What Millionaires Know That You Don’t

Summary

• Entrepreneurial success is not solely about strategy; it's about execution. Two businesses in the same field can yield vastly different outcomes based on how their owners execute their business plans.
• Speed of growth in business often stems from pattern recognition, not just in strategies, but also in recognizing patterns in people.
• Understanding what an "ideal scene" looks like for different roles is crucial to scaling a company effectively and quickly.
• It took me a long time to find the right executive assistant because I didn't know what the ideal scene looked like. Once I found it, I realized how invaluable it is to have the right person in that role.
• When hiring for roles like director of marketing, sales, or finance, it's not just about the job description but also about knowing what a high-performing individual in that position looks like.
• Speed in scaling a business is directly related to your ability to pick the right people and recognize when someone fits the ideal scene for their role.
• Mistakes will happen in hiring, but every top performer I've encountered was noticeable within the first few days. I've never seen someone who wasn't an A-player from the start turn into one later.
• Decrease tolerance for mediocrity to avoid wasting time on people who won't help grow the business.
• It's essential to understand the roles you need to hire for and to decrease your tolerance for non-excellence in these roles.
• Seek advice from people who have successfully built and scaled multiple departments over a long time, rather than from those only a few steps ahead of you.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting by creating a clear picture of the ideal scene for each role you need in your business. Think about what traits and behaviors a high-performing individual would have in these positions. After all, picking the right people is key to growing fast.

A good way to avoid wasting time is to lower your tolerance for mediocrity. If someone isn't excelling quickly, it's likely they won't help your business grow. Remember, every top performer stands out in the first few days. If that's not happening, it might be best to move on.

Focus on hiring people with a proven track record of excelling in their roles, not just those with the right skills on paper. Seek advice from those who have successfully built the departments you want to grow. These mentors should have years of experience and multiple successes, not just a slight lead on you.

For instance, if you're struggling to find a good executive assistant, like I did, you'll need to understand what an ideal one looks like. When you have that clarity, you'll recognize them much quicker.

As you scale, prioritize roles based on the sequence that will best support your business growth. Don't try to hire for every position at once. Instead, focus on one key role at a time and invest in getting the right person.

To sum up, here's how you can apply this plan:

1. Define the 'ideal scene' for each crucial role.
2. Decrease tolerance for mediocrity and quickly move on from underperformers.
3. Hire based on performance history, not just skills on paper.
4. Seek mentors who have successfully scaled businesses over time.
5. Prioritize and fill roles one by one based on your company's growth needs.

Remember, knowing what excellent looks like is essential to rapid growth and scaling your business efficiently.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"Most business strategies are not complicated: Find something that people want, charge a lot of money for it, and deliver that thing really well"

– Alex Hormozi

"Speed comes from picking the right people and knowing what right looks like"

– Alex Hormozi

"It's very easy to know when someone is not a stud"

– Alex Hormozi

"Every single A player I've had, I've known they were an A player within the first couple days"

– Alex Hormozi

"Your tolerance for non-excellence continues to decrease in time"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

how is it that two entrepreneurs can start a business at the exact same time and two years later one of them is 20 times as big as the other one and how can an entrepreneur achieve success make some big risk lose it all and then start over again and then achieve back to the same level of success in a fraction of the time compared to somebody who's starting from scratch that's the question that i want to answer today in this video and if you don't know who i am my name is alex from mozy i own acquisition.com it's a portfolio of companies it's about 85 million a year and the reason i make these videos is because i was once broke and there are a lot of people who are broke and i do not want you to be one of them when you are scaling a company one of the difficult pieces of this because i've tried to think back like why is it that every single time we start another company or require an interest everything goes so much faster even when the strategy itself is not that complex and so think about this structurally most business strategies are not complicated find something that's something find something people want charge a lot of money for it and deliver that thing really well so much so that they tell other people about your product it's not overwhelmingly complex to consider the execution is difficult but the concept is not and so a lot of people think they're going to win on strategy when they're starting a business when you could have two people who have lawn care companies and one person has a long care company worth a billion dollars one person that can barely break five thousand dollars a month it's not because the strategy is significantly different it's just the execution how is it that an entrepreneur or two entrepreneurs can start at the exact same time and one can be get 10 20 30 times faster or when you start over again you can always skip these steps to get to your level of incompetence my theory around this comes down to pattern recognition and let me explain it's not just pattern recognition from the perspective that you have strategies or something that you're you're recognizing but actually patterns in people and so i'm going to give this a quick story to drive this this point home i have struggled for the last decade to find uh an assistant and so it's one of the things i'm actually you know a little embarrassed about but i i've gone over seven on assistance um so much so the point that i was just i almost kind of gave up just even trying to find an assistant and until recently i every time i had an assistant it just always right off the bat it just never felt like right and i always was like yeah maybe it'll get better it'll get better at it and they just never really did and the problem was that i didn't know what it looks like when it's right and so in the videos that i talk about i use the word the term ideal scene i don't know what the ideal scene of this dynamic looks like when we are scaling companies right and i'll tell you what i found out there in a second but like when we're scaling companies what we have to do is pay down ignorance tax of knowing what ideal scene looks like which is where speed comes from having people who have outside eyes look in who already do know what i steal ideal scene looks like so you can skip steps faster and so i'll give you an example what this looks like in real life like for me in the role of executive assistant thank god that like for me it wasn't a necessary thing to continue to grow the businesses now that i have one i don't ever really want to live life without one but the entire time i kept bringing people in i didn't know what to look for we do hiring you know we do the hiring process we do an onboarding and training process they never really got up to speed or we never really got in sync and then i'd slowly kind of fall away there would be distance and then it became kind of awkward and then i would end up having to cut the relationship and so in this instance we immediately synced up i really like the person i trust the person and they are so proactive in all aspects of my life that i just sit down and start working and then she places things in front of me i'm like hey i got 13 minutes she's like cool do this i'm like i've got you know 18 minutes here she's like cool do this and do this and every time i'm done i'm like hey what else should i do she's like boom and so we meet based on the priorities that i have and then she has this big stack and knows how long every every one of these things takes because i talk to her about how long i think the tax will take and then as i have openings we slot it in so it's like i wake up and i'm just crushing work until the end of the day because i know that the amount of time that's been allotted for each of the task is the appropriate amount of time and so and if i do finish early i get another task done right and so we can we can we can crush stuff but it's not so much that this is the importance of the executive assistant more so that it took so long for me to get one and now that i do have one i know that i will not ever not have one for the rest of my life because now i know what ideal scene looks like i know what to look for within the roles that exist in the company there are going to be these gaps as you're growing you know probably on some level that you might need somebody who's going to be a director of marketing you might know on some level that you need somebody who can be a director of sales you might know in some level you need a director of hr director of finance director of customer success director of product you know director of you know all these different things right legal maybe and so these heads of the companies have to come in and so there's two different ideal scenes that you have to know number one is what sequence these people will best fit and you hire because you don't hire them all at once obviously as you're scaling but the second is what does that person look like not just like what does the role do but what is somebody who's very good at this role look like what we're doing is looking at people who are exceptional at the role and saying how can i find something just like this and that is why people can go so much faster because once you have figured out what a sales director looked like who's good or a salesman who's good or marketing director who's good you can find and duplicate that pattern again fundamentally like this is like my belief in terms of speed of scale is that you do not know what the people look like and it's one of the issues that we deal with the most with our portfolio companies so the portfolio companies that we work with are almost all uh e-learning and coaching type businesses um and service-based businesses and we work with those companies and they're like hey you know my mom can do some math and so she's gonna be our uh our controller like i don't i don't think she's what that's not that's not ideal scene that's not what this looks like like just being able to do math is not i mean it's a requisite but it's not all of the requisites for becoming a really good controller and to the same degree it's like hey we've got our top salesman he's gonna become sales director like um i don't know if that's necessarily a good idea he might just be a really high level individual contributor and not a very good sales leader or sales manager the big mistakes that happen and they are so costly because of the time in two ways one it takes time to bring these people on board and then it takes time to figure out that they're not good takes time to off-board them and then the whole while you're not growing because that that whole cycle took the time if you had the right person all of the aspects of that depart would be growing rather than staying the same or shrinking right and you could have just moved on and started as as that department was growing moved on and started filling another role with the right person and then that department started growing instead you have to spend all this time inordinately on this department that you mishired for and then find someone else to replace and you couldn't even hire the next person you need and so when you're thinking about this and this is the big takeaway for everyone is that speed comes from picking the right people and knowing what right looks like and don't get me wrong you're gonna make mistakes we all make mistakes but i can tell you that it's very easy to know when someone is not a stud it's harder to know if someone comes in and starts as a stud and then goes down but i can tell you that every single stud that i've had every single a player i've had i've known they were in a player within the first couple days and so i've had eight players who then stop being a players but if someone is not an a player up front i've never had someone become an a player and so your tolerance or my tolerance for non-excellence continues to decrease in time so that i can not waste the time of trying to figure out whether this person is going to help me grow the business in terms of the thing that is probably getting in your way it's your tolerance is too high for people who are not that good and a misunderstanding of what the roles look like that you need to hire and so the things that you need to do are to decrease your tolerance and find people who already know what this role looks like when it is excellent all right so don't take advice from people who are one step ahead of you right because they might not know i mean how many times have you heard someone say oh i've got this new so and so they're so great and then four months later they're like oh no i actually got rid of that person it didn't work out don't listen to people who are like two steps you know one step ahead or six months ahead like it's not useful find somebody who's built multiple of the types of departments you're looking for scaled it for a long period of time and then that person will be able to share what the what the requisites are for the roles that you're looking for all right so anyways mosey nation lots of love keep rocking and i'll see you guys in the next video keep crushing