the biggest mistake that I have done in my entrepreneurial career I'm going to walk through and then I'll explain kind of the The Meta concept that I think is why we are doing better now than we've ever done before the very beginning of my business I started an online uh Fitness coaching business called the free training project which then flipped to for-profit I then started a gym now I did a smart move and said I'm going to focus on only one of them which was the gym and the gym grew I kept doing this gym thing cuz that kept working and then all of a sudden as I kept opening locations I was like man I'm pretty good at this marketing and sales stuff then all these people started being like hey can I give you money to do other stuff and I was like well I accept money and I can do other things so that sounds great within the next 12 months I had a dental agency a Ciro agency and a business that was the turnaround business which was me flying out to gyms and so I tried to grow four businesses at the same time where I was CEO of all of them it took me getting into a head-on collision in a DUI where I had a mentor of mine whatever you want to call it who's like your lack of ability to make decisions will kill you after that over the next 7 days I broke up with which is probably the best term because some of you guys are in terrible Partnerships and won't admit it I broke up with my partner um that I had with a couple of the gyms not all of them but a couple of them I broke up with partner I had for dentl a part broke up with a partner I had for Cairo and then broke up with another business that was related to tangentially with the launch thing and it sucked but finally after all of those conversations I was able to just do the turnaround business and then within the next however many months you guys know that story it exploded we made a whole bunch of money and then we switched to licensing and then we did uh 3 something then 480 then 780 then a million then one2 then 15 then two and we kept going straight line all the way to four at that point I was like huh you know what we could do start another business that was when I started Prestige and Prestige obviously helped the top line and the bottom line as well but the day that I started Prestige was the day that gym launch stopped growing so gym launch maintained and then I grew Prestige cuz then Prestige got all my reign then I was like okay well I split my attention we went up in Revenue well I'm going to create this ecosystem for gyms and so then I started Allen and so I'm now here with three companies I just have more money to do things now and so I'm CEO of Allen CEO of prestige labs and CEO of gym lunch and as soon as that happened um Prestige Labs went down slowly and gym launch went down very very very slowly and that continued until I sold Allan and then after I sold Allen gym launch straight line up and that was what allowed us to actually eventually exit the company I bring this up because it's been the hardest lesson of my entrepreneurial career you have to learn to say no and I actually think Focus just comes down to saying no to everything that is not what you said you would do that's it that's all it is and so if we want to be focused then you can run that filter through your brain which is this is something that is not what I said I would do which means if I want to be focused the answer is no now how focused you are determines the extent to which and across domains that you say no to so on one level you say no to business opportunities even more focused to be a person who says no to business opportunities and new friend opportunities even more focused to be somebody who does no new friend opportunities no new business opportunities no networking opportunities and the list can keep going right if somebody did literally nothing else then they'd be the most focused person and so it's not a am I focused or not it's how focused are you there's this quote that I heard from Justine musk which is Elon musk's like seventh wife removed or whatever Elon if you ever see this I love you she said he said no in a way that protected his resources so that he could Channel them towards his own goal and I realized that behind every no is a deeper yes to whatever it is that you do and so I just think about it that way which is like the focus feels bad on the outside because no one likes saying no but what it really is just saying yes again to the thing you said you would do and the reason this is so near and dear to my heart is because I have it's it's been the struggle of my life it's been so hard for me and the opportunities that I get presented now are insane they're nuts and I recently had to turn down an opportunity that was absolutely absurd and now the opportunities are all billion dollar opportunities everything's a billion now which is cool but I also have acquisition. comom which will for sure be a billion dollar plus company in the next 36 months like we will be there that's like we need to we didn't we need to not do anything else I can just not mess it up and it's still hard and so I gave myself this saying which was and you can scale it up or down whatever way you want which is I'm not going to sacrifice my first billion for my second and so right now some of you have your first million or 10 million or 100 million or whatever the number is for you and you get excited about your second 100 million or your second 10 million or your second million and you forget to make your first one and I'm I'm keep I have so much content on this specific topic because it's something I struggle with so much and that's why I wanted to hit on this so you're going to hear another quote so you guys can tell me who this is uh people think Focus means saying yes to the thing you focus on you've got to focus on but that's not what it means at all means saying no to 100 other good ideas that there are you have to pick carefully I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done Innovation is saying no to a thousand things Steve Jobs you've got to say no no no and when you say no you piss people off also Steve Jobs I was listening to an interview from one of his Executives when they were building the um the I can't remember if was the iPod or the iPhone and so they were like so what was it like to work with Steve and he said Steve would start meetings and just say what have you said no to lately you just start with that because he figured out that that's what Focus really meant is what you say no to and he said I would sometimes like have some NOS ready for the meeting so I could like throw him out but he's like he wouldn't be satisfied if I gave him like obvious NOS he said it had to be no to something that you deeply wanted it had to be like a juicy no and some of you guys right now have juicy NOS that are sitting there and you just have to get the credit from Steve Jobs for saying a real no cuz the other aren't actually NOS they're obvious Nos and if you actually pursued them you'd be an idiot the ones that really are the meaningful ones that Propel you in your career are also these sacrifices that you put on the altar of the success that you want to have and so in some ways it's like it's it's all the opportunities that you turn away because you really thought about the one thing that you that meant that meant the most to you and so I got this from a mentor he said if you don't say no to good opportunities you'll never have the time to pursue the Great opportunities' and once in a lifetime opportunities come about twice a year so let me explain why this concept matters and why it's going to make you more money and why I think it's the greatest superpower of entrepreneurs so fundamentally you can do more stuff or get more for the stuff you do that's it which is fundamentally volume times leverage this is the definition of output which I Define work as output personally so I don't Define it as you know work times distance times whatever in within the context of a business it's the amount of stuff you do and what you get for every repetition which yields your ultimate output so in the beginning when you're really shitty at making cold calls you have to do a lot of them to get and you don't have a lot of Leverage because you're bad at it to get some level of output but here's the really interesting thing about leverage and volume the more you do the better you get at doing I've told this story before and there's a lot of different analogies for it but two classes start in University for making one class the professor says you have to make the perfect pot by the end of the semester it's the only assignment you make one pot and at the end I'll grade you on how good that pot is the other group he said I don't care how good the pots are make as many pots as you possibly can and I'm just going to measure it and the pot has to be round and it has to be able to hold water and that's it those are the requirements of the pot as many as you can and at the end of the semester everyone assumed that the person who had the quality pot was going to be one who had the best pot and the volume pots had the most volume pots but something interesting happened which is that the people with the volume pots had both the most pots and the best pots because they had so many more repetitions to get better they had done more work and they got better at what they did and so then they had literally far more output and the quality was better so they crushed the other team if it was a business Bruce Lee said I don't fear the man who's done 10,000 kicks one time I fear the man who's done one kick 10,000 times and so some of you are just doing one kick at a time which are your business ventures and you as entrepreneurs are just like wondering why your kick suck it's like because they're always new and it's starting a game over with a different character every time you get to level two and saying well I'm going to see if I can beat level one yet again with this new character and then you get stuck yet again I'm partially saying this because I'm trying to reinforce this with myself because saying no to that last billion dollar opportunity just recently I said no to so I made a video um a while ago about a billion dollar opportunity I said no to a really big one was far more than a billion dollar opportunity like this week and so this is me rededicating to the fact that the woman in the red dress just gets hotter and hotter and hotter it never goes away or at least it hasn't gone away for me if you continue to grow if you stay the same then you know the woman of the red dress or if you go down the woman of red dress gets uglier right I say this figuratively what's interesting about this is that I actually think the distractedness comes from a place of delusion it's that we somehow fool ourselves into thinking that if we do two things we can compete against people who do one thinking that we're that much better than the competition and we're just not because the person who's going to beat you is the person who said no to everything else imagine the perfect competitor somebody that you would be incredibly afraid to go up against they're incredibly intelligent they're incredibly hardworking they always learn from their mistakes they never stop they say no to nothing else be a tough person to compete against and then add on top of the fact that they're patient and they have no rush to beat you probably going to win here's the interesting thing you can be that competitor like I mean I think about myself when I had I had I if you count each location as a location I had like 10 businesses I was CEO of if you don't count the locations then I had four different businesses that I was CEO of it was absurd Not only was I just the CEO I was also the chief salesman for like half of them like and also did the delivery like it was a period of time where I did not sleep I did not eat I did not work out I mean I kind of worked out cuz Lea fores me too and she feeds me so I ended up staying in okay shape but anyways point is is that I was only alive on like I was like hooked up to Just Energy drinks and adrenaline hoping to make this thing work and the harder I work the less money I made because I was doing it wrong and I'm hoping that I can prevent one person here from doing that and so saying no as I try to see this now is saying is putting money in the bank saying yes spends the money and I think we want to say yes because yes is feel good in the moment and feel bad later when you have to stick with that commitment NOS feel bad today because you have to let someone down but feel good later when you realize you don't have to go or you don't have to do that thing that you almost had to do and so it's actually Nos and yeses are very short-term long term in terms of decision making so I was like why do we keep doing this or we Royal we why do I keep doing this um and so trying to zero that down has helped me um and just saying like oh this is you being wanting a cookie today that's why you're trying to say yes you just want a cookie right now and simplifying it like that has helped me get over it well I mean I you know once an addict always an addict for you know distracted Focus uh but for now I've have conquered my my addiction for the the week um and so you know the reason people can't say no is because saying yes once you start takes less effort it gives reward now and pain later no gives pain now and reward later and I think where this really comes down is that our business when it gets tough stops rewarding you because like when things are growing it's exciting of course it's like a new relationship you're like super you know you're into it things are moving momentum's happening you're hiring people there's cash flow it's great but then all of a sudden you encounter this boss or this obstacle this thing that you can't get over and all of a sudden like all that reward starts going away or becoming far more infrequent and so then you your eye starts wandering and you start looking for the other relationship that high again um but trying to reframe that point as I am at level three and it doesn't matter how many new characters I switch to I'm going to have to battle this boss and so all I'm doing is delaying the inevitable for a confrontation that I have to have to do thinking about it that way has basically made me be like don't be little [ __ ] like you have to frame and this is a useful exercise for anyone is I try and frame the thing that I don't know how to the problem as something I don't know how to do so rather than saying who had the ads problem you guys so instead of saying ads agencies don't work I'm not saying you say this instead of saying ad agencies don't work you say I don't know how to work with ad agencies that is a skilled deficiency and now it's under your control right and so blame becomes something that you can control and then now you can do something about it I promise there are agencies that do a good job in your space the same thing is like um Tik Tock doesn't work for us I don't know how to work Tik Tok this is a skill deficiency and if that's what I need to do for the the next level rather than starting another business and reconquering the first three because I can get to that level really quickly and get that quick High I have to sit here and I have to be comfortable in the fact that I don't know what I'm doing and the problem with that period is that you basically have to try out all of your best bad ideas until you have no bad ideas left and you have only good ones and so and then one of those good ones will work and sometimes it takes five best bad ideas to get to a sixth good idea but once you have that sixth what's interesting about it is that like you've seen before once you unlock level three you know how to pass it every time and so I would say that the reason that we've been able to move so quickly now with the companies that we have that we invest in that we buy is that we know what level you know one through 100 million a year looks like and now we're about to you know cross our third company doing that and so like we we we've done this before now and I remember I think I was telling somebody the story but when I was trying to find a sales director for the first time I had no idea what I was looking for so the first thing I did was the first mistake everyone makes which is oh this guy's the best guy on the team I'll make him the manager don't do that I did that and then of course I lost my best closer and my best closer also hated managing 0 for two and so then I'm like okay I either have to give him a demotion which is going to hurt his ego right just it's just terrible rocking hard place so so that didn't work out so then I hired another sales manager this sales manager was the opposite of that guy all operations all process and he did mediocre to bad better than the guy who hated people and just wanted to close deals who's a pure Hunter this guy did okay eventually we said Hey how do you think you're doing and he's like not that good and we're like okay you can either leave or we can take the demotion he was like I will swallow my pride and take the demotion I'd rather just close and I was like great so then I had a third sales manager and this guy l people and he understood sales well and so he loved spending time doing one ones he loved watching the guys improve he was just a people person and he was organized and he trained the team and the team's performance went up and I was like oh that's what a sales director looks like and from that point in my career I haven't missed on sales directors and that has been true of every every other role I've had in the business and so all of the time that it took for for those managers to cycle through was growth I didn't have close rates that dropped cash flow that suffered because I didn't know what it looked like and so I consider that ignorance debt and so we have to pay that debt down so all businesses incur debt and the biggest one being ignorance of the founder not knowing what it takes to grow this business and so framing the problems that we have as the things that we have to confront as this is debt I have to pay and there's no way around it this is a toll of the success road that I'm on and I will stay at this toll until I come up with the change to pay this debt to open the lever so I can go to the next toll booth and keep driving until I hit it again and it's going to cost me probably more at the next one because these guys are greedy these told these uh you know the lessons of Life are very expensive and so for me the reason I spend so much time documenting a lot of you guys probably don't know this but my podcast when I started it I didn't make it for you guys I made it for me and for those of you who are trying to like document your journey really helpful frame because I didn't really get too obsessed with the fact that I had like 200 downloads per episode like it didn't really matter to me cuz I was like you know it'd be cool cuz one of the biggest things I always wanted was Elon Musk and Jeff basos the channel from 1997 where he's like here I am on Amazon and this is our sign and we'll see what happens and I wish that they had done that and so I've tried very hard to be able to do that um you know with my own career and so for those of you who want a fun little tidbit the first podcast that I have is 90 days after after I lost everything so you can actually hear from basically Ground Zero to here now the evolution and thinking so and I think that there might be some utility in that because as I'm walking through that it's at zero so what I'm thinking with is an entrepreneur who just lost everything is trying to figure out what the next move is and so use that for what you will but from a Content perspective I try and document those lessons so that I can continually recognize the pattern again and so what I want to have happen is oh this is another one of those and then I can just play The Playbook I be like what did I what was I thinking then and I can go back into the archives and be like Oh yeah this is what I'm looking for oh yeah this is what I'm looking for two biggest regrets I have is that I didn't document anything until I lost everything twice number one the second biggest regret that I have is that I have no recorded sales from the 4,000 closes that I did in person not one to be fair Tech wasn't as good then it would have been a little bit weird but I could have done it and I regret that I mean imagine the [ __ ] Library I would have had and so I hope that you do that but what I want you to have is I want you to have your your playlist of your hottest calls if you are a salesperson or have great salese having them record when they're hot when you're like dude I could close anyone right now that's what you want to record because the way that you pause how you phrase your questions your tonality everything is what it's like to be on fire and being on fire is simply a different way of doing things that you were before that's more effective and so so what you want to do is then study why what is it and how I talk and how I phrase these words that increases the close rate of my calls what is it and then you can get better and better and better at closing because you'll study the best game footage you'll repeat the most successful activities that you did advantages of saying no to everything is actually keeping a deep yes because the best person in the world has only done that thing their entire lives and that's how you get world class results the biggest Returns come from the end of the cycle what I mean by this and this is kind of the unfortunate or fortunate part of life is that if you think about this as your progress right so let's say this is 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% right that's you compared to the rest of the marketplace you get better this whole time and you barely see any improvements in output but all the gains come from being the top 10% to the top 5% all of this gain becomes yours and then top five to top 97 A2 all of that becomes yours and you gain more from getting from 95 to 97 A2 than you did from everything up to 90 because fortunately unfortunately we live in a winter take all society and so if you look at the top selling book on Amazon it sells more than the bottom 5.9 million books on Amazon Amazon and when you buy stuff on Amazon you probably like oh there's three products here one that has 2,000 reviews one that has 200 and one that has 20 you're not like you know what I'm going to chance it on the 200 you're like I'm feeling risky today no you just buy the 2,000 why because it's trusted and that's how most people do it and that's why the sales are distributed 95% and then for some reason someone doesn't like the color of the main seller and or their phone didn't load weird and they accidentally click the number two best seller right and you got lucky and so what's interesting about this period right here and I'm I'm starting to really live that right now and I'm trying to like send telegrams back so that hopefully it's helpful is that if you make a video 10% better you don't get 10% more views sometimes you get five times the views if you make a video 20% better you'll get 50 times the views and so we get outsize returns for incremental improvements here and the only way you can get those incremental improvements is saying no to everything that isn't the one thing that matters most so I think some of you guys have some juicy nose sitting on your table at home I think you have some strategic decisions that aren't really strategic decisions they're things that just take up all your time when you could just be working on the stuff that you know will grow your business which is do more do better period and you don't need to try that new thing you probably don't need to go to that random lunch with so and so to explore synergies I know who you are and I'll tell you a fun story to drive this home so um recently there was a relatively large influencer who reached out to me and lots of following blah blah blah you'd know who they were and um they were like hey I would love to connect and I was like this will not change anything about what my plan is to grow acquisition. and I fundamentally have always held the belief that if I continue to grow a that door will either be open or there will be a bigger and better door that will open in that door's place if it closes because people will always want to make room for winners and winners have to say no to everyone else Joe Rogan can call anybody to get them to answer his call and if he said no to them 10 years ago do you think it's more or less likely that they answer the call when he calls them now more likely but if Joe Rogan had taken every one of those calls and not built The Joe Rogan Experience the way it is now many of those people probably wouldn't answer their calls and so when people are trying to connect with you because of the success you have realize that it's because of the Su success you have and they will only want to reach out to you more when when you have even more success and so you actually threaten the main reason they reached out to you by choosing to take the call and so this particular individual he like well you know maybe we can you know I have the deal that you could blah I was like all right maybe this could contribute and says I am free on Monday at this time he's like well I'm not free at that time and I said okay and he's like I'm not free on Mondays and I was like well I take calls on Mondays he was like well um well I mean can you change it to any of the other days of the week and I said no he just kind of like got weird and so then I was like I guess we won't meet and I can keep living my life because I know what I need to do right now to get us to where we want to go and there's probably nothing that this person is going to say that is going to in any way increase the likelihood that that occurs and so thinking about it from like how will this change my activities help at least does for me say no to the hundreds and thousands of things that want to take your attention and you just have to make the decision of whether you care about that thing more than you care about feeling good in the moment or Saving Face and I would strongly recommend as fast as seemly possible being okay with people not liking you not understanding you and thinking that you are different than them because you are you're a winner H yeah I'll take let's take I got a little time so let's um uh shoot why can I ask why did you say to the billion dollar deal if that wouldn't that contribute to the big over Ru the way that that deal would work it would require more time for me to not be doing this that deal though it has a risk adjusted return of a billion plus now decreases the likelihood that I make this billion plus which has a far higher likelihood this one is I don't want to say nothing's guaranteed in life but I don't have need to believes like with every new venture there's a certain number of need to beliefs like if this happens and this happens and this happens then we can achieve this thing if I've already netted out the need to beliefs like we need to believe that if we make content that we can make content that spreads to business owners that was a need to belief I didn't have that when I started acquisition. comom so I paid down that risk by starting but it turns out that if you make business owner content business owners pay attention check now from business owner content does that then create demand for deals I don't know some people just watch stuff and nothing happens it turns out that if you do make business owner content even if you give away all the secrets business owners are more likely not less likely to want to do business with you I didn't know that that was a guess check that worked and so there's just this number of need to believes that occurs in every single business if you don't know what these are for you highly recommend figuring with those out because then you can ask the question differently which is does this increase the likelihood that what I want to have happen happens and then that can approximate a confidence score which is how confident am I in taking this action which is what's the perceived likelihood of me getting what I want or what I think will happen and so most entrepreneurs by Nature are optimistic we think everything's going to work out and then all of a sudden everyone here many people every time I ask this question more than half the room says they're stuck so obviously it didn't and so we have to balance this eternal optimism which keeps you going with the crushing real reality of the fact that we don't guess that well and we have to solve new problems because we don't have the perspective from which to make the judgment when we started you probably know a hundred times more about the business now than when you did the back of napkin math and you're like I'm going to be rich right and there's all these other things but the thing is is that they are now known unknowns when you have an opportunity you go into unknown unknowns because you don't have perspective because you're not in it all you have to do side note is talk to people who are in that game for five plus years and they will tell you all the problems in the business yes so I have the construction company I have a flipping business um and I also about to start building like literally three houses how did you identify uh you know gym launch as your wife how do you know it's your wife or just another woman in the red dress so I'm going to read this quote from the um founder of uh Dropbox Drew Houston he said everyone loves the idea of focus but what Focus actually means is shooting stuff you love and turning down things you know you can make work and so you all three of those businesses you can probably make work or they already are so for me this is actually my really good litmus test for this which is what's the one that like you don't put as much time in and it just makes money and it's covering all your fun ideas real estate right do that imagine if you actually spent time doing it all of your time I'll tell you a story so we had a um a lady who had a uh re like a premium cocktail business and so she came here I got to understand her business pretty well um and so she was cans but she wanted to be premium she had spent a ton of money trying to get this out there and fundamentally people didn't really care too much about paying a lot of money for canned cocktail drinks when you could just have a tiny thing of Jack and kzero and kind of call your flight a flight right and so she was trying to sell on to travel and having a tough time she was too expensive and there was no brand behind it so the buyers wouldn't buy and the people on the plane didn't care so I asked her how do you live cuz she obviously was burning a lot of money in this business and so she said oh you know for years I've always just been a flipper and I'm really good um interior designer and so she knew how to identify properties that had big value ad where if she did a facelift she could make big money and so she just did it with penth houses so she was just really good at that kind of like really high end and so I was like so has this been the thing that's made you all of your money your whole life and she was like yeah that's kind of how I make my money but this this and I was like this is a waste of time and she was like well the interior design flipping thing isn't scalable and I was like let me restate this to you real estate isn't scalable I was like it is possibly the most scalable business in existence you literally add zeros you add doors it actually gets more scalable the bigger you get and if you're like well I don't know if I make enough money doing just the real estate I have to do these other things then you need to fix the model which means maybe you have a bigger construction company than the size deals you're doing which means maybe you can support much bigger deals on the real estate side and then the constraint becomes capital and luckily in real estate capital is not a hard constraint to solve if you have a good deal the capital will appear way back what do you do when you and your spouse are confused that's Lila doing that to me so um what do you do when you and your partner or you and your spouse are conf confused or in Conflict around what is the juicy know and what is the real yes I will tell you a fun story which is that the Allen deal of me starting Allen the software company is the only fight that Lea and I have ever been in and she just pleaded with me to not do Allen and I was like you're you're just G to you're just going to have to see like when we just you know crush it and the thing is is that we did crush it but at the expense of the other two companies and so I just borrowed from Peter to pay Paul and so what you don't want is to do what I did which is I wanted to prove myself right but I was long-term wrong I really like to think of kind of the question that I was asking earlier like which one of these things instead forget about the new exciting juicy because there's that everywhere and you can convin who here knows how to spin themselves up and get really excited about something right not hard not hard to do but the devil you know in a lot of ways is the devil you've already paid all this ignorance tax on and so a lot of you guys are trying to jump ship when you're here but you've already paid down all of this time and you're just starting to see a little bit of growth because you started to really turn the corner on your skills and this is the first time that you have a more attractive woman in the red dress and so the thing is is that every business this is my fundamental belief is that every business can become a billion dollar business I've yet to see a business that can't do it so whether you if you were like I want to do the salons I'm like well then cool then go let's go do 2,000 locations it'll take 25 years but if that's what you want to do then we can go build a billion dollar thing you can build billion dollar construction companies you just can't do that and build salons the piece of mind I want to give you is that either of the choices will work if you stick with it and neither of them will work if you don't pick um the man who I owe a contract to all right so we have we have two groups of products we don't know whether to to one and then scale that or let me ask this Lila uses as frame a lot and this is helpful probably for you guys which is which problem would you rather have you can either have the brand and director consumer marketing problem which is what you have in your $53 business or you can have the B2B competitive space of being price matched against other machines and dealing with buyers and invoices and you know so which of those businesses would you rather have so I said earlier about play it out play it out which of these businesses would you rather have I don't think you can have both I mean you could I just don't think you'll make as much money personally it would be the D to St on the website okay then stick with the thing that you're good at that has made you the money up to this point the fact that these people came to you just say that's not the business we're in it's shooting things that you absolutely love that you know you could make work I know you could make it work and you probably love the $20,000 checks but if you really want to do this then you have to play it out because the guys you're competing against aren't thinking about selling machines they're trying to think about how to sell more of these $53 things now if that vanished from your mind how much simpler is your life so much that feeling you have right now is what Focus feels like and you just have to protect it at all costs it makes it really easy to win when you only have one thing to do