business you got to do it in a way that you're not doing anything and if you're not doing anything then why sell the business yeah and so for me i told myself this story but the reality was they wanted me to show up for quarterlies and be available for the occasional uh like strategic like hey can we touch base about something which is exactly what i currently do yeah so then it's no longer so it's not a question of money because if you're selling for that amount of money you've probably been making money for a while right so it's not going to materially change your net worth unless you're in software in which case it's a different you know game but for most of us here who sell service businesses of some kind you're probably pretty high margin pretty high cash flow and you probably have a decent amount of money after you get this kind of downstream impact of what's actually going to be added to your net worth then the question is what am i going to take with the 40 million and buy that's going to create me because if you're selling for 100 you're probably doing 15 million in in profit right so what am i going to go buy with 40 million that i can get 15 million dollars of profit every year from that i don't have to do anything for right and so i had the story of what the sale was going to mean to me in terms of my reputation which was completely living in other people's eyes which was useless and irrelevant and not true i had the story of money which is this is going to be a big change in my life but when i looked at all the numbers i was like this will change nothing about my life in no way like nothing because unless you get into another stratosphere of wealth yep like it nothing's going to change right so then it goes into the energy and headspace i was like okay well i'm doing the same thing before as i am now and so thing by thing there's the story of what we think it is versus the reality of what it is and so um the the biggest thing that i feel like uh has been my biggest takeaway from this is that when i've looked at and i have a big thing on private equity lessons that are really cool too but it's probably running out of time um i learned from the guy who lives above me so the guy literally lives right here he does 3.8 billion a year in in revenue he owns his company 100 outright and he does 26 net margins privately held that means he took home 935 million dollars in income last year the secret to success he said i've been doing the same thing for 40 years four years and so what i feel like i i continue to witness is that the wealthiest people in the world and i'm i'm stealing this from charon because they buy and they build and then they refinance so you don't need to sell and the only reason that you would sell is because you think the party's over you think that this thing is no longer going to be a thing anymore long term yeah but if i make a bet that gyms are going to be here in 10 years which i do think gyms are going to be here in 10 years right or your business whatever the spaces is going to be there in 10 years well then what's the reason for selling so and i got this from my closest friend because he was like what problem are you solving and i was like well when i started this process i was in a ton of pain he was like okay are you paying down i was like well not really he's like well what do you think is going to happen post sale he's like it's he's like the sale he's like match the conditions he's like what does your life look like after the sale tactically yeah is there a way that we can make your your life look this way before the sale and keep the damn thing yeah and so then we started looking at it from can we match the conditions and so if you can do that then you we build the thing instead of a really high paying ceo job we now have an asset that is sellable and can can carry debt on our balance sheet income tax free that we can then use to go invest in the other stuff that we want and as the company grows it pays off the debt and you have the thing that you're getting the debt who's continuing to grow as well if that's what you want all right dude i got i got two thoughts in my head i just want to throw them to you and you can do something with them or not yeah two things i see happen a lot in boardroom is people hit their you know their number it's not 100 million often but it's that you know like it's like the dream they've now hit it and they're like well what the hell do i do now um so that's a really common thing and then the other thing uh talking about exit not exit is really interesting but one of the things you've done to um to get exit a ball is to take the name off the door yeah totally so the name off the door i just want to prepare everyone is like it's like a three-year process so it takes a lot more time than you think it will this is i would just share the things that worked for us all right so uh layla's just said we have no youtube strategy honestly alex just likes making videos in as a great teacher yes that's thank you leila i'm packing the strategy yup that is a strategy um so first thing is we edify customers uh into specialists and the key nuance here is that we don't make generalists because generalist means they can replace you and you actually either have the problem of having another face that's not yours or you have the risk of that face walking but either way it's either a face that doesn't make it sellable which is the same weakness or you have a face that becomes a threat to the business right either way it's not good and so we make siloed experts which we call subject matter experts that specialize in a specific thing so you might have somebody who's really good at sales somebody who's really good at lead nurture somebody's really good at add buying something he's really good at pages whatever the thing is so that you can have people tag those clients and they become kind of the the customer support but like with special specialization beyond that you take some of the better customers you have who want to exit their business and just love your brand and you say hey would it be cool if all you did was talk about this all day they're like dude this is all i want to talk about anyone like i don't like dancing anymore i want to talk about dance right see um and what if we just helped you just help our clients better and then they become the head of product right because if you think about the things that we're probably doing you're probably an expert of some sort so you need to replace the products expertise so first you got to get a person then you get the process the process around this is called the beta process every single private equity firm that we talked to loved this process so you can write it down i actually learned this from management consulting the way that it works is that if we need to solve a problem so there's always a problem to be solved right all these ask your customers there's plenty of problems right so ask them these are uh problems your clients have problems is that what you're talking about yeah yes and then they can upvote the ones that are the most salient to them you take the ones that are the most that are that are plaguing the most people and then you say hey who here is doing really well with this and then you get you you draw uh draw a line and ideally it's depending on the client size for us we look at the top one percent so we've got a thousand locations top one percent is ten people so i want a group of ten to twenty that are in the top echelon so cut the percentage wherever you want to get 10 to 20. and then we do a round table and so the benefit to them is that they get to kind of get a bonus mastermind with you for free in exchange for sharing all their secrets yep what we do then and this is the qualitative process is that you write down everything that each of them says step two is that you reorganize the notes and find the common commonalities and the point here is not to do all of the things they do but to do the things that all of them do and so a lot like the list that i had for reducing churn was like 180 items between all the guys but the one thing that the five things that all of them did is the only five that i took to make the solution and so once you have that you consolidate the solution and then you take the guys who are the bottom 10 percent and some middle guys and you say hey i have now productized the solution and you deliver it the same way you would to your customers which is through a portal and blah blah you don't do anything actually because if you did then it would up the results you say i need you to go through this and we're going to report back in 30 days right you can you know have a cadence with them you know once or twice a week whatever you then measure the results here's what's cool about this one is if it works you just have something that delivers tons of value and you didn't have to generate it it process generated it which means it's not you you're not the guru you're not the face a process drives the innovation yep the second thing is if it doesn't work you still report it because every entrepreneur would love to know failed tests yeah i would love to know if this headline worked at this one even if it didn't i want to know because then i don't want to try it and so it still provides value even if it doesn't work because you proved it didn't work so i just want to share that with you because if some of you guys do experiments and they didn't work share them it's valuable so that's on the product side right on the the marketing side we slowly introduced other people in the ads until eventually it was just them in the ads right and then additionally we obviously started the outbound team so that we had multiple channels so there was like name was one issue which we solved by getting me out of the inbound and then channel dependence was the other issue which we solved through outbound right and so those were the you know those are the two solutions uh on that now i want to share something that i think is more important than everything that i've said so maybe you can unshare the the thing for a moment um when when when i'm sharing the things that are working for the outbound team you can't do it like you can't do it like if you get to a certain point if you're at 10 million or 15 million like you can't do it you need other people and you you can't hire people with the intention of training them to do the thing it's not hey we need to build an outbound team together it's i know that you built two outbound teams for similar type products as me i need you to do the same thing here here's some really favorable upside potential for you uh and i need you to build it from here and i'll give you all the leeway in the world i'm incredibly patient as some as long as i see progress yeah so i have very low patience if i see no progress if i see progress you can go as long as you want as long as we're making progress because i know we will eventually get there and so i think that if you use that as a frame of mind that we're not looking for people who know how to run but we're looking for people who have already run an olympic gold and want to run another one and i'm telling you if you find the players you will be able to build something significantly bigger and this was a breakthrough that took me way too long to learn and it sounds stupid because it's so trite and overstated but like you need to find champions and you got to pay him well and it will be worth it and there's a book i don't know if layla put it in there but there's a book called uh the motive which is a one-sit read it's 130 pages with big text and it it fundamentally changed me as an entrepreneur and i really think everyone should read it because you can read it in an hour and a half and it will change the way you see operating a business because at the end of the day it's just an assembly of people if you want it to be a business if it's you with a thousand helpers it's not a business it's just a really high paying job right and so you got to get people who can do it i know it sounds stupid and it's obvious but like that's the belief is that and i was stuck at mid 30 million for three years and i had mark ford who wrote ready fire aim write his book and he said that the thing that you get stuck at thirty and i like skip to the chapter where he had 30 million as a breakdown and he said if you're stuck here it's because you're the only one that's you're the juju you're the steam you're the fuel behind the growth of this thing but at a certain point there's only so much that one person can push it you get the fourth level of infrastructure in the business and they don't know who you are they don't know your vision they don't know how you do things because they're so far they're so far three levels you're okay fourth it's an organization it's it's beyond tribe right um and so i was going somewhere with that uh when i hit when we hit 30 and i read the book he was like you need to find other people who can own their own p ls and become entrepreneurs within your company and what happens is it becomes a shift from being a business to being a conglomeration and so if you think about amazon they're not amazon's not a business right it's a business of businesses it's a collection of businesses that serve a purpose right and so i had to shift my thinking in terms of how mine worked to we have a number of business units that operate off of one shared spoke of shared services we've got it hr legal finance all in the middle and then we've got profit drivers that drive revenue across the business units and the people who drive those are responsible and compensated based on the growth of their business line or their product loan and so then you get people who can start making 300 grand 400 grand a year 500 a year if they crush it and they should because otherwise they'll just start their own version of your business and so if you can give them that you can attract the entrepreneurs um who want to drive growth are really good operators who just have a little bit less risk uh you know tolerance yeah that's epic so that's the so that that's that really goes for any of them so like outbound if you're going outbound or you're like man no one can never market like me there's somebody who's better than you yeah that totally is it's it it's bad for the ego and good for the business um so dude can we talk for a minute about um about i don't know what the word post exit post exit not even post exit but like post i've hit my number what yeah i'm bored what's my new role uh you know who am i what do i do that's stuff just for a couple minutes yes so i made a video on youtube about this how passive income was overrated and uh it was because we had completely replaced ourselves in the business and it was still making a lot of money and uh and then we started acquiring other pieces of businesses and whatnot and those have continued to cash flow and i was like what do we do like we have nothing to do all day and so i think what i messed up is that i continue to pursue freedom right because that's what all of us here at least i did is freedom was the goal right um and i thought that it was freedom from work when when in reality what i should have done was freedom to do things that i wanted um and for me i want to work and it took me a year to give myself permission to work again because i always thought that if the business relied on me it wasn't a business and i was doing something wrong and that was a story that i was telling myself and i love working and i think that if all of us achieve the levels that we have right now it's because we love working we love doing this and we still have this dream of this exit in our minds but it's not it's i'm just it's it's a it's a farce it's not true and you wake up the next day and all you do is you know and there's just an another blunk of money there and you're like well i mean you can only go out to so many nice dinners and nice restaurants and nice shows at some point you're like i gotta do some and so like i would say that you don't need to go through it because i spent the last months nine months doing nothing and being bored out of my mind and wondering why i even existed and then it just eventually gave myself permission to just do the things that i like doing and if it just happens to be that it makes money great and for me and again i got this from shiran because it's been it was um so good but like the things that light me up are buying and building is it's expansion and so you know if we end up selling i don't know they gave us the offer this morning maybe maybe not um but i do know that whatever it is it's going to be the decision will be aligned with what i am building next yeah and if i think that keeping this will help me build that better faster stronger then i will keep it if i don't think that and i will tell you this is when i was contemplating the sale i i could not see past the decision because it was an unmade decision it was like black it was like i lost my vision i couldn't see past this unmade decision because it was this variable this huge fork in the road in my life i immediately and i you not i immediately knew what we needed to do to grow the other company to 30 million in ebitda and what we're going to do for the new company because i'm still building the next company no matter what um and so i think that the season that i just went through and i feel like it took me two and a half years um was transitioning from ceo to owner and it took a lot longer and it was a lot more emotionally difficult a lot more emotionally difficult than i expected why identity you know um i mean layla had a conversation with our team yesterday like it's so nice that you guys are gone did you say that to them or they said that to you no they said it to us they're like i don't want to offend you guys sorry thanks i thought it was like i'm so great not having you guys in my life sorry no i just thought it was interesting because it you know i think both alex and i had always prided ourselves on you know for me it was like i have to be the example i have to be working my ass off doing more than everybody else so that they you know because they're all a players and so i want them to see that i'm doing the same yeah and i was talking to one of our our guys who's really stepped up and he's one of the you know one of the highest ranked people in the company and i check in with him once a month rather than you know the because he's not the ceo or ceo and um i said like how can i support you how can me and alex help you know just want to know at the end of the call he said can i be really honest with you and i was like yeah he said it's really nice not having you guys around he's like yeah he's like you know everyone feels so much more creative you know they have to be way more self-reliant and all of us have to be able to step up so much more since you guys have stepped out and so we're just growing so much as a team we're so much stronger and i was like man like everything that you do to get to like 90 of the finish line the last 10 requires you do the complete opposite yeah that's fascinating so everything about every entrepreneur every level of entrepreneurship based on my observation my personal experience has been it's it's relinquishing control or at least the perception of control and so you know when you're when you're at zero to a million you're giving up can you force yourself alex because here's what i'd love to i'd love to do and i i think you're going there but i just want to yeah i want a mind meld so we've got this journey and we've got the you know the zero to one and then we've got the one to what's the next jump is it three ten ten perfect and i say it's like 30 to 50. it kind of depends on the company perfect and then we'll go up from there a lot of the people on this on this line right now are kind of in this space and we've got some in in this space but can you just do like top three for this for this space right here yeah to get past the million you have to give up um everything with fulfillment so customer success customer fulfillment right yeah exactly life fulfillment you have to keep up your phone um i mean that's the that's the the the key part you're also giving up if you're going one to ten you can't sell anymore right you need someone you need a team of people who are selling on your behalf so it's you have to not only be able to sell you have to teach people to sell you have to know how to recruit sales people you have to know how to manage sales people you have to know how to send sales people um and continue to get them uh performing right and that's a different skill right we know how to sell how many people be like god i close these people so easily and no one else can sound like me it's like it feels good but you're still way poorer than somebody's got 20 sales guys closing for so like just get over it like there are people who are better than you at closing because all they're going to do all day is close you're still running a business yeah so you got to stop selling it's my opinion that 10 to 10 to 30ish is you have to give up the marketing you have you really have to get beyond that and then at going 50 plus you know 30 to 50 plus it's like you have to give up the leading which is difficult right and the zero to one i'm just i'll throw it in there for fun it's like you gotta stop doing then you go to managing and then you go to leading and then you go to decision making um and so you could say leading and decision making decision making is above leading that's kind of the ultimate i would say exit is that people are making decisions on your behalf oh my bad i got this thrown around alex would you say for 50 plus because this is what i was thinking i was making a present like this the other day and uh i think for 50 plus you go from being the leader of the company to you lead like the one soul leader but you're actually just the resource yeah you're a guy you're just a guy you're an advisor yeah you provide capital and you provide connections network vendors that's what like pe does that's what you know the big guys yeah this is great so can i just say something to cap this real quick is that so if you're stuck right now you have to think what do what am i holding on to that i need to give up great question and when you're giving away control i'm not saying okay well i'm not going to be involved in sales anymore it's like no you have to learn how to put a good leader in there who knows training systems who knows how to recruit who knows how to hire and knows how to send you know how to keep culture and build a team that can that can work together right those are a lot of attributes and you know your skill is how do you find that person because because each one of the skills begs the next skill you have to learn how to close you got to learn how to teach other people to close right then once you have other people close you got to learn how to teach lots of people to close and maintain them then you got to learn how to recruit a sales manager who knows how to do that right and so each of those are kind of the levels and they also mirror if you think about it they mirror the levels of of organization in the chart right if you're doing it then there's there's this is you if you're managing it's one right if you're managing a manager is two right if you're now leading this you you're leading people who have business units right it's it's three right so and then finally you know you're advising and you're letting other leaders lead directors who have managers and customers and so right now i think this is our fifth level of hierarchy uh within the organizations and so they now function as assets that produce cash flow yeah mini innovators a million this is so great