https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSYfZdAE8Ks

1 00:00:00.000 --\> 00:01:00.000 very rapidly went to from making not a
lot of money to millions of dollars a year in profit um to my second
year uh doing almost 20 million dollars in profit uh and that that that
fundamentally i think ruined me in a lot of ways earlier on because i
saw that as my my benchmark \[Music\] what's going on everyone uh happy
sunday this is uh coming from downtown austin uh wanted to talk to you
about one of the most profound belief and perspective shifts that i've
had over the last few years um and i think 2020 was that year for me uh
where i made one of the most profound internal shifts and uh the shift
has yielded me unbelievable amounts of decreases in anxiety uh for me
and honestly just increases my increase my level of certainty and i can
understand why so many people fail to a much higher degree

2 00:01:00.000 --\> 00:02:00.000 and i think one of the biggest curses
that i had earlier on in my career is that um you know within months i
went from it's just everything kind of aligned for me um mind you after
five years of uh eating uh but nonetheless things did align for me um
and very rapidly went to from making not a lot of money to millions of
dollars a year in profit um to my second year uh doing almost 20 million
dollars in profit uh and that that that fundamentally i think ruined me
in a lot of ways earlier on because i saw that as my my benchmark you
know what i mean i saw that as like if it's if a business is not doing
this then it's failing we're doing something wrong and i think that it
was a really poisonous viewpoint for me or toxic viewpoint and uh i want
to share with you what what what i've shifted to and what has been such
a dramatic improvement in my life and i think my business so when i look
at investors

3 00:02:00.000 --\> 00:03:00.000 and people who make a lot more money
than me and people have much bigger businesses than me uh i see this
common thread of looking at it from an investor's time horizon and so i
feel like in entrepreneurship everything is about tomorrow everything's
about this week everything's about this month and making payroll and all
you know you have all the day-to-day things but you get so much you get
so caught in the monthly goals and weekly goals that you forget to make
the long-term investments that are important and not urgent and when i
look at the billionaires of the world and all of them are trying to
build you know escape paths to mars to me i see that i'm sure there's
the cool factor but the fact that they're all kind of thinking about the
stuff just leads me to think that they're thinking on such a larger time
horizon than the rest of humanity which is probably one of the reasons
that they're more successful and uh one of the things to think about
this is kind of fast versus inevitable and i have tried to shift my
perspective to wanting to do tasks and actions on a repeated basis that
i know

4 00:03:00.000 --\> 00:04:00.000 that if i repeat them over a long
enough time horizon will lead me to inevitably accomplishing my goal and
so what it does by shifting that way is i look at tasks i look at
projects i look at initiatives in a very different light i also am i
mean i wasn't super affected by competition in general mentally because
of other things but i think this has been probably the last nail on the
coffin for me in terms of like well so and so is making more or whatever
right the things that we do to compare ourselves if you remove the time
horizon and think of uh not next year but maybe next decade right i've
been using five years because that is a timeline that i feel like i can
wrap my head around and israel for me um i had a mentor reach out to me
and he was like and you know this guy sold his thing for three 3.4
billion and he's like bro you need a hundred year timeline and um i i
took that in i accept that uh but i it was it's not real for me yet and
so five years is something that is real for me that i can believe in

5 00:04:00.000 --\> 00:05:00.000 and so uh what that does is if you
think about time as an inevitable force that's going to move forward one
way or another think about for a second how and this is for me do i see
time as a threat do i see time as a liability something that i'm always
saying is working against me or is time an asset that is working for me
and i think this has been the single greatest shift in perspective for
me is now seeing if i extend my time horizon then time stops being a
liability and a threat and becomes an asset and how things compound over
time now works to assist me rather than hinder me and so i'll give you a
simple example so uh i have never believed in seo right or really even
inbound marketing and i have had a major shift in perspective on this uh
probably in the last 12 months and the reason for that is because you

6 00:05:00.000 --\> 00:06:00.000 know if you your first 12 months of of
doing you know seo and i'm saying that as a general as a catch all time
really just any inbound marketing and that is not paid advertising that
results in people because that's technically kind of still outbound
right you're you're putting ads out there and then getting people to
respond rather than basically pool based marketing where you're putting
you're creating a water hole for people to come towards right and so
i've i've never really invested much thought into inbound stuff at all i
mean the only example of that is really this kind of vlog slash podcast
which i never did for uh for really any business purposes it's just more
for me to document my journey um but nonetheless uh thinking about this
in terms of that perspective of and i've been talking to people who are
like oh yeah we have this you know it's taken us five years to build
this asset but now this asset creates 3 000 applications a month for our
for our software or for our whatever right and i think to myself i'm
like man just building a machine that just consistently month over month

7 00:06:00.000 --\> 00:07:00.000 creates more and more and more inbound
interest is just wildly compelling to me and so i think to myself okay
sure we're gonna have our outbound things uh both outbound in terms of
manual outbound with people cold call call email etc you know cooldm but
also we have our outbound with paid advertising across platforms but the
kind of the third piece of this is what can we quote invest in that if i
did it over five years i believe it would be unreasonable for me to not
have built another channel that is reliable and sustainable and enduring
and so you'll probably see some more things for me in the next 12 months
along that line because i think it's really awesome and i want to use
compound growth to my advantage rather than as a hindrance rather than
something that i compare myself to and feel always inadequate and so
what i think that the shift from the ceo to investor mindset has helped
me

8 00:07:00.000 --\> 00:08:00.000 with is the stress that i put on myself
for like quarterly goals and looking at someone else who might have
started at the same time as me and is doing better than me because then
i get to think to myself okay but we're not comparing ourselves now
we're comparing ourselves to what's going to happen in 20 years right
will their company still be here and i'm trying to build something that
endures that lasts that maybe even can be passed on to a future
generation and i don't think those were ever thoughts of mine when i was
starting my entrepreneurial career and i wish they had been and so i
don't know where you're at right now but maybe if you can if you can
take that perspective and think to yourself what could i create that and
what tasks did i do what projects could i invest in that even if they
don't pay off this quarter or next quarter even the next 12 months i
think that it would be inevitable that i would have a disproportionate
payoff five years from now and obviously that begets the obvious you
know the the the single greatest constraint that most people have which
is they can't do anything consistently

9 00:08:00.000 --\> 00:09:00.000 but i believe i can do things
consistently and i think that many of the people listening to this can
do things consistently and so if you have that character trailer already
you've developed that discipline i feel like using that discipline to
invest in things that are going to create disproportionate returns is a
good use of time right for us and so i'll give you a real example around
this we're looking at doing an initiative on the gym launch in our
dremels company uh related to just generating more you know inbound
applications and whatnot and i was talking to our gm about it and i was
saying listen let's let's not think about that for like this quarter i
mean we can start now but let's not measure the roi until you know next
year and i don't think i would ever have said something like that a year
or two ago i don't even think it would even be a thought um but it's
it's been wildly freeing because there's so much less pressure around
initiatives and i think it actually improves the quality of the
initiative and the execution

10 00:09:00.000 --\> 00:10:00.000 of the team because they're not
immediately being like oh it's been a week and it's not working so we're
failing right and so um let me give you another really good nugget that
i've had recently around this which is um rather than looking at
week-over-week month-over-month sales growth instead i asked myself the
question what one thing if i tripled it in our company what non-sales
related you know what not in revenue related thing that if i were to
triple it it would be unreasonable to believe that my company would not
triple as well and for me that was inbound qualified or i'm saying
inbound but just number of qualified applications generated that was a
metric that i was like okay sometimes when you're increasing the number
of applications that are coming in uh you have a new sales person or new
sales team and their their close rate is low it happens right it's part
of scaling a business but over a long enough time horizon it

11 00:10:00.000 --\> 00:11:00.000 would be unreasonable for me to
believe that if i were to triple my number of applications uh i would
not see a you know a proportional increase in sales and so what's
interesting to me is that if i can i've never actually thought about a
leading indicator because i have leading indicators on churn which is
like customer activation and i talk about that in other stuff but i've
never actually had a leading indicator on growth which is fascinating to
me that i've never had this which is like hilarious but actually
measuring the number of sales accepted leads and so that is that's
defined as a lead that the sales team accepts because they showed and
are qualified right they are the type of person uh who who we can serve
uh you know they have the size business that we work with you know and
they showed up and they have interest right so that would be a sales
qualified lead and so trying to say i want to increase sales by five
percent a month is a fine goal the thing is is that there are so many
other variables that can affect it in a short time horizon like that

12 00:11:00.000 --\> 00:12:00.000 whereas saying i want to increase our
number of inbound applications by five percent per month is far more
consistent and reasonable to do and so if you thought about like a line
right if i increa i know that i can increase through consistent activity
the number of inbound uh applications either through adding more people
to outreach uh creating more channels for content um and then you know
obviously there's the paid side which is you could add another platform
etc right and so if i if i draw that line that is something i can
consistently do and so when i'm thinking about growing my business and
hitting a goal like tripling it right in the next five years and i think
okay well then let's take let's take our sales qual sales qualified
leads right and let's draw that as our line and that's going to be our
baseline right that's what we're going to focus all our attention on the
day-to-day activities around that those are going to be like the stock
market right they're they're going to be up and down up and down up and
down and i think most of us are looking at such small time horizons

13 00:12:00.000 --\> 00:13:00.000 it looks crazy but if you look at it
from an investor's perspective in terms of years or decades then you can
really see the truth and the reason that a stock will go up over a
decade is simply because of the true economic value that a company is
providing right and so for me a leading indicator of growth would be the
number of interested inquiries that we get and so that is actually going
to be my primary predictive metric that i will be driving because i know
that of course we're going to change processes sure we might change crms
you know we might change our funnel or our sales like all these things
are small things but if i can simply increase the number of qualified
applications of people who want to for example grow their gym uh by 3x
in the next five years then i can reasonably believe that i would be
able to achieve it and thinking that way it's just been amazing and so
that is what i'm dedicated to doing and some of these smaller projects
which for me were like well this thing isn't going to double our lead
gen so i don't want to do it

14 00:13:00.000 --\> 00:14:00.000 i've really shifted my perspective on
that and so i'm now looking at uh reliable inflows it's like okay well i
think this one thing can generate us 20 new clients a month that's not
huge for us but it's it's it's noticeable and so okay well then how you
know how much does it take to to invest in that how long do it you know
and and and let's start it let's start the let's start the snowball
right and so that's one of the that's what i was talking my gm about and
so we're actually going to do this initiative that i think will result
in about 20 new clients a month and it's going to take us time to get
there but i but i think it's it's going to be really really uh valuable
for us right over the long haul especially and so let me just take a
quick look at my notes because i wanted to make sure i'm not missing
anything for you um do do uh yeah i think that's i think that's um
that's my biggest thing right that's that's pretty much my message for
for what my biggest

15 00:14:00.000 --\> 00:15:00.000 perspective shift has been is thinking
about a five-year time horizon shifting from ceo to shareholder uh
shifting from ceo to to board member or advisor and thinking about it
over those time horizons and i feel like if you can just make that
change i wish i could explain to you how much less stress i have because
if you know the company goes up by a little bit or down by a little bit
one month over another month it just it just doesn't affect me like it
doesn't affect my life in any way and i feel like i had my ego so and
this is actually the last point that i had in my notes which is my ego
is just so much less impacted by the fluctuations of the business that
it's just it's just phenomenally increased my standard of living like
i'm just i'm just really not that stressed about things you know i just
can't even express it to you and so anyways this has been probably the
biggest lesson of 2020 for me um and obviously 2020 for us was uh we our
profit was cut in half we did i think 13.4 in profit last year and we

16 00:15:00.000 --\> 00:16:00.000 did i think six six this year we're
getting our final books but around that this year in profit which was
technically my lowest year of profit in a while and um but i can
truthfully tell you it just really doesn't affect me because i know it's
a momentary business disruption because of a pandemic that
disproportionately affected my clients than many you know than many
other industries um and i don't think it'd be unreasonable for me to
believe that over the next three years right that we would we would not
only recover but grow past where we were before and so in thinking about
that um anyways i just it's been it's just viewing time as an ally and
not an ally or an asset not a threat or a liability and once you can
when i can hitch my cart to something that is inevitable like the past
and the passing of time um then i feel like you're aligned with forces
that will grow you without your permission and so anyways i'll leave you
with that i hope you have an amazing day and keep being awesome catch
you on the flip side

17 00:16:00.000 --\> 00:17:00.000 \[Music\] \[Applause\] you
