9 Years of Business Advice in 63 Minutes (Copy These Steps)

I started my first business in college 9 years ago I was dead broke last month I cleared $128,000 so my aim in this video is to hopefully distill 9 years of business advice and give it to you guys in a simple yet comprehensible format that'll enable you guys to not make the same mistakes that I did then hopefully achieve your goals a lot faster so we're going to do this whiteboard style the very first point I'm going to give you is no matter what happens in your company or your business it's always your fault okay I know this is sort of like a like a trivial statement to make for a lot of people but I just want you to consider it when you have a staff member that just like completely craps the bed on a client project and it results in your company just going through the tubes or whatever you losing a big deal it's not the staff member's fault it is your fault because you were responsible for hiring the staff member that ended up doing the thing that you don't want them to do at some level up in the big Domino chain okay this is just a bunch of dominoes laid on a table that very first Domino you tipped over that's totally not going to hit the thing that very first Domino you're responsible for tipping over you are responsible for putting your intention out in the world that resulted in you having a business to begin with these hiring practices that resulted in that person you know maybe taking advantage of you or you know just not doing a very good job likewise if you have a poor client relationship it's because of you it's not the client's fault that they're taking advantage of you or you know they're asking for a ton of revisions with no compensation it's your fault because you are responsible for enabling that behavior you're responsible for saying yes to that client to begin with you're responsible for not having good policies or procedures right if you get in the habit of internalizing this and you blame yourself for the losses um you'll grow and you'll learn a lot faster but believe it or not that's actually not enough because it's not enough just to blame yourself for your losses what you also need to do is you need to attribute to yourself your wins now this left half I understood pretty intuitively I want to say most of my business life and so I picked all that up very quickly this right half here where the good things in my business are also my fault um this is something that I'm only starting to figure out now and the difference that it makes in my resilience my adaptability my ability to continue doing what I want to do is crazy so you know if I could give this to you guys as a shortcut celebrate the wins when something great happens in your business know that it was because of you were the one that hired the person that did the project that did the whatever that ended up in the good positive situation that you're in you were the one that like created the agency or the business or the e-commerce product or whatever like it was you putting your will into to the world that made this stuff happen and you know the coraly is when something bad happens in your business just know that it was something that you could have done better um to maybe uh decrease the likelihood of that occurring so it's your fault it's always your fault no matter what lightning bolt hits your factory or something it's on you um the second that you start getting in the habit of doing this your life just begins to improve immeasurably the second thing I want to talk about is this idea of inputs over outputs so everybody kind of has their panties in a Twist over this whole output idea okay what I mean is right we get in the habit of setting goals and having these Big Dreams and desires we want to make this much money we want to have this sort of car family the reality is anytime that you focus on outputs let's say that this is my output this sort of like a treasure map okay and I start right over here the reality is if you focus on outputs you'll only really ever get this far but if you focus on inputs if you have some goal to make a ton of money and every day you just I don't know cold call 10 people or something what'll happen is you'll start and what you'll quickly find is you won't just hit that output goal you will massively overshoot it and the same period of time you'll do like 3x what you thought was even possible because most people vastly overestimate what they can do in a day or a week or a month but they underestimate what they can do in a year if they just focus on outputs so like this is maybe what an input uh sorry an output looks like if you focus on outputs this is what an input looks like anytime in my life I've ever focused on inputs I've just crushed it and believe it or not inputs are actually a lot simpler to conceptualize than you probably think inputs aren't something amazing or crazy or super complicated they are literally things like send 10 job applications a day on your favorite freelance platform they're send 50 cold emails a day they're record three custom videos they uh I don't know tell your wife that you love her every day or something I'm not a relationship guy but I hope you guys understand kind of the point that I'm making if you just get in the habit of focusing on the small daily actions that you need to take in order to win um you will vastly overshoot the vast majority of your goals I started a Blog forever ago in another life it was called nick. com and I definitely don't have it up still and you definitely shouldn't subscribe to the newsletter but uh what I did is I had a challenge for myself I said I was going to write one blog post every single day because I wanted to be a blogger that's what bloggers did so I wrote a blog post every single day for a whole month 31 days and very similar to what I've actually done on my YouTube Believe It or Not although I've since changed my uh approach to that every

single day by the end of the 31 days I had something like three uh subscribers to my new utter or three subscribers to my blog I should say that was 31 days and it Ned three results I was devastated I was heartbroken my goal of being this independent blogger who could work from his laptop anywhere in the world and have a fantastic lifestyle was very quickly crushed I looked back on that just a few months ago and because of the 31 blog posts that I wrote at the time looking back I'm now on the first page of Google for God knows how many Search terms this is a few years ago the point that I'm making is if you focus on the inputs if IID continued to do what I was doing back then and I just never stopped writing these blog posts which to be honest they took me like 45 minutes a day they're pretty easy I'd probably be the biggest blogger on planet Earth by now the vast majority of people on planet Earth they struggle with consistency and the ability to apply directed inputs over and over and over again if you get in the habit of just becoming an input person and just really having ironcloud habits um you'll Crush I mean like basically anybody that I've ever known that just has their inputs right inevitably makes a ton of money they have super successful life think of it like going to the gym right okay on that note the third point that I'm going to make is don't ask yourself how I can do X ask yourself how do I structure my life in a way that I can do the thing I want to do that's pretty long I should have shortened this my wrist hurts do the things I want to do every day for a year okay we are definitely shortening these truisms but um don't ask yourself hey how can I send 50 blog uh write 10 blog posts today ask yourself hey what actions do I need to take right now that allow me to structure my life in such a way that I'll be able to write one blog post every day for the next year that I'll be able to make one video write uh 10 cold emails every day for the next year what changes do I need to make at the high level to my life to enable me to do that do I need to rearrange my desk do I need to change the people that I'm hanging out with the point that I'm making is if this is sort of like the ground floor of the result that you're getting there are many levels up that contribute to this okay you know if this is your ability to do I don't know let's say five DMS a day then this is your work environment okay this is your desk and then this is your relationships okay diet if you go up the chain of the out of the thing that you are tracking right the the result the 5 DMS a day your ability to do what you'll find is there are a bunch of these things that are really getting in your way every day if you can find a way to restructure those in such a way that just enable you to do the thing that you want to do every single day for a very long period of time AK if you can find a way to make it very low friction then it is so much easier for you to succeed let me give you a quick example I um you know I record YouTube videos right one of the reasons why I was able to grow so quickly on YouTube was just because I was bble to create a substantially larger volume of content much quicker than most other people and the reason why is because when I would record a video I would just click the camera button and I would record and I would just talk for an hour what I mean is my recording time to finish product time was basically 1: one right so the amount of work that I put in had very large um like a very large result uh in correlation what most people do is they'll record a video for like I don't know an hour and then they'll get like five minutes of usable content I got like 10 to 15 times that realistically so the way that I constructed my life was I constructed it in such a way that I got to record content just while I was doing the stuff that I was normally doing anyway if I had a cool client project that I would have had to do anyway I just turned my camera on and I talked about it while I was doing the client project and sure it was a little bit less efficient than me just doing the client project but I constructed my life in such a way that enabled me to do this thing as sort of more documenting than creating essentially which enabled me to um you know do the thing that I wanted to do every day for a very long period of time so yeah don't just ask yourself I guess if I could summarize don't just ask yourself hey how can I do this one thing ask yourself hey I want to become the person that does this sort of thing consistently how can I structure my life in such a way that I can do this every day for the next year and if you get in the habit of doing that sort of thing you'll find inevitably that you're going to grow substantially more successful than if you just were to figure out how to do that thing okay great so let's um sorry I have a little tab here I need to look at let's uh move on to the next one which is obviously the fact that if you want to win business you kind of have to

do this okay spend money to save time so I wish I knew this earlier I came from a pretty poor um Family background um and I don't mean that in any disrespectful way just that the first few years of my parents life in this country in Canada where we're from that was very difficult well where I'm from anyway it was very difficult for them uh because they were you know escaping communism at one of the uh one of the most unstable periods I would say and so as a result you know we obviously grew up very frugal and everything was very penny pinching it was very difficult for me to ever really justify an investment one big thing that I've unfortunately come to realize is that you know we all think that we have more time but really we don't the graveyard in life okay these are really crappy tombstones graveyards are filled with people that over their entire life just thought I have more time Believe It or Not time is actually not the renewable resource money is the renewable resource time is the finite dwindling resource and so if you can spend money to save time you should do it basically and any at almost any opportunity obviously you know we can get more complex here there's like the internal hourly rate if your hourly rate is I don't know like $50 an hour and if you could save something that's $60 an hour then obviously you should pay um 50 sorry you if you could pay $50 to save an hour and your hourly rate is $60 an hour you should obviously pay $50 where you can but really um even in those instances where whatever you are buying is actually less cost efficient I want to say than the money that you would spend to acquire it my honest take on things now that you know I've come into uh substantially more money and you know I've sort of like unscrewed a large portion of my thinking is that you should actually debias even further and you should do something like you know if I could spend uh $50 to save myself $30 of time than I should because time is just so it's so precious it's so unbelievably Priceless there there's almost no way that you can really qu qualify or quantify that um that it just makes sense to save time times basically whenever humanly possible so I say I spend money to save time all the time one big thing that a lot of people ask me you know I teach a lot of automation these days is um naden is this um no code or low code platform and you have the ability to like host any on your own computer as opposed to or a server as opposed to like you know pay their big service fee in order to do it um I because if it saves them even like five minutes a month it's worth it you know if I don't have to go through this big rigoll of like setting up my own NAD instance and then like doing all these crazy app connections and if there are even a few moments of friction that saves me from then it's worth my time there are obviously a variety of other things that you can do but just to give you guys some ideas I guess just debias you know debias your favor of time of money over time because yeah money compounds right over time tends to be the exact opposite every year that you live feel shorter and shorter and shorter so money every dollar you have grows bigger and bigger and bigger you should always essentially be willing to spend money to save time um so long as the equation so ridiculous that you would be making a silly decision okay great the fifth thing I want to talk about is do it yourself now a lot of people are going to look at this and they're look at what I just wrote above and they're going to say Nick what the hell why are you lying to us man you're going to talk about spending money to save time presumably to delegate work now you're going to tell us to do stuff yourself doesn't that defeat the purpose well if you're going to delegate something just make sure you've done it yourself anytime in my business that I've ever delicated something to somebody that I haven't done before um you know this has been 9 years of consistent probably like once every month or two every time I've ever delegated something I haven't done before the outcomes have been absolute trash so what I do now as a rule is I will always do the thing that I want the guy to do guy or girl to do for me at least once it doesn't matter if I suck at it I will do it at least once because this will do two things for you one this will allow you to gain an appreciation for what the thing that you are asking the person to do actually involves and then two this allow you to delegate a lot better So you you're going to get to appreciate you know assuming that they actually do hard work you're going to get to appreciate the quality of that hard work then two you're also just going to be able to delegate better you're going to know more about the thing that you are rating if you are working with somebody that maybe isn't very good you'll know because you'll have actually gone through the process right and most of the time if you're the sort of person that starts a business yeah you're not going to be amazing at everything but you're going to be more capable than the vast majority of people business owners wear many hats and you know you hiring a marketing guy to do some marketing for you or something well you kind of already know how to do marketing you should because big chunk of businesses marketing you'll

be able to intuitively understand what they are doing will this take you more time yes absolutely it's going to take you substantially more time whereas you know before you just say hey do this for me here's money goodbye now you're going to have to say okay you know let me sit down for couple of hours and try and figure this thing out and then do it but um on the back end you're going to save a ton of money and my honest opinion is that you're also going to save a lot of time because you can delegate better to begin with so uh I would highly recommend whatever you are going to delegate in your life at least do it once like you don't have to do it all the time but at least do it once okay the next point is what got you here won't get you there now I think you probably understand what I mean by this but there is a very different set of strategies this is like our little graph of progression there's a very different set of strategies that enable you to make it let's say here this is zero and this is one and this is 100 versus here okay the path the distance from 0 to one is going to require a ton of different strategies that you're throwing at the wall approaches that you're doing different types of lead gen different types of marketing different understanding consistency relationships whatever so what got you from 0 to one isn't necessarily going to get you from one to 100 if you just do the same thing right it's not going to allow you to make progress It's like different sort of ground almost right like if you're starting over here and they I don't know just a bunch of lava rocks or something you're obviously going to have to like have a different approach to getting over those lava rocks than if they're just a bunch of crazy spikes all over the ground right the point that I'm making is that the business terrain just silly video games examples man uh the terrain that you are going to be navigating at different parts of your business Journey will necessitate different strategies so you know if you do the same things at like if we make this concrete to business if you do the same thing at um that you did to get from Z to 5K a month it will not work if you want to go to let's say 100K a month I mean you know it'll work to some capacity but it is not the most optimal and most effective way to do it what you need to do instead is you need some different wonderful cool Blue strategy um and you need to constantly be recalibrating um your approach depending on you know the current income level that you're at because income levels tend to correlate with um you know problems and so on and so forth okay another point I want to make that's related to a few of the other ones that I made earlier is you should be patient with results but impatient with actions what do I mean by this remember earlier I was talking to you guys about my blog and how I did 31 blog posts and I basically got nothing this is basically what it looked like these are the number of blog posts that I post posted these are the number of views so I did like 31 in a row and I got like nothing right well the reason why I didn't continue with that is because I was way too impatient with results and I was nowhere near as impatient as I should have been with action if I just zoomed out a little bit okay what actually ended up happening is after I stopped I grew like this but because I was so hyperfocused and so zoomed in on this little of the graph I failed to see that was even possible now if you just zoom out a little bit if you become a little bit more patient with results what you quickly realize is that basically everything in your life that you've ever wanted always takes a little bit longer than you thought almost always is a rule and even if it doesn't take more time than you thought then anticipating that it will leads to substantially better outcomes because now you're focus on the inputs which allow you to overshoot those goals so be patient with results note that anytime that you're talking to the market there's always a little lag okay if you ever played any video games like competitive video games and I brought this up before but there's always a lag no matter what you do you'll press the right um Mouse button and then your character will make a little action but it'll take like 50 to 100 milliseconds depending on you're paying your lats or whatever like life is basically the exact same it takes a little bit of time between the action or the input that you provide and then the output and you're better off just pretending you have a little bit longer of a lag ping if that makes sense now on the flip side you should be extraordinarily impatient with action most people are very patient with action they say I always have time to do this tomorrow why don't I think through this a little bit more why don't I try and figure this stuff out right what happens to those people well if you all remember that happens to those people okay the reality is Graveyard is filled with people that thought that they had more time you don't you have no idea what's going to happen with whatever you want to do in business or

in life reality is you should just do the thing and you should figure out for yourself as opposed to just spend all day speculating so if you wanted to do something whatever it is man start a business uh go on a hot date with your cooworker whatever it is like do it now be extraordinarily impatient you don't have tomorrow you really don't you have no idea how long this opportunity is going to last and it's probably going to last a shorter amount of time than you realize and it's going to take you more time than you think in order to acquire the thing you want acquire so both sides are sort of fighting against you okay any the next thing I want to cover is that done is better than perfect as you guys could tell a big part of the philosophy that I think I've had to um unlearn over the course of the last nine years so I've started my business is this idea of perfection you don't need to make everything perfect to go all you need is you just need to make sure that it's like 80% of the way there so my goal always with whatever product it is I get to 80% when I launched my content writing company it was really the first time that i' ever actually like figured this out when I launched my content writing company I settled for 80% I was not confident with many things and I was very than I'm very thankful that I had a business partner at the time that said something along the lines of listen it doesn't actually need to be perfect why don't we just give it a try and just see where we land if he hadn't said that to me then I probably wouldn't be anywhere near as successful as I am today because it was us trying this new hiring approach pricing approach that ultimately led to us being able to explore the problem space and then see how you know we could ultimately get the best result which is this one here but you're never going to know until you actually go in and make that leap right so done is always better um it it's how you play the game in 2025 and 2026 and 2027 and Beyond you can't focus on building it and then having them come you basically do need to just constantly be um spitting out something acting and reacting in the real world and then allowing the market to sort of make some decisions and determinations for you okay number nine is businesses like the gym if there's one big thing that I've really realized um about like Fitness it's that like it takes a lot of time in order to see any sort of results I'm sure we all know right now I'm not like the most Jack guy on the planet uh but I do have a 12-pack no I um you know I'm not like the craziest gym rat on the planet but one thing you learn pretty quick in the gym is that like you know if you had two possible universes okay in the first you do 10,000 bicep curls today and then the second you do 30 bicep curls okay every single day or every two days for the next year or something like in which Universe do you think you're going to be fitter well obviously the one in which you do a little bit every couple of days as opposed to like a ton on one day now the reason why is cuz your body obviously requires some time in order to like you know upsert the freaking myonuclei or whatever right it's a little bit beyond me at this point but um you know your muscles need time to build believe it or not business is the exact same thing there are a lot of processes that are outside of our conscious awareness or control that need to occur in the background in order for you to see a result in the thing that you're looking for when you send out that Outreach or when you hire those people or when you work with new clients that you never thought you you'd be able to when you create that content there's so many background processes that are going to be occurring completely unbeknownst to you that need to occur and they require time to really mature and flavor um before you get any sort of result from that so if you are you know I don't know if you lack the ability to really sit down and allow that to happen then you're not really going to get anywhere you can't wait until the last second and then just do 10,000 bicep curls you want to grow really massive arms like me um you need to do a consistent amount of work every day for a very long period of time so the next point I'm going to make is hyper relevant if you've been watching my AI content and that's that business is like the gym no the it's beware of shiny objects looks like my monitor was so shiny I was just repeating the same thing it's beware of shiny objects I know we talk about this a lot you've probably seen a million in one videos about shiny objects but the truth is there are a lot of opportunities in life especially the second you start seeing success and it's actually more powerful to say no than it is to say yes like have you guys ever watched that movie Yes Man from way back in the day um oh geez how is that actor's name not coming to me insane one of my favorites anyway um the premise of it is it's a man that just starts saying yes to everything and his life ends up improving and changing and getting really wacky and really exciting because before he was the sort of person that said no well the reality is you should probably be more of like a no man or a no person to generalize because I can't tell you the number of

amazing opportunities that have landed on my desk just over the course of the last like 6 months or so um as I've taken off with this info product business that had I said yes to any one of them I probably wouldn't have achieved like half of what I've been able to achieve today there's so many time syncs there's so many opportunities to just be misled you live in this Minefield of shiny objects really especially if you're in like the AI and automation space or any sort of Technology the reality is it's the dull looking boring things I mean this doesn't look boring it kind of looks like a cool sexy Sapphire I don't know it's this ugly Rock thing okay that you need to be focusing 90% of your effort on because these shiny objects are just that they're just shiny okay they're all like pite or whatever the heck it's called these things don't actually yield any sort of result for you or if they do the reality is it takes too much time and energy to start up whatever process is necessary to make money with these things such that if you go ahead and actually do uh you know you lose time that you could have otherwise focused on building the thing that you knew actually worked okay this is called opportunity cost and I attempted to draw a coffin here um but I hopefully you guys see that the idea is beware of shiny objects there's a ton of opportunity costs associated with putting time and energy focusing on things that are not the main thing that actually makes you money if you find something that makes you money okay for instance you're at the I don't know you're at the casino this is an example I provide in maker school you're at the casino okay and you're playing uh slots and you know there's this little thing that you pull right you pull this little lever when you pull it then you hit a 777 and then you make $1 okay now every time you pull this lever you start realizing this thing's broken man I just made a dollar okay now I made another dollar that may not seem like the craziest find in the whole wide world to you but let me be clear the people that are rich in life they just find levers like this that pay them a middling sum of money and then all they do is they just pull that dang all day long you're not going to have some amazing shiny Zero to Hero thing overnight in reality you're going to have some boring little lever that pays you some pittance and your job as somebody that's going into business is just finding a way to pull that lever as often and as effectively as possible so look for the boring things right uh boring but big the the the boring monotonous super underlooked businesses are usually some of the highest performers I mean I started all of my first businesses in the service space right no longer um predominantly now I'm sort of in like the education and the coaching space and I guess just like the videography and production space but when I started I mean I went I was going door to-door selling local marketing Services I was going uh I don't know was buying leads off of various lead aggregators to sell wedding videography services like everything that I was doing was just like a boring company I wasn't doing like AI techn crat BS I wasn't trying to revolutionize uh public transportation no it was just like small little winds acrw over time where it's like m okay this thing makes me a dollar oh is that another lever over there that makes me $150 I should probably focus on that oh no way that's another one that makes me $2. 50 and over and over again so beware of shiny objects you need to be able to restrict your focus if you want to win today in 2025 2026 and 2020x and Beyond um because they're just so many and the rate of change especially in regards to artificial intelligence is just going to continue increasing so if you don't cultivate that skill today you will never have the opportunity to cultivate that skill all right I have a little bit more pointed of a tip here but if you sell small ticket then agreements don't matter what do I mean by this well generally speaking if you're selling something that's like I don't know let's say it's like less than 1,000 bucks you selling something that's like less than a th000 bucks like you don't need to sign an agreement some people are going to want an agreement but don't get caught down the legally any situation I've ever had where I had an agreement that was for something maybe even more maybe under $5,000 realistically and the person did not fulfill their end of the bargain it did not make sense for me to go after them spend the time and energy on this silly legal process when realistically I could have just been focusing on acquiring more customers instead I know that when somebody wrongs you in business and it'll certainly happen the tendency is to go after them with everything that you can not just for ego preservation purposes but because you know we all believe at some deep level in like karmic balancing of the universe I'm sure right we want the scales to be even but the reality is all the time and energy that you are facing that you are factoring in and giving to this person that may or may not have wronged you on a small ticket deal worth $1 1,355 all this time and energy is delivering you a subpar Roi relative to just like acquiring new business so I had to learn this myself the hard way I've worked with a number of businesses that have hundreds of thousands of dollars outstanding every minute that we spent attempting to acquire you first of all your business should never be hundred thousands of dollars outstanding

there's obviously systemic problems with these businesses so I'm not telling you guys to be in that situation or that sort of situation is okay but in all of the situations in which we attempted to claw back that money it ended up just always being a complete an utter crap shoot complete an utter waste of our time if instead of you know looking for that big jackpot okay if instead of doing that we focused more on just like the small little Dependable lever like I was talking about before that you could just pull all day long over and over and over again to make money then you know if you break it down per unit time right if we spent a 100 hours trying to acquire I don't know let's just say $10,000 in missed contracts like this is only $100 an hour if the business itself um values itself at more than $100 an hour and maybe you could make like $125 an hour pulling this puppy then you should have just been doing this all along right so be very wary of I guess the opportunity cost more generally um and yeah I wouldn't really worry about agreements like just work with people that you trust like sure you can stick like an agreement area down there but don't expect it to be legally enforcable don't worry too much about hiring lawyers to do all that fancy stuff for you in practice it doesn't matter and let me just like cap this off with of course I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice so uh if you don't use an agreement or something and then you end up having to claw out $500 or $1,000 because some person perceived that you know you did something that you cannot legally defend against fine but just understand at the end of the day that this is all small fry stuff okay it's all very small fry stuff and if you catch yourself in like small claims court or something for a few hundred or thousand dollars odds are that time would have been much better spent just going straight to the big leagues okay on that note everybody is a salesperson this is something that I had to learn the hard way many times because I was a salesperson and I thought that sales people were necessarily like me when I started one of my first businesses we were door too and I was doing you know 50 to 80 businesses a day knocking on their doors and so I had a very stereotypical idea of what like a salesperson looked like they were presumably some young man with a little folio uh with mismatching suit jacket and pants that uh you know would stroll into a business with a fair amount of Candor and try pitching them on some giving them their little elevator pitch and having them sign on some dott line the reality is that's not what modern sales people look like modern salese look kind of like this video that you're watching right now where I'm delivering a tremendous amount of value to you in exchange for basically nothing with the idea that you know I'm buying Goodwill that I will eventually monetize later modern salespeople are I don't know they're people on uh the girls on Instagram teaching you how to do makeup because in reality what they're doing is they're teaching you how to do makeup so that they can approve the probability that you're going to buy one of their products later if you are uh student or something like that you are still A salesperson every time that you write a paper and you give that paper to your professor you are selling them on the idea of you being worthy of that a if you are in a relationship and you know obviously people like to avoid this whole relationship um side of of uh I guess this concept because we all have I don't want to say not pragmatic views on relationships but I think you know we all have the sort of idealic view the reality is the person that you're with you are in some way selling them on your character um every day you know when you show up and you do your best and you make them very happy and so on and so forth like everybody in life is a salesperson it doesn't matter where you are your business career if you are a student you're a salesperson if you are um I don't know if you are like a teacher you're a salesperson you're selling your students on the idea of Education if you are like a Instagram Channel you're a salesperson you're selling people on why they should go and subscribe to your Instagram if you are a I don't know consultant you're a salesperson you are selling them on the idea of you as this knowledge if you are doing personal branding okay any sort of inbound you are a salesperson your content is selling them it may not be you on a phone being like hey how's it going why won't you buy from me today and all this stuff you're a salesperson and then you know obviously there's still like that actual salesperson person who uh does like sales calls and stuff and they're obviously a salesperson too they're just the most visible of the bunch so everybody's a salesperson like everything is a sales pitch how you conduct yourself in public as private it's a sales pitch um your reputation behind closed doors all this stuff is just another opportunity to sell um so in business treat it as such you know have Ironclad reputations and so on and so forth okay the next thing I'm going to say is competition is good you know like all the movies that we presumably grew up watching it was always about like you know anything with to do with business it was always about finding some cool business model with no competition some new comp some new business this

blue ocean idea well the reality is unless you're hellbent on building the next Uber okay and you want to build Uber 2. 0 just with a different name and maybe like a big unicorn broad or something if you want to build um the next Uber yeah competition matters because you you're talking about you know going like multi-billion dollar okay but the vast majority of the people that are watching this the vast majority of people in general they're probably not going to make like a multi-billion Dollar business and even if they could they wouldn't want to cuz you know what the hell goes into these things I mean these lunatics are working 24/7 they have no families no fun no nothing uh most of us don't want that okay I mean I'm saying us Loosely here but most people don't want this in reality what you're probably doing is you want a business that maybe you know swaps one of these by several thousands maybe you want something that makes like a million dollars a year or maybe even last 15 or $20,000 a month okay and when you're operating at the scale to be abundantly clear this is your market and this is that tiny little sliver at the $155,000 a month or whatever you want to make it doesn't matter what everybody else is doing here because there's always room there there's almost always going to be some sort of room in this massive pie chart okay this is like a I don't know like a 200 Mill ion dollar a year opportunity or market and most markets are way bigger than this by the way I'm talking like pretty Niche here on all Hy your little $155,000 a month business is not going to realistically change anything so you don't actually have to worry about the competition if anything you know what you should do is you should look for places there are a lot of competition then you should actually go in and insert yourself in there because odds are if a business has a lot of competition it's because that business is simple straightforward and produces a definable Roi so if anything competition should not be avoided competition should be embraced going draw a really silly thumbs up signal here but competition should be embraced that's my thumbs up kind of looks like a little bunny rabbit if you can find Opportunities where there are a lot of people flocking into a market you shouldn't think and I know this goes against so much investing advice right like sell at the top not at the bottom or sorry buy um at the bottom not the top and so on and so forth but if you see opportunities for stuff like this like that means that there's a lot of opportunity in this market of course be reasonable about it some things are hype Bubbles and you know not uh everything that has a bunch of people flooding towards it is actually good fundamentally but most of us have the ability to like discern the difference right if you are I don't know considering starting an HVAC company or something and you're like oh there's so many HVAC people in my space in my city it's like yeah there are a lot of HVAC people in your space in your city because they make money you know they they're coming in because there's a demand for it they wouldn't have prevalidated this demand if there wasn't so don't take competition as a negative signal um especially if you don't want to do anything more than like a couple million dollars a year the only space in which you actually start need to do start needing to do that like crazy market research and stuff that's like when you're you know venturing into like the be territory and certain concern yourself with making billions of dollars opposed to just us as humble Millions the next big point I want to make and I've kind of already said this but it's just say no more often than yes like don't say yes to things that your way I receive however many sponsorship deals a day um opportunities and they pick $10,000 for a video $5,000 for a video I could say yes to all these things right if I had I would have I might have made a little bit more money in month one um but I would not have made more month more money than I'm making right now by you know securing the Goodwill of the audience and stuff like that so um in business you're going to have a lot of opportunities to like make this but don't focus on that what you want to focus on is this you want to focus on like the slow but steady growth that compounds over time and when you find something that works just do a lot of it so um this is especially relevant as you grow and as things start demanding your attention as people start asking you if they you know if you could do a project with them or you know this amazing opportunity with this big private Equity Firm or you know we want to buy your business to do X Y and Z if you believe in what you have and you're strong about the fundamentals and you know your strong willed I should say about the fundamentals um you don't need to just keep doing what you're doing um and if you believe strongly enough in the thing then um you will make way more money and it'll also allow you to clear your head and just focus on pulling that lever as quickly as possible okay the next thing is um decide with about 70% of information so don't wait until you get to 100% in order to make a decision you know my old um my old business partner the guy that used to go door to door with name grinder he uh once said a man who can't make a decision in a minute is not a man to be re uh anyway a man who can't make a decision in a minute is not the sort of man you

want on your team or something like that uh the whole idea being that you know it can take a lot more time than a minute to get the information necessary for a decision but you still need to be able to make a decision so in reality what's going to happen is you're never going to have you know the full 100% battery bar of information you know in order to make the decision in reality all you're basically ever going to have is you're going to have some subset of that like 70% or something Max and you're going to convince yourself oh well I'm just going to learn a little bit more and I'm going to kind of make up this Gap right no after a while all information just becomes uh majority of information that you're learning just gives subpar um sort of diminishing returns like when you learn about something new like the first like I don't know one quarter or one/ third let's say is responsible for 90% of the information you'll learn about that thing you know if you could spend another third and you learn like five and you could spend another third you learn like 1% or something crazy so what you want to do is you want to become comfortable deciding with about 70% of your info and then sort of like front loading with your gut um yeah 40 to 70% I believe was called by uh was stated by this guy Colin Powell but somewhere about somewhere around 70% is usually fine the next point I'm going to make is to hire last this is something that I've harped on quite a bit um but this is especially relevant now with you know AI agents taking the fold and a bunch of technological changes on the on the Forefront so hiring is super expensive like the average person that hires they might spend like three months of a salary like let's say I don't know you want to pay $3,500 for a salary the average person that hires somebody when you get somebody in month one you're not actually just paying $3,500 okay you're paying substantially more than that because like first of all they don't know how to do the job most likely on month one so now you're actually paying extra in training you're taking time from you other people you are paying for mistakes and you're paying for like even if it's good it's still subpar work most likely and then on top of that what you're also doing is you're paying for regulations you know a lot of states and cities and countries around the world um especially the EU which is unfortunate they just have so much to be frank um around the hiring process you know you're paying for PTO you're paying for some sort of mandatory leave you're paying for a certain number of sick days you're pay you're paying for all this stuff now obviously I'm being very specific here I'm talking about the employment situation but even if you're not hiring like an employee and I don't know you're hiring some sort of contractor or something and I don't know you are still paying them 3. 5k a month but you know they supposedly get to dictate their own hours and stuff you're still getting most of these right and you know there also is going to be some regulatory risk so um it's way more expensive if you think it's 3,500 bucks a month first month in terms of opportunity cost you're probably spending like $10,000 or more and what if something goes wrong well now you just paid this person a whole month of salary okay and now you got to hire another one at another $3,500 a month and now you also have to pay you know interview time like your own interview time you have to H you know look through a bunch of other people that aren't that person to make that decision it's crazy to be blunt with you guys hiring is like the hardest and most difficult and most annoying part of business and if you can get away from hiring you're going to want to so I know everybody says delegate delegate right and um they say the second that you're doing something and like you don't know how to do it hand it to somebody but obviously my Approach is very different I would almost never recommend you hire um for a role for a long-term role today because we also have so many technological changes that are just invalidating the need of a hire like why would you hire somebody um that you have to train that makes these mistakes that give subpar work that you have to do regulatory issues with you got to pay Severance you got to do all this stuff when you could just pay a model you know a few hundred bucks and then take an additional 30 seconds of your time to like do outputs like it's really not a big deal that's with today's level of Technology try you know three or four years from now so don't hire um first always hire last try and build systems out that enable you to do the thing that you're hiring for my recommendation for you is to list out all of the job duties sort of like a table like if this is uh I don't know like the role these are the duties like actually go and like list out um I don't know maybe you're hiring a cleaner oh well cleaner is not a good example sorry maybe an editor that's what I meant to say um you're hiring an editor right what does the editor do the editor takes this input like a draft and then turns it into like a finished product okay what else does the editor do the editor uh I don't know messages people when things are overdue right when you start doing this you'll very quickly realize if we just like take the person out of it that all these things or most of these things are actually just doable with technology or at least partially doable with technology and if you end up hiring an editor any anyway well at least now you're going to know all of the work that goes into it and you'll be able to

like productize and line item everything and build systems that help them do more work and less time so hire last don't ever hire first okay the next big point I want to make is that Revenue doesn't matter at all so revenue is Vanity and then profit is sanity I have a feeling some of you have heard of this before but it's why you know it's why there's so much like distrust in the info product and coaching space as well everybody always talks about Revenue they're like I made 8 million bil jillion dollars today it's like well how much of that do you actually like take home right so revenue is Vanity you could have I actually reminded this one time that I was um living with uh my roommate at the time jonno and he uh he was working with I think he was selling a speaker or something to this guy that um uh he ran like a cleaning company and it was a pretty big cleaning company because they did like $2 million a year so when the guy came over to our place you know me and J we were both like aspiring young business guys both um doing very similar business models at the time selling to weddings actually and uh you know uh he was like Hey like I hear you do business what kind of business do you do the guy's like oh yeah I run like a cleaning business is $2 million a year it's like holy crap this guy runs a like it's like a seven figer business $2 million right like I was pulling like three grand a month at the time and that was pretty inconsistent I think Jon was doing something pretty similar so you know we're like looking at this like what the hell man that's crazy and then we started talking a little bit more and I believe it was J that asked him this question I don't really remember to be honest but it was something like he's like how much are you making on this and boy was that a good question because I'm pretty sure the guy was like 8% or something 10% 8% and I was like what you're making $2 million a year Topline which sounds huge and incredible and successful and this puts you so far ahead and you we're like you know prostrating ourselves in front of this guy and then I was like we actually make a pretty similar amount of money yet you know mine's 90 whatever percent margin granted we were working for ourselves at the time and his was you know eight so I guess what I'm trying to say is like the the revenue figures are just total vanity they don't actually matter like if you have a choice between a business that does like $2 million a year okay and there are many businesses that do $2 million year easily okay and then there's a business Ser uh at let's do 10% then there's a business here that does $250,000 at 80% okay like do the math on these both do the same thing this is 200k right in net this is also 200k in net so what are you going to choose I mean most people would probably still choose this because there's some I don't know Revenue multiples maybe it's a bigger business they could sell it I mean I would choose this I would definitely choose this I mean I the small lean equation for sure as few people assumingly boss but don't to do with the hiring stuff that I was talking about earlier um so yeah you know like Revenue was vanity profit is sity profit is the only thing that matters net profit um you know obviously like I guess there going to be some tax implications tax depends on where you live in the world like how you're structuring your business and stuff like that um but definitely like definitely iida if you guys don't know that just stands for um earnings before interest it's kind of an accounting term um uh depreciation I always say depreciation taxes and amortization I think the t is actually supposed to be a bit duh yes that's probably supposed to go down here because depreciation amortization similar Concepts but essentially um you know definitely look into your ABA just you know Google search a You' never heard of before essentially just like that's the thing that matters your AA not your Topline Revenue you're not going to see any of that money anyway it's all just like you fluffing yourself to be honest so screw that man focus on profit is uh always sanity the next big point I'm going to make is whatever you should do whatever you do you should always under promise and then overd deliver okay no matter what this is like the easiest simplest hack anytime you get any client or contract you just say you're going to do X and then do X plus two okay just deliver a little bit more than you told them that you were going to deliver and they're going to love you for it because nobody does this everybody's so concerned about their margins and they want to save money and cut Corners here or there what they don't realize is when you do that you are massively reducing your retention massively when you just deliver what you what you say you're going to do retention is like it'll be a few percent if you under promise and overd deliver you're probably going to like three to 4X your retention and you know what for digital business models that sell a recurring service retention is where all the money is in anyway let me give you an example let's say you do some sort of one-time offer for $2,000 this is one time okay you sell uh I don't know five of these

okay that means you make $10,000 right but let's say you're smart and so now you offer recurring service in addition to this now the thing is you use this as your um intro offer as your Gateway in to your business so not everybody that does this obviously goes to your recurring offer but let's just say one in five people do okay actually let's say even less one in 10 people do okay what that means is um you know uh I mean like mathematic anyway let's say you have a $5,000 a month recurring what that means is basically every person that gets in your business that buys this thing is mathematically going to give you an additional on10th of this $500 a month mathematically I mean you know you just kind of do the math on it 10% conversion rate you got five people come in they're going to be making on10th of of this so let's hypothetically say right now it's a 10% if you start offering your package and you tell people hey I'm going to give you this package is going to be amazing but then when you do this $200 one time you go above and beyond and you offer some additional thing and you give it to them totally for free you say hey here's your deliverable and then here's a bunch of free on top of that you didn't even ask for that I just thought you'd really like because I like you you're going to take this from 1 to 10 to something like 3 to 10 okay you're basically going to Triple this puppy you're going to go uh I don't know what's that like 1. 5 out of those five people like in addition you're going to make $7,500 a month and let's say your turn is 6 months you will have effectively given yourself um I don't know an additional 45k of Revenue you know if you just um add it up future contract value and stuff on top of the $10,000 like basically you just took your net earnings from 15K be clear over to uh what's that 55k I think my math is correct just overd delivering now I know you're like okay Nick like what the hell is this overd delivering like isn't it going to cost me a lot of money it's like yeah but is it going to cost you $40,000 to fulfill no it's probably going to cost you like an additional uh $1,000 right it's going to cost you $1,000 and like you getting more materials or you having somebody else look over it or you paying a little bit more in margin so your net really is kind of like you know it's 15K versus 54k what are you going to do you're going to pick this all day long right winner chicken dinner so no matter what always overd deliver especially in some sort of like digital recurring business model um because it just massively improves client Lifetime and uh yeah you know that's really what you should be optimizing for anytime you're selling like an agency service or something where people are going to be coming back or something you have the opportunity to upsell now it's a little bit different if you are selling like a totally one-off service I don't know junk removal or something where like the likelihood of you actually having somebody that like you know can hire you again and again is a lot lower but still something you should definitely consider all right next thing that I'm going to pitch you on is to C cultivate an audience asset now I can't say that I actually wish I did this earlier because I have this approach with these audience assets so like first of all what is an audience asset when I say audience asset I'm referring to something like what I have like a YouTube channel or like a mailing list or like a LinkedIn following or like an Instagram following or something like that now what you should really do is you should understand there's a ton of Leverage here and like when you have an audience asset and they like you for you and they get a lot of value from you and you're consistent about the posting and stuff like that like you have this almost like transferable resource that you could take from one business model to the next you could very quickly and easily validate offers sell stuff um and it's very powerful but you can't actually just go ahead and like cultivate the audience asset right away if you're a total beginner what I see a lot of people do is they'll be like oh I know I need to be posting on Facebook Instagram so what I'm going to do is I'm going to start posting even though I haven't made any money then they end up spending all their time posting and then they haven't actually made any money so the reality is all these social media platforms are so God dang saturated that you can't just start posting if you have nothing interesting about you or no unique angle or no crazy accomplishment that you've done nobody's really going to give a crap so you have to do instead is you have to achieve something and it can be pretty marginal you can make 51 $15,000 a month in some industry where people don't routinely make that much money and then you use that to start your audience asset and then if you time it right you maximize return on investment because now you've done the impressive thing and now you're also growing an asset that uh likes you because you're talking about how to do the thing and then you're lighting fire on basically the entire markets ass at the same time which just improves the standard fores said Market um and you know if you do it right you're predominantly giving more so than receiving uh yeah you can make a ton of money I mean just look at me and look at a bunch of other people that started around the same time as me doing similar things so my recommendation for you guys is definitely cultivate an audience asset um I was doing a lot of outbound before now what I find is outbound just doesn't SC as well so like when I do like cold email and stuff like this is basically I

don't know volume I don't know maybe volume and work let's just say like volume and work this is the amount of emails that I was sending that's the amount of work that it was taking and this is like the results It's Kind of linear right but you know what I'm finding um basically uh like my audience stuff has just been crazy um well I mean I guess it's just been like this the volume in work has stayed the exact exct same um I just do the same thing that I was doing and then the results just like grow so maybe it's not actually like this maybe it's like this realistically right if this is the volume and work that I put in then that is the result and the reason why is because it just takes you know very a very similar fixed amount of time to produce the content and then the content just gets seen by a lot of people um the value is you know if you've done what I've said before and you've constructed your lifestyle in such a way that enables you to produce a large amount of content or do the sorts of things you want to do like content production easily and it slots into your day-to-day then you can do all of this while you are still building the thing first but yeah generally what you want is you want results first and then after that you want some sort of audience and the audience will help you get more results I get tons of like leads from my YouTube asking me to build systems for them which enables me to use that as social proof and a bunch of other things which enables me to get on this like basically like business flywheel okay that's my business flywheel looks kind of like a happy birthday cake so yeah uh th that's my main recommendation for you on that front there obviously a variety of other things that you can do in order to build the audience asset but um I won't go into the specifics implementation there if you guys find any of that interesting just head over to a Nix arve daily updates it's my other channel where I discuss basically what I'm doing to grow my own personal brand just because I know there's slightly different audiences here versus there so yeah if you want to listen to me ypp on all day about my Instagram strategy that's the place to do so okay the next big thing this is especially relevant in the 2020x Years is um you know distribution over product so you know the whole idea of build it and they will come right the idea is you build this amazing product and it's this super cool product that everybody likes and it's amazing then a bunch of people just come to it well I hate to break it to you that doesn't exist in 20 25 what you basically do is you build a bunch of people that come to it and then after you say hey what kind of product do you want hey do you like this sort of product that sort of product hey if I were to sell you this how much money would you pay then after you get to build the most amazing product ever for all of them but you have to focus on the distribution first before the actual product if you want this to happen and the reason why is just because there are so many products out there nowadays and the market sophistication is just getting so unbelievably nuanced that you basically need to be able to cater to the wants and the needs I'm a much better artist than I thought you basically need to be able to cater to the wants and the needs of exactly the audience and exactly the group of people um that you're selling to and if you build a product before you know exactly what those things are just off your gut feeling the likelihood that it'll succeed is very low there's a very low chance okay it's probably not going to happen um you know this is sort of like the uh I don't know I don't want to say no it's not like the scientific approach this is like the artist approach where it's like I feel it in my it's like the Steve Jobs thing I Feel It In My Bones like the people want this right reality is you don't really know that people want this it's much better to be a scientist than it is an artist the way that the scientist does things is they'll take more time to see results than the artist will on the cases where it works but generally it's like this right they make May uh start at the same spot or maybe even lower but then they'll get a little bit better with the product and then and then because they have the distribution they can do this so focus on the distribution first that allow you to become a scientist as opposed to an artist it'll allow you to actually like build things that the market wants and then it'll also just allow you to like be a lot faster and um you know I want to say a lot more iterative and and incremental and consistent in your approach okay the next thing I want to talk about is your reputation and why odds are you're probably not doing enough to protect it so you know how earlier I talked about how money compounds and therefore it's not uh it's a nonre renewable resource or sorry it is a renewable resource it grows with time whereas time tends to like inverse compound I want you to think about reputation in a very similar way as money not in that you should trade it but that it grows if you have X reputation today you'll have like you know x squared reput reputation and then you'll have X Cube to the four x to the 5 x

you'll have x to the four x to the 5 x to the 6 if you can hold on to your reputation um it'll grow much faster basically outpace you so uh the benefit to this is in you know the 2020 years reputation and authenticity are basically at a premium it is so unlikely that the people that you work with will have a reputation because we've all just been scammed to death we've all been sold a bunch of in the past uh you know based off false premises and stuff like that like as a result you know the supply of reputable people has gone way the hell down meaning the demand for this has gone way up so if you have reputation you get to take advantage of this like crazy demand for it and then you also get to grow it really quickly if you could build a solid ironcloud reputation today in like five years you know um that reputation will be worth 100x what it is now and you'll have been in demand the entire time which will help a ton so um definitely protect your reputation this has been pretty Cornerstone to like the that I've done business um just because I know how important or I can see how important it'll be to be authentic especially in an age of like hyper accelerated AI media everywhere uh but yeah those are more or less my thoughts I wish that I had known all of this stuff when I was starting my business uh my very first one my event management company um you know to make a long story short I basically started an event management company in college specifically because I really liked going to parties and I thought that I could just throw parties and get paid for it the first couple parties that we threw were like not at all legal and they did not at all go very well financially but eventually we actually got sanctioned by the school and that enabled us to pick things up and make a little bit more and if I had known even a fraction of what I knew back then I probably would have been able to run not just the most successful party company at the University like we did but probably the most successful party company in like the entirety of the province that I was living in Canada maybe I mean a big portion of the country to be honest these are those gems that may not necessarily be easy to internalize like they're easy to understand at surface level but they're very easy to like take they're very difficult to like take deep within yourself and really yet until you've had a failure which is why I've tried to so viscerally show them to you guys illustrate them and document them like I have so I really hope that this helps you know you guys got at least a fraction of the value that I did um I think that there are a lot of different ways to go with business and I should make the caveat that this was just mine and this probably applies better to me than it does to everybody but that doesn't mean that the information here is not useful at all to you obviously interpret it through the lens of your experiences your past and your beliefs and take it and use it to build a fantastic business I really appreciate everybody's time if you have any questions about anything that I've talked about here just drop it down below more than happy to answer and I'm also do a video based off your suggestions otherwise if you guys could do me a big solid just like subscribe do all that fun YouTube stuff to get me to the top of the algo and I'll catch you on the next video cheers