It's Actually Pretty Easy to Get Ahead of 99% of People

it's actually pretty easy to beat 99% of people because most people do the wrong stuff and for me personally I have a portfol of companies at acquisition. comom that does over $250 million per year and I make these videos because I am really just shouting at my younger self of all the mistakes that I was making by working a lot on things that didn't move my business the vast majority of growth isms for the most part are wrong because if they were right people would do them and then grow but most of growth is counter

intuitive so I want you to imagine your business as a tree okay so let's say you've got this tree and it's planted in the ground and you're like where's the top of the tree don't worry we'll get there and the height of the tree over time let's just imagine is your Revenue okay so as the tree gets taller your Revenue goes up okay now the problem is let's say that you have these little offshoots right that's these little these little these little these little growth hey the these are B+ problems hey we should add this

thing to our email sequence hey we should do this thing for our fall what happens is the resources from the tree from you from the ground that are going into this thing are getting shot out to the side and so you are growing you feel like you're solving problems but you're still here at the same Revenue as you were last year but once you cut these things off then all of the resources go right into the trunk and they just keep growing and then your business continues to stay focused on the one thing that is

going to move the tree up the most so it's not about the amount of tasks that you finish it's the amount of growth each task gets you and this is why even biblically they talk about the way to keep a tree healthy is to prune it and pruning literally means you're cutting things off commitment is the elimination of Alternatives which means commitment is literally the recipe for growth is that you focus all resources on on the one growth path that you get the most for right now you have a big list of things that you

think you should do and what often happens is that you will do number five number three maybe number two because those are the ones that you're like oh I can knock that out pretty quick oh I can knock that out pretty quick but what ends up happening is you get to the end of the day and you still have that number one thing that's sitting there on your list and that number one thing you probably know is the most important thing that if you only did that one thing it would make the rest of the

things on that list irrelevant by comparison but what ends up happening is that we do the B+ problems all day because it makes us feel good because we know how to solve them the A+ problem is usually one that's a little bit hairier it has more variables it's more complex we have to get into systems we have to do more analysis and then we have to iterate to figure out how to solve it and so because of that we prefer the fast the fast dopamine or whatever you want to call it of solving the quick

problem rather than solving the most important problem so fundamentally most people want to do a good job I have found this from the people who work at my companies is that they want to do a good job and so what they're afraid of is that if they have this problem that's underneath of their purview that you are going to yell at them and say oh my God ah look at these fires right but the thing is is that if you just say dude there's this massive fire right here that's burning and by far will burn

everything to a crisp far more than these itty B fires will that means that it's okay that these burn and so when I do a prioritization meeting especially if it's a big turnaround thing or we got to turn an apartment around something like that like this is the most important thing in the business I set the agenda up front and I say hey as of this point nothing that has happened before today anyone is accountable for I will blame no one for anything and so if I ask you in the future of this conversation who

made this or what made this happen I am not asking to blame you I'm asking so that I can understand the problem better so that we can solve it together and by saying it's like as of this moment there's Amnesia from the past no one here will be responsible and so by doing that the pressure in the room they're like okay we're on the same team and going forward if you get and like I think you have to be specific with this it's like John if you get complaints from CS about this stuff your turnarounds

being slow that's okay you can tell them I said it's fine hey Sarah in legal if you're having this issue and people are like hey we got to get these contracts signed tell them I said it's fine and remember I pay everybody's paychecks and so at the end of the day I'm the one who's got to sign it and I'm telling you it's okay as hard as it is for you because you guys all want to do a good job to let these fires burn we have to flex we have to focus on this one

otherwise this one's going to burn us to a crisp I was on a call with one of my portfolio teams and it was a paid ads team and they were having issues with pixel tracking and this issue had been going on for three weeks and it was because everyone was distracted everyone was looking at all these different funnels and pages and followup sequences and fundamentally if the pixel is not bringing in the right traffic none of the conversion re optimization ever will matter ever again if the pixel gets worse and worse and worse because we're

seasoning it with worse data and if you're like what the hell is Alex talking about it don't worry it's just payad stuff but fundamentally if you're on a payad steam and you know what I'm talking about if that is wrong Nothing Else Matters and so the the difficulty and this is what's tough is that you have to look at all the other problems and be like oh yeah all this stuff sucks we're going to ignore that because if we don't fix this none of that matters and even as I was going up and pulling up

some of the pages I was like God this is ugly and I told her I was like this is so ugly we should fix this but we're not going to today because today we're going to fix this problem we're going to fix the pixel that's it and once we fix the pixel in all of these seven funnels once it's fixed then we can go on to the next thing but the next thing because if you reassess you might find out that once you fix the pixel issue some of your conversion rate issues might go away

because maybe you're getting the right traffic in there which is why you have to always reassess after doing the solution rather than trying to force Fe like I think these are the top 10 would you put eight above seven who cares you're not even going to work on it you're just going to work on the one and then get that done and then you will see with this new reality in this new context which of these now will move the needle the most and so Frank slutman who as a three-time IPO uh entrepreneur talks about

this in his management book where he basically focuses every company on only one thing and so he says some companies have five objectives some companies have three objectives his companies are only allowed to have one because once you do that one thing and this is something that I have found from my experience is that let's say you had that list of five things to do you have those five quote priorities if you do the one that matters the most what you will often find is that number two through five sometimes one become irrelevant other times

something over here actually all of a sudden becomes the next most important thing which means that if you had done number three number five number two on your list and then done number one then you figuratively would have wasted all of the time doing 2 three and five Because by the time you did number one it actually made those Solutions IR relevant everything that I'm talking about right now is based on a concept that we call the theory of constraints which is that you have one thing in your business that that is limiting your growth

it is the constraint of your growth and once you deconstruyendo million a year so it's a decent sized room um 25% over 5 million 50% over 1 million and so it's for legit business owners we talk about this type of stuff that really moves the needle for businesses in a big way fundamentally the goal of strategy which is the big fancy word that people use is to prioritize limited resources against unlimited opportunities there are unlimited things that you could do to grow your business you could run Tik Tok ads you could run LinkedIn ads you

could run LinkedIn outbound you could optimize your site you could improve your sales conversions there's a million things that you could do to grow your business but there is one thing that can grow your business more than the others and that one thing would pale or make everything else pale in comparison and so when people are considered excellent strategists translate that into their excellent at prioritizing but the real best strategists see all of the moves and probably some moves you don't see that maybe the number one thing on your list gets you a 2X but

there's another move that has a number one that's a 10x and and so fundamentally you have to prioritize against all things you could do known and unknown and the people who move the fastest in terms of distance covered are the ones who get the most for every unit of effort which is not about how fast they do things but at how much speed they cover with the things they choose to do and so let me give you a different analogy that you can think of with so a lot of people have a little wheel on

their car and they're thinking how do I make this thing spin faster right they've got this little wheel and they're like I just got to go around and around and around and around right but what they don't think about is that you could have a wheel that's this big and if you just do one revolution you get more than this one does in 10 and so we want to just think what is that one big wheel that if I just roll it once it makes all of the wheel spins that I have on this tiny

wheel irrelevant so let's imagine you have your to-do list right you've got your one you've got your two you've got your three that's a three there you go you got your four you got your five the thing is is that most of the times these are B and C Level problems because you know how to solve them yay but this one is the A+ problem that you have no idea how to solve and so we spend all day every day just crossing these things off and then we are happy at the end of the day

but then we're sad at the end of the month because we still haven't solved the one big problem and so you have to be comfortable with the idea that you might not solve it for one day or two days or 3 days or four days but if you do solve it on the fifth day you get the A+ solution that gives you it takes your wheel from a wheel that's this big to a wheel that's this big and from that point going forward when you're rolling you're getting that much more for every Revolution and so

I want to make this super Tactical for you once you've identified what the priority is what the one thing that matters most is then typically humans us and your team will likely not want to do it it's very much in our human nature to just continue to work less and less because it's easier and so these are some tactics that I have done to pull the future forward so number one if you change the meetings from end of week to end of day or twice a day you will communicate how much more important it is

you to get those things done so so if you have a weekly Cadence for something that is the priority for the business then you should be meeting far more than once a week probably more than once a day number two once you've determined that that is the priority and you have a Cadence and deadline Associated that because you're getting feedback loops that are installed much faster then you want to eliminate everything that's not that now they might sound obvious in retrospect but it it isn't in reality especially if you have a team and so the

way that we eliminate is by saying everything that you are currently working on is not as important as this thing which means you need to let some of these fires burn once you have set that deadline and you've eliminated everything else then we increase the frequency of communication so obviously the meetings set little mini deadlines because you want to get things done by then but in between communication also needs to ramp up so if you check in on someone after an hour after meeting and say hey where are you at that that communicates a very

different idea of the urgency around the priority or the problem that you're trying to solve now once you have that communication Loop in there what you want to also do or that I have found effective is to make winning obvious Clear and Present publicly so that means that if you have a dashboard if you have a progress marker a thermometer something to show anytime someone sees it the progress that is being made it acts as a reinforcement Loop for the entire team to get things done and if you want to go real advanced mode put

a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow saying once we fix the conversion rate on our page then we will all get this thing together and it could be we all go out to dinner it could be hey everybody gets the rest of the day off whatever day we finish it like you can make the pot of gold whatever you want but it also shows what's in it for them so it's easier to say committed than to stay committed which is the only thing that matters now as the boss for first in the

beginning you're boss of you but over time if you develop a team you become boss of other people and so what I have found is that you can't just increase the priority you need to also increase the commitment and so commitment I Define it as the elimination of Alternatives and so let me give you a simple example marriage the ultimate commitment relationship wise means that you eliminate every other person from your life literally who's not your wife or your husband that you will ever date again so you say you were the only person I eliminate

all others and that is a commitment if you're in health if you want to commit fully to something then it means you have to eliminate everything else that is not that thing so that's where you throw away all the food in your kitchen that's not aligned with your goal you pour out all the alcohol you eliminate the alternative so that the only thing left is to do the thing that you committed to and within the context of business you have to eliminate everything that is not the priority and the thing is is that it's very

easy to say you're committed and I've noticed with my teammates a lot of them are like I'm committed but it's very hard to show that you're committed so if you want to teach this process to your team this is how I think about it number one is you prioritize you say there's lots of things we could do but if we just did this one thing this would be the most important the second thing that I do is I create urgency so I say this is very important this is when we're going to be meeting about

it we have to get it done by this time but you can't do that without all also eliminating everything else that they have on their plates it's not fair to say hey we're now just going to make this incredibly important thing that's due tomorrow but you also still have to do your normal work it doesn't work they're just like it's not going to work especially on a continuous basis and if you do one two and three then what's going to happen is that you will solve it and you will solve it significantly faster than you

thought because everyone will be focused on solving it and everyone will get out of the way to make sure that it gets done and then you look at your list and you reassess and then you rep prioritize you set the new urgency you eliminate everything else and you keep going and the difference between a bad strategist and a good strategist just comes down to the thing that they choose to believe is the most important so this is how I applied this four-step process to the paid ads team that I was talking about earlier so first

off I said okay here are all the things that are wrong with our marketing and then I said and we're going to ignore all of them except for the pixel issue then I said okay we're going to meet end of day today because this was first thing in the morning and people were like well I have a I have a meeting right now and I was like oh yeah is it with me they're like oh no and I they're like well should I I was like yeah don't be on the meeting and I was like

and if someone gives you a problem tell them they can talk to me then I said that also means that whatever you're regularly doing for the day it's not that it's now this and then we went through every single line item of what had to happen for the pixel to get fixed and we assigned every single line item to each person and I said how long do you think this will take how long do you think this will take how long do you think this will take and by the way I'm asking I'm not asking

for days here I'm asking for minutes and hours all right and by the time we're done it's like great so it looks like we can get all this stuff done in the next six hours so we're going to meet again at 4:30 today so that all of you guys can show off your work and I can tell you how great of a job you did then at the end of this I said okay now every single person tell me back what you're going to do next now and so here's what's interesting people came back and

they said something and it wasn't what I said so I said let me say it again you're going to do this you're going to do this and this is going to reroute here say it back to me and they said it it's like right write it down and then I go back to the person ask him again once everyone gets it right great we're going to meet in a few hours I'll see you then at the time of me making this video right now I'm between the calls all right which is why I'm so fired

up so once we get on the call once the pixel's fixed guess we're going to do we're going to look at the next thing on that big old list and say all right we had 20 other things we need to do but tomorrow we're going to work on this one and we're going to solve that and the thing is is that so many businesses what they have and there's this great analogy for this is that they have this graveyard of half built Bridges they never get to the other side of the river because they never

finished the bridge and so the thing is is that the company is spending resource ources building all of these Bridges putting These Bricks here but they never get one of these dollars across to the other side into their bank account and so this is honestly where most businesses lose all their money is building these half built Bridges because no one focuses on completing their work so we had a portfolio company that had a show up rate issue and so they had uh call it a sales event that they ran regularly in order to turn prospects

into customers and so we noticed that they were getting a very low percentage of their prospects to show up now they were complaining about lead quality things like that and so we said okay if we only got the industry standard Benchmark of leads to show up to this event we would increase the revenue of this business by 35% and given the margin of this business let's say is 10% we would more than triple the profit of this business is there anything else we could do with the resources we have that would give that kind of

a return a tripling of profit for no risk in the next 30 days and since the answer was no then we said great everyone in this company the only priority that you have is to get this number to go up and so then we did a number of things to make that one percentage go up and as a result of that Focus the business did grow by more than 35% because every single person in the company was aligned with it and guess what also happened other things fell by the wayside other things that were not

as important started to burn we had little customer service issues we had little issues in the sales department these were all little things that normally would have taken away from the team's focus on that one thing but because prioritization is so powerful if you get the one thing right it makes the rest of it irrelevant the thing about doing easy problems is that they're so tempting because we all want to have that quick win we want to have one or two wins hey I want to get my momentum going but what ends up happening is

that you you eat half your day and then you get a couple calls a couple interruptions and then the day is gone and then the next day you still have that number one that's sitting at the top but you filled up with two or three more easy wins and you never get the big wins to happen that continuous parade of little wins never moves the ball forward you never get the breakthroughs you never get the growth a big part of why those A+ problems are the big hairy problems is because they are soaked in the

unknown we don't know how to solve them and so I want to give you this Frame of understanding that I have which is when you have these other things underneath two through five on that list you typically know what you need to start doing how it's going to go and what it's going to look like at the end the number one problem you typically don't know where to start and you don't know what to do and you don't know how it's going to end but you know that if big picture if you solve that one

thing everything else would be irrelevant and so part of beginning to solve that problem is learning to understand the problem itself and so you can't feel like you're not making progress when you're trying to understand it and wrap your arms around it and so there's an old saying with how do you eat an elephant you eat it one bite at a time and so you just have to start pulling the thread which is how that's my term it's like I just start pulling the thread and see what comes and then as I pull the red

my next pool becomes more and more obvious to me but you don't know what the next pool is you don't know what the next step looks like until you take the first step and the reason we don't is because it's unknown long term you want to make sure the team understands what the priority is and that's what you're doing as the boss but if you want to have faster communication cycles and more people immediately aligned with the priority of the business then what you and this is something that LE I've worked a lot on is

increasing information transparency across the company that's a lot of big words but basically just means that you want everyone to know the same stuff because if everyone knows the same stuff the financials the conversion rates how we make money the profit margins then everyone else has the same information now that might freak you out as an entrepreneur but I remember when I was listening to Sam Walton's autobiography he talked about one of the big fears that he had was like showing all the financials but guess what the biggest companies in the world are publicly traded

and every single employee can see every single thing you could possibly imagine about the company and yet they still function and so it is 100% a an irrational fear that entrepreneurs keep by thinking that no one should know and so I have over time continued to loosen up my my my you know White Knuckle grip on information because the more people who know everything the more people can help me solve the problems if you were to come tomorrow and say guys this is the priority like we're got to do this a lot of people will

get overwhelmed because they don't know because you also told them something last week and the week before was also a priority and they're not done doing that yet and so one of the practices that I'd like to do is to pull up their agenda and say show me everything you're working on right now okay because you'll find out that some things you ask them for two months ago that they might still be working on and even if they're not working on it's taking their attention because they know they're not working on they think they should

be working on it you're like oh I totally forgot I even asked you to do that oh uh we solved that other problem already in that other department which makes this problem now relevant so sorry about that if you have more frequent Loops where you can look at that list and say oh no this is more important than this don't worry about that don't worry about that this one we can deal with next week table it this is what I want you to work on and this is how i' start you can give someone so

much less anxiety around the work so much Clear Direction and it gives you the opportunity to give out adab boys the moment they do it and if this is going to help you make more money in your business here's two more videos like this that'll help you make even more