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Hey, this is Sharan Trivadsa. Welcome back to the Business School podcast. And in this episode, I'm going to take you behind the scenes and share with you something that probably no business owner, no entrepreneur, no CEO will ever share with you. And it's all centered around this one quote, which is most people only see the decisions you make, not the choices you have. And in this episode, I'm going to pull back the curtain on one of the biggest moves that we've made@acquisite.com and explain to you exactly why we made it on all step by step, starting right now. One thing is for certain, just because it's tried and true doesn't mean it's working right now. So the big question is this. Where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and the exact how to, how to grow your business, how to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth. That is the question. And this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharon Trivata and welcome to Business School. All right, I want to share something that honestly makes me a little uncomfortable to talk about. Not because it's bad. Actually, it's quite the opposite because I genuinely don't love sharing all of the stuff publicly because some stuff needs to stay private. But a lot of what I'm going to tell you, many of Our employees@acquisite.com haven't even heard of yet. And I'm sharing it with you in full detail because I think it's important for you to see the how things work behind the scenes of a fast growing business that may be appealing to you as well. So here's what we're doing. I'm going to peel back the onion and one of maybe the biggest move since we've ever made at acquisition.com, the behind the scenes decisions, the sequence of it, the why behind all of it. And you know, I always believed in sharing the real stuff. It's like there's no highlight reel, there's no, you know, sure, there's a press release somewhere, but the actual decisions that are happening in real time and how, how I'm going through them, and maybe that'll benefit you as well. So let me start with something that has been sitting with me lately to set the stage. There's a quote that I keep coming back to, which is people only see the decisions you make, not the choices you had. I'll say that again. People only see the decisions you made, not the choices you had. So think about that for A second. Every single successful person you've ever admired, every company that you've ever maybe studied, every leader that you've ever followed. You saw the outcome. You saw the decision, but you never saw the sequence of choices that actually got them there. You never saw the fear. You never saw the doubt. You never saw the aspiration. You never saw the ambition. You never saw the conversation at 11pm when someone said, are you actually sure about this thing? And then you wonder why your path feels harder than theirs. Look, you're like, how did that person make it? And it feels so simple. So here's what I've realized. And then nobody shows you the behind closed doors decisions. Nobody shows you the sequence of things that happen. And without seeing the sequence, you can't really learn from it. You can't really admire it. You can't really appreciate it. You can't really study it after the fact. You can't really use that learning in your life. So I'm gonna show you a little bit of the sequence. All right? So before I get into specifics, I wanna talk to you for a second about why I think this matters for you. Because I bet you're probably going through something similar right now. Maybe you're thinking about your next big move. Maybe you're wrestling with whether or not to make a certain investment. Maybe you want to bring on someone new into the business as an employee or a partner. Maybe you want to take the job. Maybe you want to ask that girl out. I don't know. All these decisions have the same shape of sorts. There's fear, there's shame, there's doubt. There's this little voice in your head that says, what if I'm wrong? It sounds, I will tell you, identical to whether you're making a multimillion dollar move or whether you're figuring out the next chapter, or whether you should, you know, stop living in New York and move to San Francisco. And when you watch someone else go through this in real time, I think something kind of shifts internally and gives you the courage, the confidence to be able to do that. So I actually think it gives you permission. Permission to make the hard call. Permission to bet on yourself when nobody else can see what you actually see yet. So that's why I'm doing this. So let me give you all the. Let me give you the tea, as they would say. So here's what's happening. At acquisition.com we are redesigning and evolving into a managing partner led model, where my partners, Alex, Leila and I are each going super deep on very specialized areas to build what I call a bigger and better future together. So as of this year, I'm stepping into the, you know, CEO role to execute our plan to build the private equity business model of the future. My bestie Layla is stepping into the role of executive chair with her focus on building a world class media machine for us and also deploying a lot of strategic investments that I will tell you about in a second. And many of you know, my partner Alex, Alex from Rosie is going to continue and honestly he's the money monster. He's going to lead the charge on building the operating money models, which is the title of his third book, the Guinness Book of World Record Book. Building the money models across our entire portfolio. We believe that this managing partner LED model, where Alex, Leila and I go deeper on the specialized areas is what's going to create a bigger and better future for us. Now I know this sounds, what makes it sound like outside? Oh, it sounds clean, it's tidy, it's obvious. But I will tell you the behind the scenes part of all of this. Last year in August, which is not that far ago, we made $106 million in 72 hours. The obvious move for us was making 100 plus million dollars in a weekend all without leaving our offices was an obvious move to kind of strike when the iron was hot to run that same play again to keep that momentum going. We could do that, but we did not do that. My partner, Layla was, you know, she, she is one of the times when I saw her at her true, you know, visionary form and she called it immediately, she said, hey, we're not doing another one of these until we build the infrastructure to support a something, something completely bigger. As to what comes next, and I will tell you that decision was very uncomfortable for everyone because that meant that we almost had to put our massive engine on pause to build capacity because growth only comes with capacity. And I will tell you what followed after that. The this was the most Constant, like our Q4, essentially the last four and a half months was the most concentrated period of what we are calling the organizational building that we have ever done. We doubled the size of our business, essentially we doubled the size of the headcount of our business. We brought on six new C suite executives in one single quarter. Like think about that for a second. We, we built a completely new C suite team where essentially Layla and I were running everything out of the six. Two of them came from inside the business that we promoted from within. Two of them came from our Personal network and two of them. We ran a full external search process to build out a six person, brand new executive team. And you need to know that why this matters. So you may be choosing. I know the scale and scope may be smaller or bigger than what you're looking for, but I want you to think about that. We just didn't look and say, we're just gonna promote our way out of this gap. We did not just hire our way out of one either. We did both at the same time with the same standard. And that's the behind the scenes version. Right. I want you to see that we actually had to pause the business to grow the business. And nothing hurts me more than hitting pause for a little bit. Now, of course, there was stuff that was running in the background when I say pause. We paused on new initiatives, we paused on the big ideas, we paused on new infrastructure, we paused on launching new companies, we paused on making new acquisitions, but we still did a bunch of things. But that pause was very material. That actually gave us a little bit of time and capacity to do the next thing. And so the big lesson for us here is I want to share with you that if you're planning on doing something big, you may want to figure out if you have the right capacity to do it. Otherwise, if you take this approach of I'm just going to figure it out as I go along, you're going to hit the roadblocks and not be able to live into that capacity. Right. So the reason this whole kind of redesign of re evolution of this trifecta makes sense is actually very simple. I'll tell you what that means. The bigger the vision, the more you need focused people fully in their zone of genius to make this come to life. I'll say that again if I can remember it. The bigger the vision, the more you need very focused people fully embedded and entrenched in their own zone of genius to make this come to life. When Alex and Layla and I were all touching everything, we were each brilliantly and individually involved, but we slowed each other down, right? Because anyone was doing, not that anyone was doing anything wrong, but every decision required us to context switch between the future and the present and the past and the money and the people and the infrastructure constantly. Which means none of us was doing either job as well as we thought it was deserved. So now the restructuring, the redesigning of this model makes it a lot of simple. One of us lives in the future and pulls it forward, thinking about what building towards that, what capital to deploy, what brands to Create what the next 10 to 25 years looks like. The other person stays today and moves as fast as possible to hit that three five year goal. Running the business, supporting the leadership team, hitting the targets, making, making the money work. And when you divide it that way, the both jobs get done. You actually get to live in the future and pull the future forward. You actually, then you, the other person gets to live in the present and drive towards the future. And it's very hard to accordion, as I like to say, accordion between the past and the future. It's very hard to do that in one person's head. Right. And I will tell you, the quality of the decisions that have come out of this is just the first few weeks is already, I would say, noticeably different because we are living in completely different timelines of the business which allows us to grow the business in record time. So think about how amazing that is. Like if I am growing the business, if I am growing, if there was a, if our business existed in a five year chunk and I was responsible for growing that chunk and then Layla was responsible for growing the 5 to 10 year chunk, we have two parts, two dimensions of our business that are growing simultaneously, which would never happen otherwise. So let me actually tell you what we're building because this is where it kind of gets genuinely exciting. This may be exciting for you because there may be a chance for us to work together in some way. So many five big things that we're working on right now. Number one, on the real estate side, we are building a billion dollar real estate portfolio in the next three years. We already have over 300ish million dollars worth of assets in 14 plus properties, over 3,500 multifamily units. And we're actively growing that. In fact we're doing this on the Layla brand. And so we're building a brand new class A multifamily experience under the Layla brand in the southeastern United States. So super excited for that. And I want you to be clear about like what makes this different, right? We're not just going out and buying some single family homes and housing. We are running the business of multifamily, the very, you know, operating system and the philosophy and the tools and tactics and frameworks that build acquisition.com and what we teach our portfolio companies are what we're applying to property management, to tenant experience, to brand building. So we're overlaying our business ideas on top of a real estate asset, which literally has never been done before. There is no brand in the residential real estate business. It actually means something to people living in it. And we are building that brand, which is the Layla. So if you are interested, you can actually go to our site and look at ACQ Re, which is ACQ Real Estate and ACQ Re dot. You know, acquisition.com I believe we're thinking about. We may be inviting our network, which is maybe all of you to co invest with us. If that is interesting, do go take a look now so that as and when we open it up, you may be the first one on the vm. All right, cool. Number two, we are rebuilding our business to be AI first. And I want to be specific here because it's not what you think. It's not. We're not getting people to use more AI. That's not the answer. We are. We realize that people were. All the people on our team were trained differently. And we have to go super hard to level up every single person inside our business to become AI first. Otherwise different people are going to be starting to think differently. If AI is the default starting point, not a tool that you add on top of what you're, what you're doing. Everyone thinks AI right now is a chatgpt or a cloud chatbot where you ask it questions like that is not the answer. There is, there's the. The era of autonomous agents is here. And each person deploying a team of autonomous autonomous agents is important, but no one knows how to do it and we can't teach it in. In a haphazard way. Every single person in our organization needs to be thinking AI first. So the question I'm like personally obsessed with right now is not how do we use AI to replace work? It' do we use AI to make every single person on our team meaningfully better at what they do and happier at what they do? Right. That means that the entire organization skill set needs to have a new baseline right now. If everyone was, you know, I don't even think most organizations have basic understanding of using a chatbot. We want to level up the entire organization to a completely new baseline. If not, we will never win. So that's definitely number two, AI first on my mind. Hey, if you have done anything like this for like teaching an AI first principle to any business, just hit me up. I'd love to talk to you about it. Number three, I'm really excited to just kind of give you a sneak peek into a book that Layla's writing. Layla's writing a book on all the leadership lessons learned from building the business. And I want to be like ultra specific and precise about what this book actually is because it is not a business book in the traditional sense. It is like I work with Layla every day. It is the 10 plus years of how the decision she's made, the things we think about, the hires, the fires, the builds, the culture, the complexity, how you lead to certainty, like a formula that you can use. And in fact, the main reason we are doing this is actually for ourselves. And I explain what that means. I've been close enough to see how she does it and I will tell you, she's the best of the best. And a lot of this is what we are doing with our own teams. And what, what we are super excited about is where the book is being written as an operating manual for acquisition.com and all our portfolio companies. So we're going to train our teams on this, which means if we can do that, then it's probably good enough for at least in part to you as well. So that's big, big. Number three, which Leila's book is coming, I think that's going to be awesome. But number four, I'm sorry, part number four, we are moving to this house of brands idea. And so if you think about, you know, this, this big idea, what you know, we're calling Disney a business. You have Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy. All you have the house of brands. And that house of brands powers this, this entire flywheel of the business that we have. Which is why we brought on a new Chief Media Officer. And you'll hear about him soon. He's a total badass. And here's the first frame I want you to think about. Most people building a personal brand are focused on content. The posts, the videos, the followers, the reach that is literally the character at play. What they're not building is the infrastructure that makes the characters actually last and get monetized over time. I want you to think about this. I don't know if you know the story of. I'm a big Disney fan, by the way. The Walt Disney originally built this main character was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Universal stole Oswald from Walt Disney and that whole character crashed. But Oswald at that time was a fan favorite. So was Betty Boop and Mighty Mouse and Woody Woodpecker. They were fan favorites during their times. But why is, you know, a Woody Woodpecker not as famous as Mickey Mouse? And the answer is one thing and one thing alone, which is the infrastructure. Disney. Think about how Disney, Walt Disney sketched Mickey Mouse on a train ride home. He didn't just create a new character. He Realized that he never wanted his character to be lost to a universal, some other studio ever again. So he built a machine that made Mickey Mouse, the character last forever. The studio, the distribution, the licensing, the parks, the flywheel, the, the churros on the stand, like every single thing that happens was built in to serve that. Getting the character to our homes and to our lives and on the T shirts of our children, like that was what was amazing. If the character gets people's attention, if that is the job of the character, then the job of the machine is to ensure that it never stops. The job of the machine is to get the longevity of it. Overall, we are very fortunate to have three very strong personal brands in our space right now. Like we've got the three canons and what we're building underneath them, which is essentially my job is this machine. And so you're going to see some genuinely insane approaches to content and show formats that Alex, Leila and me and plus some surprises that have never seen coming. I will tell you this. The world needs way more than a carousel or a reel. The world needs way more than an Instagram live. Like, we've got to do better because content is evolving so fast that we have to step forward. So that is like a big, big thing that's coming. I've saved the best for the last or an important thing for the last. And I haven't talked about this publicly, which maybe I'll do a separate episode on. This is this idea of category kings. One of the things that we've been thinking about is how, what is our commitment for the next 10 to 20 years? So we've made a commitment to build the next batch of category kings. Well, what does that mean? We are going to buy, build, investor, partner to create a dominant company in each market segment that we enter. Now clearly we can't do a hundred of these and we definitely don't want to, but we have like our focus and our eyes set on a very specific few industries, very specific few markets. And we're going to point the entire media machine and the operational infrastructure of acquisition.com directly at these partnerships and we will make them category kings. Because when you have so much focus of what Alex calls the debt star focused on, you know, creating so much media and operational excellence in one or two category defining businesses, we get to win really big. So our we are really, really focused over the next, you know, call it 10 to 20 years of building a handful of category kings that will be powered by acquisition.com, by the way, if you believe that you are building, designing, creating a category king watch for our next announcement. It will tell you exactly how to, how to maybe get involved with all that. So here's what I kind of want to leave you with. I've been very lucky. I got to build $2 billion companies and I missed while I was in it, in the trenches, I missed documenting this journey as I went along. All the lessons and the struggles and the celebrations and the trials and tribulations, they lived in my head and maybe on like a random social post with a story or something like that. And honestly, looking back, that was my biggest regret. I've forgotten the lessons myself, let alone sharing them with you. And that's why I started writing, that's why I started. If you're not watching my substack called the Next Billion. It's literally the story of how we are building the next billion dollar enterprise. And so I really believe that when you can watch something unfold, when I can tell you the story of the strategies, the tactics and the moves that we're making and understand the why behind each one, I really think something kind of translates and clicks for each one of us. It clicks for me, maybe it'll click for you. While the size and scope may not be bigger or smaller than what working on, you get to see the decision making process. You start to understand not just what we did or what we're doing, but how that may apply to something in your own life and in your own situation. And it may or may not, but at least you can see that there's a lot of thought going into all of this and that's what I really hope. I believe that you're probably facing some version of the same decisions that we are facing right now. And my hope is that watching us go through it, seeing how we're sharing about it, watching the sequence of us rolling this out, seeing the fear that is real and moving and making the moves still gets made, gives you the little bit more clarity and a little bit more courage for you to make that big decision for yourself too. So that is the reason I'm doing this. So hope this was helpful to you. Excited for the three brand domination to come your way, excited to build some category kings, excited to maybe have you co invest in real estate with us. So this was my way of maybe sharing with you what that I haven't even shared with a lot of other people on our team. So hopefully this is helpful to you. Hey, if you like this, can you do me a favor, can you screenshot this and tag me. That way I can kind of make more of this genre for you. So if you like this, please do me a favor, screenshot this and tag me and I can make more like this for you. Hey, this is Sharon. I have an awesome free gift for for you just for listening to the podcast. As you may know, I've got a chance to build two billion dollar companies the hard way. So if you like this episode, you will love getting the exact playbooks from those wins. It's on my sub stack called My Next Billion. It has the exact frameworks I wish someone had given me when I was figuring it all out. Now you get the real lessons from the trenches as I go for a three peat and build the next billion. So everything's free at mynextbillion.com please check it out mynextbillion.com.