1. One in every 250 businesses does over 10 million dollars a year in sales and that means that 99% of entrepreneurs never hit it. Every business that I've started since I was 25 has crossed 10 million - B2B services with Gym Launch, B2C consumer products with Prestige Labs, our supplement company, Allen our B2B software, and Acquisition.com, which is an investment firm for all of the money that we made during those businesses to invest in other ones. I feel really confident that I can talk to the points of helping you go from zero to a million, a million to 10 million, and beyond.
2. So, this is just a visual. Put this in context: ninety percent of businesses never hit a million dollars a year in sales. 90% doesn't look that way on Instagram, but this is the vast majority of businesses right now. Nine percent of businesses cross this million-dollar threshold, right? And then only 0.4%, which is one in 250, do 10 million plus. It's so rare.
3. And so, the nice thing is that success does leave clues. I want to kind of separate this into two major categories: one is the entrepreneur and the other is the opportunity vehicle they're pursuing. You'll notice I said leverage rather than opportunity vehicle, but fundamentally leverage is the difference between what you put in and what you get out. And so, you want to have the best entrepreneur getting the most out of what they put in, and so if you have those two things together then you create a 10 million dollar plus business.
4. And if you've consumed any of my other content, I used to talk about how entrepreneurs do three main things: you've got skills, you've got character traits, you've got beliefs. I've thought about this more and I've actually simplified it to one degree which is I think you just have skills and beliefs. Character traits, if you think about this, you're like, “I want to become patient.” Patience is just a general term for lots of little skills. And so, if you want to become more patient, you want to do things that patient people do and that means that if I can train someone to become more patient, then patience is a skill.
5. And so, as a total side quest on this, what's interesting about this is that you've probably heard people say soft skills and like hard skills. In my opinion, hard skills are just skills that are easy to measure. Soft skills are just hard to measure, but they're both 100% skills that you can train and improve. And so, if we say, “Man, I wish that guy had better people skills,” what we mean is a hundred micro skills that are like, “I wish you would smile when someone walked in the room. Can I train someone to do that? Absolutely. If I said, ‘Hey, I wish you would greet someone by their first name immediately every time they walk in the door,’ right? Boom, that's trainable. I wish someone wouldn't interrupt. It's like, okay, well we can just give someone a cookie every time they don't interrupt someone and let someone finish their statement, and then we train them.”
6. And so, all of these soft skills are just soft because they're hard to measure, doesn't mean that they're not skills or they're not important. And oftentimes, most of us know that like within an organization, the way that you gain influence is these soft skills that are hard to measure but incredibly important. So, if we're talking about how do we make the highest leverage entrepreneur, we want somebody who has lots and lots of skills, and really it's about beliefs that don't limit them. If someone had no limits in terms of what they believed they could achieve, then the only thing that would limit them was their skills.
7. But most of the times, the beliefs that we have are things that just decrease our potential, and it's not really our fault because most of the people that were around us, we grew up just by statistics, were poorer than you might want to be. And so, they told you how they see the world. If there's ever something that's going to be on my tombstone, it's this quote which is, “We question all of our beliefs except for those that we truly believe, and those who never think to question.” And so, like the things that you actually believe, they're so invisible to you because that's just your lens, the roots you see the world. Whereas when you're like, “I want to debate this point,” it's like you don't really believe that, you just have an opinion on it, or you have some assumptions that you're willing to back. Right? But the true beliefs of like, “Well, no one would be willing to pay for something like that,” or like, “That doesn't exist. I didn't know that was possible.” You don't even question those things because they weren't even in your mind to begin with. It's the unknown unknowns that are the things that limit us.
8. The question is, how do we uplevel someone's beliefs? So, let me give you a quick example here. So, there was an entrepreneur that I know who had a fitness app. He was a super high-level CrossFit games competitor, and he started this app, and he didn't want to tell anybody about it because he never placed top three. He placed fourth place in multiple competitions, which is insane, um, but he had a belief that if he wasn't the winner, he didn't deserve to have an app. Like, think about how crazy it is, but he didn't question that; that was just what he believed reality to be like, “Well, of course, of course, I wouldn't want it.” And so, he built this app for himself and just the members of his gym, but the app was so good that people started sharing it. And finally, a client of his, who was a marketer, said, “You need to start marketing this; you need to start posting about it.” And he wouldn't post, and finally, she convinced him to just make one post, and he like doubled his revenue. He'd gone from like 20,000 a month to a hundred thousand dollars a month with his app simply because he changed his beliefs.
9. And so, like fundamentally, he had all the skills. Like, he was already a really good CrossFit games competitor, he already had the product that was really good, and he already had the skills to be able to market it; he was just choosing not to. Unchaining an entrepreneur is figuring out the reasons they give for why they can't do something; those are known limits. Right? “Well, I can't do it because of X.” That's the things that you know because you can even explain it. “I can't do it because I'm not number one. I can't do it because I'm not in good enough shape. I can't do it because the app doesn't load well enough. I can't do it because it's only on one platform. I can't do it because insert whatever.” Right? Now, the dangerous ones are the unknown unknowns.
10. All right, that's an N. My whole goal when I started my chain of gyms was that I wanted to be America's next gym, so I bought the trademark United Fitness. I was really proud of it. I had six locations. I joined this group of Internet entrepreneurs. Now, mind you, the reason I think this is funny is because I was sold by the sales guy that there were other gym owners in the room, and they were all like doing well and doing stuff uh, on the Internet too. Got in the room, not only were there no gym owners, there weren't even any brick and mortar business owners in the room. And so, I was like, “Wow, this is a shock.” And so, everybody's going up there, explaining their like ads and their funnels and their upsell prices and all this stuff, and I get up there, and I'm like, “I own six gyms,” and I was like, “But these are the ads I run to get members into my gyms.” The thing is, I gave this whole breakdown of everything I did and how I open every location at full capacity on the first day without taking cash out of pocket, all the stuff.
11. And I remember the uh, the guy who's running the whole group, and I really looked up to this guy at that time because he was the first person who's like way more successful than me that I actually had access to. And so, I think at that point, he was doing a million dollars a month, and I remember thinking like, “Whoa, like.” And so, I go through this whole presentation. I'm talking as fast as I can, explaining all the stuff that I do, and uh, he stops, and he's like, “Alex, um, I don't think you should be in the gym business.” And I remember hearing that; it was like time slowed down because I felt like he punched me in the gut because this was like my whole plan, my whole dream, this is what I was going towards, um, but I paused and just like heard him out. He said, “You have a level 10 skill set and a level two opportunity. I don't think you should be running gyms. I think you should be teaching people how to do what you just walked through.” And I had to believe, and I still do, that if someone's further along in the game of business, you always have things that you can learn from them. And if I paid to be in this room, if I don't take the advice, it's the closest thing to me burning all the money that I paid to be here. And so, when he told me that, to me, that was an unknown unknown. I didn't know that there was another opportunity vehicle outside of me just owning gyms. Like, I didn't know it was possible, so I hadn't thought like, I didn't know how franchises worked. I didn't know how licensing worked. I didn't know how any of that stuff worked. Now, there were some skills that I would have to learn in order to enable it, but I couldn't even start on that skill path or see the deficiency of skills that I had because I didn't even think I could pursue it. And so, these are the ones that, in my opinion, are the most powerful to overcome. It's the things that you didn't know were possible.
12. I'll give you a different example in Chain of Fairies, which is one of our portfolio companies. Amazing business, super successful, single location, and the founder had an agency when he approached me, saying like, “Hey, I want to do what you did with Gym Launch, but with photography studios.” And so, we talked, and we talked, and we talked, and his model was so good. I was like, “I don't know, man. I think like one of the things that I didn't have with Gym Launch is, like, I couldn't control delivery. With photography, you can control delivery.” And so, that means that we could actually centralize a lot of stuff. I was like, “What if we just owned all of them with like a hybrid model?” We actually took the agency from what it was doing, which for most people watching this would be a very good business, to zero to start this next thing. We had such good rapport that he's like, “If you really think so.” And we walked through the math, and he's like, “I mean, this makes sense, but like, I'm going to kill something that makes a lot of money.” I was like, “Yeah, but I think it's going to be for something that's going to make way more.” And then for the next six months, we worked and tweaked the original model to get this new model off the ground. And 30 months later, that business is two and a half million a month with 30 plus locations because I said, “Let's just own it all.” He didn't think that that was a model that was really available, and then as soon as we made that switch, everything took off. Even in my own personal story, when I switched from having my gyms to doing a done-for-you, fly-around-the-country model, that took the same skills that I had as an entrepreneur and put them in a better vehicle. And then even from doing the gym turnaround business for two years, I accidentally fell into the licensing model because I didn't want to fly out. Somebody asked me if I could show them all the stuff that I did, so they could do it for themselves, and then at that point, he bought it, and it was all margin. And I was like, “Holy cow, this is insane.” That's when everything took off like a rocket. And so, I had my brick-and-mortar gyms, and then I scaled to a done-for-you turnaround business, and then I scaled to licensing, and each of those were higher leverage opportunities. And it was because I didn't know it was possible. And so, once I learned that it was possible, that unlocked all of the potential value that my skills could have. Because fundamentally, in every one of those examples, I knew how to do the same stuff. I knew how to market and sell for a local gym. I knew how to build them more profitably, create the workouts, the meal plans, all that kind of stuff that got people results. That's what I knew how to do. But at each level, when I went from gyms to turnarounds, the leverage increased from each of these things. And so, the same skill set put into a new bucket or a new vehicle unlocked huge value. And that's why a lot of entrepreneurs don't get past a million or even get to 10 million; they're in the wrong vehicle.
13. So, I talk about leverage a lot, and it's actually one of the core concepts in our logo. So, we have a supply-demand curve, and then we have the fulcrum, which is the Acquisition.com logo, and it's because it's core to everything we do. If you think about leverage, if you've ever heard Archimedes, you said, “Give me a long enough lever, and I can move the world.” This is our lever, and we'll put our little, our little