After $100M+ in Business, I Wish I Knew These Lessons Sooner

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

My liquid net worth is 31 million, and I've done that through creating several profitable businesses. So my first business has scaled to three million a month, and I still have that business. My second was a $20 million certification company. I also scaled a $30 million year medical spot, and I own two seven-figure SaaS companies. And in all that experience, I've made so many mistakes and learned countless lessons along the way. So in this video, I'm going to share with you some of the most valuable lessons from my journey that I think will make you a lot more money, whether you're just starting off or even if you're already at a dance operator in business. So starting with lesson number one, which is that your own judgment can become a prison. So there's this concept in psychology called the judgment fear loop. And it works like this the more you judge others for something, the more you fear of being judged for that thing yourself. But it'll make way more sense if I tell you a story from my own life. So I actually went to the same college as Logan Paul at the same exact time. And this is back when Vine was blowing up. And what Logan was one of the biggest creators in the entire platform. So we would see him around campus all the time, recording Vines, doing his thing in public. And just to be completely honest, we thought he was a complete loser. Like we made fun of him, we totally judged him and did that constantly. And then a few years later, by the time I graduated, I was making $2K a month bartending. And I remember sitting up, sitting down after the bar after my shift and pulling up my phone. And Logan Paul was so famous by that time, four years later, that he was hanging out with The Rock. And here's the crazy part even seeing that didn't change my perspective. I still judged other people for doing social media. I just thought it was lame. And because I did that, I had this unconscious belief that putting yourself out there was something to be criticized. And that judgment held me back for years. So just to tell you how crazy this was and how bad this living belief really hurt me, is I built a multi-million dollar year business before I even had an Instagram account, which obviously would help me a ton. So instead, I just avoided social media entirely because deep down I had this belief that people who did it were worthy of judgment. And if I did it, I'd be worthy of that judgment too, which is one of my biggest regrets. Because imagine how much further along I would be and how much more money I would have made if I never had that fear of judgment in the first place. And instead, I got started on social media six or even seven years ago. So the lesson's simple: pay attention to what you judge and who you judge, because those judgments aren't just opinions, they're really bars around your own cage. Now, lesson number two is something that will help you think a lot more originally and ultimately for yourself. And that's to be aware of something called mimetic desire. So this is a concept that was popularized by French philosopher Renee Girard, who was actually one of the mentors of Peter Thiel. And the idea is very simple. It's that our desires don't innately come from ourselves. And instead, we acquire our desires from looking at what other people desire. So put simply, we desire things not because we genuinely want them, but because we see other people wanting them. So I'm gonna give you a classic example so you can see that this is true and how this actually plays out in your own life. And this is a very simple example. But there's probably been a time where you sat down to dinner with some friends and you had no desire to have an alcoholic drink at all. But then somebody else at the table orders an espresso martini. And you think to yourself, shit, you know, an espresso martini sounds pretty good right now. And so you didn't come to the table with that desire, but you saw somebody else showcase a desire for that thing, which is an express martini, and then guess what? You modeled that desire. So this is just a fun example to explain this, but the impact of medic desire in your life is far bigger than what you order at dinner. So especially now with social media, it's turbocharged. So for instance, you might see somebody at St. Bart's hang out with a ton of wealthy people on New Year's Eve, suddenly you want to make a trip to St. Bart's. Or you see a bunch of buzz on social media about building an AI agency and it's like, oh, the next big thing, and everybody's doing it. And then guess what? Now that's the business that you want to start. Or you see a peer launch a funnel or initiative in their business, and now you think that's the exact thing you should do for your business. And so, in all these cases, here's what's important to understand: you're not thinking your own original thoughts, or those aren't your original desires. You're just absorbing other people's desires, and then you think they're your own. So, how do you actually break free of this? Well, the answer is you have to slow down and try to think from first principles. And so, first principles is a thinking that is popularized by Elon Musk. It's been around for a while, but it's really the opposite of mimetic desire, and it works like this. So instead of just copying what others are doing, you want to strip the problem down to its most fundamental truths and then build your thinking up from there. So, to give you an example from my own business, I've had so many people that I should do an events model similar to what Hermosy or Cardo Inventures does, where you sell a 5k event that upsells to a 40 to 50k consulting package, and then it's 150k after that. And I get where this advice comes from because those guys are making boatloads of money. So why shouldn't I just model what they're doing? But here's the thing if I strip down what they're doing, the first principles, and understand the reality behind why what they're doing works so well, the reason is simple and it's their brand. I know from experience working with thousands of clients that convincing somebody from cold-paid ads to get on a plane, fly out to you, and then you're gonna fix their whole business in one day is very difficult. So, knowing that, how do Harmosy and Cardone do it so well and how do they have so much success with this model, it's because of their brand. So they have a massive audience of people who already know like and trust them. And that's the main fundamental and really the main truth behind why that model works so well. And that's also why for me, that initiative is gonna be a no-go, because I don't have a brand large enough yet to make that model work. And by the way, if you like this content and you want to come to our next event where I'm gathering all entrepreneurs talking about what's working in the industry, what's not working in the industry, and the lessons that we've learned, scaling to over 100 million in total revenue. We have an event coming up in our eight-figure border mastermind. If you want to know more information about that, you can click the link in the description and it'll tell you all about it. Now, lesson number three is that clarity comes from action, not the other way around. And this is one of the biggest traps that I see that keeps people from making the leap. Rather, that's starting a business or really just taking their career or current business to the next level, is they think they need to get clear before they act. So they spend months planning, trying to figure out what they're doing, their vision, they do all this research, they try to write the perfect plan. But at the end of the day, I'm just gonna be honest, it's all mental masturbation disguised as productivity. So the truth is, you cannot think your way to clarity. Clarity comes from action. And I'm gonna give you an example. Today, I own a $30 million sales training recruiting company. That's my main business. I've also built a $20 million sales certification company, like I told you earlier. But at the start of my entrepreneurial journey, there's no way I could have predicted I was gonna build those companies. So nobody in high school or college or when they're just starting off dreams up about being a salesperson or a sales trainer or recruiter. Like it's not a sexy vision people put in their journals. Like you don't walk up to a 16-year-old and he's like, man, when I grow up, I want to be a salesperson. And in fact, when I first started, what I wanted to do was have a nutrition blog. Okay. That couldn't be further from sales training. It just couldn't. But what happened was is I started that blog and I had to figure out a way to get traffic to the blog because nobody was reading the blog. And then once I started studying media buying and traffic, I became more passionate about that than the blog itself. So then I actually started a marketing agency. But then as I was running the agency, I had to do sales calls. And then that's when I fell in love with sales because I was good at it. I like the psychology behind it. And then I took that new passion from sales from my agency business, dropped the agency business altogether, became a professional salesperson, and then one thing left to another, I eventually have a sales trainer or company, and we also do sales recruiting. Now, again, could I ever map that out in the beginning? Absolutely not. Like no amount of journaling, no vision boarding, no planning could have ever got me the clarity that this was a business that I was ultimately called to do. And really the path only became clear because I started taking action, and when I was doing that, I paid attention to what I was naturally drawn to and good at along the way. So lesson number four is that industry activ is a real secret advantage. And this is something that people get wrong about success, is they think that the smartest people win, but they don't. The people who actually win are the ones that dedicate the most time to learning everything they can about their specific industry and their craft. So I first got this concept from Bill Gurley, an early investor in Uber, Open Table, Zillow, he's ultimately considered one of the greatest venture capitalists of our time. And he gave this famous talk, it's on YouTube, and it's called Running Down a Dream. And he lays this out perfectly. So in the talk, he says if you want to be ultra successful, that you want to be obsessive about understanding everything you possibly can about your craft and consider that an obligation. So think about it like building a personal PhD in your field. And here's how you would do that. So first, you want to study the past of your industry. So learn about the pioneers, the foundational industry, the original playbooks, and why they worked. And this becomes really the bedrock of everything you're to do in the future. So, for instance, in my industry, if you saw information or coaching or whatever through paid advertising, you would want to study the early direct response legends. So people like Gary Halbert, Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, because these are guys who figured out that psychology is selling through print and words decades before the internet even existed. And those principles that worked for them still work today. But if you were in tech, you'd want to study the original computing pioneers. So Andy Grove from Intel or Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs from Apple, so on and so forth. Now, once you do that and you've studied the history, the second step is to study the grades across a variety of disciplines. So maybe you'd study study Bill Bilichek from football or Yura from Eurojim Zoshi on Netflix, Steve Jobs on product design, Warren Buff on capital allocation. Because the thing is, across any discipline, success leaves clues. And those clues can actually transfer across domains. And a lot of times, if it comes from a different industry, they can germinate into massive ideas. And then the third thing is you want to study the present. So what's the current meta? Who's winning right now? What tactics are they using? So this is what a lot of people do without the first two steps. But for me, I'm studying Alex Ramosi, Dan Martel, Grant Cardone, and I'm also analyzing nine and 10-figure recruiting and staffing companies because I want to know what's working right now, not just what worked 20 years ago. Now, as you do this, what's going to happen over time is you'll develop a very good concrete view about where your field is headed. And that's going to allow you to play smarter bets and make better decisions along the way because you'll start to develop something I call borrowed intuition. So because while you obviously haven't lived through every scenario, what you have done at this point is studied enough about your industry to where your pattern recognition becomes elite. And as a result, you collapse time. And instead of spending five years learning lessons the hard way, you could absorb 50 years of wisdom and just a few months of intentional study. Now, lesson number five is that people can only tell you what's true in their own experience. So we live in a world where everyone wants to give you their two cents. There's millions of people on YouTube telling you what to do. Your friends and families have opinions about your career. And if you start a business, somebody has everybody's advice about how you should do it. And so how do you filter all of this advice and then know actually who to listen to? So you do it through remembering this phrase that people can only tell you what's true in their own experience. So what this means is that every piece of advice that you get from somebody is actually just a projection from their own life into your situation. And the value of that advice depends entirely on how close their experience is to the results that you're trying to achieve. So think about it like a pyramid of the least helpful to most helpful advice. So at the bottom, you have advice from people who don't have the results you want in any area of your life. So that's just pure noise. Okay, it might be from your friends, your family members, some random people online who have opinions but no skin in the game. Those are people you shouldn't listen to at all. Then in the middle, you have advice from people who are successful, but in a totally different context. So for instance, maybe somebody sold their insurance company for nine figures and wants to give you advice, but you run a marketing agency. Their advice advice might be helpful, but the problem is they don't understand the specifics of your unique situation to really give you the tactical, step-by-step advice that you actually need. So the advice is still valuable, you just kind of got to take it with a grain of salt. But then at the top of the pyramid is advice from people who've already achieved exactly what you want to achieve in a situation that is as close to yours as possible, which is where the real gold is. So for example, the reason I recently paid Alex Ramosy 225 grand to spend a day with him is because out of everybody that I know who's further along than me in business, Alex is the person who most fundamentally understands what I'm trying to do and what my industry is the most. And part of the reason of that is he came from the same space in the same industry that I am in. So he understands the context. And that way, his advice is way more applicable to what we're trying to build right now. So think about it like this the closer someone is in experience to your situation, the more weight you should give to their advice. Everybody else, take with a grain of salt. Now, lesson number six is if you don't know where to start, start with sales. So the biggest thing I hear that keeps people from diving into entrepreneurship is they just simply don't know what to do. They don't have a business idea, they can't find a niche, they ultimately don't have any plan. But the big misconception here is that you have to get in the business to make money. So the thing is, if you're just super driven about making money and you want to break out of your nine to five, but you genuinely don't know what to do, you don't know where to start, you don't have any real skills right now. The most surefire, practical path, I'm not saying it's gonna be easy, but surefire, most practical path you can take is to get into sales. And that's exactly what I did. I had really nothing going for me. I kind of just stumbled into sales. My first business, which is the agency failed, I had less than a thousand dollars into my bank account, and so I got into sales. And later I became even more passionate about it. But it wasn't something that I thought at the time was gonna be this huge career builder for me. I just knew that if I worked hard and really honed in the skills, I could realistically make 20 to 40 grand a month just by doing sales alone, and that income would change my life. But the beauty about sales is if you really work hard at it, you learn your craft and stick with it long enough, almost anybody can succeed. And that's why I kind of call it like the military of business, because while it's not easy, in my opinion, it's the most straightforward path to success and getting paid when you don't know what else to do. And here's the real bonus, too. Sales will help you with everything else you do in your life and business. So it'll make you a better leader, better communicator. Even if you ever start a business, it's the one skill you have to have because sales is the only part of the business where the money actually exchanges hands. And even if part of sales gets automated by AI in the future, the psychology behind it will never change. So you can learn this skill once and you're still gonna benefit from it for a lifetime. Now, lesson number seven is effort doesn't matter if the system's broken. So I'm gonna actually tell you a story that's hilarious in hindsight, but was incredibly painful to live through. So the second business I started, I already mentioned this, was an agency. Okay, it was Facebook ads agency for e-commerce and coaching businesses. So to kick this business business off, I bought a course, it taught me how to run the business, get clients, all the fundamentals, all that stuff. In this course, I was recommended a strategy for getting the first couple of clients, and that strategy was cold email. So simple enough, you build a list, you send emails, you book sales calls, you close deals. Okay, that's cold email. So I was like all in on following this program blindly. I was the perfect student, whatever you said to do, I did it, you said jump, I said how high, I did everything to the letter. Because I didn't want to be this type of person who like invested in a course and was the person who didn't take action, all that stuff. So the very first night I launched the business, I pulled this all-nighter. I get super pumped, I got the music blasting, my energy's through the roof, and I built a list of prospects and sent 350 emails, custom written cold emails, before sunrise. And it worked. Kind of. I booked some sales calls, I got some responses. I didn't convert any of them because at the time I sucked the sales, but still I was like, okay, I got some proof of concept, the system's working, I'm excited. Okay. So from that day forward, I committed to sending 50 cold emails a day, every day for the next nine months. Like I was relentless, I did not deviate from the system at all. But here's the weird part. I never got the same response rate as I got that first night. Uh, not even close. And I really never questioned it either. I just kept my head down and kept grinding. Because after all, like I'm trying to be this good student. I don't want to be this person who deviates from the plan, tries to recreate the wheel, all of that stuff. Well, then nine months later, I generated a grand total of three additional sales calls from the first night, which I also didn't convert any of them. Now, I ended up getting a different coach, pivoting to running paid ads, and that's how how I actually got my first few agency clients. And once that happened, I just assumed cold email didn't work. But here's what I found out years later, probably about three years later, is the very first night when I got all hyped up and was blasting a bunch of music and sent out 350 cold emails in one sitting. I essentially had done so much volume that I blacklisted my entire email domain. So from that day forward, every single email I sent was going straight to spam, nobody even saw them. So that means for nine months, because I was trying to be such a good student, I was grinding away, sending 50 cold emails a day into a black hole. So no amount of effort that I was ever gonna put in was gonna fix that. The system was broken from day one. So the lesson's really simple. From time to time, you have to zoom out and you have to make sure the system is actually working, especially if you're putting in all the right effort and you've been consistent, you're doing the right leading indicators, and you're not seeing results. Because if you don't iterate, you're just gonna ride a broken system right into the ground, same way I did. Now, lesson number eight is pick one game and ignore the rest. So the biggest mistake in my career have all been distractions. So, for example, when I first got started on my agency, which is my first business, I tried to go after too many different industries at once. And because of that, I never really got traction in any of them. Then, when I got into sales, the thing that held me back wasn't my skill set at first. It was the fact that I was distracted, trying to do e-commerce and print on the man and all this bullshit on the side, opposed to just trying to become great at sales. And then later, when I started my main company, which is closed.io, the biggest setback that I ever had was when we lost focused and tried to launch all these new businesses completely outside the vertical of sales training and recruiting, which some of those businesses did do well. But at the end of the day, if we would have just focused more on the main business, in the long haul, we would have made way more money. So I see beginners do this all the time too. They try too many things and in turn end up achieving nothing. So they start something, get excited, fill up total momentum, then something called the dip hits, where it's the part where all the excitement wears off, the dopamine from the new shiny object, that's all gone. And really all that's left in front of you is hard work that hasn't paid off yet. And when most people hit the dip, instead of pushing through and really getting through it, they quit. They find a new shiny object, which gives them more dopamine, more excitement. And then guess what? The cycle just repeats over and over again, and then eventually you just have a bunch of half-belt bridges with nothing to show for it. So, what you have to understand is the dip, which is the phase where it gets hard, but you haven't seen results yet, that's not a bug of success. It's a feature. And really, how I like to think about it is it's really the filter that keeps 99% of people who say they want all the success from the 1% who actually gets the success. So the key is to stay focused and really simply just push through. Lesson number nine is that income traces skills over time. So when you're first starting out, it's gonna feel like nothing is working. It's gonna feel like you're learning a bunch of random things that don't seem to be paying off yet. But what you have to understand is over a five to 10 year window, the skills and really everything that you're learning is going to compound to an insane level that you cannot comprehend right now. So, to give you an example, I'm gonna tell you how it works for me. My first company, again, marketing agency, it failed, but I learned how to run ads and build files and write a little bit of copy. And then I went into high-ticket sales, got really good at sales. So I added sales to my toolkit. Then later in my sales career, I worked at an in-person office for an industry-leading company. Now, again, I was just a sales guy, but the real benefit was I got to watch how a real company was run at a multiple eight-figure level. So I absorbed how to build a team, how to lead, how to organize operations, really just from being in that environment. And then while I was there as well, I started generating my own leads by posting on social media, which taught me a little bit of copywriting, a little bit of organic legion, content creation. So, all that together, by the time I launched my company in 2019, you have to think I had paid ad skills, funnel skills, strong sales skills, I knew how to generate leads through organic content, I knew how to write copy, and I had a basic understanding of how to build and run teams. That's why I was able to rocket ship to seven figures in my first 30 days. And that's not because I'm magical, it's because I spent all those years stacking those skills. And then when I changed opportunity vehicles, the value I had in the marketplace from the skills I had built finally was realized. So the focus you have now, especially if you're young, shouldn't be making money. It should be stacking as many skills as possible because eventually income always traces skills over time. Lesson number 10 is that burnout usually isn't real. So burnout does exist, but it's much rarer than people think. And in fact, I think most people who think they're burned out or exhausted or whatever, they're not physically actually burned out or exhausted at all. And instead, burnout usually happens when you wake up and you can no longer answer this question, which is why am I working so hard? And when you can't answer that, that's when burnout creeps in. It's almost more spiritual than it really is physical. And it happens when you become disconnected from your purpose, vision, and ultimately the reason why you're started what you're doing in the first place. But here's the thing though, when you can stay connected to a clear vision and you know exactly why you're grinding and what you're building towards, you can work insane hours and still feel energized. But when the connection fades, that's when the normal workload can even feel exhausting. And that's not because the work is actually making you tired, it's because the work feels pointless. So, to give you an example for my own life, when I first started my business, all I really cared about was making money. And eventually I grew a multiple eight-figure liquid net worth, which is more than enough to retire on and live on the interest. And that's when burnout first hit me. Because again, I wasn't physically tired. It's just that my current purpose I was operating from was no longer valid. So I had to find a new purpose and a new reason why, which led me to now being motivated by two things, which is number one, building something extraordinary, something I'm gonna be proud of when I'm 80 or 90 and looking back at my career. And then number two, doing it with people I enjoy being around. So if you're feeling burned out before you hit a vacation or blame your schedule, ask yourself if you're still connected to why you're doing what you're doing, and do you still have a clear vision of where this is all going to take you? Lesson number 11 is to pick a simple business model, not a clever one. So because our business culture is so obsessed with extraordinary tech entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, all these people, all the beginners think that the only way to get rich is to create the next revolutionary app or software that's never been created before. And look, if you have a natural talent for engineering and you have love software and you want to do that, by all means just go for it. But I would guess that 99% of people watching this video, that's not them. And at the end of the day, they're just starting off, you want to make money, you don't want to be poor. So if that's you, here's what I recommend. Find an existing business that's already working, particularly a service based business, because they're easy to start, and just copy it. Now I'm not saying plagiarize somebody or rip off their brand, their ads, their marketing, or anything like that. All I'm saying is just pick a proven business model and don't try to recreate the wheel. Because even if you have zero differentiation, if you just pick a proven business, Proven business model, you work hard, develop the skills, you can hit multiple seven figures alone just through execution. So to give you an example, I had a friend who did exactly this. He started a commercial cleaning business, didn't innovate anything. He used to work for this guy, the guy was a cleaner, he went off, started his own cleaning business, that was it, didn't innovate a damn thing, and the guy's doing multiple seven figures right now. Okay. So it's not like he like plagiarized or maliciously stole stuff from the business or anything like that, but he didn't really differentiate either. The difference with this guy is he was just a savage executor and he just got there to success and ultimately made a lot of money just by outworking everybody. Now I'm not saying do this forever, so eventually you get to the next level that's an eight-figure, multiple eight-figure level. You do have to differentiate. But in the beginning, just don't overcomplicate it. Now, lesson number 12 is that money is a skill, not a personality trait. So you probably heard people like Gary Vee say that entrepreneurship isn't for everybody. Now, during my come up, I would hear stuff like that. And this is before I had any degree of success. And would maybe second guess myself. I'd say, like, do I have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? Am I cut out for this? But in hindsight, this is just fundamentally false. And sure, like what I will say is not everybody is gonna be Steve Dobbs or Jeff Bezos or some billionaire entrepreneur. The same way, not everybody's gonna be Michael Jordan. But the truth is, business is actually very simple, and anybody can do it. And all really business is is business is about solving problems. That's because when you solve a problem, you create value, and then people exchange money for value. That's it. Now, the key to solving problems people are willing to pay for is to learn specialized skills, which is exactly why Nabal Robin Khan says that specialized knowledge is a prerequisite for success. And it's something that can't be gained from a textbook or a YouTube video. It's something you actually have to get from doing the thing. So if you're just starting off your career, make it a priority to acquire that specialized knowledge, which is why I'm such a big fan of list of number 13, which is apprenticeships. So one of the biggest misconceptions I see with aspiring entrepreneurs is I think the fastest path to success is to dive into business right away. And look, I get it. Diving in sounds bold and it feels like the very entrepreneurial thing to do. But something you probably don't realize is that almost all the entrepreneurs we look up to went through an apprenticeship phase first. So they had a job and they worked under somebody that they could learn from. So a few examples. For instance, worked under D.E. Shaw, which was one of the most sophisticated hedge funds in the world. And it was from there that he built tons of skills and his network and then actually got the idea for Amazon. Or Jensen Duang, who's the CEO of NVIDIA, most valuable company on the planet right now, spent years as a chip designer at L Cy Logic before actually starting his company. And in fact, he met his co-founders because they were clients of his at that company. So if he had never had that job at L CI, NVIDIA, which is the most valuable company in the world, wouldn't even exist. And this pattern comes up time and time again. So the most extraordinary entrepreneurs, they don't just dive into business in their 20s with no experience at all. They start with some form of apprenticeship. They work under somebody else, build the right skills, have a great network, and then develop pattern recognition in their industry. And then when they finally go up on their own and start their own business, the deck is heavily stacked in their favor and their probability of success is way higher. Now, if you want to know more about apprenticeship and how to actually do one and how to find one, I made an entirely different video about that. We'll put the link in the description. Lesson number 14 is to prioritize leverage, not money. So when I started my career in sales, I was simply trading time for money. And there's nothing wrong with that if you're just starting off, but it is the slowest way to build wealth. But what I eventually learned is you shouldn't chase money directly. You should chase leverage because the higher your leverage is, the more your income is disconnected from your time. So Naval Ravenka has a famous framework on this, and that's that there's four types of leverage: labor, capital, media, and code. So I'm gonna give you an example of how I use leverage in my business, which is primarily labor. So labor is the oldest form of leverage, it means simply just getting other people to do the work for you. And the real leverage you get from labor isn't just by hiring a few standard people in your company, it's by finding and hiring superstars. So to give you an example, one of my employees gave a presentation on his biggest insights from working with me at Closer.io. And one of the biggest things that he said that he noticed when he came to work for us is the insane caliber of talent that we had at the company. And that there was a dozen or so people that were like seven-figure caliber business owners, but they worked as entrepreneurs in the company. So what he meant by that is there were tons of people who, if they went off on their own, could probably start a seven-figure or maybe even multiple seven-figure business. But instead, they found the opportunity to work inside of the company as a bigger opportunity, which is why I tell my clients, you can probably build a seven-figure business with just you. But if you want to build an eight-figure business, you probably need you and then a few seven-figure entrepreneurs. If you want to build a nine-figure business, you need you, a few eight-figure entrepreneurs, and so on. So again, don't chase money directly, chase leverage. And when you do that, the money will come as a natural byproduct of that. And lesson number 15 is the offer is everything. So dialing in the right offer and finding product market fit was the difference between me doing 150 grand a month and 2.5 million a month 12 months later. So they give you the backstory. When I started closer.io, which is wasn't called that at the time, but now it's called that, I was simply just doing sales coaching. And so I'd work with individual entrepreneurs and sales reps who wanted to get better at sales. So that was the first iteration of my offer. Then within a couple of months, I realized there was more money training entire sales teams than individuals. So I pivoted the sales team consulting. And that was the second iteration. And then that helped me grow a little bit, but here's what really allowed me to explode again, all the way to 2.5 million a month in 12 months. So as I was doing the sales team consulting, I started getting all these DMs almost every single week. It was like every other day. And they would say, Do you know where I can find good salespeople? Can you refer me to somebody? Do you have any connections? Where can I find good salespeople? And I kept hearing it over and over and over and over again. And so if I really wanted to hit an offer that was high in demand, I knew I had to find something to work through paid advertising well enough to actually scale. And so what I did is I pivoted again. And instead of just doing sales training, I did sales training and recruiting. And then once I made that pivot, which was my third pivot, things absolutely exploded. So I made a Facebook post about this new offer, did 150k off that one post. And then from there, I knew I was on to something, made a couple of key hires, launched ads, 12 months later, 2.5 million a month. That's the power of finding the right offer. Now, my piece of advice for this is if you're sitting there wondering if you have the right offer or not, that's gonna be this explosive offer, you don't. Because when you find it, you're going to know and you're gonna feel like the market's pulling you forward instead of having to push. Now, lesson number 16 is to stack the inputs. So whenever I want to achieve a goal, I ask myself the question how do I stack the leading indicators and my inputs so high to where getting the outcome that I want is practically inevitable. So to explain what I mean here, you've probably heard the distinction between leading indicators and lagging indicators. So leading indicators are your inputs, it's like the actions you control, lagging indicators are the results that follow. And while you can't control those directly, you can influence them through your leading indicators, which is the things you can control. So whenever I'm trying to achieve something, whether it's a personal goal, a business goal, I reverse engineer from the goal the leading indicators that I need to do to achieve that goal. And then here's what I do: I two to five X that number and sometimes more. So to give you a simple example, when I was in sales, I would take my goal and reverse engineer all the leading indicators to hit it. So let's say just for simplicity's sake, I wanted to hit 10 sales a month. So I would take 10 sales and reverse engineer, okay, I need 40 sales calls at a 25% closing ratio. To get those sales calls, I need 80 outbound connections at a 50% pickup rate. Then I have to make 400 dials based on a 20% call to pickup rate. Now, most people just leave it at that and call it a day, but that's where they go wrong. So they're calculating the minimum required to succeed, and then they just do the minimum. And ultimately, I want to optimize for certainty, not just efficiency. So I don't want to leave my goal up to chance. So instead of making 400 dials, I want to make 800 dials and then double the inputs acquired to hit this goal. And then on top of that, I'm gonna add 100 to 200 pipeline touches a day to my existing pipeline just as an additional hedge. So you can see how if you take this mindset, hitting your goal almost becomes the worst case scenario because you're stacking your leading indicators so high. Lesson number 17 is that we overestimate risk and underestimate regret. So Jeff Bezos has this framework called the regret minimization framework. So when he was 30, he had a high-paying job at the hedge fund that we talked about earlier, and he wanted to start Amazon, but understandably he was making so much money, he was hesitant to leave his cushy job. So, in order to get clarity on what to do, he came up with what he calls now the regret minimization framework. So he imagined himself at 80, looking back at his life, and he asked himself, Am I going to regret having not tried this? And so for him, he knew he wouldn't regret failing, but he would regret never have trying. And that clarity made the decision easy. So he quit. Amazon was born. So for me, I thought about starting my current business, closure.io, in the same exact way. I was coming off of 30 to 40k a month in sales, net income, and a cushy sales job. I could have easily kept that job or even gotten a promotion to make more elsewhere. But I knew if I at least didn't try to start on my own and try to pursue my own business that over the long term, I would regret it looking back. And so the point is, sure, that leap is a risk, but we tend to over-index risk and under-index regret. Now, lesson number 18 is that being young in your 20s is a massive advantage, not a liability. So when I was in my early 20s, I thought my age was gonna hold me back. I thought people weren't gonna take me seriously, they'd laugh at my track record, they'd be like, you don't have any connections, who's gonna listen to you? And while those are just limiting beliefs, let's even just assume for a second that they're true. Because even if it is, you still have so many advantages in your 20s that completely outweigh all of the downsides. And the first one is you can take massive asymmetric risks. So there's a reason they say a man with nothing to lose is dangerous, because if you're in your 20s, the truth is you don't got much going for you. And that sucks, but it's also your superpower. So when I walked away from medical school to start my first business, which is a nutrition blog, was it a risk? Yeah, but if it didn't work, I knew that was a two-way door. I could always go back and go to medical school. And again, when I left my sales job to start my own company, worst case, I fail. Guess what? I can go back and get another high-paying sales job and rebuild. It's not that hard. So those risks were highly rational for me because my downside was so limited, but my upside was huge. But you have to understand those advantages will eventually go away. So, for example, now I build companies that have done over 100 million in revenue. I have a fiance, I have a large staff I care about, a nice home. So I do have something to lose now, and whether I like it or not, it does change my risk profile. But for you, you don't have those liabilities yet. So use it to your advantage. The second advantage is you have near limitless energy. So you won't realize this until you're older. But when I was in my 20s, I was bartending till 4 a.m. I'd wake up at 9 and start working on my business all day and then bartend again. Even if I slept like garbage, ate whatever, I could still grind like a psycho every single day. Now, 10 years later, I the other night had two drinks and a piece of chocolate cake. I was absolutely cooked the next day. So I'm not saying you can skip sleep or be reckless or whatever, but still, the amount that you have nothing to lose and the fact that you have all this energy is a massive advantage that your 30 to 50 year old counterparts are going to wish that they had. Now, lesson number 19 is that the quickest way to change your identity is to change your environment. So when I first started in sales, I was still in my college town surrounded by people who were bartending and the scene I was in. Everyone was complacent, everyone wanted to get drunk, no one wanted gross. So that was a complete dead end. So when I started in sales, just a couple months in, I moved back to Ohio, which helped a little bit, but that was my hometown. So it didn't really help that much. Then I moved to Nashville. And for the first time, I was far away from where I grew up and all these people I cultivated in my teens and in my 20s. And then just in two years, I went from making $5K a month in sales to over $40,000 a month net income. Then when I started my company, I knew I had to change my environment again because Nashville is where I became a great salesperson, but that's exactly the problem. So the environment I created when I was there reinforced the idea that Cole's just a sales guy, he does sales, that's all he does, right? He's a sales rep. So I moved to San Diego, and then from there, within six months, my company was doing a million dollars a year. Really, from the day I launched, it was doing a million dollars a year, but that's what I was doing in San Diego. But here's the thing almost every entrepreneur around me in San Diego was stuck around a million to two million dollars a year. And especially in Encinitas where I live, which is like a slow surfer town. So after six months of being there, I knew I needed to level up again and I moved to Scottsdale. And that's where tons of power players are my industry were. So Grant Cardone, Jeremy Minor, Andy Elliott, Dean Grassiosi, all of them live within 10 minutes of my house. And within 12 months of moving to Scottsdale, I took our business from 100k a month to 2.5 million a month. And that's the real power of environment. Lesson number 20 is that consistency compounds. So if you talk to any experienced entrepreneur, they're gonna tell you the same thing. Being smart's important, but it's overrated. What's far more important is being consistent over long periods of time. So if you take Todd Gray's, for example, the founder of Raising Canes, when he pitched his business plan in college, a restaurant that only sells chicken fingers, that's it. His professor gave him the lowest grade in the class. And every bank in town rejected him. So he worked 90 hours a week as a boilermaker at an oil refinery, then went to Alaska to fish salmon in brutal conditions, just to save up money to raise capital to open his first location. That was in 1996. Then 30 years later, he's still doing the same thing, selling chicken fingers. That's it. No pivots, no distractions, just relentless focus on doing one thing better than anybody else. And today, raising canes is over $5 billion in revenue, and Todd's net worth is over $20 billion. Another example is Tommy Mello, who I met recently, happens to be one of my neighbors. He started A1 Garage Door Services in 2007 with 50k in debt. Now, you might think selling garage doors isn't like a great business or it doesn't sound sexy, but that's the point. He's stuck with this over two decades, and today he makes over 600 billion a year owning the largest garage door company in the US. So look, over the past few years, after scaling my company to 30 million in revenue, I've had moments where I've questioned whether this is the right business, whether I needed a different opportunity vehicle to get ahead to the next level. But hearing stories like this reminds me that it doesn't matter what business you pick, it matters how long you stick to it and how good you become at your craft. Because at the end of the day, I have a recruiting business and there's recruiting businesses out there doing multiple billions a deer. So if I just stay focused on that and keep getting better, the success will come as a byproduct. Lesson number 21 is that relationships are circular, not linear. And this lesson took me a long time to learn, but it's completely changed how I operate in business. So most people think professional relationships are linear. Someone enters your life, you work together for a while, they leave, and then that's it. So the relationship has a beginning, middle, and an end, and it's done. But that's not actually how it works. So they're actually much more circular than they are linear. And over a long enough time horizon, people always come back in one way, shape, or form. So you give me an example, your coworker today might end up being your right-hand guy when you start your next company. Your boss that you might have now might be the first investor in your company 10 years later, or the employee who quits might come back years later and then be in a different role. But once I understood this, it changed everything about how I handle people leaving our company. So most business owners, they take it personally when an employee quits. So they get bitter and they adapt this attitude of like, okay, this person's dead to me now, and they inadvertently burn a bridge with the person on their way out. So I've never operated that way. So for me, when somebody moves on, my approach is how can I best support them in hitting their goals moving forward? And how do I maintain this relationship even though we're not working together directly anymore? Because when you take that approach, what actually happens is some of the people will come back years later and work for you in a different capacity, some will partner up on you with future deals, some might just even tend you a ton of referrals over the years. Okay. Many of them also will advocate tons of positive word of mouth about your company just because of how you handle their departure and how you maintain the relationship. But none of that can happen if you torch the relationship on the way out. So I was lucky to learn this lesson very early in my career in 2020, going into 2021. I paid Jay Abraham 80K for four hours of consulting. So if you don't know Jay Abraham, he's one of the most legendary marketing strategists alive. And one of the things he told me was that he would be a billionaire today if all he had done is took one to 10% equity and a lot of the employees who left his company to go start their own business. But instead of having that foresight, he burnt the bridge, he was mad, he pursued lawsuits, and at the end of the day, he got nothing back for it for something that really didn't add any value to his life. So the story always stuck with me because it's not about just being a good person, obviously that matters, but it's also about understanding that people in your orbit today are gonna circle back in ways that you cannot predict. But when they do, you want those relationships as assets, not liabilities. And by the way, if you like this content and you want to come to our next event where I'm gathering all entrepreneurs talking about what's working in the industry, what's not working in the industry, and the lessons that we've learned, scaling to over 100 million in total revenue. We have an event coming up in our eight-figure border at Mastermind. If you want to know more information about that, you can click the link in the description and it'll tell you all about it. Lesson number 22 is health is a force multiplier. So I'm gonna give you an example of how much money you could be leaving on the table simply just by not having your health dialed in. So when I was in sales, my results were wildly inconsistent. So some days I feel great, I close deal after deal. Other days I feel off, and then I miss deals that otherwise I should have closed. And that inconsistency cost me huge because in sales, what's really key is showing up consistently, time and time again, and being able to control every single day and really capitalize on all the opportunities that come your way, right? You always want to make sure you hit the deals that you should be closing, but are maybe not closing. And then one month I basically fixed it in two weeks. So what happened was I actually listened to a podcast that referenced this study from the University of Colorado. So they looked at a bunch of people and they found that simply just going to bed and waking up at the same time reduced mental illness in that group by 23%. And then 60% on top of that had a huge reduction in symptoms. So I was like, man, that's amazing. I tried that within two weeks of just standardizing my going to bed and waking up time. That's it. I felt insane. And my sales skyrocketed so much to where my managers actually pulled me aside and they were asking, like, what did I do to practically become so much better overnight? And frankly, all I did was regulate my sleep. That was it. So that is the power of getting your health dialed in, sleep, nutrition, exercise, everything. So think about it as not separate from your business or work, but as a force multiplier that multiplies everything that you do. Lesson number 23 is that you want to take risk with your active income, but then be conservative with your investments. So this is a lesson I had to learn the hard way is that the traits that make you a great entrepreneur are the exact traits that'll make you a terrible investor. So great entrepreneurs are wired for risk. So they want control, they want to be actively involved, they want to make fast decisions, and they want to go off their gut. So in business, that works because you can actually control the outcome and your effort directly impacts the result. But investing is a completely different game. And most entrepreneurs don't realize this until it's too late or they've already lost a fortune learning it the hard way, which is what I did. So when I first started making real money, I had a choice. I could be conservative, do the boring investments, do the 60-40 split with stocks and bonds and just dollar cost average in. But instead, what felt more natural to me as an entrepreneur is I took a more active approach and I invested in assets that I could see, feel, touch, and I wanted to accumulate a bunch of real estate and try to beat the market, which was one of the most expensive and stupid mistakes of my life. So over the course of about a year, I acquired 36 single-family homes and four multi-million dollar short-term luxury rentals. And I didn't go in blind, like I got coaches, I had friends helping me underwrite the deals, I took a ton of courses, and I spent a ton of time on this. So like I went about it, like I thought, as good as I could, but that time was time I could have spent in my business. But none of it mattered. So I lost money on every single one of those properties except for one. And some of them I sold at such a loss that the sale price didn't even cover the loan cost, which meant I had to write a check to the bank at closing to sell the property. So I didn't just even lose my investment. I lost more than what I invested. And what kills me is if I would have taken the same amount of money and just invested it into the boring SP 500 dollar cost average or whatever, I'd have an extra three or four million, maybe even more, than I have today. So less than simple, you stay rich through being boring with your investments. So your business is where you have the edge, and that's where you're actively spending in your time. But unless you're in a professional investor for your investing side of things, if you don't have an edge, being active just makes it more likely you're gonna get screwed. So again, take risks with your active income, be conservative with your investments, let it be passive, boring, and then let the market do the work. So those are the most important lessons I've ever learned in my journey. But if you want to know how I started and the step by step process that I use to go from zero to $30,000 to $40,000 a month in net income and sales, check out this video right here.