Transcript

3 Stages of Building a Personal Brand | Ep 993

0:00 What makes someone dangerous is not how much they work, but how much work they do. And so in this video, I'll show you the same process that I used to build our portfolio companies that generate over$250 million a year and more recently broke the world record for the fast selling nonfiction book of all time. uh doing 106 million dollars in a weekend. And so there's one main takeaway I want, which is that you don't need to do more. You need to actually get the big stuff done. And so my favorite question to ask myself at the beginning of the year is if I could make only one thing happen this year. That if it occurred. would cause the remainder of my goals to become accomplished or relevant by consequence.

0:31 What would that one thing be? And the answer to that question becomes my priority. And I'll define priority as the thing that comes before priority. Right? It's from Latin, which means before. And so it has to come first. And where people make mistakes is that priorities As a plural only happened in the nineteen fifties and beyond. So for the rest of human history, priority was only done as a singular word. But because people bastardized things and because no one can make decisions, they made it priority. But you need a priority.

1:00 And how you allocate your resources to accomplish your priority becomes For strategy. And so people fail to succeed at business because they are unwilling to make trade-offs. They're unwilling to make a priority rather than priorities. And as a result, they make the largest trade-off of all, which is they never accomplished the most important thing. And so please do not be like most business owners and perhaps most people and have another mediocre year ahead of you. Because you were unwilling to make trades.

1:26 And so this year, my single largest objective is to get more brand credibility across the established legacy media channels. Right. And so if that occurs, the remainder of my goals uh become accomplished by consequence. And so, for example, my book launch, which doubled the world record. Had no real press. We didn't receive a New York Times bestseller, and to be clear, I went in knowing that that would they wouldn't award it for that.

1:48 But I use this as an example of what's missing from my brand per se. And I believe that if I make this change, many of my sub goals would get accomplished by consequence. And so this is my full focus beyond the regular blocking and tackling of business. And so what's interesting is I can look back at my career over, I guess, the last thirteen years since or 14 years since I've been in business, and I actually can tell you what each of my objectives was of uh for each of those years. And I thought thought it would probably be pretty cool because for those of you either starting or if you're much further along, you can catch up to where I was at at your specific stage and at least see the the caliber of the goals and how how how short they are. So let's start at the beginning, but I want to I want to link each of these goals to the next goal. So my first goal 2010 when I was in college was to get a good consulting job.

2:32 And so that was the only goal for the year. All I did was in service of that goal and I ended up getting it. And so once I got the consulting job, my next year's goal, 2011, was to ace the GMAT. Why did I want to ace the GMAT? Because I thought I was going to get into business school, that's what I wanted to do. And so that was my priority. I did ace the G Mat. And then in Ace in the G Mat.

2:49 I uh realized that I didn't want to get into business school to start a business. I just wanted to start a business. And so the next year's goal was to quit my job and start a fitness business. And so That's what I did. And so then once I started my business, it didn't make that much money. And so in twenty thirteen, my goal was Make the gym make more money. That was it.

3:06 And so then when I made the gym make more money in twenty fourteen, my goal was open a second third locations. So once I opened my second and tw third locations in 2014, my goal was get to 10 locations by 2015. So in 2015, I got to six and then realized that there was a better version of the model, which was launching other people's gyms. And so that's what I decided to pivot towards. And then in 2016, my goal was launch other people's gyms and sell my own. And you might think, wait, isn't that too Priorities. No, It wasn't because I had to sell my gym in order to launch other people's gyms.

3:37 So that's exactly what I did. And then twenty seventeen I now had this gym launching business, but it wasn't making the money that I thought, and I've talked about this story at length. But My objective then was, okay, fix the gym lunch money model. And that was the whole goal for the year. If I could just make this thing, make money, this thing could be awesome.

3:53 twenty eighteen comes along and that's what I did. It was scale the gym launch to two million dollars a month. That was my goal for twenty eighteen. So then we scaled the gym launch business to two two million dollars a month. In twenty nineteen, it was like okay, great, we have this business. I wanted to solved revenue retention. So I thought that selling physical products through that base would do that. So I launched Prestige Labs, our summon company. The first month we did one point seven million a month, we kind of coasted about one and a half million a month, kind of like for the foreseeable. Real quick, I'm gonna show you the exact ten stage roadmap from zero

4:21 to a hundred milyen plus That less than one percent 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 eight 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. Service businesses, brick and mortar.

4:46 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 forward slash roadmap. Just enter info and it'll spit it right back to you all free. Twenty twenty.

4:56 My goal going to this is now that I had this large business, I was like, I'm gonna sell Jim Watch Prestige Laps. And that was a hundred percent the goal. Then this thing called COVID happened unfortunately, uh, and it interfered, but my goal remained the same. So in twenty twenty one, my goal was The same goal as twenty twenty,'cause I hadn't done it. sell Jim Launch and Prestige Labs. And so at the end of twenty twenty one, december twenty fourth,

5:16 Christmas Eve. Just got it done by the end of the year. And so Twenty twenty two. I had this sale, I had this extra cash, and so I was like, Okay.

5:25 I need to figure out Acquisition.com's investing model, because I started acquisition.com the day after I sold Chim Lunch. Um and so twenty twenty two was all dedicated to figuring out the model. We did a bunch of different early models of minority, majority, the large minority, like we did a bunch of different stuff to figure out our model. Twenty twenty three was Build My Brand on social media. Twenty twenty three was a year of just like hardcore, doubling down on social and really kind of like. Going pro, if you will. What I did that

5:49 Got much bigger. And I launched My. First big watch book. Right. I obviously published this book earlier.

5:57 But the launch that year was all based on building the social media brand. And The book launch itself was in service of building the brand. I basically just gave everything away for free at my launch, and so all it did was build the brand. That was the goal. Once I had the brand, uh obviously a brand is thing it's it's it's like a garden, you maintain it, you don't really build it and it's done, but you have to constantly maintain it. But once I had begun that process, the twenty twenty four, my goal was to launch the advisory practice. And so

6:23 That's a huge undertaking, especially if you have millions and millions of people who follow and want to, you know, get Work done on their business. And so that took a huge amount of infrastructure. I think right now our advisor practice has 175 employees. So pretty big. And so we launched that in twenty twenty four. In twenty twenty five.

6:39 I had enough bandwidth. I wanna have a big brand moment. And so the goal there was to break the Guinness World Record. of uh nonfiction book sales in a weekend.

6:51 And That's what I did in twenty twenty five. And twenty twenty six, I shared earlier that my goal right now is to redouble down, but specifically in a different Uh domain around I'll call it legacy or traditional media.

7:05 Because I think right now that's a I'll take called a hole. within or deficiency within our existing brand. And so I'm gonna do obviously different things in order to accomplish that, but that's kind of my big that's my big thing for the year. And I've got big plants in order to do that. So you guys will see what happens there. But I think what I want to demonstrate with each of those is that If you can't think

7:25 Back over the last ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, however old you are, right? A hundred years, who knows? What is the one thing that if I just do that one thing, everything else gets accomplished? That will give you the focus that you need to be able to say no to everything else. Because the the reality is that you have a very limited amount of resources. And so This question is arguably the most strategic question in business. And so like what is strategy, anyways, right? Strategy is the curation.

7:48 And prioritization. of opportunities. So what does that mean? So the curation of opportunity means you have to see all the potential things you could potentially do. Then you have this big list of ideas, this stuff. And then you have to say, okay, of all of this big universe of things I could potentially do, which of these things will I actually do, which is a prioritization.

8:04 And so those two activities are strategy. People try to call it all these amorphous things, they have these really cock meany definitions for it, but that is all it is. And so My My My two cents for what it's worth, and that's probably all it's worth. You'll have some ultimate vision of what you want to happen in reality. Like what do you want to make happen long term? But the vast majority of those things take steps, and many of those steps are not clear. And so let's say we want to build the most trusted brand in business. So in order to do that,

8:29 Like, how am I going to become the most trusted branded business unless I have a massive business? Like it's you just can't. Like I have to build a very large business in order to do it. Why do I and so that you might ask the follow-up question, like, why do you even want to build the most trusted branded business? Mostly because business is the thing that I enjoy doing the most. And so I also get excited by big goals because small goals are not very energizing. And so I might as well go after something big. And I think Steven Schwartzman, his book, uh he's the um Thunder of Blackstone? He said this line that I I I really took to heart. He said big goals. and small goals.

8:58 Take the same amount of work. And so it's a poor investment of resources to go after small goals because Uh and Naval has a a different version of this, which is like it's just as hard to run a successful restaurant as it is to build a billion dollar startup. It's still gonna take you eighty hours a week. He's like so it's actually it's like it's like going all in on a vehicle, like in it from an investment perspective. It's like going all in on a vehicle that has a very capped.

9:20 Yeah. Not to say that restaurants have a capped upside. I mean it's significantly harder to scale. They're much more operationally complex, et cetera, et cetera. But It's a poor use of resources. And so that is fundamentally strategy. And so his his his take of setting big goals is actually a strategic bet. And so a different investor called Bill Gurney.

9:39 Uh, he's a venture venture guy. Said, listen, if I lose a million dollars, he said, I can only lose a million dollars once. He said, But if I don't invest in Google, At their seed round. I lose the million dollars. Hundreds of times.

9:51 After that. Right. And so people wildly underestimate the upside and wildly overestimate the downside when they're setting these types of goals. And so I think we need to be very big in terms of what we want to do, but in terms of how do we accomplish that thing, how far out do you look? And I think the simple answer is as far as you can see. And What I mean by that is like if you have let's say let's say you have this big goal.

10:13 But you still need to pay rent. Right. Well as far as you can see is until you're near your next rent check. Right. So it's like you gotta get that solved. Before you can really think too far in advance. Right. Once you get all your rent checks solved for the next six months, you can start thinking six months in advance, right? All your rent checks solved for a year. And then eventually you get all your personal needs solved, then you're like, great, now I've got my business needs, and you start solving those, which is why I'm such a big advocate of like you want to save aggressively, not because you don't want to live life, but because you want to make big bets. Like I

10:39 I've always lived on significantly less than I make. Because I want to go on offense. I want to be able to save My swing for the bit like the fat pitch that comes. Right, I don't want to swing at every ball. So I have to save my swings. Now, obviously that analogy breaks is you only have you know

10:54 You can technically swing forever in baseball, but in business and life, you only have a certain amount of years, you only have a certain amount of money. Uh and so You want to make sure that your swings count. There is some amount of faith that you have to have. in the fact that like future me is gonna figure this out. And I don't know if I can transfer that well. I think that like

11:11 You make that you have to make that first bet one time and then see yourself figure it out. So you can put more and more on future you of like, I don't know how I'm gonna get there, but I know I'm not gonna stop until I do. And I think having that level of faith does come from doing small things early that progressively get bigger and bigger bets on yourself. But A a concurrent theme. um that I continue to hear, and I would say that I believe strongly myself is that like

11:33 You need to go all in on you. And because one, no one else is going to, and two, you're gonna get the highest returns that way. Only you know if your goals are realistic, and only time will tell if you're right. And so like if anyone else says like make your girls realistic, I was like No no I'm not gonna make'realistic for you, make'em realistic for me. And as a rule of thumb, never listen to someone's advice. Whose dreams for your life.

11:54 Are smaller than yours.