9-Figure CEO: How to Scale Your Business at Every Level

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0:00 $150M CEO Gives Business Advice
1:19 $0 to $1M
3:14 How to Attain High-Income Skills
5:45 $1M to $10M
10:18 Bureaucracy vs. Structure
11:21 The Title vs. Comp Trap with Early Employees
14:22 Why IQ Is the #1 Predictor of Workplace Success
17:10 Using Memos to Reveal How People Think
18:59 How to Test for IQ in Interviews
22:48 Hiring for Skill vs. Stability
27:41 Trait Conscientiousness and Culture Fit
29:36 The Best Interview Questions to Ask
33:55 $10M to $30M: Data Integrity & Task Management
40:08 How to Hit Deeper Penetration with Your Customers
42:17 Hiring C-Level Executives (CFO, CMO, Sales Directors)
46:34 When to Use a Recruiting Firm
48:55 $30M to $100M: It's a Toolkit Problem
50:22 Lessons from Working with Pace Morby
53:21 Cole's Story: From 3 Companies to Focusing on One
1:00:43 One Company vs. Portfolio Model
1:04:38 When to Sell vs. Hold and Start Something New
1:07:54 What Makes a Nuclear Offer (The Wolf Trap Analogy)
1:13:17 Working with Subject Matter Experts vs. Brand Visionaries
1:16:01 How Cole Invests His Money
1:20:38 Emerging Markets and Macro Investing
1:22:26 AI in Business: Molly, QC, and Qualitative Lead Scoring

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

What do you think are the biggest keys for zero to a mil? I think the number one reasons why, you know, like products or offers or anything you want to sell doesn't work is because that's one to ten. At one to ten you're probably figuring out where you stair step, but then five to ten, it just breaks down. Like this is also the freaking hardest part of the whole gig because you're starting to get to where you can almost pay for good salaries and experience talent. But a lot of the people that you're hiring, you're hiring for like high potential.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

A lot of people struggle with having a good core leadership team. What's kind of your system?

SPEAKER_01 0:30

You would almost rather have someone with no skills. That's a more valuable thing to the company. If you're stuck around like 30 million, you're like, shoot, I can't get to the next level. It's probably like that.

SPEAKER_02 0:41

Really was the difference between driving 30 to up to 100. In this podcast, I interviewed Josiah Grimes. Josiah owns New Reach, which is a portfolio of over 20 brands doing over high nine figures a year in the education space. And most notably, he's partners with Pace Morby and Sub 2, which does over $100 million just on its own. So we break down really what Josiah's journey was going from zero to a million, a million to 10, 10 to 30, and then 30 to 100 plus. And we talk about hiring, interviewing, and so much more. So if you're an operator who really wants to scale, this is going to be the podcast for you. What would you think are the most in? I know with I know the story was sub too. You basically just launched it and you were at 10.

SPEAKER_04 1:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:26

But just for just for people who don't have the luxury of launching something and being at 10 within 30 days. What do you think are the biggest keys for zero to a mil?

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Zero to a million. I think honestly, it's probably it's more the soft stuff. And some like it's not, but it is. Like some of it is you got to start with you have to have enough faith. Like you have to do a lot of hard work in order to get there right. And that means you need to have enough faith that you can do it. Right. A lot of people, if they're if they've never started a business, it's like, oh I'm gonna go start a business business and make a million dollars. It's like, okay, well, that's like a pipe dream. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. And so then you you're not gonna work hard towards something you don't think is accomplishable, right? So I think it's like base level, you gotta have some faith that you can accomplish it. And then two, you gotta be willing to put in the work. Frankly, whatever your main like industry or domain is, um, I mean, if you're super just kicking it off, right, and you don't have any core competencies, you probably want to build up a couple core competencies, right? Like, yeah, you had a core competency in copy amongst and sales, right? Amongst other things. Um, but I think if you can build up one or two of those, like that helps you a long way, like gets you a lot closer. And then I think it's iterate fast, fail fast. So, and I think we've talked about this, but like don't build the whole, don't build you don't have to build the whole freaking thing. You know what I mean? So, like uh, if you're like, I think that I got a great idea, I could start a really cool new br energy drink brand, right? All right, well, before you go and try to find manufacturing and build the recipe and everything else, like try throwing up a landing page and drive a little bit of traffic. Yeah, see if you can sell some of them. Because if you can't sell them economically, then like you can figure that out in 24 hours and not spend nine months on it, right? Like, don't I think the biggest thing is like make your um make it very nimble. Like your first business, go into a million dollars, make it really nimble, try a lot of things as quickly as possible, as cheaply as possible. Don't go get a brick and mortar to begin, you know. Yeah, like those types of I think those are big.

SPEAKER_02 3:14

As a side tangent, I'm curious what your thoughts are on this. I told a lot of people, because I think income traces skills over time. So your skills are your ability to solve problems. If you have a lot of skills, you can solve problems. People pay you to solve problems. Okay, yeah. And so I think that the easiest way to learn a great skill is to find an industry that you're passionate about. Go work for like an up-and-coming company in that industry that's like dynamic, it's not super bureaucratic, and then go learn a skill in that industry, whatever the skill is that's closest to the value creation. And so, like in software, great call out develop. Oh, I got this from who the Darmesh. Okay. I just stole it from him. It's good, dude. Darmesh got a Darmes of HomeSpot, and I just stole it from him. I was like, Yeah, I'm just gonna say that from now on when people ask me what to do. That that was like, I can't beat that. It's super good. But he was saying, like, okay, great. In software, you want to go learn development because it's the it's a product-based business that's closest to value creation. Yeah, if you're in home service, it's more about less demand gen, but it's about like leading like blue-collar uh techs and you know, people who can be tougher to manage or tougher to recruit, or even being bilingual, let's say if you have a cleaning business and a lot of people are like, let's say Spanish. Uh, in the education industry, a lot of it is marketing and sales. Yep. You know, and so whatever that is, it's like as a young person, I want to learn the skill that's closest to value creation, and then from there you can start your own consulting business or start another business in that niche and whatever. I'm curious if you would agree with that.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

100%. Yeah, I like I like the idea of keeping it to whatever the core competency that actually is closest to the revenue engine. You know what I mean? Like I think value creation. Yeah, I like that a lot. Because I mean you can tan gently be close enough to like like when I started with with Cody, I was the intern, right? Yeah, but I was the intern for Cody who ran the company. And so like that was close enough to be able to participate in a little bit of everything, yeah, right? Um, because naturally he was close to value creation.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Yes, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

And so like that that ended up working out great. Whereas if you're like, well, I'm in this really cool startup and I'm in HR, it's like, well, if you're trying to, you know, like if you're in HR for engineering, that's a trickier path than maybe if you're in operations, you know what I mean, for that same company. Yep. Um I mean it depends on the company. If you're trying to start a recruiting firm, then yeah, then going in and learning how to recruit and being in HR might be fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 5:29

But well, I had no idea. I had no knew nothing about recruiting. We just we just learned it as we went, but I knew marketing and sales, and I knew stuff about sales teams, which you help people build. So that's what helps. So okay, let's say we're at a million, somebody's figured out you know, an acquisition system, how to generate leads, how to sell leads, and um essentially, you know, how product market fit. I would say is like getting to a mill. So what do you think about one to ten? Once they have those three things in place, what's one to ten?

SPEAKER_01 5:57

One to ten, all right. So one to ten is really fun. It depends on the business and like what your fulfillment mechanism is because you're at one to ten, you're probably figuring out where you stair step. And if you're like what marketing, like you either need to expand your marketing channels, so that's one. Two, you might need to just increase the amount of content you generate for that same marketing. Like a lot of people get stuck because they're generating the same amount of content for their marketing, and then their marketing like costs stair step. And so, like, you know, when before they scale, they go from like one to five million, and like the economics still work, but then five to ten, it just breaks down.

SPEAKER_03 6:27

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

And that's either because their fulfillment sucks, so like their fulfillment didn't scale. Like, you need to build the full model, right? Where it's like, okay, this is how many people I need to hire on the fulfillment side for all for a hundred new people I bring in on the front or a hundred new clients over here, or two new clients, I need this on the back end to service that. And so you need to scale the model, you know, in totality altogether. But part of that is, you know, whatever's generating your business, which is generally marketing, there's probably some content equation, and a lot of people get stuck because they st they don't make more content and they're like, oh well, that marketing channel's capped. It's like, well, you know, maybe you just need to create, maybe you need a more dynamic content team that can drive that can, you know, bring in more eyeballs for the right cost.

SPEAKER_03 7:07

Right.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

And then, you know, that I think that generally can take you to 10 million. With that, I mean you're also building out like this is also the freaking hardest part of the whole gig because at this point, you've hired some people in that were sub a million, you're starting to get to where you can almost pay for good salaries and uh experienced talent, but a lot of the people that you're hiring, you're hiring for like high potential, right? So like they they should be able to solve really complex problems, but they probably haven't solved those specific problems before.

SPEAKER_03 7:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

Um if you're hiring younger, because younger people tend to be a little like you can sometimes get high potential, not a lot of experience, and in the right price range. If you're you know business doing a million to five million, okay, well then you've got management problems, right? Like because they they aren't necessarily professionalized, um, and they don't necessarily have that level of professional maturity in a workplace to know like what back channeling even is, right? Or that the important the difference between maybe structure and bureaucracy, right? Because you'll start to apply one to ten million, you're gonna start to apply structure, which basically limits um it limits how everyone can talk to each other, right? When you're like five people, you guys can all just sit around a table and everyone hears everything all the time, right? So it's like one to everyone, like that's your one way to communicate. When you go to 30 people, right? Well, now information can find its way through the organization a bunch of different ways. And a lot of what you're doing from like one to five million, especially, is defining roles, building out structure around who does what, when they do it, how it's communicated. Um, and so then you're so as you're doing that, which allows you to have playbooks that you can continue to operate. If someone quits, you don't have to freak out and fill that hole, right? Like you want to build out onboarding training, all that from one to you know, let's say 10 million bucks. Um, but you're also having to train up, you know, these younger people in your org um on professional maturity and them understanding like this is structure, it's good for us. Bureaucracy makes makes you less efficient. It's rules that make you less efficient. Structure is rules that make you more efficient, right? And so you're applying structure, you're probably getting pushback from your initial team, so you're managing through that. You have to build out all the structure, which is good. Um, so like I and and at this point, most of your, you know, you're just getting to the place where you can hire people that can initially come in, have the experience to take real work, meaningful work off your plate. So basically, what I'm saying is that section of business is really freaking hard.

SPEAKER_02 9:24

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SPEAKER_01 10:20

Okay, yeah. So, like, um, I think I think this is super important, and it's like a uh main pushback you're gonna get from that initial team going to the next stage. And you as an entrepreneur, you need to know that there's a difference between those two.

SPEAKER_04 10:33

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 10:33

Right? Like when you say everyone's like, let's say you set core hours of working hours. Like before, everyone just kind of worked all the time, but now you're like setting core hours where everyone's got to be here from 10 to 3 so that we can communicate. And now you're setting up like, you know, designated stand-up meetings every morning. Right. Um, and you've got different Slack channels, and people have to put in a freaking IT request. Like they can't just walk over to the IT guy.

SPEAKER_02 10:55

Yeah, and just everybody dumps on one person. Yeah, right. We had this one lady, uh, she about blew her brains out. She was my first ops person. And it would there was a time where like if you had any ops request, it was just like everybody just goes to this one person. And funny story, like, I mean, she's a nice person, and honestly, I just wasn't a good leader back then. But it was one of those things where I didn't put in the right structure. So then they were like, Can I just be COO? And I was like, Yeah, titles don't mean anything. You're COO now. And then it was, oh well, COOs make this on whatever. Yeah, dude instantly goes to that boat. So I need a, and it was literally like this person was making like four grand a month, and they're like, Well, I need to be looking at like three to four hundred thousand a year. I'm like, it's not gonna happen. It's like we need to either reconcile your position or find a way to part ways peacefully. Yeah, yeah. But anyways, I don't know if you've ever been through that mistake. You're you're a really great operator, but no, dude, I've definitely made that mistake.

SPEAKER_01 11:51

We had uh um so much fun. Also, uh uh what's it called? Yeah, no, we had uh really talented I mean he was really talented. He was on the the tech team. I I love this guy still, dude. Yeah, like he might even be watching this. I don't know. He's he's an amazing guy, lives in Florida, runs an ad agency, just saying. Um but yeah, no, like we same sort of thing. Like you can award with title or with comp. And a lot of times when you have a small organization, you're like, well, I can't pay him more. I'm gonna pay him with title. Bad bad choice. Um bad choice most of the time, right? If your company's growing, it's a terrible decision. You know what I mean? Um, and we've kind of talked about like, you know, if you're like an if you're 10 people, you don't have a COO, you might have an ops manager, right? And it maybe a director of operations, right? But like you climb the anyhow with that, we gave him a CTO title, Catholic was gonna be a great idea. Um, and we had the same exact conversation, right? It was like I think he might have been making like maybe 65,000 bucks, 60 grand, and it was like I ran the comps on Glassdoor, the slider says, you know, and I should be making 225 to 275 on the low end. Like, God, like dang it, dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One maybe tiny caveat there is like a lot of times you can help those people by saying, hey, go look at the actual job, you know, like go look at the actual job listings and the requirements.

SPEAKER_02 13:11

And let's compare that to your scorecard.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Yeah. And so it's like you're getting the title, and you or when you give them the title being crisp and super clear about it up front. Yeah. Like, if you can do that, it saves you from the pain on the back end, and then also helping them understand like the difference between like they're using Glassdoor CTO slider, right? And you should take them to like go look at LinkedIn and let's look at the actual job, like what are the jobs here in your loc, like whatever local area, and look at the requirements. And it's like 15 years of management experience, PhD, or in you know, these four things, and you're like, you have two years of you know, community college. So it's like yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:48

And also, you know, especially it's these can titles like CTO, COO, stuff like that, because they probably found something on payscale or Glassdoor or whatever. Yeah, but that company might have had 250 people. So it's like, yeah, the CTO of a company at the 2450 person scale is way different than our company of 10 people.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

Yeah, or just managing the data at like a hundred million dollar revenue business. Yeah. I mean, like the data around that versus the data that you like that needs to the end and the technical infrastructure that needs to be managed at you know, for like CTO at like three million dollars. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:22

So I still want to stay in this one to ten million range and then do a sidebar about hiring. And I want you to tell me about IQ.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

Oh, dan dan dan this is like this is your your best take.

SPEAKER_02 14:35

One of your best takes.

SPEAKER_01 14:36

Thanks, bro. I'm sure I think I probably just copied this from someone else, frankly. But it's been very useful for us, right? Yeah, like you know, the the question is like, hey, what's the what's the number one indicator uh for success in the workplace? Right? And like, I'm gonna know, dude. I wanted to answer hard work. Like that's like that's the correct answer. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 14:56

Integrity. Integrity. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Okay, baby. Like integrity, passion, hard work, grit, those are all great answers. Yeah. Um, like the scientific answer, or the probably we'll say, you know, correct answer is actually IQ, which sucks. We're canceled. Yeah, dude, it's like, I know it's like officially canceled. Does luckily it doesn't always apply to entrepreneurs, praise God. Okay, that's how I that's how we snuck in. Okay. Yeah, it's IQ. So it's like if you if you could be either born in the 95th percentile for wealth or 95th percentile for IQ, you should choose IQ because by the time you're 40, you're like just as wealthy and you're still smart. Yep. Right. And so uh and really IQ is your you know ability to solve nuanced problems. And so like a lot of people in workplaces, it's like this guy just doesn't listen or he doesn't try. And the reality is, it's like, no, um, like his ability to solve problems is less than yours, right? Like if you have a team, if you've got a team of you know, like 12 people, you'll notice that they tend to gravitate towards some one or two people on that team to ask all the questions. Yeah, those are probably either you're way more experienced, so they've got crystallized IQ, or they've got you know fluid IQ and they can just naturally solve problems, right? And those are the people you should make managers, yeah, right, because they can solve problems. Um but yeah, so yeah, so like sorting when you are hiring, you can't give them an IQ test, um, but you can basically break it down and get something very close um from like a cognitive assessment.

SPEAKER_02 16:20

Yeah, which which is how how do you assess it?

SPEAKER_01 16:22

Yeah, um from like from an assessment perspective, so you got IQ kind of breaks into three main categories, right? Which is like verbal, spatial. Well, I guess I maybe I'll talk to each one of them uh individually, but like verbal is you know, if you're sitting with a person and you're having a conversation, you can hear verbal IQ by the syntax, the vocabulary they use. Uh-huh. And that's going to dictate what they can understand when you say it, right? Like if you give them instruction, if you give someone on your team instructions and they just got it, like they knew what the project was, okay, that's probably high verbal IQ, or more like likely to have higher verbal IQ. Yeah. Whereas, you know, the person that you're like, I explained it to them and they brought me something totally different that could be a verbal IQ issue, right? Or if they I mean, writing is an easy way to tell, you know what I mean? Um, just in general, like if you have them write a little five-paragraph essay or something, right?

SPEAKER_02 17:10

Well, you know what we do that's super interesting is when uh somebody wants to propose an initiative or something new, we have them write a memo.

SPEAKER_01 17:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:17

Yeah. Like this is like the typical Jeff Bezos. Uh I think it's Bezos.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

This is also the difference between like when you're plus 10 million, right? Like all of a sudden you have to push things to writing because you need a process around the conversation. Yeah. Not just verbally. And yeah, it's a but yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:31

So and I and I think that's from Bezos, especially because then the the conversation about the new initiative, everybody reads the memos before, and then everybody's on the same page, and then you just like discuss what actually matters, right? But the interesting thing about it is when people write a memo, number one, if it's not that important, they won't write a memo.

SPEAKER_04 17:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:48

Number two is a lot of times they'll write the memo and then they themselves will see, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, and then they just stop writing the memo. Number three could be they write the memo and then you're like, Oh, I mean, I haven't really had this on anybody on my team, but I, you know, you could write a memo and then it's like, what is this? Yeah. You know, like you're because it's it's a reflection of their thinking. Yes. Number four is you write the memo, they write the memo and you're like, damn, this is really good. Yeah, right. Like this is really insightful.

SPEAKER_01 18:14

Yeah, it's a reflection of their thinking. That's and you want to know how people think. You want the in business, not in art, but in business, right? Some of the best thinkers are structured thinkers, right? So do they put things in categories? Do they put things in pairs? Do they use a framework the way they think about things to solve problems, right? And obviously you can see that if they write something, you're gonna see a framework. Right? It's gonna start with like the agenda, you know, like the bullet points. Structured thinkers win in business. Yeah, and so if you can if you get an like if you're having a conversation with them and they're using fancy words, right? Like, okay, that's likely higher verbal IQ. If you give them a problem to solve and they use a framework or a structure to solve it, that's likely also higher IQ. Um, so just like things like that that you can use to kind of triangulate in on.

SPEAKER_02 18:59

So I would imagine that because I'm trying to like package this in a way people can implement it in their business. I'm imagining that in the hiring process, you could let's say give somebody a task, and then obviously their ability, because we all have those people in our organization where it's like, yeah, if I just tell it to this person, I don't have to explain it twice. Like I don't even have to write it down. Yeah, you know, they just ignore it. You know, those are high IQ type of people. They have I call it like high processing power, which is probably my political correct way of saying it, you know, but they have that. So in the hiring process, you could assign them a task. One thing that I should probably do, I don't do this, but after you were saying it is even maybe have them read my you know, company memo, which like I wrote a 34-page, like you talk about a freaking memo and writing. I wrote like a 35-page, like, what's the plan this year? What was the thinking behind all the decisions? What was the thinking behind all the decisions last year? What did we learn? What's you know coming up in five years? Have them read that and then write a memo to the memo, you know, challenging any of the ideas like that. Whatever. Anything that I could guess, I guess I could get them in in writing.

SPEAKER_01 20:02

Yeah, I suppose. Writing and demonstrate your thinking in writing.

SPEAKER_02 20:06

Yes, to see what that would be. Any other ways you could test for this stuff in the interview process? Yeah, dude.

SPEAKER_01 20:11

So it's like it's okay, the three are you know, verbal, spatial, and memory. And so, like, what I like to do is train something at the beginning, you know, like I might whiteboard something out. I'm gonna come back and have them train it to me at the end of the interview. Okay. Um, I I think that you know, like as I'm in interacting with them, hearing them talk, I'm gonna gain just like an understanding of syntax, vocabulary, whatnot. That's an indicator. Um, and then like you can use tools like we use BRIC, um, like B R YQ, and they have a cognitive score in there as well. And so like you can use tools like that. I feel like those are very useful. Because I think the interview you want to focus on, get them as close to actually performing their job as possible, right? Like assurance that they're gonna do the job. Like on one side, if I say, like, are you a good media buyer? and they say yes, I know nothing more. Like, I gain I gained freaking zero. Or were they gonna say no? Yeah, like what are they gonna say no? It's like I gained zero, you know what I mean? Whereas if I have them buy media against one of my accounts for a week, it's like, okay, I know if they're good or not. You know what I mean? Like, that's this is doing the job, and this is totally useless. So I think in the interview, you want to get them as close to actually doing the job as possible and and be looking for the words they're using, they're thinking, and then memory, right? Like what I talked to them about in the first interview, did they were they able to draw back to that in the second interview? Right? Um, those are all good components. Because the other thing is like you can explain something to some someone, they have to understand it, that's verbal. Two, after they understand it, they have to remember it. Store it. Yeah, store it. Three, and then um, or two, and then three is like where did they store it? What did they connect it to? Right? When do they reference that information? You can know a lot of things and remember a lot of things, but if you don't reference them in the appropriate times, right, to solve the right types of problem or to solve the particular problem at hand, then it's useless information. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 21:49

And so you kind of want to Yeah, well, I will say over time, and I and it's interesting you say this because I've gradually just with my own interviews, over time, even for sales guys, because what we do is is we can work with a business that might be, you know, just starting off all the way to like, we have sometimes, I mean it's rare, but like we'll have sales calls, you know, at maybe like one every other month with a billion or multi-billion dollar company. Yeah. And then also it can be all sorts of different industries. And so you have to have a high business acumen and like problem solving ability. Yep. Because I can't like I can train you on sales. Yeah. I can't necessarily train you on like how to find the constraint in a billion dollar company sales process versus a hundred billion dollar company versus a company doing 20K a month. Yeah. And then also versus solar versus this industry versus that industry. So it's interesting one of my hires recently that worked out really well, he had like no experience. I just was like fuck this guy's so smart. You know I just was like this guy's really smart and I knew from his previous position I was like man like that was more complex than this and he learned it.

SPEAKER_04 22:55

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 22:55

So I was like I think he has a high rate of learning. So I he didn't really fall into my normal criteria of a sales guy.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:01

But I hired him and he was he was great. He's one of our best hires.

SPEAKER_01 23:04

Yeah I mean I don't know how you know I don't know kosher some of this this is but like if you look at people's like where they're at in their life and when their motivations are going to be highest that's one. And then two like when they are most driven to solve problems and if they have if they're in that portion of their life you know what I mean which is different portions for different people you've got to kind of dig that out and figure out do they have a natural motivation now like most young guys coming out of college or whatever that are like just getting started they're going to be pretty high motivated highly motivated right yeah you also see a lot of people like you know they just went through a big life event you know what I mean and now they're really motivated right yep and so I think that you can if you can catch onto that with also high cognitive ability like they're gonna be super driven high cog that person's gonna is going to be you know rocket ship for and you also think with the life events thing because I've noticed in some roles we do want people who are like they're trying to push to like whatever their definition of career greatness is for them.

SPEAKER_02 23:59

Right. In other roles it's better for us sometimes in in certain roles the hire for more of the stability like there's a specific role I'm thinking about where I know if they're like yeah I used to be doing this and trying to achieve these things or running my own business but now like I have two kids at home and you know we just bought a house and this and that and like I'm looking for something like secure. Yep. Like that's almost better for like this role over here. Totally you guys think the same way about that 100%.

SPEAKER_01 24:25

Yeah like I mean bang on dude so like it's okay if you're if you're a young person watching this and you're like why do I work for all these idiots? I'm smarter than all of them right it's like all right check it out um it's like there's two things that if if you own the company you're thinking about two things not you're thinking about skill like they have to be able to do the job and do it well but then you're thinking about stability right because you've had the experience where one of your sales directors tried tried to freaking unionize your sales team some bull crap right like you've had the experience where you know someone that was absolutely key leveraged the crap out of you and said like I'm gonna bounce you know because like they weren't they were skilled but they weren't stable right and so like when you're looking for hot like leaders in a hierarchy it's like okay if you're one individual sales rep and you have a bad day okay maybe you impact a couple clients if you're a sales manager and you have a bad day right like you say something cynical like something unprofessional immature you're unstable in some way you disrupt okay well all 12 of your sales reps right that that sales manager disrupts if you're a sales director you disrupt your four managers and all of their teams right and so like as you climb the hierarchy the risk profile like you need to be skilled but the risk profile of the company is almost worse if you're skilled but not stable I'd rather you'd almost not totally but you'd almost rather have someone stable with no skills right yeah and so like because that's a that's a more valuable thing to the company like loyalty stability consistency maturity professionalism like that's those are the type of people like if I get to choose who's reporting to me like I want them to be skilled but I want all those other things. Yeah like I don't want the the person that I'm like what happened you know like and now I gotta go try to you know fix this whole portion of the organization.

SPEAKER_02 26:08

Right and that's because too if like the man let's say your director who has two managers or something under them and then let's say 24 people if they are unstable or emotional. Emotional is probably emotional is a good word. It's a good word for people to like grasp this.

SPEAKER_04 26:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:21

And they come off of an executive meeting and they're fucking pissed at you because you you know decline their idea or like you're coming off of a one-on-one and they didn't do as well in their performance review as they thought they were going to do and they're not gonna get a pay raise and then they say something about like oh well this fucking company you know they don't like to pay anybody. Yeah you got like now that liability is 24x exactly opposed to just the salesperson doing it. So you have to have and I and I think about a lot of our managers too I'm like they're remarkably you know I I never thought about it this way until I heard you say it but they're remarkably like stable people. Yeah you know they're like they can handle the ups and downs and the stress like they're not freaking out.

SPEAKER_01 26:58

Yeah and I think that's like when you scale like the reason why a lot of entrepreneurs sabotage like they might have a company that could scale but they kind of either sabotage themselves or like this sucks or I don't like managing people. You see a lot you see a chunk of people that built a strong company then they're like realize I just don't want to manage anyone. That's a lot of people. It's a lot of people yeah and a lot of times it's because they had skilled people but not stable people in their org and so like they had no solid footing you know I mean like to no one to rely on in their company in their org. And so to them everything was always fluid and a pain in the butt and like oh my gosh. Some of that though too is like some of those people have their own emotional instability and they cascade into the org well I would say that is at least 50%.

SPEAKER_02 27:38

At least at least some of the people I know.

SPEAKER_04 27:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:42

Cool what was next oh yes I wanted to ask about so IQ any other personality or hiring tips hacks whatever that you know of because this is this is your zone of genius well thank you dude I mean the obviously you know it's like if you're lining them up it's IQ trait conscientiousness which is proclivity to work hard like natural drive so like if like they can't but go do something on Saturday. Yeah and if you're like what did you do on Saturday like I just relaxed watch TV I'm like that's cool like but that's probably that's not your killer. You know that's not the person that has to be doing something that's going to be excited about the project that takes all weekend but it's worth it. You know what I mean is like we accomplished something super cool. We work so hard and we accomplished something super cool right like you want those types of people and so uh like when was the last time you took a you know a work text outside of work right like what was that about like try to figure out do they naturally like and enjoy working are they wanting to be on all the time right like that's a proclivity to work hard trait conscientiousness that drives success right that really is your grit that's the second thing you know what is it IQ's like 24 to 35% of the variance in performance and then the next one which is this trait conscientiousness like proclivity to work hard is something like you know somewhere between nine and twenty percent or something so work hard's got a little bit work hard we got 10% there. We're showing up we're on the board also outside of that what else is in important fit dude so like I want to know because I want to gauge for stability. Like now I know they're smart right now I know they're smart that they want to work hard I want to gauge for stability right and obviously some of these positions I'm looking for like crystallized experience like they have the know how already but um like are they a culture fit and so then it's asking questions that aren't like you got to be a little bit smarter dude we talk about you got to be a little bit smarter than whoever you try to be a little bit smarter than whoever you're interviewing and you should be able to do that because you can think about your questions forever and they just have to answer them on spot right so like if you're gonna ask a cultural like a question ask a question like like one question I like asking is like you know who's your favorite person you ever worked for? And then why and I try to get like the exact story on why and then I ask them a counter question like who's your least favorite person you ever worked for? And then they're like oh you know Tiffany because she was you know she didn't believe in me whatever like oh like when did you tell me the story like when did you like realize that Tiffany didn't believe in you and you know like well I had this report and it was a really good idea you know what I mean I was just out of college and it was it was like a really good idea and so I went and I put it on her desk and I was like this is a report I want you to read I think it's a really good idea. Um and she was like and she was like really happy she was like okay awesome thanks you know like uh like we can you know I'll totally do this but then she just never came back to me and I knew it was because she just thought I was too young and so she didn't respect my ideas. And I'm like okay so what you did was you took she didn't get back to you about the report. That's something that happened and what you made that mean was that she didn't respect like you made that mean your insecurity which is that you're young. Yeah right I was like okay that one's not terrible if now you're older and you don't have that same insecurity you probably won't read it that way but I can guarantee you I as a boss am gonna accidentally forget some of your reports or you're like some of your good ideas I'm not gonna probably respond to an accident right yeah um and so like it gives you I get you get to kind of step outside and get a separate read on how they think yeah um or if they're like oh this person you know is like was always you know she was super negative all the time and she did blah blah blah and like oh like when did you experience that like tell me it's like well she would always kiss up to the boss and always do blah blah blah. Like you want the you want the specific example and then you want to see if the specific example actually would mean what they're making it mean. Right?

SPEAKER_03 31:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

And then if those are too far off you can't manage that person well. So like stuff like that like that I use that as like a culture fit indicator for us. But you want to come up with clever questions that give you that you know a way to triangulate how they might actually be.

SPEAKER_02 31:30

Yeah and let me know if I'm on the right track because this is what I do is I think about the skills that I want to hire for and not just skills but also like you said like traits like work ethic you know IQ whatever and then I try to ask questions but the way I make them answer the phrase is tell me about a specific story when yeah there you go. And what I try to do is get away from because I'll be like you know the classic is tell me about a specific story where you had to give a Herculean sales effort to get this deal across the line. Like it was a crazy deal you had to go above and beyond tell me about a story like that. Like I want to know everything about it you know end to end like what happened. So you end with what happened and what's interesting is a lot of times they'll be like well you know generally sometimes they'll even say generally or they'll say well when I'm really trying to get a deal across the line and then they just talk in generalities. Yeah totally and I'm like well I want to know a specific story. Big one. Yeah because like the one I always would tell is like this one where I had these like three sisters on the phone with this breastfeeding of her and then they started crying and I started crying and all of a sudden their mom was on the phone. I was talking to their mom I had to sell their mom and it was like I it was just a crazy story. But anyways like any good salesperson has that like war story. Yeah you know like where you had to it's not a general you get you get the wife on the phone and then all of a sudden you know the wife's like bitching you out and then he's she she's bitching him out. This is a real story I had when I was told real estate agents uh she was bitching me out and then turns and starts bitching the guy out for being on the call. And I remember I was actually a noob back in these days and this was back when like we were able through ring central you know we were able to essentially somebody could listen in as the call was going on. So like my manager was giving me these like slacks and things to say whisper things and we legit turned it around. It was nuts. It was nuts but you see how it's like a specific story. Yes. You know so yeah that's kind of what you're going for there.

SPEAKER_01 33:29

Super good yeah and I that's like akin to you know kind of like Elon's thing right which is like you know if they actually did it then they should know the details.

SPEAKER_02 33:36

Like if they were a big part of the win yes they should know the actual details because on the resume you can say was a part of insert thing company achieved that you had no real part in yeah no real part of like yeah was aligned with us getting the company to 30 million dollars a year front end revenue and it's like you were like an ops person yeah like how did you do that but you didn't even contribute with that at all. Exactly uh before we go to 20 to 30 mil any other like good zinger interview questions you really like?

SPEAKER_01 34:03

Oh dude I think that good zinger interview questions I mean one I ask is like where do you get your moral compass or code from like oh wow that's good I like that just because I want to understand like I want to understand what they ground themselves to because that's what I'll be able to ground them to. You know what I mean one and then also that's the paradigm that they think about is this moral or not. And so I feel like that's helpful. You know good answers there could be like one either their faith or it could be like my parents right and then I want to know like you know what are like what are some of the tenets of that moral code moral compass that they think about. What I don't like to hear is like you know like oh I you know it's just like I feel I'm like I don't know like feel is a bad don't start with feel you know what I mean but like well I think I just you know know what's right and what's wrong or like I just feel that you know like you know like I'll I'll know if it's a good thing or not you know like or something like that. Like that's obviously a weaker answer for me but like that's helpful. It's insightful I'm sure I think the biggest thing is like get instead of asking a tremendous amount of questions get them to do the job. You know yeah I agree. Get them to do the job. That's like how get them to do the job is really how you figure out show their work and show their thinking.

SPEAKER_02 35:03

Yeah show their work and show your thinking that's good that's good. Okay. So going from 10 to 20 to 30 what do you think are the keys there and now since you know I know in Astro and stuff too you guys are like 10 just overnight. But now that this is probably the phase where you guys even had to grind a little bit totally to get there right so even for you guys what was kind of the big keys and big differentiators data integrity dude like a big one.

SPEAKER_01 35:26

I mean obviously you start to build out so at this point you can afford like you know you're paying people enough you get to keep your your winners you can pay enough to keep them praise God they're taking off meaningful work you're starting to find the right stable components so that your org feels pretty solid like now it's okay now you got to implement task management but actually do it well and you got to implement like some data infrastructure because otherwise everyone's got a different dashboard. You got like 18 freaking dashboards they're like all right what did we sell last week and finance is like we sold this and then sales like no like we sold this and marketing's like I'm not tracking through and you're like what the fuck is going on you know like we have one metric in our company I'm not gonna say what it is but if they're watching they will know we cannot come to a fucking consensus on this metric. It's like and it's kind of important and it's like we can never get it within 20k you know it's like finance says one thing back end says another thing ops says one thing and it's like what is the fucking number what's the number what is the number we need to know what the number is but go on so that's I mean so that's data integrity and and data infrastructure right and structuring that correctly and you need like at that point you need to invest in someone really smart and talented like that's got a PhD right that can come in and that's been there already that's seen what it looks like and can help you make the cake right and so from a data integrity standpoint I think so that's one of the biggest ones because otherwise you're gonna you're gonna be in pain all the time everyone's always gonna freaking complain. Dashboards are never going to be quite right and you're gonna try to drive based on intuition instead of data.

SPEAKER_03 36:58

Yeah it's so true.

SPEAKER_01 36:59

That if you're driving on intuition trying to go from 30 to 60 to 100 like at some point you're gonna be making too many incorrect decisions.

SPEAKER_02 37:07

Well you don't know what the constraint is yeah so you know what's the interesting thing when I do one-on-one calls with our boardroom clients which are generally people from 100k to let's say 30 mil or 50 mil I don't even have the call if they don't bring their data and then sometimes we find out the action item is go fix your data.

SPEAKER_04 37:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:23

Because like if you can't even bring the data well then we already know what the pro the constraint is the data.

SPEAKER_04 37:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:28

So like by the very nature of you not be able to bring that then we know what the problem is because if I mean I can't tell you what to do if I don't see it and if you don't have it then how would you even know what to do.

SPEAKER_01 37:38

Yeah and most of the time it's like the reason why they don't know what to do is because they don't have the data. Like most of the time if they've gotten to that level they're actually pretty freaking smart. Not always that's not always true. Because they don't know what data to look at or whatever blah blah blah but like yes I think data is is hugely important. And then the next is like task management. So like it used to be a bunch of things that people task management, onboarding playbooks. Yeah right like all of that really starts to come into play. Because now you're at a level where if someone like you you need to get out of the level where if someone quits you're like shoot that was an important person we're we're six months like we we moved back six months you know you gotta get away from that and so and there's there's ways that you can control for that but I think like good task management good project management throughout where you've got board like okay it's this type of it's this type of a project we're running we've got a board for that yep right and like track your tasks like tasks should grow over time as your organization adopts the task management make sure all functions are in there this gives you visibility as a leader to be able to say what's marketing working on today right right like you shouldn't have to call everyone to be like what are you working on every day instead you should be able to see it in the system. So like you're you're moving into that level because you need visibility into what people are working on in your organization and are they even working if it's a remote org. So that's one. Yeah and then the other side is like good data. So now you can drive and you can see where people are too busy and where people aren't busy enough. And if you can like so you if you got those two and then maybe you add to that like now you're starting to build out like a more maybe this is a little advanced maybe this is the next step but now you're starting to build out more of like an advanced budgeting process. Right? Like you need baked in budgeting is all about correct assumptions. It's like good books. You know what I mean like I think at this point right around this point you probably like need to start getting your first audit you know done. Not for not for the IRS or anything goofy like that but like your own internal like you need an audit for yourself. Right? You're also gonna run into there's a bunch of reasons why you should get an audit. Like it's gonna it's gonna show you a lot about your your finance and accounting team at this point. But anyhow those are just some there's plenty of stuff to do in that stage right but most of it is um operationalizing your business.

SPEAKER_02 39:42

Yep. So and then if we should so you talked a lot about the ops is there anything growth wise as marketing sales you see from let's say 10 to 30 yeah so I mean you're probably launching so you're monitoring everything.

SPEAKER_01 39:55

Sometimes you know like if you really hit you know if you really struck gold and it's like your product is just continuing to scale you know what I mean? And you're so you're hiring out content and hiring out or like people generating front end marketing type stuff.

SPEAKER_02 40:06

Yeah when you're saying content I mean you're meaning organic content I'm assuming but also a lot of creative is yeah I think I yeah I think you were calling that content.

SPEAKER_01 40:14

Yes yeah yeah altogether yeah so that's probably better. Okay. Good clarification ads, content, nurture assets, conversion assets um you're expanding all of those kind of in in tandem right as you're as you're continuing to grow. So I think like most of that scales and you're gonna figure out where your depth is in your first product line. Right? And now you've got probably an owned audience depends on how big that audience is depends on if you're B2B or B2C right but now you're looking at like okay can I can I sell them other things? You know can I get some expansion on this? Do I have any network effects or marketplace effects that I could build into is there anything that I can attach to my current owned audience that increases LTV? Is there software I can sell them can I bring in affiliate partnerships um so like you're looking more at that like can I can I have deeper penetration in the customers that I currently have. And so you're you're starting to build out those things and then uh and hopefully as your core business just continues to scale as you scale everything in tandem like a machine should right so if that's happening beautiful if you're like well I want to go after extra growth or you find that hey I hit a little bit of a plateau. You know what I mean like the which frankly if it's a good product I mean it depends on how niche the product is but that's probably not a TAM issue. Right? Like you probably have plenty of white space you could grow into and you have a right to win in. But like if you do and you start to slow down like okay well maybe you can maybe there's another vertical that's adjacent that uses a lot of the same mechanisms that you can roll out like alongside it. And I think that you're doing all of that. But at the same time sometimes people like in order to get from 30 to 100 what they do like if you're in it's like just turn on a totally different front end marketing you know way to reach their customers.

SPEAKER_02 42:01

Yeah let's circle back to that in a second. Before we move on to 30 to 100 uh so back to opside a lot of people struggle with getting good C level managers and when I say C level managers I mean because I you're more sophisticated with the titles than I am I'm like I kind of just call it whatever.

SPEAKER_01 42:19

But uh I mean you need content creative so yeah yeah there we go.

SPEAKER_02 42:23

But um a lot of people especially at this level I see they struggle with okay having a good sales director head of sales or whatever you want to title that CMO good um you know whoever's leading over ops good uh CFO for finance etc like that core leadership team so what's been the biggest because this is another area I think you're really really good how do you find hire how long does it take to train those people what's realistic expectations there like what's kind of your system for that um that's a good question man I think that uh at that point you're hiring like if you're hiring a CFO you're hiring for experience right I mean like you need a pro that's got probably audit experience hopefully has some experience with maybe a big five maybe's gone through a couple transactions something like that yeah um like you're you're hiring for experience like cognitive ability right obviously but very heavily for especially CFO because it's a it's a it's a role that even if I mean you know there is differences per business but largely a good CFO should be able to drop into almost any business. Unless it's like something like you know your business is a Brad Jacobs style crazy like MA thing and they did this other thing that was not that at all. I mean there's there's differences but I would feel like whereas like a sales director for instance that can be if your enterprise very different than if you do more style like transactional sales like we do. Yeah. You know like that's almost a totally different management and skill set type of thing. I don't know if you'd agree.

SPEAKER_01 43:46

Yeah I think so I mean and then one thing I don't know how this is in the weeds but it's kind of it's something I didn't know. You know like someone had to freaking explain this to me. But like when you're hiring so back on the CFO thing but like when you're hiring a CFO you've got accounting like you have some people that focus more on accounting which is what's happened in the past and then some people that have focused more on finance which is what's happening in the future good like FPA right and so you need you your CFO needs to have prowess in both of those areas like you want them have to have done some forecasting budgeting finance like that type of stuff which is finance forward looking and have a very strong you know pedigree on the accounting side right and so like you I don't know so like there's little details like that but your question around specific how to find C so we we talked about CFO but the other C levels so like obviously if you CFO you're hiring for experience what about like like CMO that's a tough one CMO sales director that's a tough one. CMO honestly I mean so it this is very business specific at this point. Yeah I mean and like I mean one one thing to look at is like people bear with me on this okay maybe all right I'm I'm gonna throw it out there we'll see how it goes. But like people peak in their you know okay so like cognitive naturally cognitive function tends to start declining somewhere between like 55 and 60 or something like that right there's kind of this turning point where your fluid intelligence declines but your crystallized intelligence continues to advance. Right. Right? And so you tend to be the best executive with the most crystallized knowledge like the ability to recognize patterns so if you think about like an amateur chess player they can recognize like whatever it is like I don't know 600 patterns or something like that when they're playing chess. Yeah. Whereas like a master can like has memorized 34000 patterns or something ridiculous right and it's because they've seen it so they've already been there they know exactly how it could go they can see all the nuances. Alright that's why like you know if you're 60 plus you those are your like your bet some of your best board members right because they've seen a lot of stuff. Right. I mean like they can give you really good experience like experience driven insights crystallized knowledge um where you kind of have the and then you know your fluid intelligence is the highest when you're probably like in your 20s. Right. I mean like and that's why you can pick up on a lot of things right well you're probably the best executive somewhere between obviously this is not freaking don't go higher off of this or whatever and then just rule thumb but rule of thumb like your best executive is somewhere between like late 30s through 50 their 50s. You know what I mean? Because they've got still a lot of fluid intelligence like they haven't felt that decline and they've got all this pattern recognition and ability to understand you know what's going on. Like what you're looking for is like a combination of like entrepreneurial ability to invent and to go create new things still solve nuanced problems but then institutional understanding because they need to know what you're building towards like you're not hiring a CMO so that they can keep your business at the same level. Right. You're hiring the CMO that knows what the business should look like at the next level so that they can take you there.

SPEAKER_03 46:36

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 46:37

And as far as hiring for those positions like generally I mean if you're at let's say you're at 30 million you might have one talent act person right on your team but you should go hire a recruiting firm for these specialized positions that know how to speak the language that already have the relationships already have the connections right and they'll they'll bridge the gap. Because like you're gonna come in and not know anything like when I was hiring my first you know CFO type person I was like I didn't know I mean I took some accounting and finance classes in college but like I didn't know like I wouldn't have been able to hire that person. Yeah um and then the same thing is like what most entrepreneurs do when they hire them their CMO is they hire someone that's a good marketer but doesn't know anything about institutionalized structure or operationalized structure. So like they hire the person that's good for their business right now but has no idea how to build in stable managers right and and manage an organization underneath them. They're just a good marketer.

SPEAKER_05 47:32

You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 47:33

And so like a lot of people are like this guy's a wicked he's an ace copywriter and he's so freaking smart. Yeah and like he's the CMO and it's like uh does he know how to freaking build managers and directors because that's his actual workflow that goes along too it's very it's very tough to have both of those in one position.

SPEAKER_02 47:49

If you're looking for a mastermind to take your business to 10 million a year plus then you want to check out our eight figure border mastermind. So after doing 100 million in total cash collected for my own companies I've created a mastermind where I really pull back the curtain and show you exactly how I've done it. So I not only share with you what's working for us across marketing sales fulfillment operations finance for all of our different companies at the same time you can network with some of the top people in the industry and also listen to world class speakers like Patrick David, Dean Graciosi, Neil Patel, Tom Bilo, and many, many others. So if you're interested check out the link in the description and get more info. One thing that I've heard I'm curious your thoughts on this is it's it like what you said with the CFO, it's very tough if you are not a good CFO yourself, right? Like you took some accounting classes to know who it is. What do you think about like the way I think about it is you just need to find one of your friends or something who has the CFO that you wish you had and then you're like okay that's kind of like talk to that person get an idea okay this is kind of what I want and then also just see if you could just pay them to do a second interview with the candidate.

SPEAKER_00 48:50

Yeah that's great.

SPEAKER_02 48:51

Super great that's I think one thing uh yeah it's a great idea. Okay. And so 30 to 100 what do you think and I'm I'm curious more again on you know especially like in a single business like Sub 2 who was there right like what were the big things in growth that helped to hit that level because that's a level that very few people in our industry have hit.

unknown 49:13

Right.

SPEAKER_01 49:14

I think the biggest thing that we had is we started to have really like this network effect on the back end where we received plus up just from referrals. You know what I mean so like that really helped us. You know and as the community expanded we saw more and more referral motion and so that boosts all of our marketing metrics and everything else. And so like I think that helped and I think I mean we're continuing to grow in sub two you know I mean so like we haven't we haven't hit a platform.

SPEAKER_02 49:38

Yeah we haven't hit your TAM yet dude no dude we haven't not even close but maybe let's go to start another business.

SPEAKER_01 49:43

Yeah dude so like uh so I think that that we've got a lot of you know trajectory with there but the biggest thing there is like building to the model you know like we need more content more creative um and we need to make sure that we don't fall off on fulfillment you know what I mean and so one one thing that's really nice is like that you know the sub two is built so that you make like everyone on the back it interacts in the community aspect drives ROI for the members and so as it gets bigger it's one more of a moat but it's also more benefit to everyone in the community. So like that it that type of a business naturally spins up you know what I mean and like accelerates. So that's so in some ways it's it depends on you know what type of business you're talking about.

SPEAKER_02 50:24

So in some ways that's like an unfair yeah well what's interesting is I think in our industry you know what you guys and Pace have done with Sub 2 is really one of the only examples of I'm not saying you have like a network effect like Facebook but yeah I would say that every additional member to the community makes the community more valuable which is the definition of network effects which I've not really seen replicated anywhere else. You know and I'm also curious so working with Pace like he is a community beast. Yeah I've just never seen anybody like it and in fact like he's so good to where I even told him and I don't think he wanted to at all but I was like I was like dude if you ever ran for politics like you probably freaking win. Because you're like I was like because you know when he did that tour yeah and he was meeting all of everybody from his community which in and within itself is badass I was like the guy's going on campaign. I'm like man big should I donate to this guy's I'm like I'm not gonna donate to any politicians but Pace Morby I would donate 100% what is the biggest lessons you've learned from him and just seeing how he's operating because you guys are such a good team.

SPEAKER_01 51:25

Thank you dude um one of the things I think is incredible about Pace is like his care for every member dude like he cares so much and and is always focused on the product right like he's always focused on the this community aspect building it in and is relentless in his desire to help people. You know what I mean so like the you know like I want to help people I want to see people be successful.

SPEAKER_02 51:50

Do you think how much of that is like something genetic with him versus because I'm the same way like I want to help people but I have like a I get you know I have like an energy bar that gets depleted right and it feels like his is just like overflows or something. I'm like curious how much of that you think is like learned versus just who he is and if people aren't don't know who he I mean haven't like experienced it it is truly remarkable what he does with community and how much as he calls it loves on people you know yeah pace is awesome.

SPEAKER_01 52:23

I think that pace is naturally very extroverted and so I think that that aids him in a sense in the in the you know because he likes to communicate and he gets energy from communicating but I think the other thing too though is really like he's I mean sure willpower dude like I think is the you know like sure willpower like he will he will go go go go go and do you know plow through walls to see people be successful. And I think that he's exceptional you know at it now and has been for a very long time but he also like honed that like so I think he had a natural gifting to begin but then he really worked on it and really honed it. You know what I mean and really really built it up to be able to uh and just a natural ability to remember names and faces and and not just a natural ability but then a discipline on top of that. Yeah it's like if you compound natural talent and gifting with discipline and diligence you get a phenomenal outcome and I think that that's like been yeah like pace is hard is to see people do well and so it just yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:22

Yeah I'm curious so to get to because I I've gotten well between when I had three companies at once runway wise we got close at a certain point to an 100 run rate but it kind of all we kind of consolidated back down to one company before I would I was able to realize that from a yearly standpoint. How much though from getting to let's say 30 to 100 did you like squeak up to like 99 then you're like no dang no well I mean you know I probably told you the whole story but uh we had three companies one was a medical company then had my two sales companies that was so much work and the medical company was growing so fast that the B to C sales company we were kind of just like ah like let's just let's take that and this is what we really did. We were like you know and it B2C was tough like especially with like the whole K-shaped economy like if you're running a call funnel the consumers who are buying number one it's like they were just not financially there and then you're in this position of like should you even be selling these people like you you know you can help them but you're like ah it's like I don't even want to take anybody's last dollar. So we actually absorbed that whole company into the medical company and started another division within the medical company that hit a million a month within 60 days. Wow right so that so then we so but so that was the strategic calculus which brought us down to two because my thought my theory was like three was too hard but I had done two for a while. So I was like well I guess I can do two. And then for different reasons it's a long story the met I ended up leaving the medical company and it's still around but I just was like I'm just gonna focus on the one company. So anyways but yeah at the peak when I had all three our best month was like 7.1 million like actual cash collected nice right not even revenue contracted whatever it's like actual cash. Nice but then came back down to 30 when I just went to one you know so I forget why we even got on that uh that tangent but oh yeah how much do you think let's say 30 to 100 is you know the offer the marketing or something to doing with acquisition versus certain things with operations and the reason I ask is especially you know with a lot of the people I know and the industry and stuff most people will gravitate towards oh it's just the offer yeah or oh it's just the marketing which I mean I'm sure that's got to be a part of it but I'm curious what you think just from having actually done it in the street I think uh well I think honestly like if you I think if you if your product and if you're diligent about maintaining the product quality and you went from zero to thirty million you can go to 100.

SPEAKER_01 55:50

You know like that's the the bearithmess but like I think that that's pretty much fundamentally true but you're gonna have a bunch of things that will absolutely break unless you build in the infrastructure for them. So like our biggest thing wasn't like reinvent stuff to get like once you're past 30, it's not go reinvent stuff at that point. It's really like is your infrastructure there is your data clean is your like do you have good higher level um directors and talent that can build the organization from like a thoughtful sophisticated way. Like that really was the difference between driving between 30 to up to 100. I think that you see a lot of entrepreneurs I mean I've been this person you see a lot of entrepreneurs that get to about 30 and then their toolbox is out. You know what I mean? Like they don't have the next they don't have the next toolkit and so they're like trying to tinker around with you know like these little bear with me on this but like you know you're using a fake screwdriver trying to like fix an engine or whatever that you just don't have the right yeah you know you don't have the right tools and so you're trying to get from 30 and so it's like well then we went up a little then we went down a little then we went up a little and you know it it makes you draw false conclusions to be like well it's the you know the market can't bear anymore or whatever, right? And so I think that there's I mean there's a there's a component of luck and product like your product like we've got a really strong product and so there's a natural growth and and we could really probably screw a we've screwed tons of things up and still grown. You know what I mean? So like like the like the is that a a boon to your success and a bene an outsized advantage you know like having a a strong product that people naturally love that really is found that kind of lightning in a ball or like magic yeah product market fit. Yeah of course um so like I think that there's that aspect to it but I think if you're stuck around like 30 million you're like shoot I can't get to the next level it's probably a toolkit thing. You know what I mean like if you've already demonstrated that you can sell 30 million you probably can sell more you can probably sell more yeah yeah you know like something so it's probably a toolkit thing.

SPEAKER_02 57:53

And how fast did you think you got from 30 to 100 if you had to just estimate for that brand.

SPEAKER_01 57:58

I mean we just our our growth rate you know from like a Kagger perspective you know like we try to like like our peg is kind of like once you get I think once you get to maybe north of 10 15 20 like if you can have a 30 plus Kagger where you're growing 30% I think that that's pretty stable that's probably probably about where we've been yeah so what would that be is a thirty it's like a 30% growth annually. Okay so that would be what's no we grew faster than that actually I think that's what I thought I don't know I was gonna say how many took what three years five years? Yeah I think that might be if I'm looking at I think about like from a portfolio standpoint you know we've got Key Glee and then we reach and then a bunch of other stuff and so um yeah so like across that we're at about 30% but I don't know what the specifics would be for sub two off top because with us we can get to the front end acquisition number I mean I'll tell you this we can increase our front end acquisition we'll increase it probably whatever what's 200 divided by 125 that would probably be like 50% about 50% something like that.

SPEAKER_02 59:02

We'll we'll get there on the front end in like a couple of months you know like we can we can um accelerate that front end growth quickly but our company is mainly like what we're really good at is realizing and retaining back end revenue for like years. You know it's like a B2B service etc. So we'll we'll increase that front end volume that will increase the top line and some of the profit but where a lot of the top line and profit increase will come from is it'll and it'll take from my estimate probably a full 18 to two years to really actually realize yeah like let's say a sustained 50% increase in front end volume.

SPEAKER_04 59:41

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 59:42

You know so I'm on kind of this two year track the 60 basically that's pretty s I mean hey dude it's a good that's a good thing that just two years to 60 is not bad that's a bad at all bro that's not bad and it's profitable too. So you know we we try to you know it's top line is is cool but you know it's like you can't deposit your top line at Chase. So I try to keep the profit healthy and that's you know for any reason if the market goes down or you have especially when you're in a big company if you're running like low margins and you have a 20% decrease in top line because something happens to the economy or Iran or whatever it is I mean your profit can go real quick.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:16

Yeah you know if the margin's not that high. Yeah but I think uh I mean that's one thing that I always thought was interesting is like people buy businesses that are losing money right but have revenue right because revenue in and of itself is valuable and a lot of times you know like if you're a skilled operator with the right tool belt you can come in and be like oh you know this business is driving 70 million in revenue and losing six million dollars a year it's like what an opportunity you know and so like I think well that's true yeah but it's um that's great growth dude heck yeah well thank you man so model questions so we have different models I have the one now I have one company trying to go as hard in one company as possible kind of model yeah you have a bunch of brands right I'm curious what do you think are the pros and cons of let's say one company versus what you're doing and yeah we'll just start there like what do you think of the pros and cons? Well I think that you can run multiple brands under like one uh united you know kind of leadership yes thing and so like I think there's a benefit to that whereas like you know we've got a handful of companies outside of it's like New Reach has multiple brands but then I've also got key glee which has you know franchise network and you know all of its corporate stores and whatnot and and you know movable type and you know a handful of other uh ventures and I think that brands under a unified management system way easier you know I mean because you get synergies right um whereas if you're two separate companies two separate management teams there's different types of benefits from like a focus perspective yeah right uh and it's really like so I think it's more of you know eat on an individual basis you're trying to choose should these be run together so we get synergies across or should this be more like run it separately it supports its own management team it needs its own it deserves its own focus right because we can scale it to a certain level um what I think is the worst is when you don't have a clear cut right like it's not one of those two or you start to build in different types of like drastically different types of businesses that don't make sense within the thesis of the original company. You know what I mean like like sometimes for instance like if you guys added a tech like a technology layer that might make a lot of sense and drive some recurring revenue and be really cool for your current existing base and so like that aligns. But if it's like you want to go start car washes it's like well it doesn't make sense. Yeah but you're like but but my operator's really strong and I'm gonna have him help me on this on the side it's like no.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:42

So when you have these brands you are bringing them in thinking there's expansion revenue opportunities so to speak yeah or one brand like they're all running they're all running a similar playbook like similar playbooks right like yeah so there could be shared knowledge etc but think about somebody let's say who's like you know there's they're they're thinking about maybe doing a portfolio model versus maybe they have this one opportunity that they could just go all in and try to scale that as big as possible right like how would you say the pros and cons are between they should they should go all in on one if that's like the if this is their if they don't have like family office money you know or whatever or or they're not going to place executives in each but they're gonna come in and be the executive then you should go all in on one right okay and if you build that to a level where you've got like so we built Keegly up for two years I was the CEO there and then I did the same thing that you kind of did I started New Reach and I was the CEO at Keegley and at New Reach for a while.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:34

But the reality is like Keegley had a strong enough leadership team at that point that I could do that. Right. Right? And really strong partners too. So like that was the but I had to focus if I had tried to launch both at the same time that would have been so stupid. I mean like so it's hard it's hard to run one company well and generally speaking if you're gonna try like from the get go if you're choosing which one to do focus on one. If you already have a really strong leadership team in on one and maybe you backfill yourself as the CEO and start another great you got a portfolio company backfill yourself as a CEO that can work really well.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:08

How do you note though to like it's like when to allocate your resources between doing let's say like kicking up the new thing versus just okay I'm just gonna focus more on this you know like let's say you're at a point where you could go portfolio maybe you're at 15 million a year with one company your leadership team's really strong okay how do you know you're like okay I I you know I'm pretty leveraged out of this I could start this second thing or put in a CEO and start this second thing or I could just stay CEO and just drive this further.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:37

Is there like a calculation yeah dude you can think there a hundred percent and I think it's also like okay what's my end goal with this company I got 15 million let's say it's 15 million bucks I'm doing four million in EBITA. Like okay um so if I've got that and I haven't sold a company yet I don't have a nest egg of finances right it might make a lot of sense for me to go sell that you know I don't know what I'm gonna get them I don't know what type of company it is but let's say I can get an 8x multiple on my four million right and so whatever the heck that is we need no dude if we had I should have given no calculator what is that like 20 32 something like that um but like you know 32 million dollars it's like okay cool now I've got a nest egg right like maybe I maybe I only rolled 30% so I kept or 20% or whatever so I kept some money in that business but I took some cash out so I could diversify put in a new CEO right and now I'm running this thing over here like that might be the right call you know versus okay I'm gonna go focus over here and I'm gonna put a CEO over here and hope this 15 million doesn't fall you know like that wouldn't make sense um whereas if it's like if it's a rocket ship and it's like I'm gonna be at 30 forty five or whatever it's like at that point it depends on I mean for me dude I like starting new things.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:49

So like I have a most of us do.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:51

Yeah it's like my problem dude it's like I love starting new things like it's it gets me fired up it's super exciting like I love it. So I weigh that Into my equation too, you know what I mean? Like when I'm choosing where uh you know, like how many things to focus on or whatever, it's like the right thing is probably to focus on one always, but God didn't build me that way. You know what I mean? So like I like to do I like to do multiple things and and uh yeah, so I think you gotta kind of weigh in. You're like, there's the dollars and cents component of it. There's are these cash flow or like am I trying to get cash flow out of this for forever, like an annuity, or am I trying to exit this at some point? Um, and then there's you know, like growth trajectory for the company. You know, like is is it growing rapidly? Well, if it is, I probably continue on this ride. Um I don't know, there's there's a best.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:41

Yeah, I I think that you could find a formula if you look at diminishing marginal returns of continued effort within that main company, and also how efficient, and like what's the actual production function, like how efficient are the inputs versus the outputs. Yeah, like if it's still if it's insanely efficient and you have this thing as operating as good it can it as it can be, which is a hard thing to know if you really have it, and you're approaching a diminishing margin marginal return for TAM or whatever reason we want to say it is, then yeah, it could make sense to do something new. Yeah, whether that's even a new product line within the same company or a new portfolio company altogether. Yeah, dude. That's kind of how I think about it.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:14

Yeah, you said that that was money, bro.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:16

I thought a lot about this. That was fire.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:18

Uh my one, maybe my one little thing that just extra little sprinkle on top there would be like one thing you want to consider is if you plan on exiting the company, you should have prepped that company to to at least take the next step for whoever you're acquiring. You know what I mean? It makes sense. You know what I mean? Like, so you gotta you wanna write that in because you're like, you know, if you're selling a company because it's about to die, I mean like that's so lame. Yeah, but I mean, like, you know, like I alright. Um, but you should be baking in, hey, this is gonna at least double, you know, from wherever I'm leaving it. And so, like, but it's okay because you're gonna get the cash out and you want to deploy the cash better than you would, you know, from reaping what you've already prepared for it to double or whatever. So, like, I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:54

There's a there's a so you're in an interesting position because with the portfolio, you've tested a lot of offers. And I'm curious, what's from like an offer level, what's the difference between an offer that just is like okay to lukewarm versus nuclear?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:09

Nuclear. Um, so like I think if you're on the front end and it's just like, hey, fun testing stuff or whatever, there's I mean, there's so many, there's so many factors, honestly. Like, even from I mean, there's different things that are popular and there's certain things that aren't. That's one. Yeah. You know, like you, you're looking for tailwinds, right? Like you're looking for tailwinds. So we track, you know, our freaking 20,000 something or other different education platforms to try to find waves of like what are people interested in right now? Yeah. So like what are what are what are people interested in right now? Um, what's going well, where are people, um, you know, we track all the way through their little marketing apparatus to figure out like, okay, like what do we think their metrics look like, CAC Dell TV. And uh, you know, we for those we're trying to be second mover. And so like you can come in and and have a lot of a good base to understand like why something should win in this market. Um so I think there's that the re the reason why offers fail, dude. Oh, here's something. I don't know. This is probably a terrible analogy, but alright, I was watching National Geographic, okay? And they're they're basically walking, walking you through how to like you know, trap a wolf. And the guy goes out there and he's like, It's like, all right, we're today we're gonna try to trap a wolf, and he like takes his trap and he like puts it down, and then he like puts a T-bone steak in there, and he's like you know, like scurries off or whatever, right? And like the wolf is just like no freaking white dude, walks past, is like, I'm not going over there. Yeah, and he's like, dang it, right? And you're like, okay, well, we're gonna try something else. And like basically, you know, in order to actually trap a wolf, dude, you like it, it had to be like fresh snow, they had to freaking boil the trap, you know what I mean? Like, the meat had to look like it was an animal that had just died, you know what I mean. Like, and uh, like they had to put tree branches that had fallen from the tree to create a cubby so that the wolf would walk in from the front instead of snagging it from the back. Like it was all these different little things, and then they had to like cover the tracks a certain way, yada yada yada. Um, and then finally they might catch a wolf, right? And it was like, holy crap, dude, it was for a wolf, right? It's like supposed to just be an animal, you'd think they just eat the food. Um, and I think that so not to call prospects wolves, okay? Bear with me on this. But like when you're making an offer, I think the number one reasons why, you know, like products or offers or anything you want to sell doesn't work is because the way you prepared it was like not like you couldn't trap a wolf. Yeah, packaging. Yeah, it's like the you couldn't trap a wolf with it. Like you the way it comes into it, it's not the the through line between when they see the ad to where they could buy on the page, those don't make sense, right? They don't land perfectly. Or like, you know, it's like it's really uh like we had one that we were, you know, it was just a test for an offer recently for some home services stuff, as we're kind of like interesting, yeah. Um there's a lot of neat, like I don't know, it's fun, dude. There's so many cool things to make. Um, but we were testing that, and like one of the things that was a big uh problem with the funnel is that they would come through and then like right before they would register, it would be like in Phoenix, Arizona. And so like people would get all amped up and then be like, wait, I gotta go to Phoenix, Arizona for this. Right, yeah. You know what I mean? Like, whereas nothing on the front end prepared them for that, and the marketing was was national. And so as soon as we removed that, our marketing metrics normalized and the thing worked. You know what I mean? So, like the there's things like uh um, or at least I hope it worked. I haven't checked back, dude. Maybe this is all a lot. It worked, it worked, it worked. Amen. Um, I think actually, I think, yeah, but like that was the biggest, like, people stopped right there. You know what I mean? Like, that was what was stopping them. And so, like, you just gotta really be thoughtful, like you're you're interacting with other people, be at a high enough level of quality that people are wowed. It's the same thing with service. Like, there's a difference between, you know, I can't remember, I think this might be a uh Ritz Carlton thing or something, but there are you know, like someone's at the um they're at an event, and the person walks over and is like, like, hey, there's no coffee at the event or whatever, like you know, like is there coffee? I thought there was gonna be coffee here. And the person's like, oh, you know, like no, like we're so sorry, you know, there's there's no coffee. Like, I'm I'm really sorry. I understand coffee is really not like it would be nice to have, but you know, like the hotel has certain roles and we aren't able to put coffee in the rooms, like you know, uh I really apologize about that. And it's like, is that good service? It's like, well, I mean, it wasn't bad service, but what's better service is like what's your coffee order? I'll go get you, I'll I'm going to Starbucks right now, I'll get you a coffee. Exactly. That's better service, right? And it's like that, people are like, I'm in for that, dude. Like, that's freaking cool. And that's the difference between trapping a wolf and not trapping a wolf. It's like, do you is it so good, right? Like, can you make it so that people are like, I haven't seen that before, right? Like, can your copy be so good? People are like, this is a joy to read. Can your can your product be so good that people are like, dude, this is like freaking working on an iPad? You know what I mean? Like, it's something that that's the can you take it one ring above what's out there?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:59

Um, and if you even if you get close to that, yeah, you know, like I like how your uh offer insights come from watching National Geographic on a Sunday. That's right, dude. Let me tell you about National Geographic.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:12

If you're talking about offer creation, you probably should listen to Cole.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:14

Let me tell you about wolves. Let me tell you about wolves. I like that. I like that. Uh how do you make some of these because you're working with educators in the portfolio, right? You need to harness like their zone of genius, their expertise, etc. How do you make them happy? You know, how do you like uh because obviously, you know, you guys are doing a lot of the work and a lot of the operations and stuff, which is very important. You know, how do you make sure they value that? They see the the right amount of value there, uh, that they're also happy, it's a win-win. Yep, what's the biggest difference?

SPEAKER_01 1:13:43

I think you've got two, I mean, so I think the first division is between subject matter experts and then we call them like brand visionaries, but like the people that we put, like that are on the front end of you know, like reaching the world with the the product for the first time or introducing people to it. Right. And those can be the same person, they can also be different, right? Um, subject matter experts are I mean, some of the coolest people ever. They might they like they love curriculum design, they want to live in that world, right? And uh they're very good at laying things out in frameworks that people can ingest and understand um and relate to, but also learn from, you know what I mean, and then implement and see the result. Whereas, you know, people that are that you're gonna use more to like reach the world are probably better storytellers, they're probably more naturally interesting, you know what I mean. Like that's their that's their gifting, right? Um and they probably enjoy creating a bunch of you know like social media type content. Whereas your your quintessential maybe subject matter experts are more like they read a lot, they have gone through a lot of different programs, and they know exactly how humans learn so they can build the the curriculum correctly. So like I think that there's a divide there. There's not always, and a lot of people try to bridge those two things, and then end up like either you find a unicorn who's like exceptionally talented, which we have some of those that's really phenomenal on both, like they can educate really well so people get it, and they're super interesting and inviting on the front end. Right. Right? Um so like I mean if you can find that person, that's amazing. You're gonna compensate that person obviously more. Um whereas, you know, I think the the more normal is someone can be focused on the front end and really bring people in, and you're probably paying them some type of uh affiliate, you know, something along those lines. Uh they get the benefit of like you're spending a lot of money maybe to ads, you know, like so they're coupled with your product, your product has a lot of name recognition, so it's beneficial to them. They get to be out in people's feeds all over the place so people they'll find their their personal socials, um, so they can grow their personal brand, so they get benefits, like all these natural um second effect benefits. Um whereas your subject matter experts for the most part, it's more of your it's more of your quintessential hiring program, right? You're gonna post the job, these are the requirements, you want them to have a certain experience from like a curriculum design, whatever.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:01

Nice. Okay. Little pivot. Uh what do you do with your money in terms of investing? So and I want to throw in a little caveat here because I'm curious how much you actually uh because obviously Keegley, for people who don't know, you're one of the biggest wholesalers in the nation. Then a lot of your real or a lot of your brands are around real estate in one way or another. Do you invest a ton in real estate? Or like I know, you know, what's really interesting, Ryan Serhant, for instance, he's obviously like, you know, big big broker or whatever. He doesn't invest in real estate at all because for him, it's like, well, my active income is basically real estate. So I want to diversify with my passive income. And you know, one of my kind of maxims I do my wealth sort of generation from is you want to be concentrated, you want to create wealth through concentrate, yeah, concentrated act active income and then stay wealthy by diversified passive income. So I'm curious, you know, how do you think about your investments portfolio? Do you invest in a lot of real estate, et cetera? And also I'm especially asking because I'm like the uh, you know, Jim Kramer, where they're like inverse Kramer, and it's like if you inverse Kramer, you basically I'm basically for real estate, you could just inverse all my investments. And if there was a way to short my real estate investments, you'd probably be like worth a hundred million dollars. I'm like, if I invested your real estate fund, it's bad news. It's bad news. I'm just well, it is actually true. Hopefully, hopefully not anymore. Sorry, dude. No, anyways, go on. Um well you're in a lot of like single family too, and well, I was, yeah. Okay, yeah. For people who don't know, did single family lost a lot of money? Then did Airbnb lost pretty much all my money. Then did um I did syndications, but I did that right before interest rates took off. Lost a lot of money. And so I've had some funds return and it's not all zero, but out of like, let's say, a 12% allocation to the portfolio that I have, I'll probably take a 5% haircut. Okay. Like when it's all said and done, that'll probably be 7% of my portfolio.

unknown 1:18:03

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:03

Going back to the bank.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:04

But anyway, that cuts.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:07

Share with me your portfolio wisdom.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:08

Yeah, I don't know if I have a lot of portfolio wisdom, but I I agree with your maxim basically on you know, make your money concentrated and then go broad, diversify, and that's how you invest and grow your money. Um and protect it. So I like that. I think that maybe the one difference is like I have a unique window into real estate, and so I can make better I can I have an advantage, you know what I mean, if I invest in real estate. So I still have some of my money in real estate, but and multi-family, yeah. But principally the um my portfolio probably looks like most you know, like a lot of equities, yeah, uh, some annuities, that type of stuff, and then just um I mean I mean we have it with a well a local wealth advisor, right? And I mean they've got what six billion dollars assets in around.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:53

Are we with the same person?

SPEAKER_01 1:18:54

Um you use do? Do so we use do, but I don't use do for my financial management stuff. Yeah, we use Wild Wealth, yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah, which is actually the dude's last name. Okay, it's not like he's wild over there with the dollars.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:06

I can't I actually just like Wild Wealth. That was interesting. That's good, dude. Literature. Good name. Good name.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:11

Um, but yeah, so we use them. And then uh but like, I mean, they they do some smart things. I mean, like picking 10 stocks instead of just investing in the SP 500, because then you can take a loss on like, you know, what's a direct index?

SPEAKER_02 1:19:23

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's super advanced stuff I could um I have some really interesting options for that. Uh how much do you ascribe to, you know, the whole a lot of the macro economists like Ray Dalio and there's a bunch of others, but he's the most prominent one. Yep. Uh, with focusing, do you think more about like international emerging markets, gold, et cetera? My portfolio is basically probably half 45%, just good old like US equities SP, or uh maybe there's certain small cap or heavier tilt towards AI growth or whatever type of stuff. But it's mainly like index funds for SP. And then within oh sorry, no, 50% is equities, but then within that 50%, maybe like 60, 70% is US equities, and then the rest is international emerging markets. Yep. And then I have, you know, probably 10% gold, um, 12% real estate, 7% crypto, or maybe 10% crypto now. It goes up, it goes up and down so much, depends on when you calculate it. Yeah, um, then I have some private company holdings that I I would say about another 10% and private companies that I would say I would call it venture. Some of them actively involved, some I'm not.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:29

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:30

And then I'd have to I'd have to go through the sheet to figure out cash bonds, that's probably another 15%, and then some stuff I'm not thinking about. Yeah. But I'm curious because I kind of have it set up to where it's a little bit of like a US dollar decline tilt.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:44

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:44

Do you think that way at all or no?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:46

I mean, I think that there's a lot of opportunity in emerging markets. Like I had a buddy that he flew out to Turkey, this is a couple years ago, and spent all this time. He's like, This, he's like, this doesn't make any sense. He's like, it was the the property plant and equipment of this company, like the the book value was like 850 million bucks, and their market cap was like 16 million dollars. And so he was like, What the frick? You know, this isn't Turkey years ago before it blew up, but he was like, uh, like he should have put a million bucks in, he put a hundred grand in, right? And it was like a 52 bagger or something, so it's like worth five million dollars or something now. Um because you know basically Turkey is a market kind of exploded, right? And so like I think you have an opportunity for some outsized returns, like India is really interesting right now, Japan's pretty interesting. So I think that I think it's fun to I enjoy participating in that type of stuff.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:34

Yeah, to be clear, I don't do that single picking, I just index fund an emerging, you know, emerging market ETF.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:40

I mean, I think uh I mean I think it's I think it's a good idea. Yeah. I'm just more my my drive for it is less sophisticated than yours. Okay's just like I think it's cool, dude. If I could go to like India and be like, yeah, man, this is a cool company. They make slippers, bro. I got some dollars in here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think mine's less sophisticated. Yours is more like huge, you know, macro trend. Are we gonna see this and can I hedge against it? But I think it's smart.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:04

Okay. Yeah, it's it's it's weirdly like you, you know, I don't know if you you have this, but I go through periods of being very obsessed with one topic. And the last three, four months have been like macro investing. Really? For some reason. Yeah. Just like reading all about that. Well, it also makes you feel like the world's gonna collapse. So you're just like, okay, yeah, great. Like I'm preparing for the collapse. I'm preparing for the collapse. Preparing for the good old collapse. Um cool. Last thing we'll touch on is AI. Is there anything interesting you're doing with uh your companies with AI?

SPEAKER_01 1:22:33

We got a lot of fun things. We we're about to relaunch the uh um movables, movable AIs new platform will relaunch here in two months. So that's exciting. Um, that should be pretty cool. Then the as far as AI just in our companies, I mean like the it's really been a benefit to us. We haven't done anything crazy as far as I feel like maybe I shouldn't say this, but like I feel like we've done all the regular stuff that most people are doing with AI. Um the stuff that we're it's like just inside the companies from an operational uh efficiency perspective. Some of the stuff that we're doing that I feel like is really freaking cool um on the AI side of things, is we're gonna launch uh it's called Molly, but M-A-L-L-I. Uh and that basically like it's an inside of New Reach, but more or less facilitates community. It's kind of like if you were to take you know like OpenClaw and then you plug it into all the data across the community. So if you've got a property, you're like, hey, I got this deal. Oh, interesting, yeah. And it's like all of that.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:28

Because especially with real estate, just for people, there's a lot of cooperation that can happen that's different than maybe if somebody was starting, you know, a e-commerce business or something.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:38

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it facilitates that. It facilitates the like actual deal flow by like, oh yeah, let me connect you with this owners club member, drops them in a group chat. That's good. Um, and then tracks like, you know, one, there's a huge utility from a data perspective that allows us to be that is useful for the whole community. Um and then also just facilitate ROI for members of the community, like, oh, you need a lender? Here's a lender, right? Like, and to do that on a level that's like so granular that it I feel like it's gonna be hugely impactful. So we launched that, we'll launch that here shortly, which will be cool.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:10

Yeah, I would agree. We have stuff where we're automating certain workflows. A lot of it is really right now just making certain employees more efficient with what they already do. Yeah, like a big example I can give you is like this one's easy for me to speak on, is like sales manager QC.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:26

And so we have like certain dashboards that because the that you can't quality control every call, but you can train an AI to kind of number one, do a first pass and then really let you know which are the ones you should, you know, QC. Because a salesperson, I mean, one call they could do really good, next call it's like they forget everything they told you, right? So there's that. Another really interesting one that actually might be interesting for you is so you know, like obviously in marketing, you can basically hold the marketing team accountable to like an MQL. Yeah. Where we're like, okay, if they answer this on the app and they show up and blah blah, they meet these qualified qualifications, they're a MQL and they're this score of an MQL. Like we have threes, fours, and fives, and like they could be a 3.3 or a 4.2. And that's based on a variety of things they could put in the application. You could even do it super sophisticated. For instance, you know, comp if they have an email that's at company name, yep. It's a higher it no matter, I guarantee you, it's a higher quality lead than Gmail. And then weirdly, uh, we found like Yahoo and some of these other ones are higher quality than Gmail. That's pretty strange. If they're on Outlook, dude, straight to the top. Outlook, that's a good, that's that's a good one, right? So you could go super sophisticated with that. But um, you know, the problem is is let's say you have a MQL that's on the calendar. Well, like, even if even if you have two MQLs with the same app answers, who shows up on the call is wildly different in quality. Like anybody who's taken sales calls would say that, right? Because who shows up on the call is gonna be different people.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:56

You know, one might have tons of intent and watched a bunch of content and one might not to. And granted, maybe you could find that on the application too. Yeah. But what would be very interesting is a rolling quality score day to day that rolls up to weeks and months that is a qualitative, because basically an MQL is a quantitative-based score. Yeah. And then you can't rely on the salespeople because they just say it's good or it's bad based on if they're closed. So then with the AI, it can basically analyze the prospects, transcripts, their level of intent, and all this stuff, yeah, and use your certain criteria, really the same stuff you do in the application, and then be like, hey, you know, our MQL score is still 3.3, but we did see a decrease to 2.7 this week in the qualitative score. And it's something to actually finally validate the conversation of, like when your marketing team says the leads are fine and the sales team says they're not, and you're like, well, the data says it's fine, but your sales manager's like, no, man, like I swear to God, I reviewed all these calls, like it's it's bad. Something happened, everybody's been homeless. Like you guys did something, so this actually can finally answer that with a metric.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:00

Yeah, that's cool.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:01

That's like one I'm quite passionate about.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:03

Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:04

Cool. Anywhere you want people to go find out about you, follow up and just keep watching cool stuff. All right. So the CTA is uh subscribe. Subscribe, guys. There you go. About that. Thank you for coming on, man. Thank you. If you enjoyed this podcast, you're also probably gonna like this podcast I also did recently that you can check out by clicking the screen right here.