I just got back from the acquisition. comom scaling Workshop where I paid Alex and le la horos $5,000 to help me scale my business from $6 million in 2024 to $12 million and Beyond in 2025 and in this video I'm going to break down everything I learned and took away from that Workshop so you can get all the benefits without having to pay let's dive into the first last one by the way if you don't know who I am my name is Ticky Bush I'm a former Wall Street hedge fund Trader turn digital writer and now I run a portfolio of writing businesses right with AI ship 30 for30 type share and our premium ghost ring Academy everything you need to effectively start and monetize as a writer on the internet all that information is in the description below without further Ado let's get right into that first lesson so the first lesson and the most important one for me was the fastest moving entrepreneurs are obsessive resource allocators so from the beginning of the workshop they said the frame that everything they were going to walk us through was through an investor point of view and so we basically spent the first day filling out this worksheet that more or less valued our company based on a handful of metrics Revenue profit and then what they call risk adders or detractors things like keyman Risk um data risk Market risk a handful of other factors that I'll talk through throughout this video but this one clicked for me right away because they basically said your job as the CEO or whatever position you have at the company that makes the decisions is to seek the best risk adjusted returns with the resources that they have and so every business is constrained by like a handful of resources that they walked us through and that's time of the team and yourself attention so where that time is spent how much how many different things that time is pointed towards and then Capital which is something you can use to accelerate um the completion of pro processes completion of projects whatever it is so I took that and they walked us through and it clicked for me right away because I have a background on Wall Street background as an investor and so basically your only job is to First align all of the attention on the most important thing so aside from time aside from capital the first thing is getting clear on what is actually worth doing and what are all the things that are not worth doing because if you have all the time in the world and all the capital but you point it in the wrong direction you're not going to go anywhere so the most strategic decision or the most important strategic decision is what to work on where to place that attention then you strategically invest capital and time or so second I have properly allocating everyone's time to achieve that thing the fastest so you pick what to do and then you have as many people work towards it as possible and then you can invest Capital to either have more labor or more um whatever it is resources Talent uh to achieve that outcome the fastest so my main takeaway from this one is just spend first more of my time on aligning attention and so figuring out what are all the things we could do what has the best risk adjusted return based on that and then figure out okay who is going to work on it so how much time is going to go towards it and then is there any way we can invest money to make it happen faster if there's one area that I significantly underinvested this year it was in spending more time figuring out what is worth doing rather than printing out a big long list here are all the things we should go and do and spreading our attention thin across all of them and as a result not achieving any of them as quickly as we could have if we picked one thing and did it in sequential order and I'm going to bounce around here but basically the way they look at prioritization as a company is there are always going to be a bunch of fires going on at any time but there is a bigger fire going on and that is the most important problem to go and solve and so rather than trying to put all the fires out at once and then they just keep growing you pick the biggest one you attack that one you put it out and because you see that all the other little fires are burning you end up you basically create a culture of like look at all these other fires yes we need to go attack them right now but there's one that's much bigger that could take us down if we don't figure this one out so we're going to figure that one out first knowing we have to move quickly on it because all the other ones are burning as well and that clicked for me as a like a mental mod for prioritization you do want to identify all the all the fires but then only work on the most important one and so that's something I'm trying to take into the next season for our business okay the second lesson is from 3 million to 10 million in IA this is where the majority of the value in a business is created so I'm going to jump in an Excel model just to kind of um show you the math behind this but before we go iida for anyone unfamiliar it's like the fancy Finance term for profit so basically from 3 to 10 million in profit uh I wouldn't say the majority of the value and so I need to change that word but basically the return on that strip of profit growth is significant in terms of Enterprise value of the business and so how I'll show you that is basically the process of going to 10 million doesn't only triple or 3.3 times its ebah but it can significantly change the margin so here's just an example of this like right now our business currently did $4 million in revenue or profit in uh 202 4 and so if you look at what we could potentially take it to right $10 million in profit would be an incredible home run business for us right now um based on everything we ran with the workshop are multiple not that we're interested in selling the business but it's around two and there are a handful of reasons there but the big one is at this level of profit the business is still relatively fragile because to get to the next level you have to put significant significantly more things that create like more defensibility around the business so taking yourself out of the marketing having a defined executive leadership team that are incentivized on the profit of the business just a handful of things that by growing to this $10 million Mark not only does the profit go from 4 to 10 so that's a 2.5x return or 250% but the multiple that the business would be valued at if it were to sell goes from 2 to 8 and so you can see here currently the valuation would be around $8 million but if you get it to 10 and you do the things that make getting to 10 inevitable your multiple goes from 2 to 8 so it's actually four four times on the multiple and then two and a half times on the profit which is a 10x you can see the valuation goes from 8 million to 80 million that's a 1000% return or about a 10x so that is why they focus as a business uh like a private Equity holding company however you want to look at it in this range because there are a handful of like checklist style items you can Implement on a business that has gotten to 3 to 4 million in profit it's doing a great job um but to get to 10 you need a very different way of thinking for the most part or you need um like someone who's done it before to show you a little bit of a road mapap because it's kind of No Man's Land um in terms of where to Market what else to offer things like that so that was a big reason we went to the workshop is we find we're like right at that sweet spot and then walking out of there it's like great this is exactly the time to double down and make the correct strategic decisions to get to that $10 million mark because for ourselves and all our employees this is where a significant amount of the value of the company will get generated okay my third lesson is LTV to CAC are two metrics you must have constantly staring at you so we have not done a great job as a business organizationally uh looking at these numbers because at our given Revenue level they're not critical and especially because so just to Define them LTV lifetime value or lifetime gross profit basically how much money you keep from each new customer you bring after you subtract the cost of delivery so that was something that um I was unaware of I thought it was just the amount of Revenue that came in per per person but basically how much you keep after paying your employees to fulfill on that service it's different than paying employees just to operate the business but like specifically for example uh we run a group coaching business and each client or each coach can take on roughly 40 to 60 maybe some more around 50 to 60 clients at one time um so basically we would divide how much we pay um our coaches by 50 because that's how much it costs for them to fulfill on each new student we bring and we'd subtract that from the price it's not a huge number for us but it is a relatively important number over the long term because if you found that you were paying too much for delivery it's going to be difficult to scale so LTV lifetime grow profit however you want to think about it and then customer acquisition cost this is just how much it costs you to acquire an additional customer or if you have an organic based business it's just the number of customers you have divided by your marketing costs because we do not have a marginal cost to acquire customer uh at this current stage because almost 90% of our sales come from organic and for that you have fixed costs right if you make just better content you're going to reach four more people uh without spending any more money which is nice very nice and something they're very interested in investing in are people um who have strong Brands but are able to also remove themselves over time from that and replace it with retargeting and different um acquisition channels but basically we had almost never done this exercise and it was very Illuminating for us because um as we look at different ways to grow there's really only two things you can do increase LTV or reduce CAC and you we have again not have not had the most discipline around this but any project you take on you should say this is increasing LTV and here's how much we expect to increase LTV and here's why we do it or we're looking to decrease CAC here's how much we think it's going to decrease CAC and go from there so it was just a good reminder of like at the highest level this is a a metric that allows you to compare businesses across a bunch of different vertical with only one number basically the ratio if you had a the LTV to CAC of a 3 to1 money printer is 3:1 so if you had a money printer that every time you put a dollar in customer acquisition cost you got $3 back you'd have a three to1 money printing machine and that's ultimately what you're trying to grow as a business is a highly predictable um LTV to CAC number that consistently just brings you returns and that especially as an investor from a risk mitigation perspective you want to know that that LTV to CAC is going to stay for a long time so that was just a good reminder to us to look at this number we're going to be integrating into some dashboards and that brings us to the fourth lesson okay my fourth lesson was we need a single dashboard with the most important metrics in the business duh right but we have like these are spread out across a couple different places and I'm reminded by a talk by um what's his name Keith R boy from Founders fund or I think Sequoia now he has a great talk called how to operate highly recommend going and looking that one up but basically he says the quality of a dashboard is one how many people use it on a daily basis and two how clearly they can connect their performance to the performance of the main numbers on the dashboard so kind of a a mouthful there but basically you want everyone in your team on your team using the dashboard and that means you have put the correct numbers on there for them to track but then they should also be able to see how their main kpi and this is another um either Peter teal or depends on who you ask here but everyone having a single kpi that they're responsible for making as good as possible and is somehow very clearly connected to the the high level kpis of the business that all needs to be included on that dashboard so we have a handful of numbers that simplify our business which is front-end cash generated backend revenue generated and live offers made that's on the marketing side but within that we need to make sure that we have all of the numbers that attribute to those numbers right so for front-end cash we have a handful of guys on our sales team we should know how many of or each of their numbers as a proportion of that frontend cach so everyone can see how it's connected and you can do that for backend with our csms or for live offers or live calls it would be by platform so I'm just thinking about if we were to build this dashboard and they just kept kind of hammering home you need something to make data driven decisions and if you cannot make data driven decisions that's your bottleneck of your business and so that's something I'm focused on is like for the most part we have these numbers but they're not put in a place that the entire team looks at that's easily accessible so that's going to be a big Focus for me in the first quarter all right the fifth lesson is leveling up in business is transitioning from selling to people to selling to employees and he said this off the cuff but it I felt this significantly this year in that in the beginning of any business you're probably the one generating the sales in some way you're either doing the direct sale if it's a transactional relationship or you're doing all the things that lead to the sale if you're running a onep person business and as I've started to hire more I've realized that first you hire someone to manage the team that does the selling right so for example if we have a sales team originally I was doing the sales calls then I hired a sales team and then I was managing them and selling them to keep selling to potential customers and this just kind of levels all the way up right so once you have a manager your goal is to sell to them to stay so they keep coaching the people making the sales and they they're the ones making the sales to the customer then as you have exec you're constantly selling the executives on Stang to sell the managers on Stang to sell the managers and basically you are in a constant sale and retention game it just changes who you are trying to sell and retain and that's again been a big lesson and another reason why I'm making a ton of content like this this year is I would say 80 to 90% of our employees and especially our highest performing employees all came from either our programs or some kind of organic piece of content like our podcast uh that Cole and I do together that I want a a stream of people potentially trying to work for me or with me and this content is the best way to do it because what's better than looking behind the scenes of a business that you're eventually going to work for uh and that's what I'm trying to do with this Channel right now so this was just a great lesson of I am you have to adapt your sales skill to continue to sell you're going because you're selling to a different person right so rather than selling to a customer the way you retain an employee through a continued sale is far different but a lot of the mechanisms that create a great customer experience also create a great employee experience and so those are again some things I'm taking into the next quarter all right my sixth lesson is brand is the best way to improve LTV and reduce CAC at the same time so looking at both sides of that LTV to CAC equation it's cheaper to acquire customers because if we have fixed media expenses right for me to have this YouTube channel we just need an editor and someone to upload the videos and so that is a fixed expense and so if I get more people to watch this video I can get far greater Returns on my marketing spend um because the number of eyeballs goes up without my expenses going up so brand is a great way to drive CAC down because I for the same price get a lot more customers and it's going going to increase LTV because I heard this Golden Nugget I think it might have been horos or Jeremy hannes uh someone I also work with and he says when you make content after someone has purchased something from you they will associate the content with the purchase they made whether or not that was part of the purchase and so brand and content and high quality content at that will improve LTV because customers will continue to stay or buy your next thing because they will associate the new value they're getting with the purchase they've made in the past which makes them more likely to purchase again in the future that was just an aha moment and why I'm coming back from that Workshop really doubling down on YouTube going forward this year or just having some kind of mechanism to talk about what I'm building on the business side while educating at the same time this was the big reason it's I know that if I only did this if I only grew my LTV or if I only grew my YouTube channel and continue to pump out high quality organic content LTV is going to go up and C's going to go down at the same time and building on the point above employee ltvs so how long they stay and the cost to acquire a really good employee are also going to go up and go down at the same time so YouTube extremely high return that's why I'm doubling down on it or at least starting it this year all right my seventh lesson is every single thing in your business is trainable you just lack the skill of training and that is purely a reminder to myself there were so many small moments during this Workshop where I recognized that there was an extremely intentional training process going on and it stuck out the most when on the first two day or really on the first day they had multiple team members present so like 45 minute keynote presentations and their presentation style was so similar to Alex and Leila in the way their slides were created in the way they paused in the way they told stories in the way they just everything uh was extremely feedback driven in that there was a clear set of behaviors that made a good presentation that they did a long job operationalizing or uh like a lot of work to operationalize and then trained that behavior so one good example when they um someone asks a question at the end of a presentation you know how this goes in a big room after like in a workshop Style no one can really hear the question so the only person who really gets any value out of it is the person who asks they every single question so 50 plus questions across five or six different presentations the person speaking would listen to the question and then they would pause clarify with the person and then word for word almost everyone goes for everyone who didn't hear the question what they asked was repeat repeat repeat repeat that way everyone who asked a question got value out of it um rather than just the person to asked and there are so many little examples like the way their front office or not front office but like the guys at the front desk shook hands they all shook hands in the same way like it was a very good firm handshake that was just too uniform uh to not have been taught and trained and their operations team everyone just there were so many similarities and I think that the belief that I came home broken all right the belief that broke for me as I came home was anything you think you're the only one in your business that you can do it's a it's it's incorrect now you might be the only person that can do all of those things but you can combine different people to he had a great example of like how do you make a unicorn if you have a unicorn in your business uh you're probably not going to go find another unicorn but you need to find a rhino a firefly and a horse and combine them and that is a nice mental model for like all the things you that you don't think you'd be able to replace uh it's probably because you're looking for one person to do all that replacement when in reality you just haven't done the work to list out all the things you're actually doing and then figure out how can I train just this subset to this person this subset to that person this subset to that person and so I'm going to be working on that again the theme Here I I emerged with a ton of takeaways that I keep saying I'm going to do in q1 but in reality I'm going to kind of try to work on these all year all right my eighth lesson the people doing at the highest level have an excessive intentional standard I was blown away by the quality of their team across the board so one again goes back to when you have a great brand people want to work for you when you have a vision big enough for extremely talented entrepreneu entrepreneurial type people to fit underneath at their current stage so maybe they have a bigger ambition in the future but for now it really serves them to work for you because they're it's verifiable that they're going to learn more skills and get paid well uh that make their future goals more likely that was just so clear across the board and so they loved working there they loved the culture of high performance and then again like I said earlier they'd been trained with extreme repetition and intention to detail every bit of this um Workshop was so clearly iterated from a prior version that it was the first time I'd ever looked at a team in an industry that is similar to what I run and go that is what it looks like to run an excellent organization like a an organization built on Excellence that was so clearly something they all wanted and thought of and again I'm coming back thinking how can I try to implement that with our team all right lesson number nine this was a costly one uh this year and it's past 3 to 5 million in Revenue anything new starts with a who and not a how so this year on top of running the sales team on top of creating content on top of running finance and just the general departments uh interfacing with our success team things like that I tried to bootstrap our cold ads initiative and said I need to go learn this myself while contining to run the rest of the team and that was a mistake because I spent probably 200 hours trying to take different courses joining masterminds really sinking my teeth into this world um and I thought I had to be the one to start the initiative that I could then pass off to a media buyer or some kind of new higher but at this level I had the sequence flipped when I would have been far better spending probably all 200 hours that I spent on cold ads just trying to recruit a really strong director of marketing or or something like that who had done this before or a really high level media buyer or someone who had just executed at this level before um who could come in and build the entire department because yeah it's a completely different department and this is a segue or not a segue but like a sidebar they look at marketing and brand as two different things and for a long time I've looked at them as the same thing or marketing having organic and paid but brand is organic and paid is marketing and that was basically the way they look at it is like brand is views marketing is clicks and so brand is anything that helps create more views videos threads whatever type of content you create and then marketing's responsibility is to capture as much of that attention into clicks to get them to take whatever action it is and so we had an assumption that going towards colder and colder audiences and traffic would give us a more predictable Marketing System um and so I try to go and do that myself I should have just one spent more time Consulting with other people of was that the best choice so it goes back to um the resource allocation I deem that the highest return on time and attention probably wasn't we probably should have just been making YouTube videos and so here I am um learning from my mistakes as I make my first video of the year or second video of the year um and yeah I think that was just a great takeaway is now like for example we want to potentially start doing a better job with our referral and affiliate network of people sending us to to PGA other writers other um you know solar preneurs who think that this is a great way to monetize as a writer and rather than think that we had to be the ones to execute it it would be better off spending that same amount of time finding someone who could come in and build a department from scratch so just going to try to beat that over my head and look I'm not going to sit here and say that I made a mistake doing that um earlier on it was probably a mistake this year cuz we were already at three or five I think we did 5 million of Revenue in 20 23 um maybe a little under that and I should have done that from the beginning this year but every Department that I booted at before that the sales department the really the entire organic marketing department um Cole and I both worked on the curriculum things like that all of that should have been done by us because we were before that Revenue level so the takeaway if you're watching this at a lower Revenue level is not like oh I need to just hire first you should probably do most of the work yourself until you get to this Revenue level but from here the opportunity cost of trying to give this all your attention you probably have other things that you're working on that are continuing to feed the entire business as a whole so it's better off to invest in one person who can build the whole thing all right my 10th lesson is that Excellence is a remarkably High number of extremely small details done well so as I leave that Workshop I would give it a 10 out of 10 high quality well done well worth of value far exceeds the value workshop and it's only it wasn't because of one thing they said it's because I emerged with a 100 takeaways that were all like offthe cuff things that I might not be relevant or useful now but I know will be in the future future and on top of that they were just like they had clearly looked at all of the feedback from prior events and just looked to eliminate extremely small frustrating things so I'll give this example there's like how do I visualize this there was the area where they gave the speech or like all the talks and then right when you turn out you would face a wall and then the only way you could go was left but there was a very clear sign it said restrooms food area left and then right when you turn left you immediately saw another that said restrooms this way food area that way and it's subtle but like those are the only two things that you would leave the room to find and right away you had zero decisions to make about where to go you saw it you turn left you immediately saw where to go again depending on which one and like that level of attention to detail is what creates incredible experiences it's not this big show it's the super small details continuously done to eliminate all the frustrating parts that other people would find because if I was getting lost trying to find the place I'd be frustrated they had high quality food like it wasn't some BS sandwich and like it was really good food clearly aimed at people who took care of their bodies cuz there was like healthy options across the board um my business partner Cole is gluten and dairy free and everything was properly marked uh they had a barista for fresh coffee and I mean I had three or four cappuccinos a day from that and so I was just wired the entire time because rather than some crappy coffee machine that no one likes they had a really good Barista that was doing a great job again made for a better experience Wi-Fi signs posted everywhere and especially right when you need them like we would take a break the next one is a 15-minute break every 90 minutes which prevented us from getting burnt out but we would take a break and then right when we'd start to the break they would put the wi-fi signs on the screen and or the passwords so you immediately knew that hey when someone's going to need the Wi-Fi is during the brakes and so let's give it to them right when they need it and I can make a very long list of things but it was just a takeaway that it's the metaphor they use is it's not one Silver Bullet it's a million golden bbes or one golden bullet whatever you want to say it's a bunch of little small things and I'm just trying to find ways to remember that for oursel for myself um our programs like if you can just eliminate the 3 to five really small like paper cut style things that create a negative experience um most people will walk away thinking it was awesome and myself included all right my 11th lesson is any change you make in a business you should expect a 20% decrease in performance this was like a slap my head moment because I realized all the changes we made this year were not 20% style changes and so if you have an expectation that there'll be a 20% decrease anytime you change a marketing funnel anytime you change a sales script anytime you change an onboarding call anytime you change a meeting Cadence whatever it is uh anytime you make that change you should expect a 20% dip for even a little bit of time which means the return back to the the investor uh the investor mindset should be at least 20% for it to make sense and arguably from a risk adjusted perspective it should be 40% because there is a chance that it doesn't work and so anytime I'm making a change I'm asking do I expect LTV to go up 20% because of this or CAC to go down 20% because of this but really I'm using 40% and so when you keep that lens there are very few things that actually move the needle that much and I just need to spend more time looking at what those things are I'm just I I typically see an area to improve and then just make a long list of them and try and do them all at the same time when in reality one because I'm trying to do them all at the same time I don't get any of them done done as quickly as if I did one at a time and two I'm not picking the thing that could actually lead to a 40% jump which means I'm just taking these 20% haircuts on performance um because I'm changing something and then in reality those probably aren't leading to more than 20% returns and so this is just me saying like from a strategic perspective this year I did not do a good enough job looking at what are the projects we're actually actually working on and are those going to lead to 40% jumps if not I need to skip them and spend more time finding the things that will all right the 12th lesson and potentially the most important one is the ultimate size of the business is the sum of the intelligence of its people so I'm going to kind of go off on a little bit of tangent here but Alex has this great definition that intelligence is speed of learning and so if you look at the formula that if the business size size of business equals the sum of the intelligence and intelligence equals speed of learning then the size of the business is the sum of the speed of learning of all its people just pause for a second to recognize the size of the business is the sum of how quickly or the the speed of learning of its people so how quickly the business is able to iterate determines the ultimate size of the business and so when you have a lot of smart people who can make changes and improvements very quickly you can build a massive business but the interesting part about that is that you can create a culture where that is the focus and so one of my big changes to our core values is to move away from something that we've called Relentless Tempo which is moving quickly for the sake of moving quickly getting things done and I want to change it to Relentless iteration because iteration is doing things quickly in the right direction and so not recklessly but we are making an incremental improvement with everything that we do and if you look at the ability to iterate is something that can be trained and that you can help people understand what is the fastest way to improve this thing based on bottleneck analysis based on again risk adjusted return then the entire company can ultimately get bigger if you as a leader instill that culture of iteration from the top down and so how do you iterate something quickly it's all about rapid feedback loops particularly um reward and Punishment based feedback loops so when someone does something correctly you're immed immediately rewarding them and telling them to do it again and you reward them again and on and on and then the second someone does something that you do not believe is correct you should have a swift don't do this do this instead and then second they do the correct thing you start rewarding them again and so they they said this off the cuff again but um punishment changes Behavior the fastest which means this like my dog sitting right next to me if he you know goes in the trash and I with him right when he goes in the trash and I just go don't do that and then reward him the second he away he will um stop the behavior of going in the trash quickly and then continue over the long term to not do that when I reward him and so that was the other side of what I was trying to get to is um punishment changes Behavior quickly but reward changes Behavior over the long term and so I agree with that and I did a little bit of stress test in my head but yes if you want to change Behavior you punish immediately and then always or send spend all the rest of the time rewarding and I want to build that culture where we are looking across the entire business what are the things we're doing wrong make it extremely clear that those are wrong and then identify what the correct behavior is and start to reward that so if I can build that culture of constant constant immediate feedback when someone does something correctly I think ultimately we can build a culture of iteration which ultimately builds a much bigger company and so that was the last realization all right that wraps it up for this video I'm walking out of here with a ton of lessons and I'm going to immediately start applying them to like I said grow our business to over $10 million in Revenue in 2025 if you enjoy this type of content and you want to follow along on that journey be sure to subscribe leave a comment with your biggest takeaway follow me on all platforms and I'll see you in the next one