Watch This If You Have a Service Business

I've been in business for 14 years. I've scaled six brick-and-mortar gyms. I did 30 plus gym turnarounds across the country and built service companies to over $30 million a year. Today, our portfolio at acquisition.com is over $250 million annually. And so, in this video, I'm answering your questions about how to scale your service business. And for all these questions, I try to make, you know, my answers as tactical as humanly possible so that you watching from home can immediately use them. Enjoy. I am a chiropractor. Uh we do right around 2.4. Been stuck there for 5 years. Uh I'd like to get to 3.6. six to get out of the swamp. Stock are growing over five years. We've been at 2.4 for five years. Yep. And so I don't know what's stopping us. I'd like to get out of the swamp. Heard. Um and then profit margins, you're at 30%, right? Yes, sir. Yeah. Okay. I remember seeing 600,000 as a profit number. I if that's still accurate. Okay. Um Okay. So you have 600,000 in profit and you have do you have you and a partner or you're 100%. 100%. Okay. Um, well, what what do you want to You just want like what do you want to have happen? Do you wanna like what do you want to do? Do you want to go to many locations? Um, no. I wanna I want to grow a a main big location and Okay. Um, you know, create a space for family to eventually I mean grow in there. If they're if they don't want to do that, then I would probably change my goal to be in an exit. Okay. From a standpoint. What's your square footage? Uh, right now we have 7,700. Okay. So, decently large. Yeah. We occupy about 4700 of it. Okay, got it. And so are you at capacity within the space right now? No, we used to have a supply issue till about two weeks ago. Okay. And then we hired another doctor. So now it's become a demand issue and that's where we're at now. So how do you get customers now? Uh we our highest is referral. Uh then we get about the next highest would be paid ads through Facebook. What percentage are ads? Uh we do probably about 20% from ads. About half is from referrals. Another 20% is from Google. Okay. So you separate met ads from Google ads when you talk about ads. Yep. Okay. Got it. Um we don't actually currently do Google ads, but that's where they said they came from. Heard. Got it. Which I would probably see as word of mouth. Like I googled you or I googled somebody. It's probably SEO or something like that. But um Okay. So two and a half million like what stops you from just spending more money on meta ads? Uh trust that we're doing it right. I mean I just Are you making more money than you put in? Yeah. Well, so you might have one of these guys, which is that we need we need attribution tracking so that you can know if you're putting a dollar in and getting $5 or $10 or $20 back out. We have no clue. But as soon as we have the attribution tracking because fundamentally what what you lack right now is an input output equation for the business to grow. And so every business needs to know what are the what are the core actions that I do that increase how much money I make. And if you can't define that for the business, then for sure as [ __ ] your employees don't know what it is. If you don't know what it is, right? And so for you, if you are not supply constrained and you're demand constrained, that means lead generation is the issue. If lead generation is the issue, what's the activity? The activity is going to either be I'm going to be making content. I'm going to be getting affiliates that are going to be promoting my [ __ ] for me. Uh I'm going to be uh running paid ads, right? Those are going to be kind of like the the bigger buckets that you're going to be going into. And then you got people who do those things on your behalf. And so right now, do you make content? Okay. What percentage comes from that? Uh we just started it uh about two months ago. How much do you do? Uh we I'm not going to tell you to do more. I'm just curious. We do four videos that gets created into short and long per week. Uh four videos for the month and per. Okay. Got it. Don't. Yeah. Chopped up. Okay. Got it. Okay. So, you got four longs and you chop those into little shorts and things like that. Okay. Got it. Um, all right. So, short-term, long-term, short-term, we got to get the data tracking in place. Second step is going to be putting the ad the the ads funnel in place and kind of like what the sales motion is um behind that. For local, the good news is that uh it's easy to do because there's already so much trust locally that you don't need to have nearly the complexity of kind of like the funnels and indoctrination and education prior to someone making a purchasing decision. You can pretty much just like one call close, two two conversation close anybody. Um even at very high ticket numbers, which is one of the benefits of local. The downside of local is that you've got a market that's this big. Correct. That's the downside, right? So, if you don't want to expand markets, then you need to dominate the market you're in. And so, it's going to be a multi-prong approach. And it's kind of like I was saying earlier, like we're going to start with ads because that'll just get you more in because I'm guessing right now, if you have a good reputation, and good brand, then the ads will actually help you more than they would help somebody who doesn't have that footprint. But then we're going to start probably layering in the the content as the second um kind of the well that needs to continue to get dug. Again, this is going to be longterm. And so, you're going to want to be a thought leader. And then what happens is that if you can if you can succeed at building the brand long term and it sounds like you're a more long-term guy. So I will I'll speak in these terms. Um what happens is your radius actually continues to expand. And so if you take it to the natural extreme you can go to the Aean Clinic in New York or whatever. I think it's in New York. Um because they have a national reputation but people would fly there. And so that's how that's what it looks like as you continue to expand the brand because people will just be more willing to travel to you and pay premium prices, which I'm sure if we looked under the hood, the prices probably get tweaked too. But like those those are some things. And if you're in the swamp, cash flow is actually the biggest thing that you need, right? Um and so again, the pricing and packaging is probably like again if I was order of operations, pricing and packaging would probably be number one. So we could free up cash flow. The freed up cash flow would then funnel into the ads so that we could get well data attribution. Then we'd put the ads in place. uh start start flowing uh putting flow through there and then the baseline that happens after that is we're just going to increase the cadence on the on the content that demonstrates thought leadership. That's the path. That makes sense. Thank you. Uh how do you we're having trouble also hiring uh good highquality doctors. Mhm. In Wyoming, it's actually ladders up to the first problem, cash flow. Okay. We need to fix the pricing so that we can generate more cash flow. so that we can pay doctors, so that we can actually get the business to not rely on you as much. So, real quick, if you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. My team and I put together the $100 million scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so, we broke it into these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at. No matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it. and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information. And if you want us to actually help you deconstrain the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out on the thank you page. You can just book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help. And if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live. I sell basically complete digital marketing services to service based businesses in Australia. I move SMBs uh like cleaning companies, stuff like that. Cleaning, yard work, average revenue for average revenue per company is anywhere between half a million to 2.5. Tough. The ones I sell. Uh I pivoted. The company's gone from zero to 500k in the last four four months. It's I pivoted from fitness. Uh just happened. So it worked out well. Uh so they all been wound down getting other people operate. I'd like to ideally get to eight figures. Uh, in terms of what's stopping me, I well, I spent the whole 28 hours here going through every framework I could to figure out what was wrong. I just want to figure out, can I tell you what it is? Good. I also want to figure out uh where would be besides like getting the operations and moving out to other people and making sure I'm not involved in delivery. Where would be the best use? Get to three, 10 will suck. Yeah. That's what's going to So, you're four four months in, say you're it's it's brand new and you haven't seen all the [ __ ] that's about to happen. So what's going to happen is because you're because you're servicing SMBs, yep, their volatility will translate over to your volatility. Mh. And independent of how well you do, they will start turnurning. Um, and you have probably mastered the sales function, which is why you're growing quickly. Y um, but you also will have like CAC will never be cheaper than it is today. So CAC will always go up and churn is going to start eating into the business because SMBs suck. And so we what's going to happen is that your margins will continue to compress and compress and compress and you'll have to spend more and more. CAC will go up. You have to hire more people because of churn. That's what you're going to think you're going to have to do in order to fix the churn, but it's not. But whatever, let's go to it. And so you're going to keep going, keep going, keep going. And so revenue keep going up, but the margin gets smaller and smaller until eventually you're just like, I feel like I'm running a nonprofit and I have to just keep selling stuff and I don't even feel confident about it because I got all these people complaining. But it's really because they're the business owners who suck. And then you think, maybe I should take more responsibility for the business owners. I'm going to start maybe doing some sort of sales motion, some sort of, you know, nurture motion because they suck at sales. They don't know how to run their business and that's why they can't market with me. But I'm going to do this because I want to take, you know, responsibility of this. And all of that is just wrong. And so if you want to get to three million bucks a year, you can just do what you're currently doing. You'll just sell more and LTV will probably be what's your price point? Uh $450 a week. A week. Okay. So you're 2K a monthish. So you're right in the sweet spot of churn. like that is like if you like 1500 to 3k a month for an SMB average stick is going to be four to six months. Um and so you can back nap back of napkin. How many are you selling a month right now? Uh I'm selling about 10 a month at the moment. Cool. So if you're selling 10 per month, right? And uh you said 2K was your price point, right? So let's say that we have five turns on that on average. 10K, right? and send per month. Right. So, you're going to get to 100Kish per month. Um, and then you will stall. And so, at that point, you'll either have to increase units sold or increase LTV. And then you'll keep thinking, man, if I could just get this to go up, it would be amazing, but you won't be able to. Um, and so the only way to really make SMB work is to go the opposite end is to go super super cheap. And then build something that cost you nothing to deliver on. nothing to deliver. Yeah. So, it's like $400 a month or less for an SMB if it's a nuisance style. So, I'll give you some examples. Um, if you were like, I can get you ranked on first three of maps in your local area and I charge $400, $500 a month, they'll do it because they can see it. Yeah. And they'll pay for that. Um, review management um and SEO stuff. Uh, they will pay $300 to $400 a month and they will stick on that. you'll get like 30 to 40month stick rates on that. Um, but you'll close way more sales velocity. Uh, so LTV is actually similar to this, but CAC stays super low. Um, as a result, but I know you just got out of fitness, which you probably got out because it was terrible and hard. Um, you might need to just go and get to there and then you'll feel good about things. Um, like you might need to walk this path rather than believe me. But that's probably that's what's going to happen. So what do you want to have happen? not walk uh to not have to walk the path in the first place. Um get a less amount. So this is like the this this is me just being real. Like marketing there's so I mean obviously a lot of marketers follow my stuff and so I get a disproportionate amount of marketing agencies and I've seen every model under the sun. Um SMBs suck as customers. Um and so you have you have to do this one or the other. You have to go out market. You have to go down market. Um and you guys go really cheap and it's something that's super automated. uh or you do truly do more of these hight touch services, but you do it with a business that actually knows their metrics, actually has a sales process, already has a proven model. Uh rather than all of them just like wanting to change their stuff all the time, not knowing what they're doing to begin with because like they're expecting you to figure out something that they haven't figured out themselves. Um and so that's so like your price either goes up and you serve a higher level avatar, uh or it goes down and you serve the one you are now, but you make sure that your delivery is almost nothing. Yeah. And then it becomes a CAC issue because you have to offset CAC. And so then it become big headlong long tail one time setup into very small recurring monthly high gross margin. Understood. Those are the two models that work for what you want to do. So drop low, go high and then the middle is just a dead zone where everyone dies. Cool. Makes sense. Thank you. We do uh we're so website as a service um based company. So we build websites, do digital marketing services, that kind of stuff. Uh we cater to small medium businesses, small businesses. Uh average revenue per customer is 450 bucks a month. Subscription based company. And uh we're at Yeah. We're at 20 million uh bucks in revenue and notice example right price really small. You price it super low and it works. Go ahead. And uh we want to get to 80 80 million bucks of revenue in about three years. So uh the question we're asking ourselves is we're in an industry where AI is very disruptive. um every day that goes by, you know, it's constantly degrading and decaying our our product. Uh and at the same time, we have kind of this uh one channel uh risk that that we're living with. All of our sales, 100% of our growth has been done through outbound cold calling. Love it. Yeah, it's great. Um but again, cold calling is becoming harder and harder and the industry is decaying. So, we're constantly we're trying to figure out industry is decaying. What do you mean by that? Churn is going up. churn is slightly ticking up, but um at the end of the day, you know, AI is making it easier and easier for our customers to be able to build their own websites. Well, yeah, I know. We're the type of customer we deal with. They're not usually super sophisticated. So, it we do have time. I just found out about Chat Jiba. So, there you go. Yeah, exactly. So, we have time, but some of you guys still facts. So, I think you got time. Yeah. But this is the question, right? So, do we double down on on on marketing and create like an inbound channel and really invest hard into that or do we do um do we try to innovate on the product and figure out what else they need and like build a revenue engine? Uh right now we're kind of we're doing we're trying to do both but it's obviously limiting. So, this is this is really really good. I love that you asked this. So, um I went on this long rant the other day about this particular topic which is solving problems that don't exist. So un because like you have a narrative, you have a story around AI is decaying the business, but all I hear is that you have customers and your job just got way easier. Explain. So you know, I mean, like if you were like, "Our churn is escalating by 10% per month," I'd be like, "We have a problem. We need to change something." M but if it's not really showing up in any meaningful way in terms of the business itself, I think there's plenty of people who will just be super lagards on this and are not going to be replet vibe coding. They never bought your [ __ ] to begin with. Like the person who is super into AI right now wasn't hiring WAS anyways. They built their own website before AI made it quite easy. Like because I mean to be fair, website building software not that complicated. No. Right. Um, so you said there's two paths. So one is, you know, change the product around. My opinion, I wouldn't, that's probably wouldn't be where I'm focused unless I had some business metric that was way off that that I'm not seeing. Um, I would be doubling down on the acquisition side. What's your LT? What's your number of months average stick? Uh, so it's 29 months. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's the game. It's it's usually uh Yeah, it's 30 to 40. It's that's the the highest I've seen uh uh was 38 for this type of business. So like you're right you're right in the in the sweet spot there. You're a little higher priced. I think they were 299 like it all works out in the same you know um same thing. So yeah I think you just double down on inbound. So paid ads. Paid ads. Yeah. Yeah. And I would just see if you get them to prepay for the quarter so you can offset CAC. Okay. Um, on that subject, if you don't mind, uh, in terms of prepaying for the quarter, uh, you know, again, our customers are pretty price sensitive. There's people that are cheaper than us, obviously. Have you seen before? Um, my fear is the amount of churn that will generate some, you know, we we build 90% of our customers on credit cards and we hold on to 10% that pay us through like pad and through checks and that kind of [ __ ] It's it's awful. But, um, you know, we're going to experience churn if we're like, hey, you need to, you know, prepay us up up front. You'd still just close fewer, right? Um, close fewer. Absolutely. And I think customers that are with us would leave us. Why would the people who are with you leave you for how you treat new customers? Sorry. People that are with us would leave us. I don't think you change your billing process for existing customers. Gotcha. I'm saying if you're doubling down on inbound, what will go up is CAC because you'll have media spend in addition to the sales commission. And so to offset that from a cash or how cash flow positive are you right now? Uh, so we did 3.6 in Ibida last year generated. Interesting. Yeah, that's lowish. It's lowish. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious. Heavy on people. We're heavy on people, dude. AI. I know. I know. Big thing. I know. It's like you're worried about them doing it. You're not even doing it. Right. So, like, um, okay. So, this is what I would actually do. I would probably spend the next six months reorganizing the workflow, probably reduce headcount by 50%. Using AI workflows in order to actually do the same thing, increase the margin from 3.6 to like seven um or more with the added cash flow. You wouldn't have to change the price on the front end. You'd be willing to go negative for a quarter in the acquisition knowing you're going to get 29 on the back. That's how I'd actually fix it. Okay, makes sense, Chill. All right, cool. Yeah, you I sell CFO advisory. We will do probably about 2.9 this year. Amazing. I would love to be at like 20 million. Um but what's stopping me? I have We've made all this stuff. I have two books. I fire my CPA. I have taxfree millionaire. I've made all these courses. I don't know what to do with them. I don't know how to market. I don't know how to advertise. I've never done any of this. We're doing three million a year. All organic. Yeah. I mean, you're obviously not marketing shitty. Um, so you've got all this stuff, right? You got these books, you got these courses, you make content. Yes. Okay. So, you are marketing. Well, I've never put them out there. Like, I don't know what to do with it. Wait. Huh? Okay. Hold on. So, you've got all this stuff in your back pocket. So, you've got tax-free millionaire book andor course. You've got fire CPA book andor course. And you make content about tax accounting [ __ ] And so people come in and buy your tax accounting [ __ ] right? And you're trying to get to 20. Do people turn out? Well, I've never tried to sell anybody on this stuff that I've made. Well, but we don't need but like forget Let's erase those for a moment. Those are not real things for the purpose of our conversation. If you didn't have those things, what would you do to grow the business? People call our office and they come in and I sell them for monthly service and I get referrals for in person or virtual. Yeah. Okay. But you're local. I'm local. We have a bricks and mortar. I have a billboard. But most I do. Yeah. But most of our clients are are are not in Texas. Okay. Hurt. Okay. So they're coming from the content. They call up. You guys sell them. Whatever. Referrals. Yeah. Absolutely. And what are you growing at annually? What am I what growing at annually? Uh last year I was 2.2. too. Okay, it's great. Yeah, super good. So, whatever 30 35% annual growth, it's awesome. Okay, so what's the um so you you want to get to 20 and I'm guessing you just don't want to wait like seven years to get to 20 at that compound rate. Right. So, as long as you're keeping customers when I said do they churn, that's what I meant. Like are they stay do people stay with you? The people that are on monthly stay a lot more than the people that come in just for a onetime tax plan. What's the um this will be fun for you. Okay. So, what's the I'll give you like some some business accounting. Um what's sales velocity right now? I don't know what what how many units a month do you sell? Uh on the monthly reoccurring? there's probably about 190 clients. Now, how many do you sell every month? New Oh, new ones. We're We've closed down for new sales because I'm trying to figure everything out. So, nothing right now. Nothing. Well, that will not grow the business. That's for sure. That there's my Yeah, I'll be here all day, guys. Uh, okay. So, so you have a goose egg there. Okay. But, okay, you have this other stuff. Why do we care? Well, that's what I want to do. Like, I like the products. I like to educate. I like to be in front of the camera. Like, I want to do all that. Well, what's wrong with the business that you decided to stop selling stuff for? It's [ __ ] hard. That's why it's re No, like to fulfill on it and Yeah. Okay. You could always just start a business where you sell everybody else's stuff. Um, well, you didn't get my joke. You missed it. Okay. And what I'm trying to get to now, like AI, what you were saying is going to completely obliterate our industry, which I'm really excited about because I want to dive into it. I want to leverage AI tools and even overseas partners doing low-level stuff. Okay. Um, because people in our industry are really slow and outdated. But all of these are not things that you would solve with marketing. you're supply constrained and so you're like, "How do I market more?" I'm like, "You can't even take people." Well, I want to market like for courses and to buy my books and things like that. You have a valuable business right now. No, I I I do. Yeah. No. Why are we Why would we start another business that's not That's what Ed told me, but I I want to do that, too. Yeah. I mean like like I make the content I continue to repeat and I get I get my my memes made of me of like Alex just going to say shit's hard and hard things are hard and hard hard and it's because it just never stops being hard. It just always sucks. Like the course thing will suck too. You just don't know it yet. Ask the course people. They'll tell you it sucks. That's great advice, right? They're like it sucks. Yeah. The customers aren't sticky. They'll expect you to do everything. They're like, "I'm not a taxfree millionaire already and I bought your $17 course." Like, "Fuck you." You know, like, like that's, you know, that's what's going to happen. But you have you have a service that people aren't turning out of. I'm guessing. No, they're not. I mean, some, but they're pretty sticky. Yeah. No one no one who no one who has bad churn stops selling. I'll say that. So, like the fact that you're comfortable enough that you're like, "Oh, we don't need to take customers for a while." Like, I'm sure your stuff is better than you think. Um, but I think that we have to think basically you're supply constraint and so we just need to fix the supply constraint of your business because if I said hey we found a way what are your margins right now? About 20 25%. Okay. So if we said okay let's see if we can find um offshore talent that can give your existing team 2 or 3x leverage. So you don't have to increase internal headcount, you can increase external headcount and then when AI comes in, you can basically wipe those guys off the map and then fine, right? So it's like, yeah, they don't have jobs or families. Uh, they're overseas. They're not real. Um, I'm kidding. So I know half you guys are overseas. That was a joke. Um, but yeah, so I think that we need to create operating leverage. We have to look at basically how the service are being delivered so that we can figure out how to get each person two or three more, you know, X in terms of their ability to deal with customers. Um, probably there's a little bit of tech that's missing because this is for everybody. Everybody, every entrepreneur I talk to is like, I want to be AI first, right? And then you're like using Jeff GP for emails. Like that's not how you're AI first. Um, the first thing that you have to do in order to have an AI first company is you have to be a data first company because AI works with data. If you don't have data, then there's no [ __ ] AI. So, you have to have complete data first from your approach and have an architecture in place so that you know all the elements of the business from data and then we can put the AI layer on top to put reinforcement training in place in order to actually train it to do stuff. So, if that's where you want to go, which does have tremendous operating leverage and like just for everybody, this is the once in a generation move right now. So 25 years ago cloud computing came out and then you know software went from CDs to cloud and that and then all of the software companies and all that boom was the last 25 years and all the billionaires were made. The next boom is this right and so we're early and so the hard of this is like well the pieces don't all fit together perfectly yet and it's like well that's the figure out that we make lots of money from right so I don't think the solution is you selling a course because you just happen to have recorded it. I think that we need to fix the supply constraint first and you'll use all those things as marketing assets to increase demand when the time comes. So save those in your back pocket. There's nothing wrong with them. But I want to look at the model increase operating leverage. That'll probably also increase margin. Start making this number more than zero. Okay, which I promise you can take this to the bank. If you make that not zero, you will grow faster. Um you will make more money if you sell people. uh and then I think from there so it's like increase operating leverage through offshoring add in data layer once the data layer is there then we can add in the AI component that further increases operating leverage once you put the remote team in you'll then be able to sell again if you get to the point where you're like I've now reached my new 2 or 3x capacity without even marketing then great if you do need to market more then use the assets that are in your back pocket to go do more delete genen That was like four or five steps, but that's how I think through it. Thank you. I uh sell roofing and exterior remodeling. Sweet. Uh we do close to six million this year. Um I would like to be at 100 million. So what's stopping me? And I I'll be a little bit vulnerable. I would say it's comfort, distractions, and fear. And food. Fear. Oh, sorry. I was like, "All right, good to know." Yeah. I love food. Sometimes I feel that way too. Um so the the comfort is I have built the business. I've replaced myself in every aspect. I can work two to three hours a week and it run fine. Um fear I would say the fear of losing family time. Uh the work life balance. Sure. And the distractions are uh my other I've got another business, drunk removal business. Um I've got real estate. I've got uh just all kinds of little What do you think you should do that you're not doing that you want me to tell you to do? So, so I know I need to go all in again. Okay. And and I did that the first five years that I that business and it worked out great. Um went through COVID. Um I got, you know, kept the business going really well and I worked myself out of a job, got comfortable. Okay. So, I don't know what I'm looking for you to tell me to do. Well, I'll say I'll say this differently. Um, I think regrets come when we imagine the upside that we don't have without taking into account the cost that we didn't suffer. And so, sure. Uh I think I think we regret um when we imagine the upside that we didn't get without also considering the downside that we didn't suffer to get it. Um and so I think that's where a lot of regret comes from because it's not it's not real. So it's like maybe there's some girl that got away or some business opportunity that got away and we just imagine this amazing thing but not the trade-off that we would have to do in order to get it. We just imagine the upside without the downside. And so I would say a couple things. So, one is um I think that there are there are trade-offs that we always have to make and I don't I don't think they're right or wrong. I think they're just their preference. There's no right answer to how much work life balance you want to have. It's right for you. said differently, if I like cookies and I'm good with that and I also want a six-pack, I just prefer cookies to a six-pack. It's just that's the trade. And I think the the dissatisfaction comes from wanting both. Right. Right. And so either want less or trade more. And I think that's really what it comes down to in terms of like is there a path where I can work no more than I currently am um to go from six to 100. There probably is. It depends on how much you're willing to pay other people. And so you might have to take a short-term hit in terms of profitability uh to bring in the level of talent that you want to expand the business on your behalf to where you want it to go. And so as long as you are the type of person character-wise that they would want to follow and believe in your vision and you can make your vision big enough that they think that their aspirations can fit within it, you can get that type of person. But like it's it's 100% like you're you're graduating right now into the who game. Um but there's levels of who's, you know, like I remember um the first time I hired a $50,000 a year employee and I was like this is [ __ ] This is what I'm talking about. You know what I mean? Like I went from minimum wage, you know, labor to 50. I was like this they're they can read. They can write. like let's let's go, you know what I mean? Uh and then I I hired my first six figure employee and I was like, "Oh, what was I talking about?" Like this is what's going on. And then I have my first 250, first 500, first million, first multi-million dollar per year employee. Um and it's just levels. And so, um Chiron, who's our president, said this to me years ago, but I always remembered. He said, "The best the best talent's always in the future." So, whatever we have today, the best people are always ahead of you, not behind you. And so um I think for you if we if you really do want to accomplish it without making the trade you will make a trade because if you change nothing nothing will change right? So we have to change some some component of your life and so the question is which thing do you value the least? Do you value having more profit or more time with your family in the short term? In the long term you can make it up. You won't make up family time in the long term. You can make the profit up in the long term. Right? So, if you're willing to give up short-term profit, you can bring in high level talent and then they can lead the growth. In terms of the uh the fear stuff, I mean, I would just say like just hold the line. If you they're like I'm afraid of losing time with the family. It's like just don't like I you know, and then in terms of the real estate thing, I see real estate because I know a bunch of entrepreneurs have a ton of real estate. Um I don't like as long as you're not like actively running it. Um, like that's why I'm a big fan of like REITs and funds. Uh, because you have if you have, you know, good partners and that stuff. Um, they can just run it. You can make better than the market. And then, but it's not, it doesn't change anything about what I do. Like me putting in the S&P or me buying another big building changes nothing about my life. And so, it's not a distraction unless you're like, you know, if we could add a gazebo and what if we added a different roof cuz I'm a roofer and what if I combined what I'm really? And you're like, dude, stop. Just like let the real estate be the real estate. let the business be the business and just keep them apart as long as you're good there because I think you said distraction. Um, actually, let me double checking that real quick, which is when you said you're uh the distraction thing that you're afraid of. Why are you afraid of that? I'm not afraid of it. Okay. I'm just I've got ADHD and I I I collect gold and silver. I buy houses. I buy buildings. I I mean, it's just Little bit of the red dress. Well, as long as it doesn't change anything about what you do, I don't care. But if it's like now I check this stuff all the time and it like eats up my days, then yeah, I would say that's a problem. Um, and it's only a problem if you decide it's a problem. Like you might just like that stuff. It's just like I sacrifice my goals because I enjoy this add. You know what I mean? Like the cost of the big thing is the new stuff that you have to give up to keep it going. Thank you. I feel like there's some amens. This is great. Like a good meal, right? Yeah. I appreciate it. Um but yeah, that's like the cost of the big thing is all the new stuff you have to give up that you don't get to pursue. All the exciting things that you will no longer participate in because you want to do one thing big. And I think um for me personally, I had this moment um I think a while ago, but like I had this realization of how long it takes to get good at anything. And then I thought about oh, I only have like 30 or 40 more productive years at most. And so I'm like I've got like four or five big seasons in me left. Yeah. And so that's it. And so I don't have like unlimited shots on goal. I've got four or five big runs in me. And so I think like realizing that it's kind of like Warren Buffett talks about if every person just had a punch card with 20 punches on it and that's the only thing you could invest in. You could never sell it. You'd make way better uh investments. I see entrepreneurs the same way in terms of what business opportunities we pursue. Because if we take the hypothetical extreme that if we want to build something really big, it's going to take a long time, then it means we can't do that many things. So hope that helps. I appreciate that answer because I thought you were going to say sell everything. And I mean, they're investments. I mean, I'm not going to tell you to sell your investments. I would say keep passive stuff passive. Don't make it active. That's like incurring cost because if you're going to make it active, then make active money. Yeah. If you're like, I I want to take my passive money and then make it cost me more time to get five% better returns. It's like you're going to get way better returns in your active income than your passive. And just I would just keep active, active, keep passive, passive. Appreciate you. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10stage road map from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish. I've now done multiple times and so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, uh, service businesses, brickandmortar, all of this, and it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so, the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap. Just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you. All free. My family owns a residential fence company, so we sell fences to homeowners. Uh our current revenue is roughly about 20 million. Um I think a good goal for us would be 50. Um I think what is stopping us is leadership and a players within our sales and management and also standardization of our processes and SOP creation. I believe you. so right now do you need more customers? Not necessarily. Well, do you need more? We have to figure out right off the bat. Do you need more customers or can you not can not handle the the the stuff you got? We can't handle the stuff we have. You can. So you need more customers. We need more lead people. People to answer the leads and people to close the deals. Okay. So you have leads. You have a sales constraint. Got it. Okay. So how many sales people do you need? It sounds like a similar. How many sales people do you need in order to deal with the leads issue? We currently have five. I would say we at least need to double that. Okay. So, what stops you from doubling it? I think it's part the nerves that the market might not last and need or require that many people. So, kind of putting all would then be a demand issue again. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's not like we don't have a current demand issue. We have a plenty of leads coming in. We've got a whole separate staff that So, what's the fear from? What are your margins? See, this is where it's hard for me because I'm not the CE CEO. I'm the right-hand woman to kind of the founder. So, I don't know specifically. You don't know the margins as the right hand? No, because I feel like it's also kind of a data problem that we have of not being able to collect the proper data and know that it's actually correct or accurate as well. Well, I'll say it's one of two. So, you said we're afraid to hire these people. I would say why. If it's like it's just between my ears and I have irrational fears for things, I'd be like, "All right, let's get over it." If it's because we have no cash flow, then it's like, "Okay, we have cash flow issues and we have to go down that kind of decision tree." Um, assuming you don't. I mean, have you ever heard of the CEO saying that they have cash flow issues? Okay. Well, then I would be like, why don't we hire five more sales guys? We're in the process of doing that. Okay. There we go. Okay. Great. Got it. No, you're good. Yeah. 26% is our great there. You know, we fine the back end. Now it's upgrading the sales. And we have plenty of leads coming in. It's doubling up. We're in a market where it's it slows down a little bit. It's winter fencing. Innesota cold culture with her so everybody knows and yeah we're on that doorway to find the right is it all not knowing the not knowing the right path of how to bring in the right sales manager all that stuff is kind of basically you need to build a recruiting machine for sales because you're getting to the point you have five sales guys now yeah um And are you do any do you do any selfgen or is it all uh all paid? It's all paid. Okay. Yeah. So, um the people who who do who do home services at a certain scale, which is right where you're at right now, you start needing to develop basically like a sales academy. Um that's internal. And so just like, you have you have your lead genen, you got nurture, you've got sales, you've got, you know, uh, onboarding of some sort, and then you've got, you know, retention and ascension for a customer, right? You're going to have appg genen, app nurture, interviewing works the same way. Onboarding and then retention and ascension of the sales people. It's just that we have to build a parallel structure within the business always so that we can just like we spend money reliably in our demand genen side, we need to be able to spend money reliably on the supply gen side. And so those just have to be parallel functions that exist within the business. And so just like you probably know, I'll bet you know like what your CTRs are, what your optin rates are, what your, you know, what percentage of leads you close, what percentage show, all that kind of stuff, right? On this side, data. Yeah. Well, that's good. Well, just like you know those stats here, you just need to know those stats here. Are you guys doing L2 with us? We're good. Oh, cool. Yeah. I was like because we build these things out like all the time. Yeah. But that's what we need to we'd have to build out the basically the entire sales the the pipeline the funnel flow of of and so I was I I'll complete the thought in a second. Um so when I was talking yesterday two seconds ago about this how much does a sales guy make you right now? Gross profit uh probably each guy is 7800K maybe. So 100k just for simple math and that's in gross profit. Yeah. Okay. And then how much you put down there? I'm sorry. I said, so what did you say? How much how much gross profit did they make? It's a little different because we have five inhouse, five out. Just think of it's really like a you have your measures outside, your inside sales. That's kind of Yeah. Okay. Um 20 million. So you're each guys we divide by 10 two million bucks. Just be keep we'll keep it simple. And then what do you pay them? Upwards max about 200. Okay. 200 for the best guys. Okay. Fine. And then gross profit on this uh probably 50 million like what's your gross profit? Not net gross profit. What's cost of goods? Uh half. Okay. Yeah. So 1 million. So for me I see this and I see a five to one which by the way like some of the best returns you get in the business are just your cost to acquire talent versus lifetime gross profit per employee. And so if I know that we can generate $1 million in gross profit, if I said, "Hey, you could put 200 grand into the S&P or you can put 200 grand into this machine. Yeah, you get a million in gross profit and then you have your enterprise value probably also 8x uh for your business. It's like great. 8 million taxree for 200k. Sounds like a deal." And there was a little add-on, you know, I'll be honest at the beginning of your came out. Sorry for your loss. Oh, you're good. Same kind of tension that I And there. Are you guys related? He's my dad. Oh, there we go. That makes it easier. No, you're good. Um, I mean, I I have I have no words of advice there. Um, but this is what we need to do the business. Yeah. I limit my scope. No, I just met with the the scale. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's what I meant. It was kind of a home run hit. Oh, good. Okay, cool. In a different way. No, I appreciate that. Well, yeah. I mean, the whole point wasn't like hope everybody here didn't have somebody die yesterday. You know what I mean? But um but we all have [ __ ] that happens, right? And so like um like if I look at this thing for me and the reason this is kind of important because I I was I was going to go in one of two directions. I was going to either do that or just I was going to let the spirit move me. Um, but what is limiting most of y'all's businesses, which is the stuff that no one actually wants to talk about, is the fact that like you aren't good enough as entrepreneurs. So, you haven't achieved enough yet. You haven't sustained the success you have long enough. And people don't want to work for you because they don't believe in the vision you have. That's the real thing. Because business at the highest level can really be boiled down to find worldclass people and get out of their way. You've heard Branson talk about it. You've heard Steve Jobs talk about it. And it's true. The problem is they don't want to work for you. Real. Because Steve Jobs is like, "We're going to add another hundred billion to Apple." And people are like, "Wow, that sounds amazing." And when you meet world-class talent like that, those guys are making $20 million bonuses per year, right? Different levels to the game. And so I bring this up to say that if you're a small business, which is the vast majority of people here, um, then you have to win on character. they have to want to work for you. And I think learning how to master these elements of like not being a hotthead, not being somebody who, you know, turns on a dime. Um, if you have a bad day, no one knows about it. I think those are the things that allow you to get way basically punch above your weight class because you basically always have to punch above to get that talent and then that talent pulls the business up. And so I'll tell you the story and then I'll I'll switch to the next person which is I um when we sold Gym Launch, some of you guys may have heard this, but when we sold Gym Launch, there was this long table um like the boardroom in there and we had uh my team on this side and we had the private equity team on this side and they had raised $1.2 billion um in funds to do their stuff. And I was doing my back and napkin. I was like, "This guy is going to make 400 million in the next five years." I was like, "That's chill." Taking no risk. Um and I did the math on what he was going to make on Gym Launch. And I was like, he's going to make more money on my company than I did. And what was interesting to me though is that I saw his entire team and I saw my team and every single person on his team was better than every single person on my team. And it was this very visual stark contrast between his team and my team. And I was like, got it. And so I just vowed that whatever the next business I was going to do, I needed to have a vision that was significantly bigger so I could attract a different level of talent so they could make something bigger happen. So, that's a a slightly softer answer, but um we need to build the talent funnel and put that in place and then not be mean.