and you're not going to find another you to replace everything that you do you can find three people who do portions of what you do better than you and other things that you do that you don't do better than you what have you seen some of the most common qualities among a players when you hire them your best talent is in the future what happens is your ability to judge talent and your ability to attract Talent will only go up and here's the one that everyone messes up who you pick like I said it earlier say it again you don't necessarily even want to work with all chiropractors which means you need to have discipline to say no I'm dead serious that's why they stay poor they can't say no and what happens is you go for the short-term money and you sacrifice the long-term money hey what is up how's it going all good man all good big fan I appreciate it I'm a mutual fan yes thank you very much yeah thank you so much for supporting the book launch I appreciate it awesome man awesome my community loves you and that's all we are here and I literally got like 150 questions I had to narrow it down to five or six it was so hard we'll do the best we can and if we get through the six we can go to the number seven best best so let me get started with the first uh question that we have as like uh so Alex how did you get yourself out of gym gym launch day-to-day operations and this is my personal question because uh you mentioned something in the uh 100 million dollar offer that to hit your first 100K you don't need a lot you just need an offer to sell and that's exactly what we did uh but right now we are hitting a bottleneck and our biggest bottleneck is operations and I know I want to know how exactly you got out of gym launch operation because we have a very similar business model for I know service providers for web service providers uh so we help uh you know mostly agencies and digital Consultants with lead generation and sales and the way we do it is with a one-on-one Consulting and in a group coaching format okay so to get out of so the reason that so coaching models in general tend to be very difficult to scale because the reason people come to you is for expertise uh and so in order to get other people to provide that expertise then you have to create lots of experts who then eventually walk off and start the business on your behalf and take your customers with them so the there's kind of there's I would say like there's a couple different approaches so the first is that there's like the law firm and the McKinsey kind of Consulting model where they there's a track to become a partner in the business and then that's kind of the whole business structure so there's a where a way to share in the profits those businesses aren't particularly lucrative okay don't get me wrong they do make lots of money but the owners of those end up having to dilute themselves out not that there's anything wrong with that you can make lots of money doing it but that is that is a a version of the model um the other way is to productize the basically get narrower on the solution that you're providing and productize it to the grace of your house possible so that anyone could do it even if they have no knowledge of it in terms of like the implementation of the thing um that is more the direction that we went uh with Jim lodge because we had a very specific we don't even we didn't even work with all gyms like just to show how narrow we were with it we worked with only micro gym owners we have now expanded to health clubs as well but we still don't service a ton of different parts of the gym industry we only work with microgen service based businesses and health clubs and so but like the you know the five or six years that I was doing it before we sold we were only uh micro gems and so just to show like how incredibly narrow that was someone had to have at least 30 members assigned lease one employee and be running this type of model for them to be a customer and then if they fit all those things we could generate a lot of Revenue using our playbooks and so that was like I could have somebody who had no gym industry no expertise whatsoever and still say send this email say these words here's 10 reportings of people doing this exact same thing this is the expected value and so that's like from the delivery perspective now operating the business overall comes from Talent um and being able to find people who are just as smart or smarter than you and people say that but like when you actually meet somebody who's smarter than you and then they admire an aspect of what you've done so that they start to work for you that's where you really start to have the magic happen but how exactly you find those talent because I personally feel like I'm irreplaceable in the company the experience that I bring to my clients is not something that anyone else can come and yeah you're not good at teaching you're not good at teaching um and the idea of like I'm irreplaceable is completely ego um so you just have to get rid of that like you have to be like I'm the most replaceable person in the business like in the like from an employee perspective like you want like they want to become Irreplaceable the owner's perspective should be the exact opposite which is that everything that I do I can need someone else to do better than me so do you recommend like breaking down whatever I do into smaller parts and yeah 100 and you're not going to find another you to replace everything that you do but you can find three people who do portions of what you do better than you and other things that you do that you don't do better than you because they have other lives that they've lived yeah oh well so don't try and find one person replace you try and find four oh yeah that's that's a good Prospect thank you very much for that yeah uh what have you seen some of the most uh you know Common qualities among a players when you hire them like you know what I need this person right now because he's gonna crush it yeah your best talent is in the future like what happens is your ability to judge talent and your ability to attract Talent will only go up right so it's it's kind of like uh so the easiest way to judge talent in my opinion is how specific you need to give your directives right so if you take this to a hypothetical extreme on the at the at the bottom level you have somebody who's has barely any cognitive function and you have someone who you're sort of like here's how you turn on a computer here's how you open up Internet Explorer like on this extreme of just like very little cognitive function very few meta skills on the other end you just say build me a department that does this and the person can just build or spin up an entire entity that does a certain thing within a larger conglomerate right so like those are the two kind of just like hypothetical extremes of talent and so you can judge someone's Talent by how specific you have to be with the things that you're asking them to do and a big function or proxy for that is what experience they have in the past that they've done something similar to what you're asking them to do oh all right I'll give you an example if I wanted to build if I wanted to hire somebody to build a app on sales team uh and I have a B2B business then I'm gonna go find somebody who's already built one or two outbound sales teams for B2B businesses ideally close close to who are already in the industry that I'm in so the likelihood that they'll succeed and know how to do it is very high they already have tons of trench knowledge they have the experiences I just copy paste that into my business and I can give you a better deal a better culture uh to work in than where you're at now oh okay that makes a lot of sense another hack to this is finding the number two and so uh you know like in the sales person example maybe your your personal brand or your company's Brand's not as big as the company that you're trying to attract someone from so that's where you can give someone the opportunity to step up right so if you're if you're the you know let's say there's a sales director and you're the lead sales person um of the company now when I say lead I mean lead in the technical sense not the top sales person but a sales lead is usually somebody who does a little bit of training with the team um also sells and give them the opportunity like if they had a good manager who you can't get you say well you know what that manager is doing what if you were that manager here right so you can offer them a step up opportunity because they still have enough proximity to what it looks like when it's right yeah it sounds like a lot of the time to get such clients you'll probably have to do a lot of Outreach like you mentioned in the leads book and such you know methods and the lead in this instance is an employee exactly and right you know what somebody actually asked this question and I had to remove this because I read that exact answer on 100 million dollar leads so phenomenal job there thank you very much for writing the book um so yeah I'll read one of the questions that one of them are an audience member wrote they mentioned uh what kind of pitfalls to avoid that business owners know but agency owners are usually unaware of those of that leads them not to work with an agency for example what this person wanted to try is that you know try to tell uh is that like what are some of the things that agency owners should avoid doing if they ever want to scale a new experience which question do you want me to answer uh the second one okay so what things should an agency owner avoid when they're trying to scale yep yep that's one of the questions that I have I mean the same things that any business owner would want to avoid when they're scaling um I think that agencies tend to fall into the you know they they tend to fall into the bucket of trying to be everything to everyone so yeah maintaining the discipline to be very focused on what the problem that you're solving and who you're solving it for and I think that solves 90 of the problems from a strategic perspective for any small business owner including an agency and the second piece is that if you're in a service based business the quality of your talent is going to be directly proportional to your growth because you're you're basically selling people fractionalized people that's what service businesses are right you're selling some level of training that you're able to give and having more efficiency than an individual business owner would have like the the classic you know small business owner Legion agency that charges two thousand dollars a month the idea is that if they were to hire somebody full time to run these ads it would cost them five or six thousand dollars a month but you have copyrighters designers and media buyers and page designers who all work a fraction of their time for this one business and they can get it more efficiently and you can still do it at good margins right like that's fundamentally what service businesses are and so the quality of that talent and the culture that you have at the business to attract and keep that Talent um are the kind of the key or The crucial pieces of the success of the model Yeah you mentioned something in the book where you mentioned the agency model where you hire an agency to learn the stuff and you internalize it and then when you have stopped learning you replace an agency but teaching agency models agency businesses how to become Irreplaceable right that's uh usually one of the things and what we uh you know help them with is like how do you have stacks of offers where you don't just handle one thing in one Department you become the marketing department of uh the company that you work with so in your perspective how should one go there should we start with one business then upsell the next and upsell the next and upsell the next offer or like it's tough because then you it's it's it's more like creating the irresistible offer isn't necessarily about having a zillion products it's more about explaining and communicating the many small things that you have to do anyways and so rather than saying like I'm going to generate leads for you that's like one outcome but there's many things that have to happen along the way you have to create landing pages you have to write copy you have to you have to have follow-up sequences you have to work the leads you have to have scheduling you have to you know you have to split test you have to make new creative like there's lots of things that have to happen in order to just get the single result and it's just making sure that we're delineating those things because in unbeknownst or an ignorant uh business owner I say ignorant in the technical sense like they just don't know um would have no idea what you're doing you're like yeah just go get me leads it's like well it's much easier said than done and if I was doing it from an outbound perspective I'd be like well I have to warm up domains I have to you know spin up different accounts I have to split test different email openers I have to like you have to explain all the steps and they're like wow there's a lot more work that goes into this now I can I can appropriately value this price tag that you describe to whatever the service is so that's Piece One Piece two about being Irreplaceable I think you know it's tough and the the way to like in order to be Irreplaceable oftentimes you'd have to go after significantly bigger customers so like if you're an agency for 4chan 1000 for Fortune 500 companies then a lot of times they don't want to they have to it would be so costly for them to spin up at scale the level of talent that's required to do like programmatic media buys across 100 different Platforms in different countries right it'd be very difficult for them so there's so much pain associated with that that they can immediately plug into your solution and then they're likely that they want to leave or do this on their own is significantly lower right but the idea that any service provider is going to become truly Irreplaceable like any business can do anything on their own right so like you always have that and I would prefer to put myself out of business and do it in a way that aligns my customers with me then have a model that I know is is basically has a timer for obsolescence all right so uh and inside check is like uh not everybody works it's Fortune 500 companies right yeah most people don't and many people uh they might work with you know a smaller medium businesses they help them with that uh but I think in those cases because these uh let's say you become a marketing agency for chiropractors in New York you become so good at that in general people won't leave you because you're just good at that particular service okay got it thanks a lot man for that yeah and the thing is the small business owners are really tough yeah they're super tough um because they're the problem like they're super erratic they're super volatile their cash flows lumpy um they don't know where their next paycheck's gonna come from and to to no fault of your own they can cancel because they just can't make payroll that month because there's other things that are required right and so that's the reason that like do you see any large SMB agency in the U.S oh yeah no right there's a structural problem right the biggest agencies look at the biggest agencies that exist Ogilvy you have Vayner you know is up there now um yeah who do they service massive companies why because the quality of the customers are higher and so they know that when they sign a contract they actually stick with the contract we all know that if you have a small business under signs a 12-month agreement for agency Services he's good for three months yeah it's it's because even if you were the best marketer in the world if they have a shitty product or they don't work leads or they have a terrible location they have one star reviews Google there's a number of things that are not under your control if you have bigger better customers then a lot of those other things have been controlled for because they've they've achieved a certain level of success now it's harder to get those customers why because they're going to also look for an agency that's equally qualified because they're also smart enough to say well listen you know you're in your mom's basement right now and so I don't really feel like you know giving all my lead generation over to you and so I think the enterprising individual who's very good at Marketing in a specific Niche the short term solve is like sure anybody can take on 10 agency clients that pay them you know 2 000 to you know four thousand dollars a month or a thousand to four thousand dollars a month for an SMB and make a top one percent living and there's nothing wrong with that it's just work it's fine yeah if you want to have a better version of that opportunity it's learning more skills and saying okay let me see if I can understand the chiropractor business even more than I already do and see if I can combine that with kind of some Consulting around the business model itself and then start seeing if I can put some of my own Capital at risk and buying into these businesses right like that's when you start moving into private equity and away from Pure Services now again like are there like the biggest model that I've seen for small business owners from a marketing perspective um was an agency that was running 300 a month a month price point because they had figured out and like there's a key here is that like those business owners are so price sensitive that you're not it's not whether you can sell them it's whether you can keep them on their worst month that's how you have to think about it like the price isn't based on the value that you can deliver on the best month but how much you can keep on the worst month because that's where the churn comes in right and so the best model that I saw uh was doing SEO for small business owners and they had completely automated every aspect of it um it was basically just a Playbook and I think it generated reviews and maybe a couple phone calls a month but at a 300 a month price point if they got one or two phone calls a month it was worth it so the bar to get over to to ascribe value and especially on something that I call like a nuisance business where it's like I know I should be maintaining my reputation I know I should be doing some of this stuff okay for two or three hundred dollars a month I don't feel guilty about not doing it because this is all right does that make sense yeah it totally makes sense so when uh in gym launch we started helping small allergens because that's again a small business owner and you specifically mentioned this I think in the gym launch book where you know they struggle to make the ends meet uh I think that's where you went into the licensing model where you started teaching them the stuff because they can help themselves and probably uh scale up with that uh entire technique I think that's what it is right yeah I mean that's a good transition to a consulting or licensing model like in the beginning it's Consulting because you have a lot more service because you haven't you haven't like productized every part of it but if you're diligent about productizing every piece of your playbook because if you consult enough times for the same type of business you realize that you start basically reverting to the same 6 7 10 12 plays and then you just you just document them out right and then you hand off one to somebody who says cool you just execute Play One ux you play two ux you play three um and that can be from a circle space you know relationship where you can license the materials out right like for us it was truly licensing because we would generate we would test you know ads in you know 20 markets and come up with the best combination of copy creative headline and landing page and then we just license the material out to a thousand locations and so for them the cost of trying to figure out what the best ad is going to be and the cost of filming the ad hiring the talent doing all these other things was far in excess of just immediately having scratch off tick tickets that were winners so they could just immediately run the ads and get a 10x return because we had already tested 100 other ads that didn't get that and so they could just take the winners and take it to the bank and so that was where the Arbitrage existed for us and we could spend 50 Grand or 100 Grand testing it but no we had a thousand gyms that were paying three thousand dollars a month in order to have that material because it was so local so we could sell the same thing a thousand times oh yeah that's good and uh because when we are in a Consulting model right what happens is some clients actually do the work and they get results and some clients they need a lot of follow-ups and they need a lot of accountability from you right so uh how do you maintain that like I'm I know I'm getting very Nitty Gritty into this but yeah I'm good with nitty-gritty I mean I get it um I mean you you you talk to basically one of the core problems of all B2B businesses which is that you end up taking over the person's entire business until eventually they're like yeah if you could just send me a check every month and you do you run the business that would be awesome right and so that's why being very disciplined about problem definition from the services that you provide number one and here's the one that everyone messes up who you pick like I said it earlier say it again like it's not like even if you work with chiropractors right as that example you don't necessarily even want to work with all chiropractors you want to work with chiropractors like if so here's how I mean I talk about in the book in the in the referral section but you look at the customers that you have right now that are the best customers like the top 20 of the top 10 you say okay what characteristics do these people have that other people don't have in my client list and that's both from the software the hard perspective what are the quantitative differences they have a certain size business they're over a certain amount a month they have a number of locations they have a certain amount of employees number of customers like you just get all that data on them and then also what was the experience that they went through when working with me and was it different than some of my other customers because one of the things that happens oftentimes is that the first few customers you get become really sticky and then you and then you start scaling and then you have this front revolving door but you still have your core business of these people that you had in the beginning right so why is that because these people got more help from you and actually got delivered more value and then you basically tried to scale without scaling the value that you delivered to the original customers right and so you were able to train them enough that they could become self-sufficient and then not need you as much anymore and then that created a lot more margin for you but it's really saying okay I'm only trying to scale to 100 000 a month because of my ego not because that's what the business requires right now right so if you're at whatever 15 000 a month and you've got five customers and they're all like having a great experience and you keep signing people on they keep leaving it's like okay well instead of me trying to sell five this month why don't I just sell one and do a great job and then not lose them and like that's the key to compounding in a service business once you pay down the basic pay down the inefficiencies of them not knowing what to do yet um and being very specific about who you serve and who you don't like we did personal trainers we didn't work with facilities that weren't making a certain amount of money we didn't work with facilities didn't have a certain number of customers we didn't work with facilities that had a different model than what we knew worked and part of it I'll give you an example um so like cycling Studios and like yoga studios 100 could use our model we didn't work with them because the founders tended to be psychologically different they just didn't they just didn't they just like their adherence was super low because they just come from a totally different world view than the guys who are more Fitness weight loss transformation focused even though at the end of the day it's just a membership with a back room where people work out fundamentally the exact same thing but mindset wise they had a very hard time um kind of adopting a different model even though monetarily it totally made sense so I have to pick the 80 20 of the things like which 20 of the customers give us and then you have five times more than 20. yes oh all right which means you need to have discipline to say no I am and say like honestly like sales calls that are genuine sales calls in a service business really should be ex genuinely Discovery calls what's your business what do you have what are your goals right now what have you done so far tell me more about this how many clients do you have Etc it's like okay based on what you've told me you are a fit for these reasons now based on what you told me you might not be a fit for these reasons I just want to let you know now if something like that changes in the future or if you can fix this thing I could take you on or I have a a down sell that might get you prepared to be a customer for me later that's a lower level of service because the likelihood that I think that you're gonna stick is very low you're this is so hard to say no to this new upcoming business because you know they can help them but they just don't fit your criteria I have 13 companies I get 1800 a day who reach out right all right you have to say no yeah how did you go about like didn't it like it feels weird to like say no because a lot of the time I get specifically that's why most people stay poor they can't say no that's why they that's why they stay poor they can't say no and what happens is you go for the short-term money and you sacrifice the long-term money long-term because then you just get in this operational Rat Race and then you scale up your your costs to meet the fact that you took on all these customers that you shouldn't have taken on to begin with and then you have to pay them every single month so then you have to keep on taking out customers that you shouldn't take it on to begin with and you get in this vicious cycle that you can't get out until you downsize you take two steps back five steps back fix your ego and then say I'm only working with these customers because ethically I know that these are the ones that have the highest likely to success with everyone else I had mediocre success and I can say it's their fault I can say it's my fault it doesn't really matter all that I know is the likelihood that they achieve what I think they should achieve is low period so I'm not going to sell them a lot but aren't you afraid that the Tam will go smaller like of course yeah of course but I build 100 company off of a niche this big it doesn't like it really you can build a niche an inch inch wide and a mile deep you don't need to like you don't need to serve it like there's 30 million small businesses you don't need to service them you like there's there's 50 000 gyms that fit the model that we have fifty thousand that's it that's not a lot yeah yeah right and so you will be limited but the question is what is your goal now if you want to build a 10 billion dollar company then yeah you're gonna have to go after a bigger problem but if you want to build a nine figure company you can do that almost you can do that in almost any industry yeah like and I think you can always do a 10 degree shift and like good I think you can always do a 10 degree shift to the niche closest to it and slightly expand the market as you go I think that's what most people do right and you know what I would say even that just cut off the back part just like pick the niche and don't expand just get better seriously just get better just get better at delivering even more about because what happens is you can get better and better at it and then you can take a greater and greater percentage of the economics because you're because you have so much track record so much proof that you deliver so much value so consistently yeah makes sense uh when it comes to let's say uh so I got this I have a question that one of my uh you know clients asked me yeah five minutes maybe this is the right time to ask so the question that they asked around this is like I'm not able to scale because my offer is a non-roi offer so this is a PR marketing agency and they say like hey we just do PR we do press releases it's like and just help them with Fame it doesn't really help with leads and sales so how do I position myself because it feels like my offer is not an Roi based offer uh I would say you're selling to the wrong people uh all right so there's absolutely I mean PR is a big Market you know there's lots of people who want PR but the only types of people who want PR are people who understand brand and if you're trying to make your rent every month you don't understand brand you're trying to only get leads and sales oh yeah I think a person who needs leads in sales doesn't understand Brandon a person who has enough of these and now they look at like how do I build my brand they'll look for PR yeah yep yep thanks a lot man so I think we have time for one final questions sure sure awesome so you mentioned that when you started out you started with the first five customer framework that was awesome and then you just grew with referrals so this question came from a fitness consultant herself and she said that with the competition that the fitness Market is how do you stand out because even if I get my first customers and I post them there are 100 others that have this many uh case studies and testimonials to show honestly it's just being authentic very easy to say very hard to do yeah so what happens is the you know 99 of the fitness Market just looks at what other influencers doing and say I'll just I'll copy that and I'll do stuff like that but then you just do a worse version of what somebody's already doing right if you look at the top influencers who are in that space they have a very specific personality that like so zooming all the way out fitness like there's no secret like there's no secret like work out more stop eating shitty you'll look better over a longer time Rising I think that's what it is so the reason then goes where do I want to get my news from right people go to different news outlets even though the news technically is the same I'm not getting into the you know misinformation political part they're saying Jenna people consume media from sources that they like more and so the idea is how can I there's going to be a subset of an audience that is like you genuinely and they want to get there if they could get Fitness information from Alex but if I'm a you know a 45 year old Indian mother I'm probably not going to be her source for Fitness information even if I say The Identical stuff as another 45 year old uh Indian mother now if that 45 year old any mother looks at my fitness content and tries to make content like mine it's going to seem weird right yeah and even if that 45 anybody looks at another 45 video who is uh really successful right then it's still going to be it's gonna be one degree closer but it's still being not them and so most people you can stick out by actually being yourself and like I know it sounds trite but the real like this is real there are so many unique aspects of someone's life and the things they're interested in compared to other people that if you just lean into those differences those unique things that you're actually into that are weird right Rogan's into aliens and mushrooms and comedy and fighting who would have told him like you should knit like you should be Joe Rogan and you're going to have people who like some aspects and then the super fans will be people who overlap on two or three of the interests that you have and so that's the idea is you just have to show more of who you are and that will create more pools of people who relate to to you like if you pick my brand to be like dessert working out philosophy Business Marketing sales like what are like what's Alex from Rosie's brand like no strips right sure these are all like they're all completely disjointed things but they're different they're people who follow me because they only like the business money stuff they're people found me because they only like the philosophy stuff they're people follow me because they just think the desserts and cab stuff is funny like it just depends on what someone's going to come in for but if you're just you then you can stick with it for the long term and that's what's going to build over time and make you quote stand out because there is only one version of you that's lived your life so just live it publicly absolutely absolutely it's a document thanks a lot man I think we are at the end of our tenure thank you very much for being uh here and keep writing great books thank you and thank you so much to your community who are watching this I appreciate you all thank you for showing up and supporting I hope the book I hope I hope you make so much money from the book um and just and crush it because at the end of the day there's more problems than any one person can solve it I hope you build businesses to solve them so thank you guys