Real quick, guys. You guys already know that I don't run any ads on this and I don't sell anything. And so the only ask that I can ever have of you guys is that you help me spread the word so we can help more entrepreneurs make more money, feed their families, make better products, and have better experiences for their employees and customers.

And the only way we do that is if you can rate and review and share this podcast. So the single thing that I have to do is you can just leave a review. It'll take you 10 seconds or one type of the thumb.

It would mean the absolute world to me. And more importantly, it may change the world of someone else. People who are wealthier don't do more than you do.

They get more out of the effort they put in. They're not moving faster. They're just getting more credit for the stuff they do.

Welcome to the game where we talk about how to sell more stuff to more people in more ways and build businesses worth owning. I'm trying to build a billion dollar thing with acquisition.com. I always wish Bezos, Musk and Buffett had documented their journey, so I'm doing it for the rest of us.

Please share and enjoy. I'm going to solve three massive business problems that can take you from ten to $100 million. I'm going to walk you through the framework so that you can apply this to your business, your work, or your personal brand.

And if you're just getting started, or you have a $500,000 business or a $1 million business, the same frameworks apply to you. It's just at different levels of scale. And all you do is you remove or add zeros.

But the same concepts work. And if you know who I am, my name is Alex Mozzie. I own acquisition.com

portfolio of companies that over $200 million a year. And I make these because I want you to grow your business and eventually hit us up so we can invest it and help you scale it further beyond that. And by the way, these are real business problems from actual businesses, from an event that we were asked to speak at and do Q and A.

And so this is the real stuff. This is exactly how we solve these problems in real life. There were three different business owners that presented with different problems, but actually had the same much larger problem.

And so one was an appointment setting business, and they knew how to set appointments and build outbound teams for agencies, coaches, consultants, whatever. The second business was a marketing agency for HVAC business owners, so they were able to get leads through local campaigns for HVAC businesses. The third was actually a very big influencer.

We're talking like 30 to 40 million subscribers across all platforms who came and were trying to scale their business with the objective of making more money. And so each of them had very differently phrased questions, but they were all suffering from the same constraint and it wasn't what they thought it was. And when we look at businesses to invest in Atacquisition.com,

we operate off of a singular concept, which is the theory of constraints, which is that a business will grow up to its constraint and then it will grow no longer, which is the same concept as your strongest, as the weakest link. And the problem is that most entrepreneurs continue to work on the things that they enjoy, rather than the things that the business needs. And so they think that they're solving problems, which they may be, but they're not solving the problem that matters most.

And it's usually because they haven't actually identified the correct constraint. And so here's how you know if this is you, if you continue to work 16 hours a day, but you're not making more money, or the business isn't growing, it's because you're working on the wrong stuff, you're solving the wrong problems. And the reason that we focus on the constraint is that it is the opportunity that per additional incremental level of effort that you apply to it.

It's the one that yields the most outsized returns. Because for example, if you have a three step sales process, and you get 50% to go through step one, 5% to go through step two, and then 50% to go through step three, you could improve each of them by 10%. And you go from 50 to 60, you go from five to 15, or you go from 50 to 60 again.

But which of them makes the biggest difference in your business? Going from five to 15 triples the business, whereas the other ones only incrementally improve it by 20%. And so that is why we try and ruthlessly focus on what the constraint is. Because for the work we put in, we get more out.

And that, from big picture perspective, is how the people who move fastest in life aren't actually doing things faster, they're just doing more of the right stuff. So the first business that asked a question was an appointment setting business. And this guy specialized in creating outbound teams for agencies, consultants, coaches, et cetera, online businesses.

And he was saying that his problem was that he needed to get more customers, which by the way, most of the time that's not the problem. It's usually because the customers you have keep leaving. And that's the real problem.

Now, he had an issue because he had a very low quality of customers. The vast majority of customers didn't make enough money, they didn't stay long enough, they didn't have enough skills, et cetera, right? And so that was what he thought he had to solve. All right, that was business number one.

Business number two was the HVAC agency. So this is a business that markets for HVAC companies, typically small businesses. They had 50 or so clients in that niche and they're running campaigns across 50 different local markets.

And for them, the problem is that most of these business owners are not sophisticated. They don't call their leads fast enough, and they ultimately churn in three to five months. Again, seems like a similar issue.

The third business was the big influencer business, 30 to 40 million subscribers across all the platforms. And when I asked them, what problem are you trying to solve? They said, we want to make more money. And the reason that's important is because if they had said, we want to continue to build our brand more, then I would have given a different answer.

But because they wanted to make more money, they were focusing all of their attention on how do we get more, more high quality videos out. And mind you, they have 30 to 40 million subscribers across all platforms. And if we're thinking about this from a what's the constraint perspective around making money, then do we really think that adding another 10 million subscribers is going to be the thing that's going to make them the most money? Or do we try and focus on what is probably the constraint, which I'll tell you in a second.

Now, to solve business problem number one, the appointment setting business. I said, okay, my friend, of all of the companies that you've ever worked with, which of them made the most money off of the appointments that you set? So given the service value that they delivered, which of them were easiest to work with and made the most money off of what you did? Right. And he had a very specific answer of what type of avatar he did best with.

Right. And so there's two directions for that business. One is you niche down on your service delivery and say, these are the only types of businesses I'm going to take because they're going to be worth more, stay longer, refer, et cetera.

And then you can package all of your offerings and all of your messaging around that. That is probably the easiest next step for that business, but the highest leverage next step, as in like, if I were going to own this business and I transplanted my brain and my experience into his body, I'd be thinking, well, I could do that and that would probably grow me in the next one to two years. But if I'm trying to grow for ten years, then I want the opportunity that's going to pay me for the work I do today in five years.

Because most business owners, the reason they don't create valuable businesses is because they have to keep doing the same work over and over again and they don't get credit for it. Because if you have to sell ten new customers this month to stay the same size, you have a larger problem, which is that at the end of the year, you still have to sell another ten customers to stay the same size, which means you're on this hedonic treadmill hill of business that never seems to end. And until you solve that much bigger problem, which is the constraint of the business, you're basically sentenced to this terrible atlas like existence of rolling the boulder up the hill and then rolling it back down every month.

Right? And so he could niche down, or what I would do is that I would say, hey, either partner with that business and say, hey, we'll go 50 50 with you on it. Because if I know how to build outbound teams for 20 different companies every month, then I could build a massive outbound team for this business. And so he might have been doing five or $10 million a year in his little appointment setting business.

But if we look at that as one department of a significantly larger business that does 50 or $100 million a year, then it makes significantly more sense. Because what would the marketing spend be of a business that's doing $50 million a year? Realistically, probably somewhere in the neighbor of five to $10 million a year is what the actual spend would be for that department. Right? Well, if he has that that he could own half of a 50 to 100 million dollar business that he grows over the next five to ten years picking the most valuable business that he sets appointments for.

And so he could either partner with that business or spend a year or two learning how that business works, so that then he owns both sides of it, he knows how to generate the appointments for it, and he knows how to scale and deliver whatever the service is that he was setting appointments for. Those are life path choices. If you partner, you can usually go faster, but you give up some of the upside because you slice the pie.

It's up to you. But if I were in that opportunity, that's how I'd be thinking about it. Because the real constraint wasn't that he needed to sell twice as many customers, the constraint was that he had his doing.

This was setting up shitloads of outbound teams, and every month he has to set up new outbound teams and didn't get credit for the outbound teams he got set up last month. But if the team that he built was 50 outbound guys this month and then next month he starts at 50 because it's all within the same company, and then does another 50 and then another 56 months later, he's got 300 outbound guys that are all still working for him, all generating revenue that he is owning, a slice of all of it rather than just the service fees which have a very low multiple that no one would probably want to buy because of the massively shitty customer base that he was selling to. Originally, the second business was the HVAC Company.

It presented very differently than the appointment setting business, but you can probably start to put some of the pieces together. And that's kind of the goal for me, for you, Mosey Nation, is that if you can start thinking this way, then you'll start thinking with higher leverage, the opportunities that you pursue. Because if what you do every day doesn't necessarily change, but how much you get credit for it does, then you get more for what you put in.

And fundamentally, people who are wealthier don't do more than you do, they get more out of the effort they put in. They're not moving faster, they're just getting more credit for the stuff they do. And they're getting paid on stuff they did five years ago, whereas you are only getting paid on stuff you did last month.

So in this HVAC business, if he is able to generate leads and fill up 50 different HVAC services pipelines because of his marketing prowess, he probably has the marketing skill of a 50 to 100 million dollar HVAC business. And so, if you're catching the common theme here, if you're doing a million dollars a year in revenue, you might think, man, I've only got a million dollar business. And if you're like, I wish I could have that.

That's fine. Just put a pin in it for a moment. But that million dollar marketing business is charging fees here, and the businesses only work with them because they're making five to ten times more than that on the services they're providing.

And so if you have a $5 million marketing agency, then it's reasonable that some of the clients that you serve are making $50 million in revenue off the services you're generating. And you're getting none of that. You're only capturing the service fee.

And every month you have to go get new clients because some of them cancel because they aren't doing the other things that are required to be successful. Which anybody who owns a marketing agency knows your clients never do their job, but there are agencies who do more and more of the work to try and guarantee success. But the more steps you take towards owning the result, the more you're basically just doing the business for them.

Which is not necessarily the wrong mindset, because you always want to deliver more value to your customers, but at a certain point, you are the business, and so it makes sense for you to own the economics of the business. And so again, we're presented with the same path as we had originally. Now, this one was already niche down, and so either you got to learn the HVAC business or you partner with someone who already knows it, and either they can start something from scratch.

I would usually try and take an industry vet who has ten plus experiences in HVAC and has grown a company of appreciable size, or you could buy one, because if you're a company of this size, you probably could buy one and with your marketing prowess could juice the hell out of it. And the thing is that most people will try and buy it, but then also try and keep this agency thing going. But sometimes you got to take a half step back so you can take 20 steps forward.

And this is a common thing that we have@acquisition.com is that the fastest way to build a $10 million business is often not the fastest way to build 100 million dollar business. And so, for example, if you wanted to build a building that was ten stories tall, you would start with a very different foundation.

Now imagine you built a ten story building and then said, okay, I want to build a 100 story building using the same foundation. You wouldn't be able to, but that's exactly what most entrepreneurs do when they're trying to scale and they wonder why they're stuck is because they built it wrong to begin with, because they were in the wrong opportunity vehicle. So if you're one of those agencies that is in this kind of spot where you're like I over deliver for my customers, I have a handful of them that obviously do way better than other ones path one is you just started on your own because you know a lot about it.

Because sometimes people who are agency owners did come from that space learned agency and you probably learned a little bit more about how to scale a team. And now you can probably re approach that with new eyes and new learnings and maybe you will be able to build an HVAC business. Version two is that you find someone who already has done an HVAC business.

You partner with them, they get some slice of the equity that's negotiable depends on how good they are and what their experience is. Some slice between they get five to 50% of the deal and you guys start one together. Option three is that you either approach the the top few guys you have and say hey, instead of doing the service thing, let's further align, let me take over even more of this acquisition perspective and let's partner on this.

Now in that instance, if they're a really good company and that's why they're performing, you might not get 50%, you might get 30%. But again, if you think one of the big things that took me too long to learn is that it's the size of the slice of the pie that matters, not the shape of the slice of the pie. It's like lots of guys obsess about having 100% of the pie and this was me for a very long time.

They obsess about the shape of the slice rather than having a slice that's like this of a much bigger pie. And so, just so you know, the average IPO founder when a company IPOs owns twelve and a half percent of the company they founded. And that's because the more people you make money, the more money you ultimately make.

And I would say that the agency types that lend themselves more to this are the done for you more transactional acquisition agencies. And what I mean by that is like if you're really good at a lead gen strategy using some sort of type of platform or are really good at building and scaling sales teams, either outbound or even just closing teams like done for you closing teams. All of those are agencies that plug very naturally into businesses.

If you're doing some sort of like if you have like a creative shop or you do a lot of design branding, those ones tend to work a little bit better as their own companies. And also because LTV on customers who actually understand branding tends to be significantly higher and you can build very valuable companies there. It's not often that lead gen companies in and of themselves become inherently valuable.

The exceptions to that are when you own very large media assets and that generates you tons of leads for free. Like if you build the number one ranking thing for mold removal in the United States and then you rank that, get all these leads and then you sell those leads, that tends to work. But the vast majority of people who are watching this are not in either of those camps.

They are very tactical in the fact that they know how to set appointments, they know how to generate leads, et cetera, just using paid ads or whatever method they have. And if you have one of those agencies, it makes more sense, in my opinion, to capture the much bigger opportunity and get a slice of that than something that never really gets a ton of value. It's not often that someone capitalizes and makes a very valuable business there.

Hey guys. Love that you're listening to the podcast. If you ever want to have the video version of this, which usually has more effects, more visuals, more graphs, drawn out stuff, sometimes it can help hit the brain centers in different ways.

You can check out my YouTube channel. It's absolutely free. Go check that out if that's what you are into and if not, keep enjoying the show.

The third example was the influencer who had 30 40 million subscribers across all their platforms. And I say 30 to 40 million because I don't remember what it was. I know one of their platforms had like 28.

So I'm assuming it was more than that across the rest of them. Point being, when I sat down with them, I said you guys are trying to take your 97 out of 100 media company to a 99 out of 100 media company when the objective you said was to make more money and you have no product that you sell. And so all of your monetization relies on sponsorships and ad revenue, which is typically the least efficient way to monetize because fundamentally anyone who pays you for a sponsorship is making a significant and if they do it on a recurring basis, they're making a huge arbitrage on your brand and your value.

And so you capture that arbitrage. So if they're paying you $100,000 for every video, they might be making a million dollars on every video. And wouldn't it be nice to own half of that and not only own half of it, but own it in terms of, like, you're making the money that they're making, but also you have the equity in the company that has significantly more value than just the ad revenue that you get for making a video or doing a shoot.

And so when I was talking to this individual creator, I said like you've identified, in my opinion, the incorrect constraint. You're seeing your business as this box of media and trying to make more, better videos, which if you want to do brand and just continue to build the brand before making an ask, that would be the right problem to solve. But they were at 97 out of 100 and realistically, if you look at stats, they're a zero zero 1% creator.

So do we really think that their constraint of their business is that they aren't good enough at marketing? No, probably not. What they really had was the media department of a business that given the amount of impressions they had, and this is going to sound like mind boggling to say, but given the amount of impressions that these guys were, getting which when they don't make videos, we're getting 100 million views a month. When they don't post anything new.

That kind of thing is a company that's 100 million plus in revenue. And so they have the marketing department, but what they don't have is a sales department, they don't have a product department, they don't have customer success, they have none of these other departments. There's zero out of 100 on all these.

And so the constraint isn't going 97 to 99, it's going from zero to 20 on these ones. And that's where they would get an outsized return. Because if, for example, they made the same ad, they would that some outside company would pay them to make for whatever the product was.

If they owned the whole thing, even if it was a mediocre product, they would make 510 times more money, and they would actually make a stronger brand association. Because rather than flip flopping it between whatever thing had paid them that month, they'd be able to consistently talk about the benefits. They'd be able to integrate it in their content.

Rather than making hardcore right hook ads, they could make jokes about it and they could weave it in, which would ultimately build the long term brand that would be significantly more valuable. So if I'm in this guy's position, what are the choices I have here? Version one is if I've got an advertiser who consistently comes to me, depending on the size of the business, I may be able to negotiate some sort of equity thing rather than getting paid with cash. That's option one.

I think that's the best option because they'll already have all these other boxes built up, and then you just add your box to their larger conglomeration. And even if you're getting ten or 20% of the company, if it's a big company like for these guys, they're only partnering with very big companies already. And so getting even 10% of a company that's worth $100 million, and then you put all of your effort behind it and make it a two or 300 million dollar company, that's a significantly better outcome for many of them than what they're currently getting paid.

Just hand to mouth video to paycheck, right. The second option is to say, okay, is there a category of products that continue to pay me the most out of all the advertisers? Okay, well, the ones who perform the best, or probably give me leading indicators. Just do what Amazon does, see what's already selling, and then clone it and make it your own.

And put your name on it and put a couple of your own little personal quirks that you wish it did better and that you see in your comments of people who had bought the product and complained about or whatever. Fix all those things and make your version yours and better. And if you do that, then you own the entirety of that thing.

But in order to do that, you probably if it were me, I would go snipe some of the top execs at some of those companies and say, hey, you're currently an executive here. Would you like to own a slice of my thing? Again, I'm happy to own 70% and get three of the best guys over, have them build their boxes behind my thing, and they're happy to do it because they're currently getting zero or 1%. And you can give them ten each.

And they see the bigger opportunity because they also know that 50% of sales are coming from your channel. Right. And that's the kind of leverage you have, because if you are a huge percentage of the traffic for one of these larger businesses, then you usually can negotiate bigger chunks of equity and you could go right in.

That's the fastest and easiest way. The longer, maybe bigger money way, is if you do it all yourself. But that's always the trade that you have to make as an entrepreneur, is, how many new skills do I have to have in order to pursue this new opportunity versus the ones I currently have? The third opportunity for them is neither of those, but it's probably the least operational risk for them, is accepting the fact that they just like doing media and that's what they jam on and they don't want to touch either of these other business components.

And then kind of more hardcore branding themselves as a creative shop that knows how to make viral videos that they can transform into ads. And that's where you go from being a really good creator to being a Madison Avenue agency that makes ads that crush. Because if you are skilled enough to become a top 1% 1% creator, then you know stuff better than 99% of ad creative shops out there and you would be able to get huge brands to pay you to make ads.

Because here's the unlock is that most influencers are getting paid based on the impressions that they are getting the brand for free based on their audience. But where the real money is made is where you take that TikTok video, that YouTube short, that Instagram video, that YouTube video, whatever it is, and then they put a million dollars of ad spend behind it when it's already shown as a winner. And then it goes from being shown to 5 million people in your audience to 100 million people that it converts from cold.

That is where the real money is made. And so if you brand yourself as an ad agency, and I mean this in the high ad agency world, not like local business like, let me run some Facebook ads for you, but a real creative agency, you now are no longer monetizing your audience, but your skill set to make videos that go viral. That is a more valuable skill oftentimes than the size of the audience paired together.

Even better. But ad spend has no limit on reach as long as it's profitable. So they can always expand beyond your existing audience, which means that you get to capture all of the upside based on how skilled you are as an advertiser.

So those would be the three paths for that particular type of business. Now, if you're following along, what I want you to think is not like, okay, well, I'm not one of these three businesses. Now, what I should do but it's actually the framework that we approach the problem with, which is one, what problem are we trying to solve? All right, in each of these businesses, they wanted to make more money.

The next one is over. What time horizon? If you want to make more money tomorrow, the number of things you can do is very limited. If you want to make more money in ten years, you take a very different play.

It's just like that building. I explained at the beginning. If you want to build a ten floor building, you build it differently than if you want to build 100 floor building.

And guess what, it takes longer to build 100 story building. And so to have the expectation that you're going to build 100 story building in the same time it builds ten is unlikely. And more realistically, the amount of time it might take to build 100 story building's foundation might take the same time it takes to build the entirety.

Of a ten floor building, which means that above the surface, somebody else building, a $10 million or ten floor building might happen way faster than you because you start seeing them erect this building. Right. Whereas yours is just continuing to build this base before you start building up.

Right. It's that perspective that I'm telling you, after having seen many, many very successful entrepreneurs, nine figure plus, that perspective is arguably the single most valuable thing you have, which is if you are in a rush, it takes longer because you have to start over again. So number one is what problem are we solving? The second is we like, let's play it out.

Right? So if you take your current agency or whatever business you have and you take it to the natural extreme, there is usually a cap on it if you play out multiple scenarios. The next question, which is question three that I like to ask is which problem would we prefer solving or which problem do we feel like we're more equipped to solve? Or which problem is easier? Because if you start framing it in terms of the problem that you're going to have to solve to be successful, it actually makes it much more controllable for you. And this is how we solve problems in terms of businesses that we invest in, acquisition.com,

we talked about multiple paths for each of these companies, right? We'd have to pick one. And so if we're picking between, do I have to find somebody who has this experience or do I have to negotiate a slice of the companies I have, I would say, well, which of these do we feel more equipped to do? Now@acquisitions.com, we are really good at recruiting, which is how we scale all the companies we have, is that we recruit talent who've already been there, done that, and so we'd probably say, hey, we feel really confident that we could recruit somebody in and put seed capital in to get it going.

And then we'd own the whole pie. And so for us, that would be a problem that we feel very confident in solving and gives us the most upside. But you have to answer that for you, given your skill set, your resources and your experience.

The main takeaway that I want everyone to have is that there's constraints and there's leverage. Properly identifying the thing that's actually limiting your business, not what you think is limiting, is one of the biggest unlocks in business. It's how sometimes we can ten x a business in a year simply by reimagining what problems we're solving.

And the reason we get that kind of growth is because when you focus on the constraint, you get the most leverage, which means you get the most out for what you put in. And I will restate this because I think it's so important. People who are wealthy acquire or accumulate wealth faster than you.

Not because they're moving faster, but because they're doing more of the right stuff and less of the wrong stuff. And when they do the right stuff, they get paid disproportionately more per unit of effort. And if you look at the doingness of each of the entrepreneurs, if they owned an HVAC agency, it's probably the easiest one for you to visualize.

If they're running ads for 50 local markets for 50 different customers, that doing this is more or less the same as running 50 different local markets ads for one company. Arguably, it's even easier to do it for one company in 50 markets because you can standardize everything on the back end, and you only have one point of contact you have to deal with rather than 50. And so you actually become even more efficient in that setting.

And so the doing this is more or less the same, but the reward for the work compounds, and that's how they become disproportionately wealthy compared to the one that just immediately wants to sell the quick appointment, sell the quick leads. If you have a longer perspective and say, I want to build 100 story building, then you might be willing to take a little bit more time to find that partner, find that deal structure that works. So that all.

Of the work you do from now for the next ten years stacks on top of each other, rather than having to start at square one every month to figure out how you're going to pay your bills. So just like I'm advising you to find somebody who has been there, done that, and note, I was like, ten years of experience who has built in this industry. The reason I'm saying ten years is because in ten years you've lived through cycles.

You've seen different interest rate environments. You know what it's like when things go up and go down. You've lived through lawsuits, you've had employees come and go like, you've been through some cycles, right? You have scar tissue.

If I'm also now talking to that industry expert who's like, I've spent ten years in HVAC. How do I know this kid who's trying to take a third of my business or offer to take a percentage of mine is legit? I would say the same thing back to you, which is go with somebody who's been doing it for a while, who has metrics, who can demonstrate expertise with experience rather than with the words they say. And so the real ideal scene here is that you have two people who have been building deep expertise in complementary skill sets that fit within a larger boxer opportunity to capture something together.

And the reason I'm pretty passionate about this is that Y Combinator has done a ton of research on this, but they found that three founders is the optimal amount of founders for a company. Now, mind you, that's the most expensive split you ever do is that first day you split the pie into thirds. It's.

The most dilution you're ever going to experience is in one day you already own, you already gave away two thirds of the company. But typically those three people will fit within core very deep responsibilities. You'll usually have somebody who's very good at operating businesses.

You usually have somebody who's very good at product and the actual delivery, like the deep industry expertise. And they'll usually have somebody who's good at marketing and acquisition. So one guy gets customers, one guy delivers the things that this guy promises, and this guy keeps the other two out of prison and makes sure that people get paid, that they raise funding, that they pay taxes, that they actually run the business and manage people and recruit and all of the other things associated.

And mind you, bicompenteries invest a lot of multideca billion dollar companies. And so again, if you're trying to build a very big building, this kind of the African proverb, like if you want to go fast, you can go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

And so you could reasonably develop each of those three skill sets and have 100% of the pie. The question is, how much life do you have to pay in order to get those skill sets? And if you measure over a ten year time horizon, if it took you ten years to get all three versus three years to get your one third, and then you had seven years of building with the other two horses, where would you be at year ten? That's the decision we all have to make. And that's not one that I can make for you.

That's an individual decision.