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This is probably one of my favorite Alex Hormosi frameworks. This was a really great tip from Layla. This was probably one of the biggest moments for us at the event. That was another, like, brain breaking moment for me. This was, I think, the big takeaway. Although I've probably said that 10 times. I mean, shocking. I spent $5,000 and my business partner spent $5,000. So together we spent $10,000 going to Alex and Layla Hormozi's business workshop at their acquisition.com headquarters in Las Vegas. A ton of fun. We stayed at the Wynn Hotel. It was great. And in this video, I'm going to do a review of the event. So if you're thinking about going, you know what to expect. And then I'm also going to share some of our biggest takeaways as we think about doubling our business. So the reason that we chose to go is because last year we did around $6 million in annual revenue. We want to get to 12. And so that was the big question going to this event is how do we double from here? Now, quick review of the event. If you're thinking about going. All right, I already said it. The cost is $5,000. If you and your business partner want to go, you each pay 5,000 dol. And my overwhelming feedback is it was incredibly worth it. I have been to a bunch of different events over the years. I've gone to a ton of different Masterminds. I've done big, you know, they rent out a whole hotel Mastermind experience. And I've also done small 10, you know, 10, 12 people in someone's living room. Mastermind. I've done all sorts of stuff over the past decade being an entrepreneur, and I thought it was incredibly well done. Their attention to detail was 10 out of 10. And one of the coolest parts about the event for me was that you didn't just get to learn from Alex and Layla. You got to learn from their whole portfolio team. And I think a lot of people might perceive that as a negative. You know, it's like, oh, I only listened to Alex speak for an hour, two hours each day, which he did. I saw that as a tremendous positive. And my biggest takeaway from that was I thought it was so cool how each person on their team gave a presentation in the same way and same style and same format that Alex does and frequently does on YouTube and does in person whenever he's giving presentations. He found a way to systematize what he does, and then he just deployed it to different team members, all of whom have different skill sets and different areas of expertise. And just observing that was worth the money. I thought it was fascinating and in many ways it gave me the permission as a founder and as a business partner, gave me permission to ask the question, well, why can't I do that inside my own company, right? I thought it was really, really cool. Second, very small detail. I've been to a lot of events and fun fact, I have celiac disease, I have a bunch of food allergies, I'm allergic to gluten, I'm allergic to dairy, I'm allergic to soy, I'm allergic to everything besides air, vegetables and chicken and steak, basically. And every time I go to these events, I often have a very hard time with them because, you know, the events are packed all day. You've got speakers and you've got presentations, and then they give you like a quick break for lunch. And then for lunch they're like, and here's pizza. And for someone like me, that poses a problem, right? Because I can't eat any of the food and something, you know, I don't know that I expected this. Obviously, like, Alex and Layla are both healthy people, but a very cool detail of the event was not only did they have a, a full catered lunch and they had breakfast and the first day they had like bites near dinner, but not only did they have a full catered, great food, like not your cheap takeout, just really well done food, but they also had allergen free options, really good allergen free options. And everything was labeled. And again, that goes back to attention to detail. Every part of the event was attention to detail. Everywhere you looked, like the moment you had a question, the question was already answered for you. The moment where you were like, oh, I wonder where I go for there was already a assigned, there was already someone directing you there. There was a tremendous amount of attention to detail. And again, one of the bigger meta takeaways for me was observing that attention to detail and asking myself, how can I incorporate that into everything that we do? How can we be more attentive to those little details? Third, thing I want to mention, just reviewing the event for you is at the end of both days, Alex made himself available to just stand there and answer people's questions. And he stood there and answered questions until everyone was done. And a lot of the questions, just as I was listening were questions that other people had basically already asked throughout the day. It's just each person wanted to ask it themselves. And observing his level of patience and his ability to say the same thing, just in a slightly different way for that different person, that is an art, and that is very difficult. And oftentimes, the value of these types of events, it's not that you're hearing something completely novel. In many times you're hearing something that you've heard before. There's just a difference, and you internalize it differently when it's said to you. And I observe this in our own writing programs as well. Like, I know I've answered the question in the curriculum. I know that we have videos where I talk about the same thing. I know that I have YouTube content where I talk about the same thing. I know I've answered the question before. But a lot of the value for the person is when they come up, they do a hot seat and I answer their question. It's the same question everyone else has already asked. But I answer their question to them, for them. And there's something about that where you hear it differently. And so it's really interesting where I can observe that as the teacher or the founder of a program where I'm helping other people. But I also see it in reverse where I go to an event and I need someone to do the same thing with me. I need to hear it directly in order to go, oh, you're right, that is what we should do. So I just felt like they did a really good job of making sure that each person felt like they got their question answered. And the last thing that I want to say on just the event as a whole is the big focus that they really put was identifying the key constraint of your business. I feel like if your business is under a million dollars a year, you're not going to get as much value out of this, specifically this event with them, as if you're. You were to be doing more than a million. And the reason I think that is is because under a million a year, you have so many options. You have so many things that you could do that would move the needle. That really the path forward is keep experimenting. And anything that shows a little bit of promise, like, however you generated that a hundred K last year or that 200 K, you should probably just do that more, because you don't need to do that many different things. You just need to do one or two things really well consistently, and you'll get to a million a year. The reason that we get a ton of value out of an event like this or other people in the room that were at similar maybe a little less, maybe a little more revenue stages is because the more revenue that you're doing in a given year, the fewer and fewer options that you have. Right. When you're making $0, everything is an option. When you're making a million dollars a year, fewer things are an option. When you're making 5 million a year, even fewer things are an option. Right? And that's where you're able to start having a nuanced conversation. And so I was thinking about other people in my life who I would recommend go to this event. And I noticed how friends of mine that I know are more solopreneurs, and maybe they're doing, you know, 100k, 200k, 300k a year. I don't know that they would get a ton of value out of something like this. I'm sure that they would get some value, but probably not as much as maybe some of my other friends who have a business that's doing a million, 2 million, 3 million, 4 million, 5 million a year, you're going to get more value out of that. So I just wanted to give that context in general. 10 out of 10 event, I learned a ton. It was really cool. Met a bunch of cool people, extremely well run. I got a ton of nuggets just on running events by observing the event and being part of it. So if you're on the fence and thinking about it, I think no brainer, you should do it. The asterisk that I would put next to that is I would strongly recommend going once your business is above a million a year. I think that's when you're going to get the most value out of it. Now, that said, there were people there who had businesses in the 100k, 200k, 300k, 500k a year. They got a ton of value, too. This is just my personal recommendation. Okay, now here are some of the biggest takeaways that I had from this event, Specifically how I'm thinking about our business and the decisions that we need to make moving forward. Chances are all of these takeaways are things that you could also generalize for yourself, But I'm going to talk about them in the context of our business, and you should just draw the parallel. All right, so takeaway number one is you should take out as much cash as you need to from your business to feel secure personally so that you can take more risk inside your business. So let me give the context of this takeaway. The context is someone asked the question, as your business is growing, how do you think about pulling cash out? And are there certain amounts of money that you should pull out at each level. And how do you think about leaving money in the business versus taking it out? And I think it was Layla who answered this, and the way that she put it was really great. Which is your business is where you are the most risk on, you know, running a business is more volatile and more risky than buying bitcoin, than buying the most volatile stock, than doing pretty much anything, right? Because it's dependent on the decisions that you make. And so you're either right or you're wrong, you know, and there's a, there's a heightened level of risk in that. And so her point was you're already high risk by being a business owner. And so the way that you want to think about cash is you want to take cash out to de risk your personal life so that you can continue taking risks inside your business. This one really hit home because this was arguably the biggest mistake that I made building my first company. My first company was a ghostwriting agency. I had been ghostwriting on my own for about a year in 2016, then I teamed up with a friend, started, you know, scaling it into an agency in 2017. We ran it for three years and in about the first 18 months we went. We went from $0 in revenue, just me and him sitting on his couch in his apartment, to having 2223 full time employees doing north of $180,000 per month in revenue. We had like 100 clients at the time or something like that. And we grew so quickly and we had so much demand for our service that every single month we basically took the profit of that month and then poured it back into hiring the next two people to anticipate the demand of the next month. And that seemed like a really smart decision. For about 11 months in a row, my co founder and I, we didn't take more money out of the business. We didn't make more money personally. But the business kept growing and growing and growing and we just kept taking those profits and basically preemptively hiring the next two people that we thought we would need because we had the demand, right? And the problem with that is eventually 11, 12, 13 months later, our payroll was so big and we hadn't really paused and gotten all our systems up to speed to support the amount of capacity that we now had, right? We had all these writers, we had all these editors that we needed to generate a certain amount of new business in order to sustain the payroll that we had burdened ourselves with. And then eventually Churn started outpacing our growth. And then it started going the other direction. And for a lot of my time running that business, at the end we fixed some things and then we ended up taking some money off the table, which was nice, but the majority of my running that business, we took $0 out of that company. We reinvested everything. And a lot of the times me and my co founder felt really financially stressed. We both had like five grand in our personal savings. So our business was max risk 100 out of 100. Right. And our personal lives were not de risked. And so a lot of the stress that I felt during that chapter was being afraid that the business was going to take a turn, which it eventually did. And that personally I didn't have any cushion, I didn't have any safety net. And so Layla's whole point is the way you think about cash. This took me a very long time to learn. I made this mistake big time. Her whole point was that you want to think about cash as, yes, take risk inside the business, but you also want to take chips off the table so that you de risk your personal life. And that was one of those moments where hearing her say that in the way that she said it this many years later, I just sat there in the event and I was like, man, I wish I had heard this eight years ago because I would have made so much more money. Takeaway number two, above 5 million a year in revenue. You don't bootstrap departments anymore. You hire subject matter experts who then build that department again. Seems very simple, but it's not. It's easy to understand, but it's actually really hard to execute. And let me explain why. So I've been a bootstrapper for 10 years now. I've started multiple companies. I've generated millions of dollars. I think at the time of recording this, I've probably generated over $20 million in top line revenue across different businesses over, over the past decade. And I am very used to, whenever I look at a problem, my assumption is that I need to be the one to solve it. I need to be the one to build the thing. And in the beginning that's true. Right. When it's just you, that is what you do because you don't have anybody else, it's just you. And then as you start going along, right, there's different levels of maturity in each business. The people that you hire in the beginning typically are not department heads. You know, if you have a two or three or four person team, you're probably not going to jump to, you know, I'm going to go hire a sales director and build my whole sales team, or I'm going to hire a success manager and they're going to build our entire success department. Right. Usually what happens is that you're still entrenched in these various roles and you start hiring people that help you. Right? They make your life maybe a little more efficient or they take a couple things off your plate, but you're still in many ways the builder or the manager, but around 5 million a year. And we really felt this. This past year, what starts to happen is that the team grows to a point where it almost becomes impossible for you to play all these different roles. And so you start hiring out of necessity. And I've had. I had this feeling a lot this past year where I felt like at any given time or in any given day, there were so many things that needed to be done and there were so many things that I could do. And it was a challenge for me to feel like I was making progress because I needed to do so many different things. I was talking about this with my business partner, Dickie, and we were both sort of feeling this way, and we were both trying to identify, like, what's the solution to that? And so we went to this event, we chatted with Alex and Layla, but really we chatted with one of their portfolio team members about this. And we were explaining some of the issues that we were feeling and sort of uncertainty on which hires to make next. And we said something, and I forget what it was, but it was just a subtle, like, we're telling you about our business. Here's some context. And the person said back to us. And they were like, oh, yeah, you're not supposed to do that anymore. And. And both Dickie and I were like, what? What? What do you mean? And he was like, yeah, this isn't on you anymore. You. You're past that point. You have the cash flow now you go hire someone, and it's probably going to be your most expensive hire yet, and they're going to build it for you. And it sort of unlocked this new way of thinking for me where I realized that despite having built multiple different companies up to this point, I had never really reached a point where I was hiring someone who knew more about an entire vertical than I did. I was always the smartest person in the room, in the company. And then as I went down this rabbit hole further, it made me realize. And the way that Alex put this, I thought was so great, whereas he said the theoretical Constraint of a business is the sum total of knowledge of the people in that business. And so a different way of saying that is, if you're the smartest person in your business, your business is only going to grow up to your own capacity. And I think in the beginning or especially when you're younger, that sounds really cool. And then as I've gotten older, I'm like, that's stupid. I shouldn't be the smartest person in the business. And I'm using that flagrantly to symbolize the point, because we have a lot of very smart people in our company. But there is a difference between hiring someone to help you with something versus looking at a problem or looking at an opportunity and going, yeah, sure, I could spend 100 hours and I could figure it out. I'm capable. But why I should just go hire someone who actually knows how to do that and has done that before. And in many ways, I am buying their years of experience, and I'm adding that to the sum total of knowledge in our company. And so this was a really big one. Again, it sounds so simple, but it helped me, I think, better understand a lot of the feelings that I was feeling building our business this past year, where I felt like I was not able to make as much progress in any one direction. And part of why that was happening was because I hadn't yet realized that I was the bottleneck. And that the way that you. You start growing above 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 million a year is you can't be the one to build everything anymore. You have to go find people to build things for you and in many ways, know more than you do. All right, takeaway number three. Before you change anything in your business, you should test it. Shocking. What this means and where this came from was Alex was talking about how oftentimes, whenever you're thinking of changing something, the impulse is to roll it out to everyone. So, for example, if you're thinking about changing the pricing, you think, well, we're going to change our pricing page. And so every person who buys is going to see this new pricing. And his point. I thought this was an incredibly nuanced point that I really appreciated. Anytime you change anything, even if you think or in many ways, you know, you're like 99% chance this is a net positive change. There is still an element of risk associated with it. And so when you have a business, it's like an engine, and the engine's running, you know, and no matter what you do, you're like, oh, I unplugged that for a second. No matter what you do, you are adding in some level of risk. And so you don't really want to put the entire machine at risk. What you want to do is you want to find a way to isolate the risk and then decide whether or not you should implement it and roll it out to the entire machine. Right. So for pricing, instead of changing the pricing page or telling everyone we're changing our pricing, you should maybe find a segment of your customers that you could test that on, send that segment an email. Maybe it's just 10% of people, and then you say to them, hey, actually it's this amount instead. And then you gauge the feedback. Right? Very different way of going about it. This dovetails into takeaway number four, which is. And when you do change something, you should expect a 20% decline in the short term. So the reason for that is because even if something is a net positive change, chances are there's almost always some sort of infrastructure change that needs to happen in order to fully implement it. So I'll give you a really simple example. Inside our business, you know, our premium Ghost training academy costs a certain amount every single time that someone buys it triggers all sorts of different zaps like automations inside our business. And it's connected to the contract that we send them, and it's connected to the Slack channel that we set up for them. And it's connected to all sorts of different things. And so if you just go change the pricing, you realize that all of a sudden, yeah, that change in and of itself affects like 10 other things. And so in the short term, like, even, even if it's a net positive change on the surface, underneath it are a bunch of things that are also going to need to get updated and probably are going to break in the process. So it's important that whenever you're changing something in your business, you also sort of mentally earmark and go, okay, but this is going to take some time to fully implement. And so in the short term, probably for the next 30 days, we actually might see a dip. We might see a dip in efficiency, we might see a bunch of other things break that we didn't even know we're going to break. We might have to spend a lot more time internally working on improving this than we originally thought. Right. So whenever you change something, there's almost always this little dip. And you could play that out further and say the larger the change, probably the deeper and longer the dip. Right. It's going to have a larger impact on the business and it might take longer to solve, but then it comes back and then it ultimately is net positive. Right? But I think a mistake, and again, I appreciated them pointing this out because a mistake that I've often made is I would make a tweak in some part of the business, it would lead to that little decline, and then I would assume, oh, wait, this was the wrong decision and not necessarily right. Just because something declines by 10, 20% in the short term doesn't mean that it was the wrong decision. You just probably weren't aware of all the other variables that it was going to implement. Impact. Okay, takeaway number five. There's a difference between continuity and back end upsell. So I thought this was a really cool nuance. If you're in the education space, if you sell digital products at all, this is going to be really helpful for you. It certainly was for me. So the difference is a continuity offer is where someone buys something on the front end. It could be a low ticket digital product, it could be a high ticket group coaching program, doesn't matter. They buy something on the front end and then the continuity is you basically resell them on continued access to the thing that they already bought. Okay, so very easy example. Someone buys an online course from you and instead of buying lifetime access, they get access for a year. Continuity would be. Then after that, you know, at the end of 12 months, you go and you can have, you can have continued access to this for 99 bucks a year. Right? So now they're on some sort of subscription. And the nuance, and why this is so important is because what's happening is you are monetizing continued access. Okay. Which is different than an additional backend upsell. And a backend upsell typically is more or a slightly different version of the thing that they've already bought. Okay? So they buy some sort of digital product on the front end, they buy an online course, maybe they go through a coaching program, whatever. Coaching program's an easy example. And then when they're finished with the coaching program, say it's 12 weeks or 16 weeks or whatever it is, instead of selling them continuity, which is continued access to the thing that they already bought, you sell them more of the thing that they don't have full access to anymore, which would be maybe additional coaching. So at the end of the 16 weeks, your coaching is done. Would you like more coaching? That's the backend upsell. Right. And I thought that this distinction was really helpful because we've been working through and just thinking through our backend offer for pga, our premium Ghost training academy. And oftentimes now, in hindsight, I would notice myself using these words continuity and backend interchangeably. And it wasn't until we went to this event that someone pointed it out to me and said, actually, those are two very different things. They promise different things, and they also are different business models. There's different ways of thinking about them. And so I thought that distinction was really helpful. Wanted to pass along to you if you're in the digital product space. And also, like, for us, just made us realize, oh, we don't actually want a continuity. We want a true backend upsell. So it gave us some clarity there. All right, Takeaway six strategy is how you choose to allocate your limited resources against unlimited options. So this is something I've probably heard Alex say 50 times at this point. Hearing it in person made it click a little differently. Sometimes that's just what needs to happen. A mistake that I think I've made in the past whenever I'm thinking about, you know, what's the right thing to do or what's the next thing to do is I'll start with a blank slate and almost ask myself the question, well, what are all the things that I could do? And I've learned that that's actually the wrong way to think about it. And this is a great way of summarizing why that's the wrong way to think about it. Because the truth is, not everything is an option. Most of your options, if not all of your options, are constrained first by your available resources, whether that's time, energy, attention, money, whatever it is. And so you don't really want to start from a place of what's everything I can do. You want to start from a place of. Of my limited resources. What can I do within those constraints? And then you can take it a layer deeper. And again, I've heard Alex say this a zillion times, but it's such a great focusing question, which is of my limited resources and of the things that I can do within those limited resources, the two things that move the needle the most are which one gets me more customers and which one makes my current customers worth more. And through this lens, it has made me realize how many times I would come up with things to do. That, sure, they might be important things to do, or they might have some sort of net positive impact on the business, but they are not really accomplishing either of those two things. They're not about getting more customers, and they're not about making customers worth more. And so then it makes sense why I've had these periods in the past where I'll spend three months on something that I felt like was a really important upgrade, and then I roll it out and then the business is still at the same exact size that it was. Sometimes that's what needs to be done. But I think the vast majority of the time you want to prioritize your decisions based on those two things. Which one gets me the most customers and which one makes them worth the most money to the business. And anything on that list that doesn't accomplish one of those two things probably isn't the right thing to work on at this time. Takeaway number seven. More better, new. So this is probably one of my favorite Alex Hormozy frameworks. I think it summarizes the thought process extremely well. So the framework goes like this. First, you want to max out more. So until you are doing the maximum amount of volume of anything, you just have more to do. Then once you've maxed out volume, you then improve the reps of and within that volume, right? So it's about doing the same maxed out volume, but better and better and better. And then, and only then, once quality volume is the constraint, do you consider doing something new or doing something different? And what I love about this framework, and especially the first time I heard it, is it made me realize how one of the biggest mistakes that I've made in the past 10 years of being an entrepreneur, and I've made this in every facet of my life, not just building business, is whenever something would start to get hard, I would skip more and I would skip better, and I would just look for the next new thing, the next new shiny object. And so what happens is you pick something new, you start, you do a little bit of volume more, you run into an obstacle, you don't like that obstacle, you don't like that friction. You look for something new, you do a little bit, you do a little bit of volume, you run into an obstacle, you don't like that obstacle, you look for something new, and you just stay stuck and stay within that vicious cycle over and over and over again. A different way of thinking about this framework. And this is the thing that really clicked for me at this event. In the context of risk, when you're thinking about what things to do within your business in order to make it grow, doing more is the least risky thing you can do. Okay? And there's a lot of benefit to that when, when the machine is working, and you go, how do I make this machine grow? But how do I minimize the risk of disrupting the machine? The single best thing that you could do is to look at all the things that are working inside your machine and go, can I do them more? More, right? A joke that we have inside our business, and we say it all the time, is whenever we want something to grow, we go, well, we should probably just send more emails, because verifiably, every time we send more emails to a segment, we make more money. So doing more is the least risky thing you can do. Doing better has some risk associated with it, right? But it also has some incremental reward, right? There's typically more reward with doing something better than just doing something more more. So if you're going to try and do something better, you have to recognize that you are adding in an element of risk to your business, right? But if you get it right, there's higher upside. And if you get it wrong, well, there's more downside. Okay, so this is like the middle range. Doing something new or doing something different is where you have the most outsized returns and also the most risk. So this is something that we really felt this past year. We started experimenting. You know, our whole business has been built on organic traffic for the most part. And we started experimenting with paid, so using paid media to go after completely cold audiences. We felt like we needed to do something new in order to have our business grow. When you do something new, you are adding in the most risk possible. And we saw the upside and we were like, well, if we get this right, our business might triple. This would be amazing. This would be a grand slam. But instead, we got it wrong. We learned that actually paid is a completely different skillset. It's going to take way longer than we originally thought in order to do it well. And so as a result, we lit about $300,000 on fire. And so that's the pro con of doing something completely new, especially at a business of our size. Is that sure, if you get it right, it leads to the most exponential outsized returns, but if you get it wrong, well, you also are going to feel the depths of your despair. Right? And so I really like this way of thinking about more better new. And by the way, most of Alex and Layla's feedback for people, when they would say, this is my business and this is how we make money, and this is how we find customers, what should we do? All Alex and Layla would ask is like, what are the things that are currently working? Why Aren't you doing them more? And then if, if they already were, it was, why can't you do them a little bit better? What if you invested more resource into that thing? Very rarely was it, you should go do something completely different. And so this was a really important takeaway for me and for us. But I also really like the more better new framework in the context of risk. I think it helps ground why this is so important in the decisions that you make for your business. All right, takeaway number eight. CEOs think more like investors and less like managers. So again, this, I'm really starting to feel this. At our size of business now, this does not make as much sense. When you're doing a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, you're doing like a million or 2 million a year, right? You're still too entrenched in it. But the bigger the business gets, the more, the bigger the business gets, the fewer things move the needle. The fewer things that move the needle inherently mean that they are bigger projects. Bigger projects cannot be measured over a short time horizon. They have to be measured over months or sometimes years, which means it's about picking the right ones and, and it's about finding the right people to execute that specific project over a specific time horizon or a longer time horizon. And so from here, and I can really feel it, at our stage, it's less about, you know, me and my business partner Dickie, you know, sitting down and pushing ourselves for 14 hours a day and doing like, oh, we just got to grind through it. That's what we did our first year. That's what we did our second year, you know, and that made sense because in many ways it was just us. But now we're at a point where it's actually not about that. It's about identifying the right people and looking at people and departments almost like separate investments. Like, think of it like you're managing a portfolio of stocks and your, your job is to figure out how to maximize each person and give them what they need so that their big project continues to move on its own. It's not about you sitting down and work in 14 straight hours grinding stuff out anymore. It's about the quality of your decisions. So inherently, you start to think more like an investor rather than just like an in the weeds manager or even like an individual contributor. When we were first starting out, it was, oh, we want this business to grow. To grow. I guess Cole's got to lock himself in his office and record 50 looms for the next digital product, right? And now as the business grows more and more, it's less and less about that. Takeaway number nine, how you achieve the goal is irrelevant. So this was probably one of the biggest moments for us at the event was at the end of the first day, we hung around and Alex was standing there answering people's questions. And you know, people were just having drinks and kicking it. And the question that Dickie and I asked him was, you know, here's where our business is right now. We're exploring new ways of attracting more customers. And do you feel like we should get into paid ads? We felt like that was the right decision because that's what we had seen so many other people do. And we were like, oh, in order to achieve our goal, in order to grow, I guess we need to do paid ads or we need to do top of funnel cold ads to audiences that don't know who we are. And it wasn't until we talked with Alex and he just sort of mirrored back and said, you know, hey, you have these couple channels that are working really well. You should just consider doing them more and better, right? That it started to click for us that it actually didn't matter how we achieved the goal. It didn't matter if we got there by running paid or if we got there by scaling organic or if we got there by building out an affiliate department. It didn't matter how we achieved the goal. All that matters is that we achieved the goal. And that was another like brain breaking moment for me where I noticed that because I see other people with Internet businesses talk so much about using paid ads and reaching out to cold traffic, I just assumed, oh, in order for us to achieve our goal, that's to the way that we have to do it. And in reality it's not. Your goal is just a number. It's a number on a screen in the context of other numbers. And so how you get there is really irrelevant. All that matters is that you accomplish that goal and that you get to that number. You know, this gave us a lot of permission to just keep doing what we're doing and keep doing what's working well. Just do it more and better. And then a couple rapid fire takeaways just to end this. Takeaway number 10, don't underestimate the value of a better team member. So a really interesting thought exercise that we walked away with was if you go down the list, look, look at all of your, your team members, all of your employees, all of your VAs, everyone that works for you and with you and Ask yourself the question, you know, what does it look like to find someone with maybe 10 plus years more of experience doing that role, even if you had to pay them double or triple what you're currently paying for that role? And how we got there was Alex was saying, you know, the employees that he hires for his portfolio business are some of the most expensive employees he's ever hired. And he was like, you know, don't underestimate the difference between a $5,000 a month employee and a $50,000 a month employee. And I thought that that was a really interesting thought exercise to look at all the different roles in a business and ask yourself the question, you know, what would it look like to find the absolute best person on planet Earth to fill that role? Now, you might not, A, be able to attract them, B, you might not be able to afford them, and C, you might not even want to or need to. The person in that current role might be great, but it is an awesome. I thought it was a great forcing function question just to look for, where are there gaps in the team, you know, and where are there places where a role could be dramatically improved? Takeaway number 11. The theoretical max of a business is the sum of the knowledge on the team. So I've talked about this one already, but if you are the smartest person in the business, that is actually a net negative. That is a problem. When you hire someone, you aren't just hiring someone for a role. What you're really doing is you're buying all of their years of experience and you are adding it to the theoretical max sum. Knowledge of the business. Takeaway number 12, whenever someone wants a raise, show them the gap. So I thought this was a really great little tip from Layla, which was whenever someone would come to her and ask for a raise or want to apply for a different role, what she would do is she would sit them down with their current roles and responsibilities and then the roles and responsibilities for this other role that they wanted or were talking about. And she would highlight all the things in red that they currently weren't doing or the things that. Or skills that they didn't have yet. And she would just explain it very simply and very objectively. She's like, I would love to give you the chance to grow into this role or to one day take over this role, but I want to point out where the gap is. You know, here's where you are right now. Here's the skills that you have, here's the responsibilities that you have. Here are all the things that you don't have yet. And if you would like this role, well now we can focus on that. And you know, I'm happy to find a way to work with you or maybe invest in you or give you the tools and resources that you need to acquire these skills and take over some of these responsibilities. But this is the gap. This is where you are right now. This is where you want to go and you're not there yet. And I thought again, that was such a great way of explaining to someone, you know, it has nothing to do with maybe them, like as a person. It's just there is a skill gap and the person can't know how to improve until the skill gap is pointed out to them. And then last three, takeaway number 13. Checklists are more valuable than SOPs. It's because checklists are more tangible. SOPs are more like intangible explanations. You know, be a great leader, that doesn't mean anything. So checklists are more valuable than SOPs. Takeaway number 14. What do you see that I believe about the world that isn't true? So this is a question Alex asks his mentors all the time. So what do I believe? What do you see that I believe about the world that isn't true? And then hearing what the other person says and is able to mirror to you can be really helpful in learning where your blind spots are. I thought that was such an amazing question. I'm going to start asking people that question and then takeaway number 15. Literally anything can be a hundred million dollar business. This, this was I think, the big takeaway for me and for us at, at the event, although I've probably said that 10 times. I mean we learned a ton. But when you understand how companies get valued, you, you understand how valuations are constructed, you realize that $100 million in terms of evaluation for a business is really not that much. And it also isn't something that requires massive markets. Many niches have the, have the potential to grow a hundred million dollar business. The problem is that most people don't give it the 10 years that it takes. And they're always looking for, well, what's the bigger industry or what's the bigger niche? I have felt this even growing our business. We have a ghostwriting academy. It's very niche. There have been many points on the journey where I've wondered, how big can this thing really get? Every time I ask myself that question, I'm always proven wrong. And then it doubles, and then it doubles again. To be perfectly honest, the business is Way bigger than I ever thought it would be already. It was really cool to hear that validated and also see how that plays out with all the other business owners and entrepreneurs in the room and see how many other businesses that had just as much potential as ours in other really specific niches. Anything can be a $100 million business. It's just people give up too early and they want to chase whatever the new shiny object is or they want to start a new business or launch a new product. Simplicity is velocity. If you stick with it long enough, then chances are you will probably build something of meaningful size. So these were some of the big takeaways I had from the event. We're actually going back in March for a follow up. It was their upsell and we took advantage of the upsell. And so now we get to go work with their team more directly. We can ask more specific questions. And, you know, we've never, my business partner and I, we've never paid for a course or, you know, a mastermind or a workshop and never seen it be ROI negative. It's always ROI positive. And so whenever people are hesitant to spend money on themselves and invest in themselves and do things like this, it's usually out of a fear or a faulty relationship with money or an insecurity more so than it is like, oh, I don't know if it's going to be worth it. Because the truth is it's always worth it. If you make it worth it. There's always something that you can take away that is going to have a positive, a massively positive impact on you or your life if you choose to see it and if you choose to listen closely for it, you can always make the investment ROI positive. The problem is that either A, people don't have a healthy relationship with money and themselves, or B, they don't have a vehicle. So it's like, why would you go to an event like this if you don't have a business? It doesn't make sense. Of course you're not going to get an roi, right? But if you do have a vehicle and you can apply the knowledge to that vehicle, well, then it's going to be ROI positive. So if you have a vehicle and you enjoy learning and you don't mind investing in yourself, I would highly recommend going to alex and Layla's acquisition.com workshop. We found it extremely valuable.