Helping 6 Business Owners Scale in 33 Minutes

And so in this video, I'm answering your questions about how to scale specifically a brick-and-mortar HVAC business.

And for all of those questions, I try to do my very best to make the solutions as tactical as humanly possible so that you watching from home can actually use this stuff.

Enjoy.

My name is Thomas.

I, uh, sell roofing and exterior remodeling.

We do, uh, close to $6 million this year.

I would like to be at $100 million.

What's stopping me

and I'll be a little bit vulnerable.

I would say it's comfort, distractions, and fear.

And food?

Fear.

Oh, sorry, I was like, all right, good to know.

You know,

sometimes I feel that way too.

Um, so the comfort is I have built the business, I've replaced myself in every aspect.

I can work 2 to 3 hours a week and it'll run fine.

Okay.

Um, fear, I would say the fear of losing family time.

The work-life balance.

Sure.

And the distractions are my other— I've got another business, drunk removal business.

I've got real estate.

I've got

just all kinds of little— what do you think you should do that you're not doing that you want me to tell you to do?

So, so I know I need to go all in again.

Okay.

And I did that the first 5 years that I— and that worked out, and it worked out great.

Uh-huh.

Went through COVID.

I got, you know, kept the business going really well, and I worked myself out of a job, got comfortable.

Okay, so I don't know what I'm looking for you to tell me to do.

Well, I'll say, I'll say this differently.

I think regrets come when we imagine the upside that we don't have without taking into account the cost that we didn't suffer.

And so I think we regret

when we imagine the upside that we didn't get without also considering the downside that we didn't suffer to get it.

And so I think that's where a lot of regret comes from, 'cause it's not real.

So it's like maybe there's some girl that got away or some business opportunity that got away, and we just imagine this amazing thing, but not the trade-off that we would have to do

in order to get it.

We just imagine the upside without downside.

And so I would say a couple things.

So one is,

I think that there are trade-offs that we always have to make.

And I don't think they're right or wrong.

I think they're just preference.

There's no right answer to how much work-life balance you want to have.

It's right for you.

And so said differently, if I like cookies and I'm good with that and I also want a six-pack, I just prefer cookies to a six-pack.

It's just that's the trade.

And I think the dissatisfaction comes from wanting both.

Right, right.

And so either

want less or trade more.

And I think that's really what it comes down to in terms of like, is there a path where I can work no more than I currently am, um, to go from 6 to 100?

There probably is.

It depends on how much you're willing to pay other people.

And so you might have to take a short-term hit in terms of profitability, uh, to bring in the level of talent that you want to expand the business on your behalf to where you want it

to go.

And so as long as you were the type of person character-wise that they would want to follow and believe in your vision, and you can make your vision big enough that they think that

their aspirations can fit within it, you can get that type of person.

But like, it's 100% like you're graduating right now into the who game.

But there's levels of who's, you know, like I remember the first time I hired a $50,000 a year employee and I was like, this is the shit.

This is what I'm talking about.

You know what I mean?

Like I went from minimum wage, you know, labor to $50,000.

I was like this, they're, They can read, they can write.

Like, let's, let's go.

You know what I mean?

And then I hired my first 6-figure employee and I was like, oh, what was I talking about?

Like, this is what's going on.

And then I had my first $250K, first $500K, first million, first multimillion-dollar per year employee.

And it's just levels.

And so Sharon, who's our president, said this to me years ago, but I always remember.

He said, the best, the best talent's always in the future.

So whatever we have today, the best people are always ahead of you, not behind you.

And so, um, I think for you, if we— if you really do want to accomplish it without making the trade, you will make a trade.

Because if you change nothing, nothing will change, right?

So we have to change some, some component of your life.

And so the question is, which thing do you value the least?

Do you value having more profit or more time with your family in the short term?

In the long term, you can make it up.

You won't make up family time in the long term.

You can't make the profit up in the long term.

Right.

So if you're willing to give up short-term profit, you can bring in high-level talent and then they can lead the growth.

In terms of the, the fear stuff, I mean, I would just say like, just hold the line.

If you're like, I'm afraid of losing time with the family, it's like, just don't.

Like, I do.

And then in terms of the real estate thing, I see real estate because I know a bunch of entrepreneurs.

I have a ton of real estate.

I don't like— as long as you're not like actively running it, like that's why I'm a big fan of like REITs and funds because you have— if you have, you know, good partners in that stuff,

they can just run it.

You can make better than the market.

And then, but it's not, it doesn't change anything about what I do.

Like me putting in the S&P or me buying another big building changes nothing about my life.

And so it's not a distraction unless you're like, you know, if we could add a gazebo and what if we added a different roof?

'Cause I'm a roofer.

And what if I combined what I'm really, and you're like, dude, stop.

Just like let the real estate be the real estate.

Let the business be the business and just keep 'em apart as long as you're good there.

'Cause I think he's a distraction.

Actually, let me double-check on that real quick, which is when you said you're— the distraction thing that you're afraid of, why are you afraid of that?

I'm not afraid of it.

Okay.

I'm just— I've got ADHD and I collect gold and silver.

I buy houses.

I buy buildings.

I mean, it's just a little bit of the red dress.

Well, as long as it doesn't change anything about what you do, I don't care.

But if it's like, now I check this stuff all the time and it like eats up my days, then yeah, I would say that's a problem.

And it's only a problem if you decide it's a problem.

Like, you might just like that stuff.

It's just like, I sacrifice my goals because I enjoy this ADD.

You know what I mean?

Like, the cost of the big thing is the new stuff that you have to give up to keep it going.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I feel like I'm getting some amens.

This is great.

Just feel like good meal, right?

Yeah.

I appreciate it.

But yeah, that's like the cost of the big thing is all the new stuff you have to give up that you don't get to or so, all the exciting things that you will no longer participate in

because you want to do one thing big.

Okay.

And I think, um, for me personally, I had this moment, um, I think a while ago, but like I had this realization of how long it takes to get good at anything.

And then I thought about, oh, I only have like 30 or 40 more productive years at most.

And so I'm like, I've got like 4 or 5 big seasons in me left.

Yeah.

And so That's it.

And so I don't have like unlimited shots on goal.

I've got 4 or 5 big runs in me.

So hopefully that helps.

I appreciate that answer because I thought you were going to say sell everything.

And

I mean, they're investments.

I mean, I'm not going to tell you sell your investments.

I would say keep passive stuff passive.

Don't make it active.

That's like incurring cost because you're gonna make it active, then make active money.

Yeah.

If you're like, I want to take my passive money and then make it cost me more time, to get 5% better returns.

It's like you're gonna get way better returns in your active income than your passive.

And just— I would just keep active, active, keep passive, passive.

Thank you, appreciate you.

My name is Corey.

I'm an electrical contractor.

I do $1.6 million a year, probably keep about $650,000 of that.

I'd like to be about $5 million is kind of what I can see right now.

All right, my biggest constraint is myself plus hiring quality candidates.

So you can handle the volume you have right now?

So you can't handle the volume you have?

You could get more business but you can't handle it?

I can handle it when the whole crew's here.

Okay.

And then as soon as one guy's gone, I'm back in the van.

Yes, you need more people.

More people.

Yeah.

So we have to think about, like, so this is probably a multi-step thing just for everybody, like, as we're following through.

This is like, if we have— if you have enough business, which it sounds like you do, that's not the constraint, then it probably means we need to bump price.

And we bump price so that we can have the cash flow, so that we can hire the extra person, so that you have redundancy in the team.

Right, like if Alex had to hop in, if, if Tim's sick, that's not going to work, right?

We have to have 2 or 3 backups for any person who's here so that I can keep doing my job, right?

And so, but I can only do that if I have the cash flow to sustain multiple Tims, right?

And so this is where sometimes it's like a multi-step solution.

So it's like we have to fix the pricing, uh, component and it's like, okay, well I feel weird charging more because other people in my market charge even less than I do and I'm a little

bit above the market.

So then we have to think about the offer.

It's like, okay, so the offer might be the issue, which is like, okay, can we make our thing faster?

Can we make it more reliable?

Or we can make it easier, right?

And can we guarantee around that?

And if the answer is yes, then it's like, great, well then that's what we're going to charge our premium and bump prices by 20 to 40%, which sounds like a lot, I know.

But we say, hey, if we don't meet any of these qualifications, I'll give you all my profit back, which means that you raise the price.

And if for some reason you don't meet it, you go back to the exact same price you're charging now.

But everyone that you do meet everything on, you get all the juice.

If no one else does those kind of guarantees, which basically no one does,

then you can basically say, "Well, the reason that they're not doing that is because they're not confident they're going to be on time and on budget, right?

And I am." It's very easy for somebody else to say, "Hey, I'll do this job for you and maybe I'll be on time and maybe I'll be on budget." But if I have no teeth in that agreement,

I promise that it'll be free and I'll be done tomorrow.

But if I don't have to be right about it, who cares?

Sure, I'll be done tomorrow.

And they'll be like, oh, I guess I get your point.

Like, right, I'll be done by this time and it'll be done satisfactory at this price, period.

And you know that when you sign this, you get that.

That's it.

And if for some reason something happens, we'll come back and fix it.

Right.

And so by doing that, you'll be able to increase the cash flow, which will then allow you to go recruit the extra tech that you need so you can stay above the business and then ultimately

honestly just keep advertising it so that you can keep hiring and backfilling.

Okay.

I can see that totally for my service calls and stuff like that.

Kind of my bread and butter is I chase 6 or 7 different heating and cooling companies around and do all their electrical work.

Cool.

So they take the lead.

They— yeah, I have a flat rate sheet for that.

But the biggest thing they always complain about is price.

And we're super efficient to get in, get out, but they're always complaining about the cost that we came in at.

Do they still buy from you?

Have for 6 years.

Yeah, I mean I care more about what people do than what they say.

Okay.

Everyone would like it cheaper.

Right.

I would like it cheaper.

I would like all of you guys to get paid less.

Yeah.

Right?

But it's,

yeah, I just, I pay very little attention to that.

Okay.

Like, customers will always want it cheaper.

They will always want it faster.

They always want a guarantee.

Like, these are all things, like, that will not change.

So when I'm moving my prices, don't even think about it.

Yeah, be like, this is what it is.

Okay.

Yeah.

Now to, to make yourself sleep better, you have 6 or 7 guys.

It's like, wouldn't it be cool if you had like 60?

Yeah.

Right.

So then we go back to the top here, which is you have your way of getting customers, which is mostly chasing these 6 or 7 heating and cooling companies around.

Mm-hmm.

And so it's like, what do you get?

What do you do to get the heating and cooling companies?

Basically I've worked for one for 15 years and it's just constant.

Yeah.

And then, uh, the other ones since I opened my business shortly after, they've been with me.

And so really, I have no— you have no marketing function.

Yeah.

So you should start doing— this is what I would do if I were you.

I'd start doing outreach to other heating and cooling companies.

Hey, let me quote some of these jobs for you.

Like, a lot of people are just stuck with the person they're with.

They're not happy, they're not unhappy, they're just whatever.

Like, let me at least get some— it'll just keep them honest at least, right?

And so then you can just start bringing business for yourself and that'll just give you more leverage with all of the other kind of negotiations that you have with the existing companies.

Okay.

Because right now you're just dependent on them, so they have all the leverage.

Well, yeah.

And then as soon as they— like, I'm missing out on work.

Yeah.

Because as soon as they say, hey, we have a job tomorrow.

Yeah, I'm going because they're my— yeah, they're my whales.

Right.

So it's— so you see more whales.

Okay.

So we need more whales.

But to get more whales, we have to tweak price to get so that we can hire the manpower.

Like, it's usually multi-step solutions because like for most businesses, it's— if it were one thing, you probably would have already seen it.

So it's usually second order or third order that has to change so we can reverse engineer back to the fixing the core problem.

Gotcha.

Thank you.

That feel good though?

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

Appreciate it.

Real quick, I'm gonna show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to $100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish.

I've now done multiple times.

And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through.

And I broke each of these down by 8 different functions of the business.

What the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate.

And we've done this across software, physical products, uh, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this.

And it works.

And it's my gift to you.

It's absolutely free.

And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap, just enter info and it'll spit it right back to you all free.

My name's Tanner Jarrett.

We're at $1.5 mil to date.

Amazing.

$700 net.

My big concern is how do I make the dream team like you have here?

How do I get technicians on board, sales guys?

Yeah, like make it work.

So, okay, what breaks when we do more?

What breaks?

Like what stops you from doing this?

Uh, we're going to figure out which one, like order of ops.

What stops— what, what, what breaks when you do that?

Biggest issue is technicians.

Okay, so techs is the, is the issue.

Okay, so what do you— so What do you make on a tech?

Anywhere from $180,000 to $200,000, $300,000 a year per.

Yeah.

After cost.

Damn.

Well, this year.

Yeah, because your dentist is giving you a run for your money there.

I'm just saying.

All right.

All right.

So we got $300K for the techs.

Got it.

All right.

And you need them local in Bozeman?

Yes.

Okay.

And what are you doing right now to recruit techs?

Uh, honestly, kind of just gave up lately.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would imagine that would make it difficult to recruit more techs.

So then, then let me, then let me ask the next question, which is like, what stops you from recruiting more techs?

Not the decision.

There's like, yeah, some of you guys have probably seen that management diamond that I have, which is like, people don't know that you need to do it.

They don't know how to do it.

They don't know when to do it by.

They have something blocking them or there's a motivation issue.

I'm assuming you're motivated.

I'm assuming you already know that you need to do it and how to do it.

100%.

So, and you need to know the when is now.

So I'm guessing there's something blocking you.

My thing that's blocking me is I have to be involved, I believe, in every single— strong words— yeah, every single aspect of the company.

Have to or choose to?

Choose to.

Okay, choose to.

Just so we're, you know, singing from the same hymnal.

Okay.

And so I can't, I can't let it go.

Okay.

So can't or won't?

We have some— okay, we have some very high-end clients too.

Okay.

So that's where we work at the Yellowstone Club in Montana, Spanish Peaks.

I know Matt Damon, Jennifer Garner, Mark Zuckerberg.

I mean, you don't need a name drop.

Yeah, sorry, but you're a big deal.

I'm not a big deal.

It's tiny.

Ed told me to say it.

Anywho.

And so it's hard to let that go, you know, that.

Yeah, that ego.

So, so fundamentally, This is, I guess, this is, I mean, key man is the number one risk of every business.

Mm-hmm.

Um, for two reasons.

One, no one wants to buy it, but second, you wanna kill it yourself at some point cuz you're like, I don't wanna do it.

You said you burned stuff in the ground.

Oh yeah.

Right.

So, um, what we have to do is if we look at all of the things that, like, look at your behaviors, not your feelings around them.

Mm-hmm.

And say, okay, these are all the things that I do on a daily basis.

Some of those things someone else can do.

Now there's for sure things that are higher leverage, higher value.

It might be that for you, doing the design for stuff is the highest leverage thing.

I don't know.

It might be.

It might.

It's definitely not using your hands.

I can promise you that.

It might be getting the relationship and managing the relationship.

That might be the most valuable thing.

So if we just did it, if we, if we did a rank order, this is what you'd have to do is like we do a time study, which is step one.

So take an Excel sheet, you can open up on your phone every 15 minutes.

You have an alarm.

It'll annoy everyone.

Don't worry about it.

And every time it goes off, you just write what you did in the last 15 minutes.

And at the end of the week, you can look at all those activities and rank them in terms of revenue.

Like, which of these is the most valuable and most unique?

And then when you look at the bottom half of that list, does it neatly fit into some person that either exists currently that has bandwidth or somebody that we can hire?

And part of the, the good news that you have is that when you serve premium customers, which you do, you can charge a premium, which you do, which means that you should have excess

margins.

You can get premium people.

And so right now what will probably be required is that you have to lower your tolerance for mediocrity on your team.

And so it might cost— so if it's— if you're gonna make $300,000 per year for a tech, it's like, would you be willing to spend $50,000 to go get another tech who's good?

100%, right?

And so that's a combination of like, you could try the recruiting firm thing, which is a thing, one that you probably haven't thought of that I would strongly recommend.

This would probably be the unlock for you.

Is run national ads and then offer a really generous relocation package.

Hmm.

So make the $50,000 basically a signing bonus.

You get $25,000 now and $25,000 at month 6.

What do you think about instead of having W-2 employees and how much they cost, running 1099 service techs?

You're a business.

Do they have to show up at certain times and do work specific the way you want them to do?

Yes.

They're employees.

Employees.

Yeah, unless they're like, they're not vendors, they work for you.

If you have meetings and they have to show up, they're employees.

So no, you like keep it W-2.

Yeah, you want to go more legit, not less legit.

Yeah.

But fundamentally, like if you were to spend this $50,000 to go get another tech, we just have to like getting the tech.

I don't think it's gonna be that hard, honestly, if you're just willing to spend money for it, which you have the money to do it.

And then the other piece is, okay, now that this person comes on, I have this big stack of stuff.

How can I give them a third of it or half of it?

And then all of a sudden you get those time back.

And so let me ask you a different question.

If you got half your time back, could you double the business?

100%, right?

And so that's the game.

Yeah.

Beautiful.

Thank you, Alex.

My name's Trenton.

We sell roofing.

We're going to do about $3 million this year.

We'd like to be at $10 million.

My biggest constraint or what's stopping me is that Um, for the last, you know, 8 years, all of our lead gen has been from— whether from doors.

Okay.

So it's been 100% door-to-door lead gen.

And now when we're trying to knock for retail, it seems to be like, like heavier of a weight on the team.

It's a retail— what do you mean?

So, uh, like just people in market that need a roof.

It's like residential.

Residential.

Okay.

Residential.

Yeah.

And when you were doing door knocking before, you were knocking on residential doors.

Okay.

So it was the one— we were getting funding from the insurance company.

Got it.

Word.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay, so keep going.

So now, um, with me being a door-to-door guy, like, purchasing leads and all that was like sacrilegious to me.

Okay.

So there's some limiting beliefs there, um, that I started to, you know, explore last October.

We bought— I just want you to be lead curious.

That's all I'm asking for.

Yeah, I, I am.

I'm very lead curious now.

And, uh, but I basically got slaughtered learning this Just don't be acquisitionary binary.

You know what I mean?

Like be non-binary with your leads.

Like as many as you want.

Yes.

Yes.

No, that's what I'm trying to do here.

And when we did purchase leads and— You get the unedited version, by the way.

Yeah, go ahead.

And when we started to, you know, stack the guys' calendars, there was a big culture shift where we actually saw like more buy-in from the guys, but then like the door knocking just—

Yeah, because it was easier.

It was way easier.

Yeah.

But, um, like our CAC and all that was absolutely horrid, right?

So I'll spend like $7,500 just to acquire one customer over the summer.

Okay.

And it wasn't sustainable.

So I just make from a customer, um, on average $6,500.

So that does not work.

No, it doesn't work.

Yeah.

And it was just like, uh, a lot of the marketing agencies that we worked with were like younger people.

They were like using AI tools, go high level, like So we decided that we were going to build it in-house.

Okay.

So with that being said, now it comes into, you know, a leadership issue because I need somebody that like knows how to, you know, market better than I do so that I can focus on training.

And can I pause you real quick?

Yes, please.

Okay, cool.

So you're at 3, you want to get to 10, you rebuilt it from storm chasing to just straight up door knocking whenever.

Fine.

I think it was a good idea.

Um, you had a door-knocking team.

You took the same sales guys, brought them on leads that you got them.

They got lazy, fat, and don't want to do door-knocking anymore.

So great rule number 1: outbound and inbound are separate teams.

Yes.

Um, inbound is what you graduate to.

And so if you're an absolute savage, like you just take children's souls and just rip them out every day because you're a terrible person, um, But you're just unbelievable at sales.

Then and only then do you get the opportunity for me to feed you leads, because these are the most expensive leads that we have to work very, very hard for to make sure.

And like, we cannot waste them on anybody who cannot close everything.

And so thank you.

I hope that was an amen.

And, and so, so first off is the team should be separate, but you're in this mix now.

You're in a little bit of a mess.

And so my, my $0.02 would be like, take that, because I'm sure their commissions have gone down since they now are selling nothing, basically.

Yes.

Yeah.

So I would say, guys, my fuck-up, I went to this thing, he told me I did this big boo-boo, which is inbound and outbound were together, which is not how it should be.

Everybody get back on the streets, you guys do that.

And then for the absolute savages of you, because you can usually have far fewer people on inbound, that becomes the Christmas tree of the career path.

Because on inbound, I can feed you and you can do like 5 sales a day.

You can't do that door knocking, right?

But I can— you can do it if I'm feeding you leads that are already qualified, already set, already gone through a VSL, whatever, um, in the sales motion.

And then those guys can absolutely clean up, but you get— you earn the opportunity to get that level of commissions.

Now the commission structure should also be different on inbound because you have to pay for those leads.

So it's a different role.

They graduate to it.

It's more volume, lower per, but it's more reliable, which guys with families, things like that, If you have a bad day, you close 2, and a good day you close 7, it's different than

you have a bad day, you can close 0, 0, 0, right?

It's much more, uh, it's much more stressful.

And so guys will be happy to even give up— they'll even make the same money but just have to be more reliable.

They'll be— make— and you don't have to be in the sun.

So, so then we should hire for inbound sales.

Yeah, or take one of the guys you have who's really good at it and put everybody else back on the street so you just funnel everything to that guy who because then you can iterate faster

because you're new on this.

And so you want to— you never want to have too many no's because kind of like the brick analogy I gave at the beginning, the more no's there are, the more likely something's going to

fuck up.

Right?

And so it's like, I know this is an absolute savage salesperson.

If they're closable, he'll close them or she'll close them.

And so then the only variable we have is just what offer/lead source am I getting?

And like what process is going from lead to talking to them?

Those are the only variables you have to play with and you can control.

It's much easier to iterate on that.

And then get it to go faster.

Okay.

Okay.

And then.

Okay, so then I want to hire a marketing director or leader to manage that outbound team.

Goes out, inbound team becomes the one guy you need to hire, a marketer person who actually knows what they're doing.

Probably pay more than you expect, but then that person will be worth it.

Your entire business is sales and marketing, so you should have the core elements of the business in-house.

Okay.

Excellent.

If you need help with the sales process, we can help.

Excellent.

Thank you.

My name is Art.

We sell junk removal and demolition to commercial property managers.

Currently do $1 million a year.

Would love to be at $10 million a year.

What's currently stopping us is knowing which sales channel to focus on.

I know it's important that we pick one, capitalize on it, and I'm wondering how much time, energy, or volume do I spend on one while I determine if that's going to be our channel or

not?

And know whether to leave that one or focus on that one?

Yeah.

So I'll give you two answers to that question.

So before I answer it, I'm going to do the first thing, though.

Really, the second thing first.

So why— what do you do currently right now to get customers?

Right now it's been mostly referrals.

Okay.

So you can't do more referrals because there's nothing for you to do besides do a good job.

Okay, that's fine.

If referrals is the way you're getting business, What ways have you begun or you haven't started doing sales channels yet?

So I— we've started to lay the framework for doing email cold outreach as well, simultaneously with LinkedIn outreach, and then also converting some of our social media efforts into

a bit of outreach as well with people who are engaging.

So those are some of the things that were like ManyChat and then DM.

Yeah, yeah.

More, more manual for now while we get the flow going.

And then also I'm in a networking BNI, so that's Yeah, I would prefer you stick with one of them and just do more in that thing.

And so if the question is, how do I— so the original question was, how do I know which one to pick and how long to stick with it?

So I think I will reject the premise, which is that one of them is going to work, like you will make one of them work.

And so you could make any of them work.

And so I would take the hypothetical extreme of Is there a business that acquires other businesses' customers in each of those different channels in your market?

Uh, I'm not sure.

I'll bet there is.

Uh, there probably are some junk removal people who do it via social media and they take it that way.

Some people probably do it via LinkedIn.

Some people do, uh, cold outreach.

All three of those are super repeatable channels that anyone could run.

So all of them can work, my recommendation to you would be the one that you have the highest overlap with existing skill set

between you and team.

So if you and/or your team have more knowledge around social media stuff, I'd be like, just double down on social media.

If it's, I have, you know, we're better at kind of the outbound motion, then I would say go do the outbound motion via email.

And if it's like, well, we want to boost these things, it's like, well, why don't we just send more emails?

You know what I mean?

Got it.

Does that help?

Yeah, it does.

Okay, good.

That was super.

I was like, you sure?

Everything else?

You guys, that was, that was an easy one.

That was like a warmup.

Well, for, um, I guess, uh, follow up, um, since you're taking more questions, uh,

I guess if you had to just say one, like, let's irrelevant to what the team has, which one do you have the best skillset?

Uh, and to be honest, I just don't have the skillset.

And I guess networking is number one.

Like in, when I'm in person with people, I'm doing the best.

Okay, so, so hear me out then.

Wild idea.

So you do networking stuff.

And so if I said I want you to spend 4 hours a day to find every local community-based related event with 20 people or less or 50 people or less in it that have people who are similar

to your avatar, would you be able to do that?

Yes.

Okay, so why can't we do more of that?

We can do more of that.

Okay, so how many of those events do you currently go to?

And I'm guessing you get customers from when you go there.

Right.

Yeah.

They compound over time.

We go to currently a few a week and then we're meeting one-on-one with a lot of people we meet afterwards.

Right.

So I would say, all right, well then what would it take for us to go to like several a day?

That would be my first kind of like risk-adjusted move because the other things you haven't done yet at all.

So it's like, how do we go from 1 to 3 just like this year?

I would do that because then it'll free up more cash flow because the issue that you have right now, especially like in the, in the than the swamp that you're in right now.

I would just do way more of the thing that you're currently doing as my path of at least getting to 1 to 3.

It's probably super profitable for you as well.

And then I would invest more of those resources into

learning one of the other channels.

Got it.

Perfect.

Thank you.

Cool, you bet.

My name's Adrian.

I own a commercial construction company.

Did $11 million this year, $10 last year.

Read the book "Built to Sell." So I started analyzing my company and I said, well, I figured out that construction companies are not an easy asset to sell, that their enterprise value

is based off of assets or backlog of work.

Uh-huh.

As a commercial contractor, I thought to myself, okay, well, how am I going to do that?

So we started doing public works projects, bought some heavy equipment.

Now we have contracts that are for several years.

At the same time, with the clientele base that I had in the multifamily space, I started thinking about, okay, well, if I don't want to sell this company, if it's going to be that difficult,

how do I get recurring revenue?

So I started an elevator company.

And, uh, over the last 12 months, we did $3 million.

Yeah, to start.

And, um, it's a racket.

Congrats.

I have elevators.

It's ridiculous.

We can help you.

So, uh, if you were me, you know, with the 2 companies and the combined revenue, um What would you do next in order to go from 10 to 100?

What's profit on 3 versus 11?

30% on the 3,

18% on the 11.

Okay, so you're making roughly double on the construction side, but cash flow sucks and it's a pain and you never take the money out of the business, probably, I'm guessing.

Um, okay, so it's a tough call because you already did it, right?

You can't like not have the kid, it's already out there running around.

Um, that's what I had said.

Can't, can't insert it, doesn't It doesn't go back up, right?

Okay, so I think it, again, it depends on what you want to do.

So I think the elevator company totally could sell if you wanted to sell that business.

I do.

Are you splitting your time right now?

Yes.

Yeah, so it might take $800,000 in profit on the construction side to get the 2 or 3 leaders that you need to do it without you, and then it would continue to exist.

Um, I do think the elevator is the better opportunity for the reasons that you're already aware of, and it probably grew significantly faster than the other one did.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Um, this isn't normally what I would say in this type of situation, but I'm just familiar with it.

Um, what timeline do you have?

Like selling 5, selling 10?

Definitely 10.

Um, okay, you know, if I could do it in 5.

Okay, you could sell in 5.

I mean, what's the growth rate on the elevator?

Well, I mean, year 1, $3 million.

Oh, year 1, right, right.

So it's a Straight up elevator.

Okay, sorry.

Uh, exactly, straight to the penthouse.

Um, okay, uh, I'm like, so there's the reasonable advice, which is, hey, hire the people and then let them continue to run the thing.

And then I would say like what the quote Alex advice would be, which is super unreasonable.

Um, and I only give it because this is what I did.

Um, I burn things down.

And so if I can't exit it, so like you could exit the Eleven now for way less than you think it's worth.

Right, I'd— I would just be willing to exit it.

I had 6 gyms and I fire sold them in 90 days.

I made— I made in total on 6 what I should have made on 1.

And then within 6 months I was doing $1 million a month on the next thing.

And so once it was like clear that this was a way better opportunity, like the orders of magnitude better, which I think you were in that situation right now, it's super niched.

It's— you've obviously got ins in terms of understanding how to work.

It's already recurring.

It is a racket,

a legal racket, but it is.

Oh, it is.

If you're willing to take a step back, like you will, if you had, if you're like, I want to do this in 2 years, you'll like, the break-even point on this is 2 years, which is like if

you got rid of the construction firm in the next 90 days and you said, I don't care what the price is, I just want all the headache back, you will grow so much faster on the elevator

side.

Like it'll, like you did 3 while splitting your attention.

If you had had full attention, you might be at 8.

And so I tend to think only exclusively on opportunity cost.

I don't normally give that advice because it's like, it's just so hard for people to do.

But I burn things down when I like am very clear that this is the next thing I'm going to do, just because I know that my— the opportunity cost of the time of just continuing to wind

this down or get it ready for sale, I could make more than I'm going to make on that sale.

In this opportunity.

So like, let's say that a perfect, a perfect exit for that business would be like $5 million or something, right?

Based on the assets and the AR that you have coming.

It's like, for me to build another million dollars in recurring revenue in the elevator business, I can do that in a quarter, which equals the enterprise value of the other thing.

And so as long as you can get out of your head around like— because everyone, if you do this, everyone will tell you that you're crazy.

Everyone has told me that I was crazy every time I've done this.

And that's why also none of them are wealthier than I am.

You know, just like, like no one who is wealthier than me told me that.

So as long as you're good with it and you can just stomach the fact that your wife's like, you work so hard on this, and your dad's like, this is ridiculous, all the blood, sweat, and

tears and all this stuff, and you're like, I did this so I could learn all these skills and apply it here.

It was not a waste because I was the asset.

Thank you.