“The 3 Evil Es” That Almost Killed My Business

What's going on everyone? It's Alex Moszi, uh CEO of Allid Prestige Labs gym launch. We've done $120 million in sales in the last four years. And so today, what I want to talk about is the three entrepreneurial evil E of entrepreneurship. All right, so these are the three kind of E that I see over and over again from the entrepreneurs that we work with directly in our portfolio companies, but also in the entrepreneurs that I talk to in general. The biggest mistakes that are made stem from these three evil E. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk through all three of them. I'll tell you an easy way to try and at least attenuate the mistakes that you can make from them. And then at the end I'll show you the one that I think is actually the most evil of them all. All right. So the first E is expectations. All right. And the reason

that this one is so evil is that most of the time us entrepreneurs, we think that everything has to happen immediately. Right? I had an entrepreneur not that long ago reach out to me and say, "Hey, how can um you know, if we work together, how can you guarantee that I'm going to get to a million dollars a month within the next six months? " And they were currently, I think, doing $100,000 a month. Um, and that kind of expectation and mindset is literally what will destroy you in business because what happens is you set these arbitrary because all goals are arbitrary for the most part, right? these numbers that in your mind make you feel good uh or make you feel accomplished and you set these things up there with not a huge path of getting there and you put an arbitrary timeline on it and then you try and force yourself into it. And so what ends up happening is you take shortcuts, you make hasty, high-risk decisions and most of the time you end up destroying the business and taking 10 steps backwards. And so expectations that we set for ourselves and our teams, we want to be intolerant of anything other than excellence, but focused far more on the process than the outcome. So if you can shift the expectations from outcomebased expectations to process-based expectations and then meet that with the intolerance of excellence, right, or tolerating only excellence, excuse me, then you can help mitigate expectation evils, right? where you basically destroy your business as a result of thinking that you have to be a million dollar a month or $100,000 a month or $10,000 a month or whatever that number is for you by X time. Right? What I see again and again of the people who make way more money than I do is they have reasonable expectations that would be unreasonable to achieve based on process. Right? I have a mentor right now who always repeats the same thing. He says, "Good process drives good results. " And I just that's been something I've been trying to ingrain in my mind. Good process drives good results. All right. So that's evil number one. The second evil is emotions. All right. The second thing

that will kill your business. All right. If you look at the biggest CEOs in the world, Bezos's, you look at, you know, you look at Munger, you look at Buffett, you look at all these guys, right? And what you may notice is that they are very devoid of emotion. And it's not that they're like emotionless people. It's more so that they try and stay as even-handed as possible with the decisions. And this is just something that I've observed. And so, here's a telltale sign that you can tell for yourself if you're suffering from this because sometimes it's hard, especially for guys, for us to be like, I'm emotional right now, right? But like, we're human. We have emotions. And so if you're looking and you flip-flop a lot on decisions as in you're presented the same data and one day you feel this way and another way you feel another literally how you process the decision flip-flops all the time. It's because you're being subject to emotions. Now if you look at the trajectory of a business and the the hundreds and thousands of decisions that we have to make as an entrepreneur, you can see how quickly these thousands of decisions can spin this way or this way on this path based on your emotions. And it can be the right way or the wrong way. And so [clears throat] I'll give you here's two pieces to this. It's very difficult to eliminate emotions, right? But if you can detect when you are emotional, then you can decrease the speed of your decision-m, which is usually contrary to what most people do when they are emotional. They speed up their decision-m process when they're in emotions. All right? And so if you feel urgency, so for me, these are things that are like red flags. If I feel like I have to make a decision by today or whatever, most times it's completely fictitious and made up in my mind. And so what I try and do is extend the time horizon in between uh the feeling I have and when I actually decide to take action. I can't tell you the amount of huge mistakes that I was able to avoid simply by sleeping it off, right? Giving my myself 24 hours to think on it, right? And a lot of times the entire world looks different when you wake up in the morning. And so that should frighten you because it frightens me. How can the world look so different only, you know, after nine hours of sleep, right? It's because our emotional state's different. And so this is a tactic that I do like a lot um for managing emotions. So the best decisions that we make for ourselves in my opinion or that I have made for myself have come from a state of contentment. And so there have probably been moment that's why when you go on vacation, you feel like you have a lot of clarity. It's because you were in the correct emotional state to make the right decisions because you're not operating from a place of scarcity, right? have to. You're not operating from a place of deficiency where I am not good enough, right? When you're operating from a place of contentment, um, and I'm not saying we're always content. That's not my point, right? The point is that you could probably recognize those times where you sit back and you're feeling grac, you know, you have a lot of gratitude for an experience or things that give you perspective. And so it's in those time periods where you should make big decisions for your life and then know that you made them in the proper emotional state. This is something that I'm actively focused a lot on for me because the being in the correct making the right call is basically my only job now. It's really just proper decision-m and so when I sense myself in a well-rested, content, you know, full of gratitude mood, that is when I want to look at my most complex issues, my most complex multivariable, you know, decisions and say, "This is what I think the best course of action is. " And then sticking with that even when the the trials and tribulations that are inevitably going to happen as a result of the decision later down the road. And so that's my hack is I can't get around emotion, I try and extend time horizons whenever I feel urgency. And then if um if I'm going to make emotions from an emotional state, I try and go from a place of contentment and gratitude. And if I do not feel that state, I don't usually make the decision. So think about that. So if you have like moments when you're playing with your kids and you look back, you're like, man, life's awesome. That's when you make the decisions that you need to make about your life. All right? because from there you'll be operating with a much longer time horizon and that's I think my way I think this is doing it that way will trick yourself into extending your time horizon which ultimately will lead to better decision-m and the third E um of the third evils evil E oops I'm writing down evil um is or R excuse me are expenses all right so the first two one is what you think should happen the emotions affect how you think it should happen and the expenses are the the it's like the cloud in the dirt, right? Are the things that we incur along the way that increase the risk of it not occurring, right? So, if you think about expenses in general, they are liabilities. They are risk that we take on. And so, if our goal is on as entrepreneurs is to increase our upside and decrease our downside, right? That is kind of entrepreneurship and business in general, right? than actively thinking

about decreasing our downside, our liabilities is a way of increasing the likelihood that our expectations are met. Right? And so one of the biggest mistakes and biggest evils that will destroy entrepreneurial businesses is because they set massive expectations when they are emotional and emotionally deficient because they need to satisfy, you know, emotional needs that their parents didn't meet when they were kids. They then incur expenses that they shouldn't otherwise have to meet these demands that are completely arbitrary and made up in their minds, right? And so I see this one happen all the time. It's like, hey, we want to scale. We just hired four more people so that we can scale. Doesn't work that way. Get the growth first and then the growth will pay for the people. Don't put the cart in front of the horse. The only exception to this is if you have like commissionon uh you know reps like sales reps things like that. But most other times 99% of other times when you are incurring greater expenses it's not like it's it should not be to quote anticipate growth, right? growth will pay the expenses. And if you need to quote delay something for a smaller period of time so that you can shore up your infrastructure, then you can do that. And you would be amazed at how much flexibility there is, right? It's much easier to solve problems with cash in the bank with contracts signed and you're an entrepreneur. Like solving problems is what we do, right? And so if you're in that state, think about how much you eat. Like if you need to, if you have the immediate demand, right, you will solve the problem and the people will come. I promise you. All right. One of the biggest mistakes that I mean, I've made this one so many times. Um I hired 25 support reps in anticipation of growth um for our supplement company, Prestige Labs, two years ago, and I currently now have four people that handle more business than the 25 did. Think about that. And so what happens is when you anticipate growth, you don't even know what the growth is going to look like. And so you basically just put people there, the culture of the team decreases, the morale of the team decreases. They're being less efficient. And when you have lots of people, you don't think about driving good process, right? You just think like we'll just throw more bodies at the problem. And that's a horrible way to go about business. It's also not a good customer experience in the long run. And so if we can adjust our expectations to be reasonable and based on process not outcome by managing our emotions and making decisions from a place of contentment, right? So that we don't set these deficient expectations on ourselves in our business that we have to satisfy because we must be a certain way by this time. then we won't incur expenses and risk

that is undue and unnecessary that will likely destroy our business when it was 100% based on our false madeup expectations about what we thought should happen should and so when I look at the things that undo entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial businesses these are the three evil E expectations emotions and uh expenses and I told you at the beginning that I would share the one that I think is the most deadly and it's this guy in my opinion

expectations because what we believe because these are basically beliefs just said differently, right? Another way to say this, and this is a really good way um that I got from a different coach to reframe beliefs is she said if you just call all your beliefs assumptions, they will be far more malleable. And it's such a it's it words matter, right? And if we call our beliefs assumptions, they become far more changeable for ourselves. And so if I say this is my assumption, what do you guys think? Rather than this is my expectation, what do you guys think? See how different that feels? But they function the same way, right? But one of them is approachable, malleable, one of them can take new feedback and new inputs and new data. And the other one is a must, a should, a have to, right? And so if we can readjust our expectations, right, and be

focused on our product, overd delivering, delighting the customers, right? Being intolerant of anything but excellence in the process. And because of that, our emotions stay more stable because we're not missing goals that we have to hit, right? Which then create more scarcity, more deficiency, more guttural feelings that then make us shorten our decision-making loops that cause poorer decisions and then cause us to make poor decisions that create expenses. All right? So, this is a loop that self-reinforces and it can either be a virtuous or vicious cycle. And so, it starts at the top and spins all the way around. And so those are the three evil ease of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial mistakes that hopefully you can use some of these tactics uh to avoid. All right. Don't hire

before you need it. Let the growth pay for the expenses when you're making decisions. Try and extend the space. This is what I have found effective for me. And try and make decisions from a point of gratitude and contentment. And then keep the expectations driven around process not outcome. And if you can keep the high like keep your high expectations but keep them on process not on what has to happen because when you reverse it the other way you'll start making terrible decisions. So anyways I hope that was valuable for you. I hope that makes sense. Like you know subscribe all the dings and whistles that you know YouTube folks are supposed to say. So anyways lots of love. Keep being awesome. I'll catch you guys on the flip side. Bye.