Why New Opportunities Keep You Poor...

you're not making as much money as you want because you're working on the wrong stuff you're chasing opportunities rather than solving problems so a problem is something that threatens the future livelihood of your business so it decreases the likelihood that your business will continue to exist so for example if you get customer complaints from your product that is a problem if your processor you know relationship becomes a red flag that is a problem your sales team starts dropping conversions that is a problem these are things that threaten whether or not you're going to be live

tomorrow now the second bucket are missed opportunities these are things that you are not doing but you should be doing in your business that could expand or grow your business here is the fundamental problem in my life I have almost equally colored them the same as just things to do I need to fix the sales team I also need to get this email follow-up campaign redone because it sucks right or it's not there to begin with we need to get this retargeting across all platforms why aren't we doing that and you probably have this list

of what I consider should do right I know I should be doing all these things but I'm not and so this is where this gets really painful for the entrepreneur myself included which is we only have limited resources but our list of should do is unlimited the amount of opportunities taken to their natural extreme is that you have a business that selles everything to everyone think about it at every Point there's there's oh we could have a product here there that's a opportunity for Revenue expansion oh we should add in this other channel that's a

possibility or opportunity for Revenue expansion and so what ends up happening is that over time Everything feels like something that you should do and then over time your list just gets longer and longer and longer and unless you delineate which thing is a problem and which thing is a missed opportunity you will get way overwhelmed so this is why I think this is so crucial missed opportunity are typically more fun they're exciting they're new things they're shiny and that's why us entrepreneurs love pursuing them the reason that I talk about focus and the woman in

the red dress so often is it's because it's the thing that I struggle with to this day most often and so half of these sermons probably more than half are actually just me yelling at me to be clear now these are really fun and exciting and they tend to be around the things that you love and so if you're a product person you're probably going to have a lot of product should dos if you're a marketer you're probably have a lot of marketing related should do if you're customer success related same thing so if you're

Finance same thing whatever your thing is tends to be the thing that you like doing the most of and that's where you tend to see the most missed opportunities because that's where you spend the most time you can always see the next step The Next Step the next step and you keep wanting to grab those other things and bring them into your business because you see how much money that we're quote leaving on the table problems on the other hand suck and they're not fun and it's usually you going into something that you set up

once and having to fix you thought it was going to work but it's not being executed properly or there's some key problem that that you didn't expect it's basically you did something a new piece of information came to light and now you have to do something about it the reason beyond what I just said of why you shouldn't focus on the missed opportunities because there's obviously so many of them and it taken to the National extreme it's literally everything is also because when you prioritize Miss opportunities you grow your business but guess what else happens

you grow your problems and so if you have not solved your problem before growing the business that problem just gets bigger some of you guys may have noticed that I've been making a little bit less content lately and so I've been super busy on this big missed opportunity I put it that way and I've been pouring tons and tons and tons of hours into this big new project like massive thing for 2025 and Lea basically came to me and she was like I'm dying over here like I need your help I need you back right

like your head's not in the game like you're like we're we're doing business every day and you're over here trying to build the future and the thing is is this is not a problem to be solved it's a dichotomy to be managed if you're the Visionary entrepreneur in the business it's normal for you to live 3 months 6 months a year plus out that's normal but you can't take your eye off the ball from today and so for me this was a pendulum that I was swinging too far in this direction and so she was

like dude you need to make some content you haven't like you're not you're not like you're not spending any time on it and so um to give you context I think over the last two weeks we've had have we even had a a scheduled recording session yeah so we've had about one we've had one recording session last week and this is now one today and the the ones that I was going to I wasn't as prepared as I should have been uh for those sessions I was like all right all right what are we what

are we talking about today and you know the team kind of basically uh gave me gave me the talking point point and so for you guys it may not be content right it may be you need to make ads it may be you need to be looking at the outbound team it may be our customer success is failing whatever that thing is it was the thing that's hard right and so for me like I like despite the fact that everyone thinks that I'm a content creator this is not my main job all right and so

my life is not as you know as much as I try right as much as I try to make more cont everybody like it's not it's not the main thing still and so um but I let it get away from me and so the thing is is like I've given I've learned to over time give myself a little bit of Grace in saying this I will never solve this it is unsolvable but it's simply about percentages of the pie that I'm going to allocate to Now versus the future and I get a little bit too

over indexed on the future that's in my nature and so I have to overemphasize the present because this if this doesn't work then that will never happen anyways and I think Leila has always been so grounded in today and I've been so grounded in the future that's been our yin and yang but we both try and mean the I have to pull her towards future be like hey let's like this is where we're going this is we have to build it this way to get to here and she's like yeah but that's a massive pain

for me and I will tell you something that I have and now it's taking me far too long to learn is that it's easier to solve small problems than big problems and so when we were thinking about putting the sequence of what things we're going to prioritize by the way the TLD are of this is this is strategy strategy is prioritizing limited resources against unlimited opportunities these are things that you could do with these resources versus the resources you have and so if you have a fixed pool of resources the first things and this is

like I'm relooking at my my list right now are the things that probably suck they are the problems and that is where you can spend or should spend in my opinion your time because when you solve your problems guess what else also happens you grow you would like my team to go over that list of things that you have to grow your business the things that are the missed opportunities and also the problems and give you a step-by-step plan to solve those because we probably have solved them for businesses just like yours because we have

a lot of different companies probably bigger than yours in the portfolio and so if you'd like that uh we are holding uh workshops here in Vegas this my actual portfolio team we hold them one or two times a month uh and so if that's at all interesting you can go to acquisition. comom and you can click the scale button and uh if your business qualifies we'd love to see you out here opportunities can grow your company problem solved also grow your company but when you solve problems as you grow you get growth through getting better

when you grow through capturing missed opportunities you grow through doing more and to be fair I have no problem with growing through doing more but I do have a problem when more also creates more problems and so if the goal of the entrepreneur is to allocate resources across the entire company to achieve the best returns then we should be allocating more of our time towards solving problems that are coming up on a daily basis when you have a business that no longer has problems you will grow by default and so my allocation of resources has

gone in this direction now I want to zoom out and make this super Tactical for you you probably look at data hopefully if you follow my stuff to any degree on a regular basis now if you're earlier on you have to go gather that data from tons of places as you get more advanced that data becomes pushed to you via dashboards or direct reports people present those things on meetings it's the first slide and then you talk about the data so I want to give you a 2011 level hack here that will change how you

run your business number one the data that you choose to display must be there for a reason one of the biggest problems that I see across our portfolio companies and even within our holding compan company is that my direct reports and my employees often over report because they know I love data and so they like look at all of this data that we have but if you present me a piece of data and a change in that data does not result in a change in Behavior it is a waste of time and so right now

if you look at the data and you're like okay we're trending in this direction if you if you ask the hypothetical question if we Max this out would it change what we're doing if the answer is no then you should stop looking at that piece of data it's noise not signal and so when you're making the decisions for your business the data that you look at you should clearly know and your team should know what Behavior this data influences if our average view duration drops then it could be from a number of reasons but if

it does drop are we going to do something about it and what are we going to do this also will Target your discussions or Orient your discussions with your team and so if they come to you and say hey we want to run a meeting about this the end result of every meeting should be a change in Behavior it should be what are we going to do now if someone says Hey I want to report these trends that we're seeing cool and I'll give you a really recent one that happened I had a vendor for

a platform a while ago and the vendor was telling me hey we should go for shorter shorter versions of this type of content and I was like okay why and he said well because when we shorten it a higher percentage of people watch it or consume it and I said why do I care what does the view duration or listen duration have to do with any of the metrics that we have in this business can you prove to me that us getting a higher percentage of people viewing a shorter piece of content in some way

drives our business now if he then said yes pieces of content that have higher average view durations or average listen durations then create more shares then I would say got it done we're doing it but if you just report oh we should do this because it improves this metric how does that metric tie to getting us more customers or making customers worth more if you can't tie why this thing or this metric that we somehow track tracks to this I do not care and the reason I think this is so important is that we have

such limited attention in business every single day that if someone's going to buy or bid for our attention they better damn well have a good reason for it and also your team is limited as well they are human beings too and so they have many people they've got slack messages they've got emails they've got meetings and then they have the work that they're actually supposed to do and so if you have a quarterly for example and you have your whole team there if you are aren't clear about what change in Behavior the data is going

to create you are wasting your time and theirs if after that day or after that meeting you go back to business you might as well have just taken the day off wrapping this back to problems and missed opportunities you will probably have significantly more data around your problems than you will around missed opportunities missed opportunities are going to be purely hypothetical we think if we had this percentage of people to convert and they pay this price this is the revenue uplift that's that that we have potential to capture all of this is hypothetical fine on

the problem side we have to look at what thing we're going to change to fix this problem and so this is how we do it we have four steps all right so if you're writing this at home then this is this is the writer Downer part number one is the condition or the goal that we are trying to the problem we're trying to solve all right this is how this is current this is desired cool next thing is what is the action what are we going to do and this is to be clear a hypothesis

our turn rate is at 5% okay we hypothesize that if we do a one-onone reach out to every customer as they enter our you know buy our product we will decrease turn that's the hypothesis it's an action tied with what we expect and the reason for taking this cost on because it will cost you you money to do this cost resources the third bucket and this is the fun one did we do it or not so this is the before and after so we have the problem here's how we hypothesize it we have what data

that we want to affect so turn rate was the percentage we want it to go down we hypothesized it's going to go down by this much cool that's the before the after is did we do it or not very simple because you can have this whole hypothesis get to the end of the quarter get to the end of the week and then say we didn't really do it okay well then we didn't test the hypothesis now here's the fun one let's say you do it did what we expect to have happened happen because we are

guessing that if we do this thing churn will go down but we could do the thing and children could remain the same and so it cost us time and it cost us money but the problem remained unsolved and this is the nature of business and this is why your second business grew way faster than your first business because you already knew the solutions to the problems that you're going to create along the way and then you run smack into problems that you don't know how to solve and this is why I'm I want to hit

on this so hard you're not growing because there are problems that you need to solve that you're not solving because they're not fun and you don't know what to do so instead you're doing more of the thing that you know to do around opportunities but you still have not solve the problem and you've done this enough times that you've now grown the problems to the point where it's stifling your business and so you have to stop and so you have to look at that big to-do list that you have and you have to think which

of these are problems that I need to solve that will make us better and as a result of being better grow our business and which of these are opportunities that are missed that we think that we could do but aren't doing yet I would encourage you to take that entire list of missed opportunities Theos and just move them somewhere else and what I have is something called Alex is Big money-making ideal list everybody in the company knows about this I have more ideas than we have capacity to implement and I have learned through many years

of working with Lila that I actually only get maybe one out of 10 or 20 that I actually get to do because you don't have unlimited shots on goal that is the problem so Jeff Bezos has the saying that it's the beginning of this book I'll actually read it to you because I think it's so it's so significant outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom and conventional wisdom is usually right given a 10% chance of 100 times payoff you should take that bet every time but you're still going to be wrong nine times

out of 10 we all know that if you swing for the fences you're going to strike out a lot but you're also going to hit some home runs the difference between baseball and business however is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution when you swing no matter how well you connect with the ball the most runs you can get is four in business every once in a while when you step up to the plate you can score a th000 runs this longtail distribution of returns is why it's important to be bold Big Winners pay for

so many experiments now here's the one flaw and I Bezos is much smarter than me much richer than me but there's one flaw with the analogy if you go to a casino and you have a a a 100x payoff and you've got a one out of 10 BET then you should make that bet every time under one assumption that you can bet as many times as you please let's say you go to the casino and it's a $10 minimum bet and the bets 100x payoff but you only have 20 bucks you're only going to get

two swings which means the likelihood that you fail entirely is four out of five you have a 20% chance of actually winning an 80% chance of losing period And so this is in my opinion a more realistic take of what it's like to be a business owner we do not have unlimited swings we do not have unlimited resources and so we have to be incredibly measured with which swings we choose to take and so the highest likelihood swings are the problems that need to be solved in your business today these are the sure money these

are the as soon as you solve it you cash it in the things that are certainly not certain is the missed opportunities that are purely hypothetical and so if you solve all the problems that you have at a current level once you get to that and there are times where you get there where everything's kind of humming along that is when you look up your big missed opportunities list your big money-making idea list and you say now which of these will I take and here's the interesting thing if you do this you will find that

many of the ideas that you were jazzed about two months ago now you think are stupid because you found out more from solving the problems that actually give you more information that this is actually not a missed opportunity and so it increases the likelihood that the swings you do take the big swings do result in the big payoff and so like this is like the big the ultimate sleep on it like if you have an amazing idea don't tell them right then because you're going to oversell everybody you're going to oversell yourself if you sleep

on it the next day you're a little less psyched if you come back to it two months later you'll be amazed at how many of these things you just won't even want to do anymore and think about how stupid it would be if two months later after looking at all your ideas 90% of them you don't want to do anymore it means that every one of those things that you shov down your team's throat because you were excited about it was a mistake it was you failing as an entrepreneur because you got too distracted you

got too excited about shiny object you got too into the stuff that you like rather than confronting the stuff that you hate that will absolutely grow your company this is something that I'm personally working on and I'm heated about it because this has been such an epiphany For Me In terms because I love any Frameworks that allow me to better prioritize that allow me to be a better strategic thinker for my business and so this operationalizes better what you guys can can expect from me is um I will be prioritizing making more content for you

guys um I hope you guys have liked the deeper content stuff like the real business stuff I think right now I'll tell you honestly we settled on a 6 to1 ratio so basically five out of every six videos are going to be deep business stuff like if you guys haven't seen the last three videos that I put up on YouTube especially the one before last there's a banger case study on what we did to make 3 million bucks more profit in one of our folio companies to increase customer satisfaction course decrease refunds and chargebacks increase

Ascension rates by over 40% just by fixing our onboarding process in this particular business and so every company needs some sort of onboarding process whether your physical products business you're a software company you're a you're a a service business you need to have that stuff but guess what that was a problem and it was a problem that we solved and it immediately made us more money and we should have put more attention on that even sooner because the reputation that we would have would be simply better right so like the early you create that amazing

customer experience the more customers who go through it the more people have positive things to say about you and so I say all this to say one main thing confront your problems today forget about your opportunities for tomorrow put them on the big list once you've solved all the problems go revisit the list and then pick the one that has the highest likelihood of yielding the biggest return for you and then go all in on it if this content was valuable for you check out either of these two videos