Advice for Achieving Your Goals (Faster than everybody else) | 1/0 LIVE

I will get there for now I grind it will pay off in what I build or who I become I hit my goal or I grow either way I win welcome to the one of zero Show episode 2 advice for achieving your goals faster than everyone else I'll be taking questions from the audience live who what's up everyone happy uh Happy Wednesday in whatever time zone you're in thank you for joining us on the one of zero show so this is something that backed by popular demand uh we tried it uh a few weeks ago you guys liked it so uh we are doing it again we repeating successful actions so as long as you guys keep liking it we will keep doing it today's theme is around uh goal setting um but I'll be super transparent with you I uh I was talking to a family member who's probably going to die in the next you know certain period of time um and it so you're definitely going to get me in a little bit of a a mood um around that so I said that as a little bit of a preface uh for our for our conversations today um so when I when I give you responses take them the way I mean them uh which is hopefully the good way all right so let's uh let's rock and roll Alex what's up man Joe what's up man how's it going dude doing fantastic hey sorry to hear about your family member by the way brother that's very unfortunate we we all die that's right that's right and I really appreciate everything you do for the community between your books and your free content man you're the man you've helped me change my life dramatically dude you're like a god so you know I want to get that out of the way I got the acquisition hat is the lead book just show you big gu big big fan of your work man well thanks what can I help you with man so uh I had a question about setting really large goals because obviously you've sat and had a ton of large goals and throughout your entrepreneur journey and you know whether that be uh annual revenue for a business weight loss personal savings Etc things with uh a definite ending to it how would you would you say it's better to set a time frame for these large goals and have a shoot for the star land of the moons mentality and not hit it or have a time frame that you know you're going to hit it in and is it easier when you have these large goals to chunk them into the smaller goals along the way so that way you feel like you're progressing throughout throughout the Journey of the larger goal yeah um it's a good question and I'm glad we're starting off with this one um I see both of the examples that you gave as kind of extremes that don't necessarily need to exist um because both of theirs are based on outcome based expectations whether it's short or long um and The more I've been doing this the more I make my goals around things that are 100% controllable and so the outcome on the short term or the outcome on the long term neither of those are controllable but the activity that I can commit to are controllable and those activities I can measure progress against them even on percentage of days that I do the activities I said I would do and so it's like somebody who says they want to lose weight and it's much better to say like well why don't you just go to the gym um and so like actually there's a an employee who's just starting to go to the gym um and he was like what program should I follow and I was like your program is binary is that did you go to the gym I was like that's youram yeah and the first month I want to just see how how many days you do it and then next month we'll try and increase that number and then once you can do it all the days that you're supposed to be going then we can start adding things but until then I don't think there's any point in anyone putting any effort into what your programming is because you can't stick with [ __ ] right and so um to your the second half of what you said which is like do you break things down into like very very minute level I pretty much only do that because I I basically say okay this is what would be cool but if it doesn't happen or it does is relatively irrelevant because I think that if I do these things that'll happen but the only thing I can control is doing these things and then what happens is if I if I if I hit a 100% of my doing these things and then the goal doesn't happen I will still feel like I accomplished what I said I was going to do and so um that built my own confidence in terms of my sticking with my word because that's the that's like one of the few things I care a lot about is that if I say I'm going to do it I'll do it and so then what you can then do is Alter your hypothesis around goal setting so this is going to be for everybody so this isn't Just For You Joe um I probably should have done this at the at the at the Forefront of how we set goals but at acis.com we have a very simple process for setting goals number one is we say what problem are we solving and that problem should chunk up to one of three things either we're going to this if we solve this problem it's preventing us from getting more customers so if we solve it we'll get more customers it's going to we're not making enough money per customer so if we solve it we'll make more money per customer and number three is that it's going to decrease our risk of either of the first two happening over the long term which increases Enterprise Value right so if you think about the value of a company overall it's number of customers times LTV or lifetime value and how long that will happen and How likely that will continue to happen in the long run and so all bucket so that help if they're like hey I think we should make this a goal I'd be like well how's it going to do one of these three things and if they can't explain it then it's probably not worth doing which many things could improve a business but we have limited resources and the job of the CEO is to allocate money and effort and so if we're the allocator of those resources we have to make sure it's going to the bucket's going to get us the highest return so number one column is does it get us more customers does it make them worth more uh or is it decreasing the risk that uh those things are going to stop happening in the future that's column one column two is what's my hypothesis so I believe that if we do this F if we do X Y will happen right that's so it's just a hypothesis statement because we we make these goals but there's always an underlying assumption that we think something's going to happen if we do this I think if I double the amount of videos I put out I'm going to get more clicks to my website that's the hypothesis now the goal that we're trying to solve is get more customers my hypothesis if I double my number of videos that I make I'll get more customers or get more clicks to my site cool so then column three and column four is what is X and what is y right which is what is the thing I'm going to do and what do I going to happen and so that's the first part of the goal setting that's all we do what problem are we solving What's the hypothesis what's the X which is the input what's the Y which is the output that's all we do we do with every single company that's what we do every quarter that's we do every every annual planning that's what we do after the quarter or the time period's over we then have two more columns to say did we do X did we actually double our number of videos and then did why happen because you can also set you can double your number of videos but then you find out that your quality drops and so you actually didn't get the number of clicks that you thought to your site so you had a hypothesis but it was wrong and we're like okay so we need to amend our hypothesis we have to double our number of videos while also making sure that we script them and have ideas that are just as good as they were before so then we have to solve that problem right but that is the process that we that we tackle all of our goals and I have I have spent less and less time thinking huge huge amounts in the future I mean exciting stuff sure if you're Vision casting for the team to say like this is the big problem we're going after but in terms of the doing this of the business everything's down to like what are the activities what are we committing to and then the outcomes take care of themselves and as far as I'm concerned if the entire team did everything they said they were going to do and we didn't achieve any of those quote outcomes that doesn't matter to me at all wow yeah there was a lot unack there uh very very insightful stuff I love when you go on like the Riff uh I'll definitely have to play that one back and take notes man that was really just break down the activities just break down like you have so what's the goal that you have right now what whatting so that kind of goes into my second question so there's a big goal okay um early on in your career you know because I follow I know your story uh you know you had one of your mentors switch you from doing the local gyms into consultancy license model with gym launch so you know my main goal for this year and going forward is and it's just I'm kind of in Crossroads and what exactly I should do because I really want to help as many people as possible that is my like big term goal and I think my biggest uh you know leverage activity that I could do to help as many people as possible is to do a similar model to yours to help struggling landscape owners get from zero to1 million do in gross revenue with you know 20 30% margins um but what advice would you give to me if you were in my shoes while still trying to grow my landscape business and switch to this business model and start a you know consult uh model yeah so right now what you have is a strategic question um rather than really a goal like you have a directional question that you need to make a decision about within the business and so most brick and mortar business owners kind of have three three potential paths that they can expand right so one is just private ownership you just continue to own and open more and more locations all right that's number one number two um is kind of in between there is you kind of have a franchise uh franchise model right you have you test you know you have one to five locations of your own that you own at corporate and then you franchise the model out you can license model out whatever um the the furthest from that is what I would consider just more of an education based business which is which is sounds like what you were kind of referencing um at at scale all three of those help lots of people so I wouldn't say that one way helps more than another and even the advice that I got at that time I don't know if I would have given me that advice that's just the advice that I got because if I had gone back in time I might have 200 gems right now and IID probably be just as rich as I am now so you know what I mean like it winners will win and problem I'll say this is that the problem with starting over because that's what this is is that when you start into this new thing you're starting at zero because you're now competing in a brand new landscape you're going from B to C to B2B you have to understand National advertising versus local it's a it's a totally different game right um and it's tough to give you like what is the right path because you can win at all three but I would say that I wouldn't downplay the amount of people that you help with your current business because how many employees do you employ right now who now like enjoy their jobs because you you know have a good setup for them and you encourage them and you know you give them career advancement and how many people get time back in their lives because you take care of their landscaping for you so they can do other things they can be with their kids be with their families whatever it is right so I think I think um it's a short-term long-term thing right now this feels shiny and new to like pursue this other thing because it's money that's right here but um I had a I had a a business owner who had a single location who approached me four four-ish years ago uh and he was a similar position as you and I advised him against doing um what you were kind of outlining uh and the main reason was I just said well how much does it cost to open a new location and he was like I don't know like 40 or 50 Grand and I was like okay well how much do they make he's like I don't know 300 400,000 in profit and I was like okay well we should just run that play as much as humanly possible and forget about the whole like licensing thing and now that company is a a behemoth is a nine figure business now four years later uh with hundreds of employees that help thousands of families tens of thousands of families every single year and so I think that you can think just as big as you want in any of these vehicles and you currently already have paid down the ignorance tax of what you're currently doing like you're just getting to the point where you're starting to make money and doing a good job with it when it gets boring is usually when you need to go harder right like when it gets so easy right that you're like I could do this with my eyes closed when you can do it with your eyes closed that's when you 10x it right rather than say okay now this is easy I'm gonna go I'm gonna go hit myself in the [ __ ] head and try and try to learn something new because I'm an entreprene and I just like like making my life hard but boring is where you get rich like location location you know how many locations you got now um so it's just one centralized crew of four four full-time guys and then one project manager and it just one of the biggest bottom necks with it is just it takes a lot of capital and skilled labor to do you know what I do which is kind of like you know expert landscape design with insulation landscape you know just a little bit more Niche landscaping area without going too much into detail so I just think it' be harder to scale compared to giving the framework that I used over the last four years of all that information similar what you did with gyms to other business owners that are struggling because there's tons of guys in the business that are under a million per year that they're just struggling and I really think i' like to help those guys because I've helped people in my you know in my area just giving them tips and they're like man this tip really helped and you know like dou with my leads you know all this things so I have the information it's just that's what I'm really really struggling with you know it's a short-term long-term thing man like it's ABS so I'll say this you gotta pick where you want the difficulty in terms of scaling right like the the the doing the the tips and tricks and selling those and whatnot very easy to make quick money very hard to make huge money the the difficulties that you have right now the good news is that once you overcome those difficulties you then can scale and whatever whatever monsters you have to slay onest and building uh Coastal creation right to uh something really big the person you is going have to slay the same dragon and if it's really easy for you to just do this other thing it's really easy for someone else to do it too and so a lot of people see hardship and scaling as some somehow a bad thing but they're just also called Moes or competitive barriers that other people would have to overcome and so I'll just rewind this to like if you want to make a shitload of money in terms of build huge Enterprise Value the thing and like ultimately sell a business then you want to go private ownership or you want to go a franchise route if you want to just make income then by all means you can sell information it has high margins and you can do it that way but it's very difficult to make it recurring um it's very difficult to turn that into an Enterprise it's very easy to make it into a high income generating thing but you will give yourself a job that pays well most likely and that's what most people who are in that space have gotcha okay well yeah I know there's like seven people behind me trying to ask for questions so I'll uh you so don't worry there's a hundred other people who had the same question as you who that that served so you're good man thanks so much Jo I appreciate it I appreciate you Alex thanks man 100% Alex how's it going good man what's up I'm great thanks man I really appreciate that you take the time to answer my question um I speak of goals not in terms of achieving specific things like making x amount of dollars but more of a goal for the business life you know uh imagine you don't really know what you want to do but maybe you know what you don't want to do sure how to set the riot under quotes goals is it simply the opposite of what you don't want I think it's a wonderful way to start because if you uh I mean Charlie Monger said all I wish I could do is know where I'm going to die and just never go there obviously you know rest in peace to Charly but um I think it's it's a wonderful exercise because sometimes trying to figure out what you want is really really hard but a lot of people know really clearly what they don't want and you can go you can approach the process through elimination and then once you eliminate everything what's left over you can again what are all the things I don't like about what's left over and you eliminate more until eventually you're left with things that you're like you know this isn't bad and then you look up you know two years from now and you're like you know what I kind of like my life um and from a business life perspective uh just for me personally that that's very much the path that I followed um I looked back at the last few years of my life and was like okay what were the good days what were the bad days I said what were the common things that happen on my bad days okay how do I not do that stuff and then what were the common things that happened on my good days well how do I do more of that and over the last few years I've just try to engineer my days to just be as many of the good things in a row as I can um I had a mentor way back or like 10 12 years ago um and I had had a particularly good weekend and I went into work and uh I said yeah I said this great weekend and she said something really insightful and she's like I'm pretty sure the key to happiness is stringing as many days in a row like that as you can and it was just such a simple operationalized way of just seeing um living a more enjoyable life um that I took that to heart and so that's kind of how I've approached it and I you know for a very long time kind of lived by the whole [ __ ] happiness Mantra uh which is like I just I don't care I'm going to do things and I'm going to be useful to society um independent of whether I enjoy it or not but um in my lack of pursuit of it um a few years ago I was on a podcast and somebody asked me like are you happy and I thought to myself I was like you know what I used to introduce myself as like hey I'm not the happiness guy like don't listen to me for that but I can help you make more money um but I enjoy my life a lot now um which is you know almost a surprise to me as it might be anybody else um but I actually really like my life um but it it it it wasn't that was never really the goal I just tried to avoid things I hated for the most part and then when everything that I hated was gone I kind of liked what was left okay maybe one side note on on this I know you are talking a lot about um you you don't have to find your passion but you can create your passion by doing things U to get good at it uh to be then passionate about it um but for for for my opposite uh example from from before um if if there are not two planes where there is an one opposite maybe this is a kind of a sphere or something where there are several opposites um you have to as you said maybe um eliminate one after the other until you find the opposite of it you know so because I I opened the question when uh with because I said um when you don't know what you do it's a good thing in general um oh it's a bad thing and but if you if you what you don't want yeah then it's a good thing and there's maybe an opposite of it but maybe there is not just one opposite maybe there are a bunch of opposites if this is some kind of a sphere you know um and where how to find the the right opposite of yeah I think you can cross out many paths yes and so the way that I think about this is um I think about it more directionally then I think about it in terms of the perfect pick and so I think one of the big fallacies of Entrepreneurship is that we're going to pick right the first time and it's going to be perfect and the reality is that you don't have the context from which to make the Judgment because you don't have enough information because you haven't done any of them and so it makes it's it's a ridiculous hope to think that you're going to pick right on the first time it's really just like hoping you win the lottery like of course like of course you have no idea you've never done it right and so um I think about it in in the in the most basic terms it's like okay do I like Words more do I like numbers more it's like oh I like numbers more cool well I can just cross out all the stuff that has to do with words now of the numbers careers what are all the industries that are promly numbers or career paths within those okay well there's data analyst there's media buying there's conversion optimization like these are all things that are very metric driven okay well which of these well cro stuff is is a little bit marketing and numbers okay well I don't really like marketing stuff okay what about finance and numbers okay I kind of like that okay cool then you can start and then all of a sudden you just you just cut out huge tranches now at some point you take the jump and you're like well I'm just going to jump into here and what ends up happening is that you learn a ton of skills in that first career path or first jump or first business whatever it is but here's the part that I think people mess up is is that they think that if if you spend two years they're like man I spent two years doing this job or career or business that I didn't like and they think that somehow wasted when really all you did was gain more information and I I tell I mean a lot of people know the story from Steve Jobs he took a class in calligraphy right which made absolutely no sense it's which is just writing like how you write whatever handwriting and years later when he came out with the uh Mac it was the reason they had fonts was because he took a class in calligraphy years earlier and so if you follow the quote perfect path you're not going to have these little side quests that create kind of the nuance and the depth of your understanding and the different perspectives that you can take to a job or a career or a a business and so for me like I came into the gym world with a space cyber and intelligence background from military Consulting right so like it had nothing to do with that but the thing is is that I approached I learned a lot of skills at that position that I was able to apply to the gym and so I was able to look at the gym business a little bit differently than I think a lot of other gym owners did and so so that gave me an advantage and so it wasn't that I wasted those two years it was just part of the path and so I think that a lot of people really hard on themselves and think that you need to have the perfect pick but life is long and it's about acquiring the skills along the way and even if something isn't the perfect fit you learn more about what you don't like you cut that stuff out and you lean more towards the stuff you do and that's it because the only reason that you have this Rush is because you think you need to get somewhere but you don't you're going to die everyone ends in the same place uh may you give may you give you a little bit of context um I started computer science and started uh my business as a freelancer it's a classical pth uh it was obvious somehow then I moved towards being an agency I hired people and took over projects um but when I asked myself uh where do I want to be in five years the answer was total different I want to help people to grow somehow okay I couldn't really see this by being an agency okay um at least not in the way I wanted to be so I pivoted recently I shut down my small agency after two years okay currently I'm helping five software Freelancers okay some like people like me to Build a Better Business throughout my learnings I do this for free um your first book inspired me a lot um but this I hope to find out uh what my product or service can be and also finally to find my goal my business goal you know is this roughly how you would approach it like test measure I'm gonna pull two parts two things from that real quick so one and this isn't to make you feel bad about the decision that you made but the that you couldn't help people while owning an agency I think was was wrong um because you absolutely could have made the lives of every person that worked for you better and so it's really just like how you choose to Chunk Up the goal because like you can absolutely make the five or 10 people that work for you every day have amazing lives and you can have a deep impact on 10 people's life that can last forever right and their families and their kids and so forth so I just want to put that out there just because you're not the only person who thinks this who's thought that thought now with regards to where you're currently at um I would think about you did different things with your agency there were probably some things that you weren't good at there probably some things that you were great at I would just get really specific on the things that you were great at and then if there if there's elements of implementation around those things that you can help them do some done with you or done for you service around that then do that in exchange for money you know what I mean um and you can make the content around that and don't be afraid of like giving away the secrets it's never the issue because you know a good uh a good friend of mine Neil Patel if you know who he is um he is NE patel.com it's a they they serve Fortune 100 companies for SEO and so he gives away all the secrets of doing SEO and I've I've we've talked about it and he's like oh I I give I give I literally have tutorials and everything that we do he's like but no one wants to do it so they just hire us and so like everyone has this fear that like you're gonna give it's like it's a lot of work no one wants to work and so if you can just give people a shortcut even if you explain all the Nuance of the entire process people just trust you more and then when they do come to you they're coming with clear expectations because it's like hey have you consumed my stuff they're like yeah it's like that's what we're going to do cool great and so I think just get hypers specific on the things that you were really good at within your agency and don't pretend to be good at things that you weren't because you're gonna have you're going to be um tempted to do that because some of the people might start getting into the running into the obstacles that you ran into and then look for you for help and don't make [ __ ] up because that's where you get in trouble so what that would then do is say hey I don't know I struggle with this too but I'll bring in people who I knew did a really good job with this and then we'll learn together and then can you can document that stuff so I'll give you an example when I had my gyms um I wasn't very good at at at at keeping customers now I mean like I wasn't terrible at it but I would never have said I was a churn specialist I wasn't really good at like super all ltu but I was so good at the marketing and sales side and making the business profitable overall but like I had probably industry average turn now when I had gym launch and I had access to thousands of gyms I was like hey who here has super low turn and has had low turn for six months and so I had 20 guys out of a thousand who raised their hands so the top top Point 2% came up and I was like okay so I interviewed all of them and found out what every single one of them did now all of them had a list of a hundred things that they were doing but they all did five things so five things all of them did and so then I took those five things I standardized it and then I gave it to 10 gyms that were s that were sucking at churn and I said do these five things and let's see if your churn improves and then their churn improved by a lot and then I gave it to another 10 gyms and their turn improved by a lot and I was like okay now I can feel confident and I can State the facts and tell the truth that Say Hey I was not an expert at this so I found the answers out and this is what happened to the gyms that we did it with use it if you want and so I would just approach it from that perspective and don't flaunt or pretend like you know something you don't wherever you got stuck but for you you've got the software guys get hypers specific on the stuff you're good at help them with that stuff either in a done with you or done for you model and I think you'll be fine yeah great input many thanks for this uh and for your time Alex and I consume really uh everything literally you put out there uh all the time it's always mind-blowing so really a big thank you well thank you so much for coming on I appreciate it have a good one Alex imagine someone you know achieves every dream and hits every goal they have years later they get old and die two years later how much do you care about as much as everyone else will if you accomplish your goals and dreams do it for you you know um I mean this has kind of been my mood going into this call today to be honest with you um so I told I told Jason who's behind the camera I was like you know it's going to be a weird day on goals because I'm gon be like what does it matter you know we all we all end up six six feet below the ground anyways but I think uh the opposite side of that coin is um all of the reasons that we tell ourselves why we shouldn't go after big things are completely irrelevant after we die and the people's opinions that we're afraid of they too die and and so if people live on past us they don't think about us and if people don't live on past us they're dead anyways and so the idea that we would spend our entire lives catering to people who will never think about us again feels like a damn shame and so um I think the constant reminder for me that I'm going to die and that I will be forgotten and that the goals and achievements that I have are irrelevant help me go after bigger things because it makes life worth living for me in the meantime hey Alex how's it going is it a thief it's a thief nice what's up man how's it going good good good just wanted to say that I'm really grateful for being on this platform having the opportunity to ask questions directly to you and um once again if my energy is a bit low like I live in Dubai so it's like 2:30 a.m. in the morning in the morning right now how can I help so yeah so getting straight to the point um often times in the past I've set ambitious goals for myself you know like big goals for myself but to hit these goals I've burnt myself out which resulted in me not hitting my next set of goals sure and I start going in this mindset of like hey sometimes things that you love don't always love you back okay and in your personal opinion how do you balance between like ambitious goal setting with the risk of getting burnt out and what strategies would you recommend for maintaining motivation over a long period of time for to help with that yeah I think I think u i mean it's a good question and it's it's a common one um and so I see that as a common struggle so it's not a it's not a bad thing um just know that you're not alone with it you know I was the reason you get burnt out is because you're in a rush like that's it like you're in a rush because if you if you said I have to achieve that goal by the the time I die you wouldn't burn out right and so it's only based on an arbitrary expectation that you set for yourself so like you are burning yourself out like no one else is like you choosing to set a goal like if I said I need to be a billionaire tomorrow I I I could work around the clock and I probably wouldn't be a billionaire tomorrow was it a bad goal well yeah but it was really more that it was a bad timeline more than anything now the flip side is people ask me well once you hit a billion then what are like are you going to are you going to retire you going to do something it's like well no then people ask that about 100 and I was like and once I get to a billion it'll be 10 billion because it doesn't really matter what the goal is it's just who I want to become along the way and the work that I want to do on a daily basis and so I don't think you would burn out if you said I will commit to doing these things and independent of whether or not the goal happens what I care about is progress and so so if you said I need to be a millionaire in 12 months well the math says that only one out of every 200 people is a millionaire like in the OR sorry makes a million dollars a year excuse me um it's it's less than that for millionaires um but also that takes into account that many of those people are 70 uh and so they've probably lived longer than you right and so you know I think in the US uh the top 1% income is 650,000 a year right now that's top 1% right and so to set a goal that like I will be in the top 1% in 12 months I mean you can set that goal it also just doesn't matter like that goal is irrelevant like why not six months why not six seconds it like it's it just it's completely arbitrary like you make it up and then you stress yourself out and to to try and hit it right but if you said what activities would make it unreasonable that I don't make progress and if you do those activities on a long enough time Rison you will you will hit your goal and surpass it but the thing is is like real real is the goal just like doesn't matter like the goal is the activities that you do because the work is the only thing that matters in the long run like the work you do like the work is the goal and like if there's if there's one message that I could I could [ __ ] get out there to everybody is that a large part of My Success has been that every year I get closer and closer to what my ideal is which is that the work is the goal like that's it it's not the work is the goal so that the winning takes care of itself it's not we go to practice and then the score takes care of itself because even by saying and the score takes care of itself or and the goals happen anyways we still make the goals King but if you make the work King as in your dedication to doing excellent work whenever you do it because that's who you are and who you choose to be and you don't put out subpar stuff because you would know it it channels into a different a different level of energy like I don't burn out I don't think I ever will burn out it's not like and like for everybody who follows like I'm not a high energy guy you know I mean like I'm like there's some guys I see like that guy just doesn't stop like I stop all the time right but I'll endure because I keep my commitments like it's probably one of the only things I do is I keep my commitments and so if you if you dedicate yourself to Excellence overall because that's an ideal that matters to you that's an ideal that matters to me it might not be you but like whatever whatever your ideal is then you can live every day of your life in pursuit of that ideal knowing that you will fall short of perfection but still trying to make progress towards it and so even if one day you don't work because you're [ __ ] exhausted it's not like well I might as well eat pizza because I didn't work out today it's like no I'll have a slice and I'll work out tomorrow and then I'll do it again and this this you know this month I I worked out 13 times the next month I'm GNA try to work out 16 rather than saying oh I fell off my workout routine this month I burned out it's just progress right and so I think about what are the activities that I will commit to and you do have to have some sort of realistic thing like you have to you have to pay rent you have to eat food you have to make some sort of money of course but am I is it reasonable that I'm making progress because at the end of let's say this year if you go from whatever you're making to let's say it's I don't need to know what it is but let's just say it's a $100,000 a year and by the end of the year you make $200,000 a year but you met you set your goal at a million are you a failure maybe you chose to make yourself a failure if you want to if you want to be a failure you can choose you can choose to make yourself a failure you can also choose to make yourself a success right and so because then if you look at that like well if I keep doing that for another year I might be at 400,000 and I had I had my neighbor uh Jacob years ago he was 15 years old I said what do you want to do he's like dude I just want to make money that's what he said I said if I could have you sign a contract that you make no money for the next 10 years but then you're a millionaire guaranteed 10 years from now would you sign it and he said yes and I say cool you're not living your life that way and so a lot of people say they would sign it but then they turn around and then don't they they act like they have to be a millionaire in 90 days and then it takes them 10 years to realize that it was never going to happen and they had to slow and steady proc progress it just looks like it's fast from the outside because that's how social media portrays it people don't get popular until they get big but just no one sees the early 10 years you know what I mean and so all that to say commit to the activities that you will do and then look at the outputs of those activities and as long as you're making progress and you have a feedback loop of how do I get better how do I get better how do I get better you will win on a long enough time Horizon but the reality is like the win the w you move it anyways like as soon as you hit a million you'll set the goal at two million it like it's irrelevant it just doesn't matter but what will matter is the type of person you come along the way because that person can't be taken from you they can take your money they can't take who you are got it got it thank you so much Alex for the information itself you know like um obviously a lot of people listen to this listen to this as well right so all my friends like whether it's Daniel bass or even um Alex himself like I'm really grateful for this opportunity right now thank you so much oh you bet man appreciate you thanks for coming on Alex Maxwell how you doing owner of Rosen Crown what's up yeah yeah it's my agency I've started the agency like about six years ago it's been a wild ride cool what kind of agency uh we do um SEO and website content marketing cool for small business um typically like contractors and homebuilt design Like Home Services got it cool yeah yeah um I know this is about goals so I'm gonna I'm going to start it off with a little quote you might have heard is a dream written down with a date becomes a goal sure a goal broken down into steps becomes a plan and a plan backed by consistent action becomes reality so that's a big thing that I live my life by is creating this sort of a goal ladder sure and my question for you is like how do you track your goals do you do um you know I I use the bullet Journal method I don't know if you've heard of that before but that's how I can like track my progress for individual goals as well as business goals it's a great question and I think that my answer will surprise you um I don't I don't really track uh many goals um I haven't really goals down um much in a while I mean we have company goals and things like that but those usually get broken down by department and when I had a smaller business um I didn't I didn't really write them down that much um and so I would I applaud you you're probably doing something much smarter than than I did um but I will say that I spent I spent an inordinate amount of my time trying to figure out what the one thing that I can do that will make all the rest of the things not matter or be irrelevant and so like if there's one problem that that I can solve that makes all the other problems go away I try and focus on that and so like a few years ago I was like man all these billionaire you know overnight billion dollar companies are getting spawned by people building big personal Brands and so I was like well then I'll just do that and so here we are right and so I I thought like I try and think of like what is the one what is the one chess move I can make that makes the rest of this stuff irrelevant and so then I just ruthlessly dedicate myself to doing activities that I think that'll achieve that and then just get better along the way yeah yeah no I I feel you on that um what do you if you don't mind me asking what do you think because I've already I've been on a couple podcasts talking about this and I have an interesting like perspective on it but like when AI chat gbt this stuff kind of Hit the hit the ground hard uh last year I kind of saw the writing on the wall that agencies in general are going to go through like a massive consolidation and um I think that in three years maybe five but I maybe less than maybe like three years like a college kid is going to have one software that kind of does everything and they'll be able to out compete most agencies you know down in LA or up here in Santa Barbara what do you think about that I think that there's really only two modes of humanity there's humans plus tools and tools basically as long as humans compete against humans you're fine because that college kid is going to have the same access as you will and so as long as we are competing against other humans I'm not really that concerned because they'll have tools I'll have tools we'll both use tools to our advantage like all humans have since the dawn of time the moment that it's humans against machines machines win and so but once humans are against machines to me that's kind of like doesn't really matter we're gonna lose and so we just hope for the best that they like us um but I don't just be really real like I don't spend a lot of time worrying about it because what am I going to do about it right there's nothing that like what what is going to change about my behavior nothing and so until that day comes I will equip myself as I always have trying to best prepare use the tools that are available try and leverage those things so we can get more out of them than other people can try and adopt technology faster than my competitors do yeah but if there ever is a you know a trump Car Technology that comes out there well then that questions the meaning of life overall and it's you know humans against machines and you know money doesn't matter and you know it's guns and gasoline or who knows right but like yeah I I just again I I go all the way down there and then I'm like well what am i g to do today I'm probably gonna make content that I said I was gonna make I'm gonna write the book that I said I was gonna write I'm gonna take these calls I'm make these investment decisions and that's what I'm gonna do so that I I don't I don't stress about it I'll just put it that way I don't stress about it I think it's easy to spin yourself up because then you get into this existential threat but you'll probably do what you've always done which is you'll adapt yeah yeah and I I did adapt so what we started doing last year which is funny because when I read your book and I've been watching a lot of your things you kind of hit the nail on the head on what we did with Rosen Crown which is we basically positioned ourselves as like Consulting agents like a Consulting agency and what we do is we train an in-house individual right to do everything that we do using the software that we do and then we just charge monly for that yeah put yourself out of business I love it it's great yeah yeah so that's basically my solution but yeah that was pretty much it man well awesome dude well thanks for coming on I appreciate it you yeah have a good one all right see you brother work plus big goals equals ambition lazy plus big goals equals entitlement big goals don't make you different big work does you know it's funny because like a lot of people it's funny I mean this is this is obviously a whole day on goals but a lot of people have big goals like that doesn't really mean very much it's just what what are you doing about it and when I see somebody who has huge goals and isn't doing anything about it it's just like they feel like they deserve a big life like you don't get a big Life by just wanting it like everyone wants it everyone wants a six-pack everyone wants a beautiful wife or a beautiful spouse or whatever everyone wants a big business but that doesn't change anything like your desire changes nothing and claiming and like I hate I hate hate the all the deservingness worthy Mantra that is pedal by the internet because they want to tickle people's ears and make them feel good about themselves like it does nothing and so a lot of people I mean I try and boil everything down to behavior which is what are you going to do and basically Nothing Else Matters like all the words that people use to describe their emotions to describe X Y and Z like it just doesn't matter until you translate it into activity like what are you going to change about your behavior even when we're talking about the AI thing earlier it's like well what are you going to change about our Behavior if we're not going to change anything about Behavior then then talking about it doesn't serve us right and so having big goals is fine but I would just say like it's honestly it's fine it just doesn't matter like like if someone comes to me like the amount of times I I I have conversations like this people like I want to be a billionaire I want to help a billion lives and I'm like cool man that's awesome what are you doing about it like it's just easy to say I had a gym owner once who's like I want to help 10 million people get fit and I was like no you don't you have a local gym you don't want to help 10 million if you did want to help 10 million people you would you would go about completely differently like you say that because people around you nod their heads and you sound you feel good when people say that's great that's why you keep saying it because you get reinforced by other people when you say it not because you actually [ __ ] want to do that because it just comes down to what you're going to do and so all day long all of that ladders up to activity and so if you don't know how you spend your time in terms of what you do then I can promise you that you're not going to get where you want to go anyways the deservingness worthiness Mantra just it just like manifestation I just I hate all of it I just think it's just it's complete gobbley gck it's just it's make belief it just it's not it's not a thing like I can stand here and just wish for a mill it's literally wishing it's just saying if you keep wishing for it if you keep wishing for it it'll come the univer like as though the universe gives a [ __ ] about you right the universe is going to deal you something because we have one itis we think we're the center of it it's like it doesn't matter but I actually think that's really comforting because it means that you can not be worthy at all you can not be deserving you can be an absolute [ __ ] you can be a [ __ ] with three fingers and like looking like this and can't speak English and it doesn't matter because if you still do the stuff that gets you what you want you still get it and to me that is the ultimate equalizer if more people find out about your stuff more people will buy if you make your offer better more people will buy and so do those things the rest of it leave leave the manifestation and the worthiness and the deservingness and the affirmations and the self-love and whatever the [ __ ] else leave that to your competition and while you stomp on their necks as you just move past them because you're focusing on doing more and doing better of what has worked in the past then you'll get on podcast and say you know I just always dreamed this way and I just W I'm just kidding um anyways that's my little rant for that moment hi Stephanie hey Alex so nice to be with you here and what you just said is the reason I follow you um love what you do I love your podcast um and I I love the fact that you're on LinkedIn now your little tidbits of information um I am probably not your typical follower so I work in nonprofit uh but I I do my entire job is around helping business owners so I'm around business owners and entrepreneurs all the time and I do dabble in um businesses myself in my spare time um so my question is around um it's more General so it's around um just being a person who has always has some goals um whether they're learning so um just learning new things so learning goals um fitness goals as well as um growing businesses um not specifically my own but helping um friends and um others to grow their businesses and my my question is like around how um I I'm pretty aggressive about um having all those goals and like how do I not alienate um the people around me and keep like the quality of those relationships when I'm like go go go and people are telling me to slow down or take it easy um yeah so that's that's my first question before I answer what do you think I'm gonna say uh leave those people behind yeah yeah the thing is is like um you can't be like you can't be all things to all people right like they have their dream for what they want Stephanie to be like to them and you have your dream of what you want Stephanie to be like and what you're coming up against is the conflict between those two ideas and so they want you to behave a certain way and that behavior they're basically demanding from you and when you don't act that way they punish you verbally they avoid you they they send messages whatever it is right they passively aggressively make comments whatever it is and so like as you level up people either come with you or they fall off and so I mean I tend to be binary when it comes to either someone is helping me achieve basically helping me become the person that I want to become or they're hindering me and I just don't have room in my life for people who aren't helping me right and so um I think it's really admirable that you're helping a lot of businesses with the nonprofit and the things that you're doing um and you have these goals and so often times people get a lot of anxiety so I Define anxiety by having um many many plans but few priorities and so you have lots of things that you want to do but you don't know which one to do and that's what creates anxiety right just like I'm not sure which way to go right the equal opposite of that is sadness where you just don't know any path because you don't see any option whatsoever and so it's a very different feeling and so if you feel that way it just means you need to make an order you have to Force rank say what is most important to me and everything else comes second to that and if you can't like you have have to make that order for yourself because it gives you Clarity and once you have Clarity then you can make decisions around an outcome like this is what I want and when I say for me from an outcome perspective I really think inputs and outputs like you said you have a fitness goal you have a learning goal you have a business goal right I boil all of those down to inputs and outputs the same reason I started this thing with saying like our way of doing goals is we say what's the input what's the output and so Fitness the input is probably going to be like I need to go to the gym and lift weights or do cardio whatever it is right X days a week cool that's my input whether I get in shape not there's I'm not getting into like nutrition all that stuff but like like that's that's that input right my learning goal is that I want to read three books now I would boil that down probably another level because a lot of people mentally masturbate when they read and listen to podcast but I say I want to be able to take something actionable from this book and I'm going to do something about it and so from every book I want to do one thing I'm gonna take one piece of action or I until I take action I'm not going to read another book and so I actually don't read nearly as many books as people think I do um because I just try and take action on them because my definition of learning is same condition new behavior and so if I'm in the same condition and I haven't changed my behavior I haven't learned anything and so this book is really just the same as watching a movie if I don't change how I act and so I would make sure that my my inputs after reading the book have changed so that I can demonstrate that I have learned and when it comes down to the the businesses I would make sure that you boil things down also for them you can use this Frame if you're kind of Consulting helping I'm not sure how the nonprofit Works um it's to like what are the inputs and outputs of the business because every business is just a pipeline at its most at its most basic form there's something that comes in and there's and there's money that comes out and so what is the input that has the the highest uh return on our effort and time and capital or money and so a lot of times people don't even know what the activities they do they make money on accident and I can promise you they'll make a hell lot more money if they do it on purpose and so it's like yeah you know we they a lot of people just spray and pray they do a lot of different things but they don't actually know that 90% of their sales come from one channel you're like cool well what if we 10x that and then forget everything else because we make that a priority and so the the big picture is that strategy is just a fancy dork word for priorities it's all it is so when somebody says like what's your strategy just means what things are you prioritizing over others and it's taking the limited resources we have in time and money and effort against unlimited options because there's a there's countless things we can do but there's limited things that we should do and that's strategy and so back to the original point of like you've got people who aren't encouraging you [ __ ] them you already know that right well I like what you uh told one of the previous guys where you said work is the goal so I think for me that's what it is right I just want to work um so yeah so I love that I I wrote it down so Alex one of these businesses I'm helping is a gym um so what is your advice on like right now let's say around like 70 members um smaller gym like what's your um one piece of advice to like double it and then go big honestly the the simple answer is I wrote an entire book on how to grow a gym so I would say like read that book read that yeah I recently started um following you so I you know I haven't um read that so yeah just just read that book like you'll have more than one way to double the gym like it's just the business has not changed it hasn't changed in in 50 years um it's a very simple business the thing that makes it harder is people it's a very service heavy business it's one of the you know there's a handful of businesses out there that are that the what you make a profit on is the quality of the service that you provide which basically makes it a training and culture business which is why it's so difficult to scale relative compared to like a food business like you can have low skilled labor that doesn't have you know tremendous skill and you can keep opening locations and making sandwiches but when you have like a massage thing like it really comes down to the massuse it come Downs to the trainers it comes down like that's why hair salons oftentimes like there's not a huge hair salon chain why is that because it's so dependent on the individual stylists right and so that's what makes the business easy to start with a single location guy who really loves what he does uh more difficult to scale because it takes a lot of systems and operations specifically around training and recruiting okay but if they have 70 members they're in the same spot that most gyms are at which they're probably breaking even and the owners making $30,000 a year take come and working 80 hours a week um they just need to promote more and they have to fix their pricing I'd bet that those 70 members what what's the price I'm getting a little tactical but what's the price that they're charging um like around $30 a class for an hour right okay so it's a class it's a class based thing yeah um they they they have to make more money per they have to make a lot more money so they have to charge more add additional Services um that add value they have to be reaching out to every customer on a on a bi-weekly Cadence to check in with them just because they pretend they care um like there's just just read the book read the book and do the things in the book I will um thank you so much I like I said I love what you do and I also love to listen to Leila's stuff so oh yeah she's way better people just don't know you yeah thank you so much for having me thank you Stephanie for coming on I appreciate it Kenny you're muted just FYI thanks Alex employee entrepreneur that's great it's where I'm you're good for the Hest too far um so for a bit of context here I've got achievements and like I've achieved goals in other areas of my life up to this point mostly academics and Athletics um I'm realizing now a lot of those goals were external not really set by me um consciously or unconsciously so in terms of setting my own goals now um I mean everyone wants to dream bigger that's already come up so in business how do you balance the Continuum between what if this could turn out way better than you expected and be realistic when you're formalizing your goals well dude I honestly don't think it matters either way like I I genuinely that that's just right off the bat like you I'm going to rewind and give you a little Kudos because I think you you you might need to hear it but the fact that you had the achievements in your career and you were an athlete before this it actually gives you a pretty big leg up on most people because um a lot of times athletes are accustomed to working for very long periods of time without reward before achieving a goal they're accustomed to the idea of years upon years to develop skills that that take Mastery business is the same way and so if you can TR if you can generalize that approach to skill Mastery within Sports and how you worked uh with within team and having a coach if you can if you can apply that same perspective to business you'll Crush you'll do great you'll go way ahead way faster than most people because you've actually done a lot of other work that people have to do later ahead of time so I just don't want you to feel like you're at a disadvantage or anything like that because like a lot of your backgrounds actually prepared you really well for the entrepreneurial path so just like point one you should know that um in terms of realistic versus big goals dude like you're you don't it it's kind of like it's kind of like a a take this way I mean it like a little bit of a mental masturbation exercise of like how big could this get or like I just want to be realistic like it just doesn't matter like rational design I think is complete like a complete farce like no one's like it's kind of like Mike Tyson's thing of uh you know everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face and like the market will definitely [ __ ] hit you in the face and so as much time as you spend the day you get in the ring all of it's going to change and so I would just encourage you to not spend too much time in this phase because it doesn't matter it's complete make belief like I have never made a business plan in my entire life I just know like okay well this costs this much I think I could charge this much let me see if I can let people know about it and if they want to buy it that's it like that's bit like you just sell something to someone and that means you're in business like a lot of people really over complicated it's like you have a service you do something that saves someone time or effort and you charge them a premium on your time in order to do it because you have some skill that they don't or some time that they don't or you have some sort of product that you developed that I mean developed sounds super fancy like it you know it could be whatever it could be a food thing it could be a workout thing it doesn't matter right you develop a product you know what it costs you buy a little bit more in bulk so you save and then you have a markup and you sell it over time you develop a brand because you make content around it that shows why your thing is superior and whatever lifestyle and things that you want to associate your products with that other people who want to associate themselves with those values will also choose to vote with their dollars by buying your product that they say that these values matter to them that's all it is and so there's all this [ __ ] that makes business really complicated but like the like for you it's like dude just sell something it doesn't matter I would actually rather you just make a sale on anything just to show yourself that you can just get through all the first steps which is like get the LLC set up get a payment processor set up get the bank account set up and then like go ask strangers for money I'm dead serious serious as cancer man like that's all you have to do there's all this [ __ ] that's like between your ears and you seem like a nice guy this is me just like you know picking up whatever I'm picking down like speculation like no you see like dude you you will win if you if you just if you if you stop thinking about it I promise you like way Dumber people who are worse with other human beings than you have won in business like you can do it you really can like I'm just saying like just off of just like the tiny interaction I have with you I mean it did sales for a very long time so like Split Second interactions like decent decent judge of initial character you'll be fine dude just have you have you read the leads book yeah yeah okay do the warm Outreach section do the rule of 100 and either just pick whether you want to sell your time at some sort of service to solve problems for people or you want to sell a product that's it and if you don't have Capital just start with a service and you sell your own time that's it that's all you got to do if you've read the offers book make a really good offer message 100 people that you know you already have a thousand people you know right now on your phone you can do this tomorrow you can set up your LLC bank account and payment processor today that's crazy I love how you yeah you simplify everything so everyone else complicates it it's always been the simple everyone else just [ __ ] complicates it it's all it is that's my goal for you just do those things and don't care about whether the goal is realistic or unrealistic do that make money and then all of a sudden you have a way better perspective on how this works because it's like right now okay let I'm gonna give you an analogy because I think it might be helpful so what sports did you play uh iy ice hockey okay so imagine you've got like a like a 10-year-old kid right and he's never skated before all right and he's like you know I've got these goals between you know um becoming a a high school coach and and and going pro and I'm just debating on you know what I should really set my goal for my ice hockey career you'd be like dude [ __ ] get on the ice like you don't even know how to skate yet what are we talking about right like you'd probably be like this is ridiculous and so it's the same it's the same perspective right like I think you're spending all this time on the side of the ring and you just got to put your skates on to get in and then you're gonna get hit on your first game be like [ __ ] that hurt wow I can't do what I thought because like he's on the sideline trying to come up with plays for how he's going to play Ice Hockey and he's never even he's never even been in a game yet I promise you you'll win though if you actually do this stuff you'll win you'll be fine yeah that that makes sense thank you second question you have these goals now and you're in that first stage you're in your lonely chapter how do you create that external accountability to to get to these goals when really you're just by yourself dude you know external accountability what's the thing you're most afraid of cool uh yeah losing my house okay you don't want to lose your house right right then don't lose your house I don't think you need any more external accountability like I didn't want to go home a failure that's all it was like that was my external accountability every time I wanted to quit I was like I can't go home a failure I'll never I I will [ __ ] hate myself for the rest of my life I won't do it I can't do it and so losing your house is probably a very painful idea so you're working right now the good news is that you only have to work 2,000 hours a year there's another 6,800 hours that you can you can put towards that more of your time you're not working so just use some of those hours do the rule of 100 and then make as soon as you make as much or more than you currently make at your job do it for six months save up save up a nut all that extra cash don't spend any of it put it in a bank account and then feel you'll feel good about getting the other the other 40 hours 50 hours a week back because then you'll just make more but you just got to make are you married I'm married yeah yeah so just you just got to set and I'm saying this to Kenny's wife because you can play this recording to her um you got to give Kenny space for this like you have to you got to let him do this and it's going to be a short-term sacrifice but longterm if he doesn't do this he's going to resent that you never gave him the the the space right because long term if if if she doesn't support you I'm not saying she does or doesn't I'm just saying but like if she doesn't support you longterm in taking this season because this will be a season the thing is the season might last six months it might Last 5 Years and I know that's a big ask but at the same time she probably loves you because she wants you to be happy and she wants you to realize your fullest potential and if you're unhappy in your current thing and you feel unfulfilled and you have this hole that you just can't [ __ ] like every day you get in bed and you're like I hate what I'm doing or I don't want to do this I think I can do more you have these feelings and you're just sitting there at night like you don't want that but I promise you you don't have those thoughts when you're [ __ ] exhausted because you worked a double every single day because you did your job and then you started working on your career now again be more be more purposeful with the time you're probably have less chill time less Netflix and relaxing and probably be more strategic and be like okay let's make sure the hours we have count let's do stuff or let's let's make sure that I carve out this time but then it's like that's it like I'm gonna spend the rest of our time so that five years from now we can do whatever we want whenever we want and I'm just ask but she's gonna make this bet with you right does she have a career she does yeah okay well then you have even more safety now so you're fine as long yeah dude you you can't lose if you actually do it if you actually do what I just said you will be fine apprciate that thanks much back Kenny you got it man thanks for coming on when I started going after bigger goals I found it more useful to write down what I was going to give up more than what I was going to do and in general the bigger the goal the bigger the sacrifice so I actually think this is is is a second frame that um is super useful so one earlier on um I think Peter referenced uh if you don't know what you want to do figure out all the stuff you don't want to do and cross all those things out first another way of thinking about this from a goal setting perspective is like you need to do these activities but right now you currently spend every minute of your day not doing what you need to be doing and so what I mean by that is if you've been plateaued in your business at the same level for six months or 12 months or more and you spend all of your time working then you're doing the wrong stuff and so it means that you can't add more to your plate before you take away and so I remember there was this time when I had six locations and I was planning to get to 10 and I realized that what I was like what I needed to give up because I needed more time in order to do that and so I realized for me I was going to give up uh the Ravens I'm from Baltimore uh I know sad sad loss recently um but I gave up watching and following football because you know there's obviously the watching football but then all of the ancillary stuff around it like the commentators and like who's coming up this week and what are the matchups and how are the other teams doing and how are the players doing and fantasy and all that stuff so I gave that up and I gave up basically all the social interactions that I had around that with friends because a lot of them that was like the main thing that we interacted on um and I gave up uh Netflix because I used to watch Netflix now I watch Netflix now because I'm a different season but during that season of kind of grind time I gave that up too and I remember making this video um I just went Facebook live and no one gave a [ __ ] because I was just a kid who owned a couple gyms um but I was like I just realized that like I have to give these things up that I love and it was because I loved the thing that I wanted more and so I think um rather than trying because like right now a lot of people maybe are taking notes or they're like man there's some activities I need to be doing you can't add them to a plate that's full you have to clear space like you have to clear space and that mean and and usually when you clear space it hurts because it's stuff you like doing and that's and that's natural it's normal but the thing is it's it's a it's a short-term pain for a long-term gain or the alternative is you continue to suffer the same long-term pain that you are while having these short-term hits of gain right you the short-term pleasures of fantasy football of Netflix of of whatever you know the show you follow or whatever your hobby is right we do these things but we sacrifice the big thing that matters most to us and I think that that's what leaves a lot of people feeling empty like if you if you look back on the last month or or quarter or a year and you think of all the hours that you spent on these activities that don't really ladder up to anything like they don't help you get forward or make progress towards the ultimate goal that you have and when I say ultimate goal for me it's still very much like the person you want to become and the ultimate potential you want to realize if if those things haven't laded up to that you probably don't even remember most of it you probably couldn't even tell me what shows you watched or or or the games that that played and like did it really matter right and so again you might love football maybe that's really important to you whatever it is but like if you're not willing to give those things up then just be able to say I did not hit my goal and realize my potential because of the Ravens and when you say like that it makes you feel like a [ __ ] or makes it made me feel like a [ __ ] and I was like well I'm not GNA let the Ravens stop me from you know realizing what I mean they're a great team and I love you know I love I love supporting and I like having the you know the friends that I can talk about it with but if I can't talk to my friends about anything besides the Ravens are are they really my friends and so I would you have to eliminate before you can add and sometimes it hurts and that's okay hey is it Karen or Kuran it's Quran kurran there we go nice to meet you I'm a big fan of your and Lea's work and like it is so exciting to be here and it's bit shy to be in front of so many people and um so yeah my question was about uh goals so I'm more or less in the same situation as the I think Danny what's most his name uh employee entrepreneur and Kenny I'm sorry Kenny so I'm still trying to figure out my way and so I have a lot of goals and I'm very easily distracted yeah so what would be your suggestion like if I don't have any um sales or business skills but I still I'm in the want prer phase and I I want to Chase my goals so what would be your best advice for that yeah well there's there's kind of two paths that you can are you employed right now or no I'm currently unemployed now okay so there's there's kind of two paths that I would I would I would consider strongly so one is that I would try and work for a small business owner and the reason I would say small business owner rather than a big business owner or a corporation is because in a small business you're going to get to touch all the different aspects of business because there's just not that many employees and you can spend your extra time trying to learn from the other people who do those functions so every small business is going to have some element of marketing they're going to have some element of sales they're going to have some element of product or service or customer support they're going to have all these elements and so if you go there you can go with the full intention to learn and just get paid to do it which I think is a wonderful way and I think a wildly underutilized way for people who are kind of like not sure what to do go work for some businesses that you think you might want to start later it's the best way to learn like I quit my consulting job I didn't start a gym immediately I went and I I worked for minimum wage I was a consultant I was you know like I I made a I made a good living I was a Vanderbilt's very good school and highly ranked in the US and um I went from a a prestigious consulting job White Collar doing space arban intelligence uh to mopping gym floors right but I did that because I wanted I had no intention of staying mopping gym floors I wanted to learn the ropes I want to learn how it worked and so I worked at the gym I was there 16 hours a day I got there at 4: when the when the the owner got there and he would leave at 4: so he'd work 12 and then I would I would keep working till the gym closed because I wanted to I want to know what the trainers were doing I wanted to know what the what the the billing person was doing I wanted to know how the sales worked I wanted to know how the marketing worked and so that's what I did and I honestly the way I did is I emailed 40 different gym owners because I wanted to get in the gym business and only one of them got back to me and he off he said I could work for him and so I drove out and I wor and I drove out there with my car and packed up and that was all I had and I started working for him the next day for minimum wage right he called me his Apprentice right and so so like there are there are a lot of paths and if you if you feel like you have absolutely zero knowledge you'll probably learn a lot faster just getting into a business and getting a feel for it and getting paid to do it so that's the good it's like you'll get paid to do it just be willing to take a pay cut that's the thing is everyone has this big ego about like what they should what they deserve I'm worth this it's like no you're not you're not right you're worth what the Market's willing to pay and if the Market's not willing to pay that then you're worth less and that's fine as long as you don't think that that's your worth that's your worth in this season which is you're getting paid to be a student everyone else pays to be a student you get paid to be student what what a wonderful life right so I think that's path one now path two is if you had because if you had said I am an employee I'm making you know I'm making money now I would have said okay learn as much as you can from the business that you're in if you like that business and then take all the excess cash and invest it in courses skills and when I say this stuff because a lot of people are like what courses BL it's not about that like there's so much free information on the internet you can you can immediately use that stuff and deploy it but there's still costs of learning and so what I mean by that is like if you if you want to you you want to start a school Community like there's a cost right you you want to start a website Shopify cost money like you want to like all these things but the thing is the cost of starting those things or start the cost of running your first ads it costs money but you learn and so you take the cash that you have and you deploy it against those things right and if you're like [ __ ] I really suck at ads then sure maybe pay someone for tutoring that's what I did I literally paid a guy who was a media buyer one of these agency owners and I just said hey how much do I have to pay you an hour he Tred to be 750 an hour I didn't have that kind of money and so I was the best [ __ ] student in the world I sat there I recorded everything I took all the notes and I did everything he said and within six weeks I could run ads like him and so like you can learn this stuff quick if you just take the notes and you apply yourself and you're willing to risk some money and bet on yourself but tldr if you're unemployed right now and you want to get into the business game figure out what business you want to get in at least generally go to a small business I would say 10 employees or less and then say I will I I'll hustle I'll work everything and I'll commit two years I'll give you 24 months of the absolute best effort ever and I and I'll eat dog [ __ ] in terms of what um willing to make if you're willing to make the trade that and you don't even have to say this explicitly like I didn't say hey Sam I want to learn everything from you I was just like I just want to I just want to learn and most business owners want people who want to learn of course because they want you to get better because if you're better then you make them more money right and then take your extra time be friendly to all the other employees and most people take them out to lunch have zoom call meetings with them see if you can if you can help them and then they'll help you and they'll teach you what they do like this is how I've learned everything just nice to people I try and do a favor for them then I ask them if they can show me what they do it's all I've done just for a very long time okay so in a nut chill just get tied basically yeah in the short term just remember like it's not it's not a loss though it's not like you you failed as an entrepreneur this is just a step I was an employee first too it's not it's not like not like you're failing it's just like you expand the time Horizon and see that you have to develop these skills and just think okay I have to develop these skills that's the principle that I have to accomplish how many different ways can I do that if you you don't have the means right now because you have to like eat and pay rent then go get employment at something in the industry that you're interested in ideally in a smaller business so that you can learn from those people and get paid to learn what a deal yeah if you put it that way that makes sense yeah I think people should put it that way yeah don't worry about your parents or your friends or what they say it doesn't matter yeah everyone thought I took dude I was I was a white collar consultant from Vanderbilt finished in three years I had above Harvard's mid score in the GMAT like had the credit and all my friends were doing really fancy consulting jobs looking way cooler than me and then when they found out I was going to become a trainer at a gym mopping floors like oh poor you he Alex you know tough tough time I'm guessing are are you Indian or you have a you have a ethnic background yeah I'm an Indian right and so I'm sure your parents are tough on you I'm guessing I'm guessing of course they are and and and good for them right they're trying to raise a good kid I get it um but they want you to win and so I'll say this as long as you work your [ __ ] ass off on a long enough time Horizon you will gain their respect back they said they're just going to measure you on this because it's all they know they're just doing the best they can with what they know but the world's changed since they were kids and since they were your age right and so it's okay to like I know this is tough man believe me the hardest decision I ever made was disobeying my father hardest decision I've ever made and quitting my job right now I think you're in the position like you can get a job that's below your pay grade my dad didn't tell anybody that I quit and started working at a gym he didn't tell any of his friends until I owned a bunch then he was okay talking about it again right otherwise his son was a failure right then he was a failure and then he's like oh my God I'm a failure right and so it's like you just have to have a longer time Horizon for your success than they do and they're ju and like don't resent them they're just doing the best they can with what they know of course they are if they love you which I'm sure they do they're just doing the best they can with what they know they might not say it well but that's what they're doing and so go work even if it's below the pay grade with the full intention of working your ass off and learning everything like rip all the knowledge from that business specifically learn the most about acquisition which is how they get customers learn that when you have that then you can go start whatever service you want and maybe you'll learn how they do whatever their services you can start your own got it that's a lot of valuable advice thank you so much you man good luck dude you'll be fine thanks long time Rising long time to win man all right Spencer Alex nice to see you how are you excellent how are you what can I do for you good uh I would love two questions but I will be happy with one um the the first one is how do you determine priority actions when you have no tangible evidence or results for which to make priority action decisions from okay for what so context wise I I do Fitness I mean I'm a coach I have been for eight years transitioned online and my main focus is in the morning I do my deep work I write long style posts I create content okay um my goal for the year is to get 750 pieces of video content out I'm just chasing that number as fast as I can and in the afternoon trying to reach out to as many people as I can before Facebook or Instagram block me from reaching people okay um when there's no real results like you know direct for me to directly say you know making this many reals or making this style of real talking on this piece of content to X number of clientele or X number of calls whatever yeah I just don't know if I'm just doing too many things and if it would be better to focus on two of those things yeah um so how long you been doing how you doing 100 reach outs a day uh just about I do I've been I've been averaging about 75 so far this year so which is short of a 100 um okay and that's the very t i so you're month in so you're month in of do it so did when did you start you started in like January 1 when did you middle of December I've been doing reach outs for quite some time I there reach outs are always the shittiest one and the hardest one because I have I I believe very little Goodwill with my audience outside of the content that I create I think most of the connections I have are not warm okay that's fine I mean that's why it's cold so like that's fine okay and then from a Content perspective you're putting out how many pieces of content a day two sometimes four uh usually two or three reals and one still type post and so from all of that you've gotten zero customers this whole I've gotten three or four this year I believe okay so in eight weeks you've gotten four customers sure yeah five five six weeks okay so five or six weeks you've gotten four customers so you're getting like a customer every 10 days roughly um actually which you know so four yeah so one every like yeah 10 10 12 days okay um dude I actually I think you're you're fine man I think you just got to get better so like you're doing you're doing the right activities you just have to go through the better Loop like right now you're like I'll bet you your opening message is probably not as good as it could be I'll bet you nurture in the conversation of like how you're doing the ACA like acknowledge what they're saying compliment them ask them the next question like that could use some work in terms of how you're actually nurturing them to like get them interested and clarifying what problem that you're trying to solve for them and then getting them to a call that you can sell them on I'm guessing that's more or less how your funnel Works essentially yeah I most of the reach outs don't lead to to anything yeah and that's okay that's I mean if you it's it's 1% like I mean it's it's a very low like it's a it's a volume game and so you're getting a customer every 10 days like if we can improve like the nice thing with outbound that I love love about this is that like you can you can double a response rate you can triple a response rate and all of a sudden every 10 days becomes every three days just from that one change and so right now do you have do you have all the metrics of that lined out I know we're getting taxed for everybody who's listening but this is how we break [ __ ] down so in terms of I get your inputs so you're putting two pieces of content out a day and you're doing your reach outs okay so do you have uh like your your next like funel metrics you have certain number of responses so are you met reaching out to people who are um like liking and commenting on on uh on the post and whatnot yes but it's always the same people and lately my content has been getting less and less engagement yeah okay so I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna give you a a small piece on this is I'd rather you spend more time and make one good piece of content okay just make it good so now now you just got to make seven a week just one a day just make one good piece okay just make it better because in the content game quality does like it's kind of this this tough thing where like you have to make a lot in order to learn what people kind of like um but if you make too much you spread yourself too thin because it's just you and so quality still trumps quality trumps quantity but quantity quality trumps trumps quality on its own right you want to make lots of good [ __ ] but one good thing like one good video will make you more money than 10 mediocre shitty videos um but you only get good at making videos by doing more and that's why it's kind of like a a chicken egg issue um I do appreciate that you're getting the Reps in but D you're five or six weeks in so like I I would I would not lose steam it probably also is a little bit of an expectations thing like if you're getting a customer every your 10 days like it's not terrible like it's not it's not terrible like like all we got to do is tweak one part and then becomes every five days now you're now you're at more than one a week sure five or six has been like three years like that's since since I since I drastically increased the volume I've been coaching for several years and making content online I would say the consistency is more in the past year and a bit but the volume the volume yeah go ahead keep going um the the volume particularly recently because um I mean full transparency I just kind of hit a mental low that I just I didn't really want to be alive anymore I felt like I was just do I was the I was the success zombie that that we we talk about that you just you want the things but you don't do yeah you don't take any of your own advice andt it was it was a really cool place to be because I haven't been more excited to create than I have I think ever which fantastic so the volume I mean I I back to Kenny's example of playing hockey like I played hockey growing up too and I had a shooting cage and I took literally 50,000 shots yeah and and so that was like people I hated when people told me like man you shoot really well yeah yeah I've I've done it 50,000 times and so that's my goal with content is do double the amount and get better yes so like you're like dude you're on the path you're just early I'm being dead serious with you man like the fact that you've already got you've got like in the last whatever five or six weeks you've gotten four customers like you're you're just on like shot like 300 of your 50,000 like you'll get better I would just make sure that keep split testing the opening lines and the offer that you're actually presenting people when you're getting on the phone with them uh because that those are going to be the biggest levers you have opening message and the offer are gonna be the biggest levers that you have in outbound by by a long shot and if people aren't responding I would say give away more free [ __ ] so on that opening message see if you can just give give [ __ ] away because you need to get some traction you need to get some inflow like this is just me sensing just from like what you're saying like I would rather you have a full roster of clients that you're helping quote for free and then barely be able to take people on and then start raising the price of hey I can't I can't do this anymore for free and then start raising price on those people and asking them to pay like I'd rather you just give away more [ __ ] up front so you can get more people interested does that make sense in terms of lead magnets or in terms of working with clients because it has been years and so like I I have my bills paid with my client roster cool okay well then yeah one I mean to me one and the same there like the lead mic can just be a a shorten period of time I mean you've been through the the the the leads book I'm sure so on the lead magnet chapter it's just about like how can we just give away more [ __ ] on the front end to get people interested just keep giving stuff away until you get more people engaged and that'll that'll dramatically change your funel metrics like if I had one tldr for you like one thing to take away from this like oh two one make a little bit less content I'd rather you just make it better right rather because if you're doing the solo two to four pieces a day is [ __ ] tough and the reach outs and the client roster like that's a lot of work dude so I commend you on the work ethic drop it to one and then the second is put all the excess time into into giving away cool [ __ ] now I would say instead of giving away like free materials I don't think people are going to care a ton about that in the fitness space just speaking from my own experience I think what they will care about is free time and effort and Consulting and so that's where you can like walk some like hey I'll do free kitchen walkthr you can FaceTime me we'll walk through uh your kitchen I'll tell you what you should be eating or not eating hey we'll do a free grocery guide next time you go grocery store let's schedule the time FaceTime me I'll walk you through the store what you need to get when you need to avoid like just get a little bit more creative on the stuff you can give away on the front end just give and dude if you spend an hour with someone talking about their food or talking about grocery shopping they be like [ __ ] this was so helpful and then they're gonna there's gonna be this pause where they're like well how can I get more of this right and you're like well it's funny you ask and then you can and you say hey why don't we talk tomorrow I know you're getting in in the car we'll talk tomorrow I'll walk you through it cool and then they will show up and they're very likely to buy but just frontload on the on the on the DM because if you went through the cold outbound chapter in leads the biggest breakthrough we had was giving more [ __ ] away on on our outbound like giving front-loading more stuff to give to get people engaged especially if you're cold you got to make it insanely good for them to respond warm traffic they'll just get on the phone because they trust you but cold you got to make it worth their time and you have like this long to do it yeah those are the two takeaways one piece of content give way more [ __ ] up front thank you I I appreciate that and funny funny little idios synr there synchronicity synchronicity um you said when you give so much that people just naturally want to that's how I signed up a client today I got to the end of the call it was goingon to be a strategy call and she's like well can you do that yeah sure dude that is how marketing works so so do that just give that away but strategy calls a little bit of like people use those as sales call so like I might call it something different but just say like hey I'm going to walk you through an entire nutrition thing it's absolutely free I do it because I want to give back to the community and it helps me know people and at the end of that call if they don't like sign up for you just say hey do you have any friends who might be interested in something like this didn't do that today all good no like dude you're you're on like shot 300 of 50,000 like you're fine dude but dude you're five or six weeks in you still already got four customers like you're fine just from an expectation standpoint like you're super early thank you it it feel it feels longer because I've been at it for like for years but it's but dude you w early in the consistency aspect yeah you weren't though you know what I mean I'm only I'm only I'm only pushing on that because I don't want you to beat yourself up for it like you were you were in this industry but you weren't playing the game right like now you have now you have skills and you're playing the game you're thinking inputs you're thinking outputs you're thinking funnel metrics you weren't doing that two years ago no [ __ ] way right you're doing that now and now it's just going to go up I promise you like we're just going to keep tweaking these little aspects of the funnel and you'll be good like if you're doing one every 10 days it takes a double to get one every five days days two doubles in your every other day like you're this you're this close dude I appreciate that yep appreciate you man thanks for hopping on the bigger the goals you set the bigger the failures you get scars we collect from the monsters we've slain you know when you go after big [ __ ] um it just hurts more when you fall um and the more public you are about what you want to do the more people will jump on the bandwagon because you know people love heroes but they don't love anything more than watching a hero fail and so expect that if you start going after your goals and you start achieving them people will start looking at you differently and secretly they will start hoping that you fail because it will make them feel better about the action they have never taken and so um like I mean I I've told the story before but uh when I was sleeping on the gym floor uh a lot of my clients were like oh good for you you're pursuing your dream you know all that stuff um but then when the gym started to work and I started to make money and I started to be able to live on my own um and I had like managers and all that stuff like people like ah big man you know decided to come in oh thanks for gracing us with your own presence today you know um and it was this moment where I realized that um people believe in the American dream are root for it until it comes true and then you become the man and I don't really know when that happens but my postulate is that it happens when you pass them you go from pursuing the dream as the underdog to the man the moment you pass their level and so um some of the scars that you have aren't even from failures but they're from relationships that you thought you had that you don't uh because you realize that people weren't actually rooting for you they were making themselves feel feel better by pitying you and you thought they were rooting for you but if they were really rooting for you they'd root for you even harder when you win and it's really rare to find those people and the more you win the more you realize that like people who uh you see as friends and acquaintances actually see you as the competition and so um I would just say like if I if I could tell my my younger self that I would have just prepared myself more for that and just said like it's okay to lose friends because they weren't friends to begin with and you didn't really lose friends you expose the fact they were never friends to begin with and that being said everyone I hope you enjoyed the second episode of one of zero live um if you like this stuff drop it in the comments uh it it tells it gives us the signal that uh like we should keep doing this if you guys hate it like we won't do it anymore so definitely tell us uh it just gives us really valuable feedback um so that we can uh just help you accomplish your goals which hopefully if you got anything from to day um as long as you work uh you have achieved the goal and you become a success the moment that you decide you are and that took me a very long time to figure out so when you do the activities you are by definition being the person that does the activities which means you are realizing every day the potential that you want to have so lots of love keeping awesome and I'll catch you guys later by

Channel: Alex Hormozi

Views: 314,823

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Id: 9OsUfwTTslc

Length: 89min 37sec (5377 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 08 2024