A month ago, my wife and I sold our uh eight figureure software company and that deal closed uh 30 days ago. And so what I wanted to share with you was um one of the biggest and most profound takeaways that I had from selling that business and what we look at when we're buying our own companies. If you guys don't know who I am, I'm Alexi. I own acquisition. com or my wife and I own acquisition. com. Uh our portfolio does about $85 million a year in revenue. So, what I want to talk about today is one of the things that took me way too long to realize in uh looking at creating products and ultimately, you know, buying and selling businesses that are valuable. The biggest piece or biggest takeaway that I've had in creating quote fortunes um is understanding one concept. It's so simple to understand and so hard to do. The key, the one-way direction to creating a fortune through business is to only sell things that people do not stop buying. I'll say it again. The way to create a fortune in business is to only sell things that people do not stop buying. Some of you probably drink Starbucks. You probably will not stop drinking Starbucks. Some of you drink Coca-Cola and will probably not stop drinking Coca-Cola. Some of you buy Apple and will probably not stop buying Apple, right? Some of you watch Netflix and will probably never stop watching Netflix, provided they just continue to do what they're currently doing. The thing that is disheartening, right, and I'll say this because I think it's just like these are the obvious things that are so obvious, no one does them, right? Simple scales, fancy fails. All right, repeat successful actions. Do the boring work. Like these are saying we have in our community because most of the success that I've had with business has not been from curing cancer or inventing a new technology but improving something to the point that people want to continue to buy it and continue to pay for it. And so right now this is the thought experiment that if you're a small business owner I would like you to do. If you were to write down the total number of people that you have ever sold, ever all time and you were to tally that number up and then you were to multiply that by your current average monthly price, how much money would that be? Probably a lot. Maybe a lot more than you currently are making. The next thing to do is if that is the amount of money that you were making, how much money would you have available for you to spend in acquiring new customers? Probably a lot. How convicted would you be if every customer you sold you knew you would not lose? Probably vary. And so I think rather than thinking about all the many tactics, and there are lots of them, of making more money, how do I get more leads, how do I optimize my pricing, how do I sell a higher percentage, all of that stuff, right? Those are a lot of the handto-hand combat. And I don't want to be mistaken here, like you can become a millionaire just learning to be okay at those things, right? If you just learn how to market and sell, you'll be able to make money. You won't be able to build a fortune, but you will be able to make money. The thing is that if you can optimize around this single question which is what is something that I can sell that people will never stop buying it after they start and how do I structure the thing in such a way that the value they are getting is so far in excess of what they're paying me that they never want to leave that they call me when their credit card goes down to make sure that they continue to stay and pay. So, right now, many of you probably with your Wi-Fi, right, if your Wi-Fi went out because your card didn't go through, you would probably immediately update your card and get the Wi-Fi back up. If your phone service went down, you would immediately update your card and get it back going. If you if your Netflix got cancelled, you would do the same thing, right? And that is because we value those services far in excess of the price. There is what is called a customer surplus, which means you are getting far more than what you pay for. And so you feel like you're not only getting a good deal, you're getting a crazy deal. And so you never want to stop buying it because the value exchange is so far in your favor. And so when I am now looking at businesses, I am seeing what the overall opportunity is that we're pursuing and what the main value proposition is. And I am thinking to myself, so I'm just giving you the mental frameworks that I'm working with, which is how can I turn this thing that is valuable into something that someone will never want to stop buying. All right? So there's a couple of frameworks that I will that I'll walk you through. Um this is probably the most this is for B2B scenario, but you can probably apply it to anything. Many times there are especially in like the e-learning space, people will sell um a method, which I think by the way is silly because people will never stop. They will they'll definitely buy the method and then never need the method, right? Which is why I prefer models to methods, right? A model can have lots of methods that feed into it, but a method can only it's like a one and done, right? And so ideally you want to transition your business from a method selling business to a model selling business because then you will have a model that can always evolve over time. Franchises sell models and the marketing will change. It was group on then it was email
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email that it was Facebook ads and Instagram ads and YouTube ads and all the things that have happened since right media will change but the model will remain the same. And so if the model is something that someone needs to continue to have then that's something that they will not get rid of. Right now, in the Netflix video that I made, like how I crack recurring revenue, there's eight C's that I look at to make something stickier. All of those things will increase the stick. But the biggest one by far is the simple customer surplus, the value discrepancy in what you sell, uh, sorry, what you deliver and the price that you charge for it, right? And most people try and cut their prices in order to get there when in reality, we should be increasing the value so that rather like you can create a customer surplus by lowering the price so much. The thing is there's not a lot of profit left over and you won't have a big business. And so unless you have something that costs zero dollars to reproduce um you know like you know Dropbox right virtually zero dollars to reproduce more storage um then it's very difficult to do something like that right the idea if you want to create a fortune is to think consistently how can I make this so that no one stops buying and in the software world which I highly recommend you uh look at all the writers for business in software because software is software as a service right SAS All right. Now, that means that all the metrics and all the things that they have quantitatively been able to measure in software as a service 100% applies to service because it's just software doing the job that service is supposed to be doing. And so, if we can do that, right, if we can quantitate it in this way, quantify then this is the three-step process that they go through when they're trying to create a billion-dollar unicorn company. All right? And I got this from Mark Rober, um, who was the one of the early guys in u in HubSpot, right? I think he took them from zero to 100 million and now he's a lecturer at Harvard. All right, this is the process that they go through. The first step is to is getting enough promotion so that you can get customers. All right, he said, "We're not worried about pricing. We're not worried about value. We needed to be priced high enough that people will care, but not so high that we're trying to maximize profit because that's not the goal of this period of time. " Right now, this unfortunately is where most of the internet marketing community stops. They learn how to promote and they think that that's how they're going to make money, but that's not. You'll make some money, but you won't build a fortune that way. Right? So, the promotion period is simply to get customers. All right? You make sales to get customers. You're not getting making customers to get sales. All right? Very important distinction. And so, when we do that, the idea is that we're continually testing the product until we get to the point where people don't leave. And in theory, we should never really leave here until we have figured this piece out. Once out, then we can start scaling it, right? And so if you're thinking about this in sequence, it's promotion, which is usually zero to a million product, which is 1 to 10 million, which is where you're optimizing your product so that people never want to leave. They never want to stop buying. And then once you have something where the product is such that people don't stop buying, all of your marketing efforts in and of themselves will start compounding because people won't leave. And so it's just like you've got this glue and you're blowing all this traffic at this glue and it just sticks and it just keeps and if you never lose a customer, you will literally never stop making more money year-over-year. Think about that. Just like hypothetically, just think about that for a second. You will never stop making money. more money year-over-year if you never lose a customer. And I think that it's just such a profound like ideology shift. It's so easy to say and so hard to do, which is why most people don't want to do it. But if you're part of Mosy Nation and you like doing the boring work, things that other people are not willing to do, then these are the things these are the keys to the kingdom is creating things that people will never stop buying. And that means that you're interviewing customers. It means you're surveying them. It means you're looking at usage patterns. You're looking at the things that they're consuming. You're looking at how you can increase the collateral within your community so that people don't want to leave. And we do these things over and over again until we get to the point we're at 1% 2% monthly churn at most rather than um you know 10 or 20% which is what most people have. And if that sounds hard, of course it is. But the thing is that I guarantee you that no one else is doing it. Everyone's obsessing about their Stripe account screenshots. But the thing is that the fortunes are not even made in the follow-up. the fortunes are made in never losing customers because then you have time on your side because then over a long enough time horizon even if you suck at marketing people will find out about your product over a long enough time horizon. And if you have a product that people never stop using, you will be able to make a tremendous amount of money because in 20 years, if you were to think about whatever amount of sales you have right now as a small business owner, you might have been doing this for three years or five years, whatever it is, right? If you were to multiply this and you're 20 years into your career and you've actually been doing the same thing, one, it would be far more likely that you'd have something that you would have figured out how to make the product so good that people wouldn't leave. But also, 20 years from now, you'd have so many customers, even if you weren't that good at promotion, that your business would be gigantic. All right? And so I think I've told this story before, but I had a
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a consulting engagement that I did years ago where somebody was selling the exact same amount of clients as I was and they were making 300,000 a month and we were doing 4 million a month. And I think I had a hundred times the profit of their company. And it wasn't because they were like we were selling the same amount of customers. It was just that we had such a better monetization. product. We were able to deliver so much more value that we were able to grow to a much bigger size. Like if you sell a 100 clients a month B2B, you should be able to build that into a $100 million enterprise. You have the sales velocity. And so then it's just simply and I know that's like well what about pricing over a long enough time horizon, you should still pro if you're B2B, you'll probably be in a price point where you would get there if here's the big if you don't lose customers. And so I think the vast majority if there's one message from this video it's what can we look at or reimagine within our customer experience and the product that we deliver that will deliver outsized return so that we have a customer surplus which means the amount of value provide is far in excess to the price that we charge and that doesn't matter what the price is. So when someone says I charge high ticket, I think it's a silly concept altogether, right? Because it really should just be high value. That's the real concept, which is high value. All right? Because what is expensive, right? If I said, "Hey, I'll give you my, you know, my Lambo for 20 grand. Is that a good deal? " Absolutely. Right. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. And that discrepancy is going to be the customer surplus. And so right now, if I said that to this channel, hey, any the first person who wires me 20 grand, right, gets the Lambo, a lot of people would probably wire me 20 grand, right? because the value is clear to understand. If I was selling a house and I said, "Hey, give me, you know, it's a $500,000 house. Give it to you for 50 grand. It's a great deal. " Most people would make that offer. And so, the thing is that is what the business like that is where fortunes are built is finding a way to build a house for less than $50,000 to build a $500,000 house, build it for $10,000, build it for $5,000, and sell it for $50,000. That's the game that we're trying to play. That is where fortunes are made. That is where fortunes are founded. That is where you sell things that people will never stop buying. And that is the real key to making more wealth and more money than you know what to do with. And the reality is it's very simple to say and very hard to do. And that's why most people will never be wealthy. But you are part of Mosy Nation. And you are not going to be one of those people. Uh because we do the boring work. We do the things that people are not willing to do so that we can have success that they have never dreamed of. So anyways, keep being awesome. If you enjoyed this, my name's Alexioacquisition. com. Like I said, if you like this, hit the subscribe button. We have a lot more tactical videos on how to grow your business. Um, and if you uh if you didn't like this, then I love you either way. Keep being awesome because you're in the game and I will always appreciate you for that. So, keep being awesome. Catch you soon. back.
