$1M+/yr Local Businesses Hidden in Plain Sight

have a business that no one on a podcast has ever discussed it's literally the first time this has probably ever been talked about on youtube or in the audio format i'm i'm i'm breaking grounds here okay jackie robinson i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never look back so this weekend i went to my daughter's spring rec recycle and sam when do you see this what does this look like this just looks like just like know a great baller arena typical a program yeah right yeah a show pro program and that's what everybody in that crowd thought but not me i saw a business plan sam i saw a business plan i saw information i saw a giant information okay so check this out this woman has built a million dollar plus kids dance studio just down the street from us and i think this is remarkable and i think it's a good reminder that like there's these million dollar businesses like all around you you don't have to do something really grand or innovative to do it you just gotta provide a service that people love and you gotta scale it in the right way so check this out on the back is a list of all the dancers in the show now all the dancers answers in the show are all the dancers answers across for three locations all the kids basically everyone performs okay so i look at this and everyone else is looking for their kid's name i'm looking for top line revenue numbers okay i'm trying to figure it out and so i see alright each of these columns is about fifty names there's six columns okay we got three hundred kids at this dance show how much now us i know that we pay something like two hundred fifty bucks a month to be a part of the the dance studio and this is the spring rec recycle so immediately my head says alright we're doing at least spring and fall might even be doing four rec year i'm not sure i had just bought the tickets to this recycle so i know that in addition to the two hundred fifty bucks a month membership you're gonna be paying for the uniforms you're gonna be paying for tickets to the to the to watch the show of course every single parent it's gonna watch their kid at the thing in fact we brought grandparents with us and a few few extras but you look around that theater it's totally sold out standing room only i know mom who was in our class who she did not log on to buy her tickets right away and therefore only got two tickets and got them in the back and so she kicked her husband out of the two tickets and was like hey tell your mother she got her mother ought to come with a walker so that they could go sit into eighty seat like that's how that's how vicious the the competition is for these the demand isn't ins okay so basically if you do the math on this and you say okay we spend a hundred bucks on the tickets for the recycled then you spent two hundred fifty bucks a month and then you're in this thing year round you end up saying that this is a business that's generating a little over a million dollars year in in revenue so yeah one point two five million so you said three hundred names two hundred fifty dollars that's seventy five thousand dollars a month in sales a month just off that just off that and then you add on the plus plus the shows the tickets that the photos oh for the photo package you spend a hundred bucks you know is one thing after another basically that they that they sell to you and it's great we're happy customers and so you you get there she basically does no marketing the show is her marketing and what ends up happening is that you and then at the end of the show she brings out the teachers to take a bow these are the i'm like oh thank you now i see the op x line what how do we got seven teachers here okay cool seven teachers got it and so i'm trying to figure this out okay so i'm pretty sure that this dance studio is netting somewhere between five hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand and eb every year okay amazing she does she like arrived to the class in a and like a like an s class like what up a car was she traveling yeah i installed a a tracking device underneath just to see where she lives now yeah dinner be bag give out any hints as to how well the the business was doing called a bi broken back i don't know what you just called it dude be the least the other day page reference the other sarah wanted to go to like some concert and i was like yeah like charlie x c ninety it's it you know it's actually like charlie i forget what is you know like this new like a hot girl whatever don't know i that's one of those i don't say it x c ninety is a volvo i was like yeah charlie x ninety so saying like x ninety it's like x c something alright but go ahead so i just thought this is inspiring that like this local just this local service dance shows for little kids our dance dance classes for little kids scaled to three locations can be you know such a great business for somebody and they're basically kinda like found that sweet spot of doing what they love she's been doing it for like twenty five years now she's a institution locally has a great community of people around her and and you know is making people happy make family's happy and i've just been seeing this everywhere alright let me can i let me show you something interesting i was just talking to this guy but have you ever heard of goldfish swimming classes no it's a franchise that i'm pretty sure it does about six hundred million dollars in revenue and it's a children's swim class and it was one of those things where he was talking to me he he was basically i'm not gonna i reveal too much but he was like i quit my prestigious job because i wanna get into the swim class business you know everyone's like probably giving this guy the same like look of like but you're throwing it all the way and he i kinda like was like alright tell me more because i'm sure there's like there's a story here because you worked in finance like you're not doing this to feel good tell me more and he started breaking down the economics of this goldfish chain and he was saying something like each location does like two million in revenue and they have something like three hundred locations yeah i'm on their site they got a lot of locations i don't know three hundred if but they got a lot was something and insane like that and it was another one of those things that was this like hidden in plain sight but i have a hidden in plain site business not hidden in plain sight site but a business that like no one on earth has no one on a podcast has ever discussed and this is gonna be that these the the the thing i'm about to talk about it's literally the first time this has probably ever been talked about on youtube or in the audio format i'm i'm i'm breaking grounds here okay jackie robinson yeah if they're is there all a fame for things like these because i would be it alright so i just slack you a url go to d y s builders dot com so you're on this website let me tell you a story really quick you know how the amish are famous for creating amazing furniture mh i wanted to buy like a bed for my my my kid and i wanted like an heir room quality bed where i was like man i wish i had my bed from when i was a kid my crib from when i was a kid how cool would it be to give my daughter a bed that i can you know reuse all of our kids and eventually one of them can let their kids you so my grandkids kids had my bed i was looking up amish furniture and i came across this website randomly because i got interested in the amish like craftsmanship now this website it's a d y s builders dot com i think they make homes scroll all the way to the bottom where it says contact and read to me the email address that you see d y builders at i b y f a x dot com okay so i noticed i i this is just one example because it was easy to see but i noticed on many of these amish websites when i was looking at how to like place an order i had to email like you know amish furniture at ib why fax dot com there was all these really weird urls that i had to email to fax and i got really curious so i want you to go to i b y fax dot com it says send and receive emails with your fax machine so i was seeing this and i got a tip from one of our listeners andy allen and he emailed me this and it was just all coincidence that like six months prior i was like wondering what this was so let me tell you this the background of this so if you're amish or your men i a lot of them are very entrepreneurial and they work with the outside world so they make furniture that they sell to you know people like me they have websites however according to their religion they are not allowed to use certain technology that's considered individualistic so looking down in your iphone or sitting down in your home and staring at a computer screen they think that it either bring like things either bring them closer to god and other people or it takes them away and they feel according their rules that like looking at your phone and using the internet brings them away from other people however they have all these websites and they sell furniture well how do they do it well there's this small website i think it's called i buy fax as in internet buy fax dot com and it's the service where you pay something like twenty dollars a month plus like ten cents or fifty fifty cents per fax but basically on the campus i don't know what they call it the campus of a lot of amish towns there is literally like a small house like a s and in that small house is a fax machine and if you're an omni guy running a website and you wanna see how your orders are doing or somebody emails you and they're asking a question about a bed frame and like can you do this or can you do that they go to this fax machine and this phone they have in their small box which i have a photo of by the way in our document but it's like literally a tiny tiny little talent it's like a little out house where you make the call and you talk to your customer but you have to use i by fax and so the i by fax service what they're going to do is they're going to collect all of your emails and they're going to fat they're going to best follow outrageous it's outrageous it's like an it's literally it looks like a phone booth slash porta potty it's in the middle of the road and on the wall is just a tiny phone like a corded a phone with a cord yes and so that's because not even a fax machine where's the fax machine so some of them have fax machines some of them have phones and so i buy fax they'll either call you and be like the middleman and answer the question like hey linda at gmail mail dot com she's in this place she wants to know can you make a bed like this or dave wants a child's bed but he wants it to be in this color can you do it and they'll reply and they'll either hand right the reply and fax it back or i buy facts has people who they say that they will actually you talk to them and they'll be your middleman and another thing that they'll do is let's say that you need let's say you're wanna buy something off ebay or you're trying to figure out what the prices of a certain farm equipment you can ask i buy fax please tell me you know how much it would cost to buy blank on ebay and they'll reply back by fax or telephone answering your question and so this way the amish can do business with the rest of the world but aren't breaking their rules and this website that i found it's used on all of the website so if you look at amish amish furniture if they're like really og amish a huge percentage of of them are using this website and the amish community it's that tiny it's about four hundred thousand people and they are like very entrepreneurial like because that's like part of like the religion is to be like self reliant or part of the the the community rules is to be like self reliant and like amish furniture is definitely like a well known thing amish crafts of all types are a well known thing and this guy who emailed me he goes i own a business that buys and sells wooden palettes and in particular we are based in pennsylvania and so we work with mostly amish people and whenever they communicate with us which we to work with a lot of them they only communicate with us by i by fax dot com and they're all using this website and in this website here's where it gets kinda funny i looked on linkedin i can't find too much about any of the background on it the only and i'm not gonna build this guy spot up too much so i only say his first name the owner his first name's is jamal and so in my head i'm like and he lives in new york i'm like is there a brother who just came up with a brilliant idea to create an amish fax website and is this like how we share the world i swear to god that's his first aid so he's he amish or dove when you found him no he lives in new york no he lives in new york his first name's jamal i can't find a photo of them but like i i don't i don't know i don't think he is because the the amish can't work websites so like it you have to be like an ally you know what i'm saying but you can't be part of the community this is great that is so funny be like jamal is like the like slogan like find the opportunity be like j jamal what by the way why don't people like could you just basically go by a bunch of could you work with the amish by facts i'd just be like cool i'm gonna buy furniture from you but you have a you run a website so you run a website when somebody comes places an order with you and your website says made by the amish amish made furniture handcrafted amish furniture finest amish fine goods whatever and then when somebody plays in order to do you just fax these you guys and sell like could you just be a layer on top so so or what now to that well first of all i think that like there is some fraud there of like yeah we're amish like you know and they're not they're you they're not right no i'm saying you really do buy it from them yeah i think that the way yes i think and and they call so they call those people i think the slang that they use is english so like they they have an english guide he's like an english guy meaning that's like they're straight man they're front man who like can work with the world and he's he's we trust him you know he's an outsider but like he's you know he's had her back for decades so we trust him i guess that's a jamal in this case but you can have other dealer yeah you can have like and and and may have like a name for that which is like they call it english but it's like yeah it's a well known thing that this is our person who's got our back and we give them a cut on this doc says aws for the amish what is that do you like that that that's just a little i was workshop yeah that is yeah i was workshop what are you thinking about that that's good i like that it's pretty this is the a pretty nifty website if you go to a similar web and look at their and guess their traffic it's not nothing yeah four hundred thousand amish people let's just assume for a second that of the entrepreneurial amish people a very high percentage of them are gonna need to use a service like this right so if you say that even five percent of amish people are entrepreneurial of the of the amish population but maybe it's a little high let's let's say this this twenty thousand people i think you could pretty easily get to some version where you have five thousand customers paying this thing twenty twenty bucks a month that's a one million dollar business one point two for sure that's that's the exact math that i had i said one to one point two million a year and i'm pretty sure it's just this guy jamal jamal is the only guy running it i think it's he could've same could've have been ja j jamal j a v a l but like it was something do you think jamal just does he have trouble sleeping because he just laughs himself very thinking about what his career he's like i just can't believe it i just i just take hold i just can't believe that this is what i did and i'm all the providing value this is it oh it's for sure and the the i just know that these amish guys they're not exactly known for you know being open to change so once you get a customer like you're with them like they measure cat are they better churn not like in terms of like you know like percentages per year but it's like per generation because this is absolutely something that is gonna be passed on from generation to generation and the website looks like it was launched like web one point o together there's like seven sentences although site alright this is amazing so this episode is basically the local million dollar business is that's what this episode is do you want me to do one more i have one more than that could fit in this category this one it's depressing but well okay so when you have do it if it's depressing travel here it's important so when you have to utilize your pet it's like a horrible experience obviously it's like the worst thing next to your chill children and so i used a service that came to my house and it like was the best of the portable situation it couldn't have been better for the the worst thing ever and i after you know i'm a nerd like after a few months i was like this service like it was like phenomenal what was this how did i learn about this the google at at home pet youth asia it's the first one that comes up because they crush i'm not i'm not googling that okay karma not doing it okay it's called i don't even want that in my search history lap of love so lap of love dot com is the website and i was reading this press release by them and here's how this business works so they have vets so they contract all out so they have like oh best practices that they use and then they are like the call center and they dish it out to a local vet who you know does what they need to do and they teach them their ways whatever this website lap of love they put out a press release that said that they are getting ten thousand customers a week and they charge i think six hundred dollars and so if you do the math this business is making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue of which they split with the vet but i was like very happy with my service with with these guys and it was amazing that i had never heard of it and how this company just owns the entire space wow ten thousand a week can you believe that had you even know that that was a thing how'd you find out about it like well you it's word a mouth you you know like your wife or me was like telling people yeah we're like like this is horrible i don't wanna do this and like well i use this service where and you and you hear about that one liner and you're like oh my god that's so much better than like right than the alternative and that's how we found it and i was like researching it and what they do is they because i was like googling they just own like if you google that word you know like related phrases they own the yelp pages in every city so it will be like at home pet up asia in new york in nashville in this and they grow entirely through local search wow that's a crazy business it's a crazy business this crazy business and so like and they said how much ten thousand a week you said oh sorry i got confused ten thousand a month so they handle yeah ten thousand a month and it costs any from five hundred to a thousand dollars depending on a variety of things but isn't this wild and it is like this is another with services where it it sucks but like it's incredibly necessary and i it was amazed at how large this was alright here's another one under the radar business that just crush with local local businesses i saw this guy tan on twitter talking about this he said who i don't know how you say his name exactly don't make to say it again okay sorry alright so i just found that out i've been calling my piano teacher steven and his name's is vin for like last two months alright phil did he just still reconciling that fact and what i've been doing did he just take it well i didn't say it often and i say fast because i was like i was a little unsure and but was slow saying the word vin slow doesn't it know that sound like you're saying or saying the word vin fast does not sound like you're saying steven at all i mean alright say bye to steven i i tell my daughter to stay by and then she would say by steven now i'd be like oh my god name bin blame her you're gonna learn an important less day called taking one for the team i wish you to tell me to say how loud the following words today alright so there's this business called taro and taro his his tweet was today i learned about tara taro a hundred million dollar company that routes phone orders from chinese sushi and pizza restaurants in the us to call centers in the philippines and so what it does is what these guys did was there's two brothers back in twenty fifteen they start this business and they're basically like hey we'll help local businesses take orders over the phone we will be your phone so your your staff is busy you don't wanna have somebody on the phones or just constantly interrupting their workflow we'll just take the call and then we'll put the order into your system and so they started doing that they've they basically serve service three thousand local restaurants in the united states with phone ordering and they basically they're like cool like we'll do this for ten percent cheaper than your labor cost if you do this yourself and by having phone ordering you're gonna get an extra ten to twenty percent of revenue that you wouldn't otherwise get simple simple proposition right give more revenue and i can do it for you at a lower cost than you could do this for yourself and by the way nobody cares who picks up the phone to to take this order they as of this year say that they've reached a hundred million dollar run rate and and how do you spell it t a r r o and it stands for technology all restaurants run on it's the adi adidas of all my phone ordering and is this bootstrap i don't think i don't if it's bootstrap or not but it could be because this is the type of business you could definitely be bootstrap like heavy a cash flow business well now it says that it's ai powered phone ordering does that mean that they don't use philippine anymore i think both right so i think it's basically it's ai a name of one of their workers is alfred ig over there yeah it's powering all yours orders it's both so i think there's there's funny things happening with ai and call center so there's like ai tools that will change the accent of the person so they you know you call somebody there in india but their indian accent gets remix on the fly using ai so it sounds like he's steve and wichita and so that's like one tool that all these guys are using now is like the ai doesn't take the order but they just changed the accent so that you have an american accent what's that called i don't know there's a few few companies trying to do that so there's accent changers there's ai handles just let's say fifty to seventy percent of the routine things and then it routes to the human in the sort of fifty to thirty to fifty percent of of calls that couldn't be solved with ai so like basically ai is the ai makes their call center need like you know half as many people as it did before and that the rest is just profit that just falls to the bottom line for them so there's there's some cool stuff happening with that it's actually kinda interesting to track call center stocks to see what the market thinks is going on like are they gonna be extinct like his call center is just gonna go away are they actually gonna be are they gonna survive but become much more profitable because now they're ai powered and and they cut a lot of their human costs it'll be interesting to see how that plays out yeah what happens interesting you know to the most boring person on earth i guess what happened to like the nba playoffs officer are on i guess that's probably more interesting yeah but if you're like listening to those podcast podcasts you definitely might be in that category of people who who it's boring what's like i think coachella was last weekend and i only was watching the livestream stream of the berkshire hathaway conference what's the name of that really big company it was it called task us or something like that yeah are they publicly traded and yeah i think they are is there market cap just getting obliterated right now because of all those one point two billion dollar market cap and yeah it's down in five years it's down like five x suppose been yeah it's been big got nuke basically from well it kinda was at the peak of the twenty twenty one range so like let's see yeah it basically went public ryan i'd like the peak of the market like september twenty twenty one and then has just been down since then i have gotten oh yeah you're right so it could be it's a bunch of stuff yeah dude by the way i just invested this company i think you you you might actually be an investor are you an investor an owner dot com yeah yeah he's cool that thing is crushing it's crushing this this business owner dot com is kind of amazing so what they're doing is they go to restaurants across america and they're basically like hey you you need software you'd hate your current software you're using fifteen different tools use the owner system instead okay it's actually like not that new of a pitch you know there's other companies that have claimed to be like oh we're all in one or we have the the best point of sale checkout system and these guys have just got it like really really right because they're growing incredibly fast and so what they do is they go to a company and they're like hey look today if i google there's a great case study on their website like if your case study is good this is when i decided to invest i was like doing like the diligence on it and i was i watched their case study and most case studies on business websites are awful gone awful i watched it and i was so thoroughly convinced and i just thought to myself if they either their case studies this well imagine how they're doing like the other important parts of their business because this is like you know the these sort of like the thing that's a kind of a throw away for most businesses they're pretty poor execution so it was this dude who was a pizza shop owner and somewhere maybe pennsylvania the other or something somewhere like that and he's basically showing he's like look if you googled google my pizza shop name if you googled like whatever like town slice pizza pennsylvania the first result is slice the second result is door dash the third result is like all these other companies are stealing my like people are searching for me they're not searching for door dash and they make these websites at rank in seo it's about i was on page two hey as basically i started working with owner and owner first of all now i'm the first result because i'm the first result when people are searching for my business those orders come through me directly i don't have to pay door dash the fifteen percent fee my on my website in my online ordering works really well because that's what owner does they provide that like out of the box i don't have to know anything about tech to be able to do that and then you know i get these i get customers emails and phone numbers and i'm able to text them when we have promotions and sales and deals and things like that and basically i'm making an extra like ten grand a month and that's huge for me like that's like that's like the difference between bringing on the brink of failure or having like a margin of safety it's the difference of like hiring an extra person or not and and i just saw like that's that same like business proposition which is like look your it's twenty twenty five you need to have a website you need to be able to take online orders yourself and you need to rank for your own name at the top of google and look you don't wanna have to deal with you know fifteen tools to be able to do that and we should do it for you out of the box and do it really well and this business is scaling very very fast right now a very very impressive growth and this guy seems like one of those founders that's kind of like high octane i don't know super well yet but just seems very very high octane i'm pretty sure the intro i got to him was someone said this is the best company i've ever invested in and this is the best founder i've ever invested in and i was like are you just saying words are like do you mean these words and he's like i mean these words so it could be wrong but i mean them i it's a hell of an endorsement the way that i invested in him was way less fancy as yours i just jason lump was like he's the best and i just said okay and and i remember talking to him and when i talked to him he this was i think through no maybe this was four years ago he was twenty one years old and he was telling me a story and once i heard like twenty one years old and jason le saying he's the best i was like well okay cool i think i think i'm in and the valuation i believe was really really expensive it was like a nine figure something valuation yeah and i was like this has gotta be huge to like really be worth it and i think he's gonna actually make it a massive massive business have you ever even talked to him hopefully through email we traded like five emails on one night because i was like tell me they answer these five questions and then he did he is the terminator when i had a conversation with him i was like oh you're gonna destroy everything in your path like i i i could sense that but he gave me that vibe where i was like i don't wanna be your enemy you're on a high protein diet he's on his videos for work and stuff like his like youtube videos or whenever they gotta do like interviews he's like us comes off like a really sweet nice guy when i talked to him one of one i was i he's incredibly intense he he will annihilate people in at in an ethical good way but like he's the type of guy where i do not wanna compete to against this guy it's so funny how you get a vibe off people and very quickly so like i remember joe rogan once described somebody he was describing somebody who we just thought was just like a in his mind i don't it's like a total loser but like just like a no like a spine person and he and but the way he was describing them he was like they he's like they just had no energy you don't meet somebody and like are your veins empty like where is the is there any blood in your veins and i just never when he said that immediately in my mind i could think of three people who are like that just like very low energy people in my life and they you can meet these other people that literally like they walk at a different pace they have like like a different amount of energy remember like when we were hanging out in north carolina and and mister beast took us to walmart i'd show us the things and i remember like i was like why is it dude walking so fast like this guy's literally like his i get a literally like a extra heartbeat or something in his cadence he's just like walking faster than everybody else and literally had more energy than anybody else and he was busier than everybody else and i couldn't tell like is he so busy because he's got so much energy or did he have to raise his level of energy does this guy have just more atp in his body because he schedule demanded it and i'm met right i still don't know like cause an effect to that but it was very obvious to me as i've met more and more people that literally having more energy is a common trait of like the most successful people and i don't know if it's cause her effect i was so i i've got a you know i think we we have a small team maybe fifteen people and a lot of them are these like young twenty five year olds and they're animals like they're rabbit animals and they like do crazy animal stuff and every once when i gotta correct them and i have to remind them stay crazy just like i need a direct crazy a little bit and they were asking what i meant and i was trying to think like well how can i give you a good analogy and i was like have you guys ever seen curling i was you know like when they take like that big rock that like is capable of is smashing through everything if they wanted it to and they push it and then there's all those people in the front with like the broom there's just like sweeping in the area to make sure like everything like the path that you need to that that that big rock that's a like a brute force like blunt object so you are just guiding it to in the right lanes and it's like clearing the path i was like i'm the broom and you're the rock and someone's we're gonna we're gonna push you down this lane and i just need to be in front of you constantly like clearing the space and if if i'm ever not clearing the space for you or i need to rep recommend you it's just me kind of saying like hey i need to go like in the this direction but you need to continue being like this brute force red rock yeah that's just gonna like smash through stuff and it's just our job to like change directions every once in a while but i need you to like stay what you are and that is when i know i've hired the the right people is when a i feel like that and b sometimes i feel like i'm intimidated by them like can you hired someone and you're like i i wanna keep you happy because if you go like like if you if you go work for someone else it's gonna be bad news or you like almost getting intimidated have you ever had someone who you hired who you're intimidated by i mean don't of intimidated right were but i i know what should be fur con was like this like immediately i was like oh whoa okay so if there's there's no yeah but it's like yeah he's super smart but he doesn't know anything about business no actually he does yeah yeah but he doesn't you know he does he doesn't work that hard nope actually he works way hard than everybody so like wait wait you're there's no butts it's just super smart and worked super hard and is like well rounded and knows knows enough about the other stuff to get it right like holy shit okay you know and and and i would say the biggest thing is like their self assumption so how do they carry themselves and how do they think about themselves you hire a lot of people that wanna fit into your company or they wanna defer to you or they defer to your judgment and when in while you hire somebody that doesn't wanna do any of those things they come in they see broken stuff they wanna fix it they don't think what you were doing was right they just if it's it's good they think it's cool if it's broken they think it's broken like that's it they don't think that anybody else is more qualified in the companies to do it like they think they could do it themselves they don't think that there will be an employee forever like they're like cool i'm here right now a partnership and like you know eventually i'm gonna be doing my own thing or i'm gonna be i'll be you know in the leadership of this company i'll have more equity in this company that i have today like there's some people who have a confidence about that about themselves because they have a certain self assumption and and for the people doing prophecy you know what i mean fe with guy who worked with you at monkey inferno the the incubator and he previously help start app eleven which is a hundred billion dollar company but between him between app loving becoming a hundred billion dollar company and him starting it he worked for you and it wasn't like a clear runaway hit for a minute but then it like it did and he was loving what right it wasn't like a clear i love it was already run away hit when he when he got it got it so he he knew it was there what the hell was they doing working with you or maybe it had not paid out yet believe it or not he doesn't care i don't know if i i think i think i'm a not in that category he because i was there when the money hit oh got it okay he was still working on our like beta release of our app that had four hundred users and he was up till three am that night and he could have cared less and nothing changed between going from you know whatever you know normal person to being worth you know nine figures in an instant nothing changed nothing well i don't believe and i remember even telling him i said look man i was like prepping him like i said psychologist i was like look man it'd be crazy if nothing changed i understand we gotta figure out like how we're gonna are you just gonna wanna retire are you gonna like is are you gonna lose that edge is it gonna be temporary you wanna take some time just go on vacation and enjoy it like i was like it's hard to walk into an opium den and not get high i was like it's hard it would be like i think kinda crazy to assume you're gonna get massively massively rich generational wealthy like in the next few months and that nothing changes and then he was like cool analogy can you go out can you get out of my way now so i just do what i doing i was alright and then nothing changed it was amazing i think i like walked into the office one time like after or what happened i i think i at this point i knew that he was like wildly successful and i saw him like i don't i don't remember exactly how it was but i had this feeling like he had his hat turned around his on the backwards of his head and he had like a crew screwdriver in his teeth and he was like behind the tv like installing a raspberry but was that think all the raspberry pie yeah here's like installing this like computer chip to like the tv and i was like fe kind what are you doing and he was like explaining to me like how it'd be cool because this raspberry pie things like a computer so he's turning the tv into the computer so and it like and of the things that he wanted to do like there was a handful of like amazing things and then it really kinda boiled down to like isn't this cool like that i was like yes it is cool and and i remember i was to justify like why are you and then he just kept it going but it's cool it's cool don't you think it's cool and i was like right yeah you're right that's actually the best reason why you should be looking like a mechanic and like doing this and it was like it i we we were doing one of our sessions it was at like eight pm at night that's sounded a different than how it meant for it to sound but we were like talking about business at like a pivot i at your office and he was like there like installing this like pie into your tv yeah yeah and the funny thing is when fe joined the company it's a good lesson i i would say because it could've have gone either way so f on builds eleven i think app eleven at the time when he left was maybe like a hundred million dollar a year business but it was clear was scaling fast and he leaves and he leaves because he's like cool the rest of the job is managing people if i wanna stay cto and like i liked the beginning when i was building stuff so i'm gonna just build stuff so he leaves and he decides to go build he decides to learn mobile development so he's like oh i think mobile is gonna be big now and so he's like i wanna actually learn android development and he starts building games for fun in his bedroom alone and he does that for a little bit i find him there and i'm like go i think you're super interesting you should come join us don't be in a room alone no fun building that way come build with us so he ends up joining us and he joins us like the head of android and within the first few weeks it was like extremely obvious that this guy does not fit in first of all he's smarter than everybody second of all he works harder than everybody he was there like everybody would leave our company culture was everybody would leave around five pm most people had kids they'd go home he would come in at eleven and he would leave something like eleven pm and then he would still be on slack at two am and then he would come in again the next day at eleven eleven thirty and he would just do that every single day and when everybody else would quote me a timeline like alright cool they we'll i'll show you the prototype at the same meeting next week he would show me the meet the prototype the next morning and so i was like okay this guy he's gonna break our culture one way or the other and you could tell the other engineers they both liked him but we're also a little bit like this guy doesn't come till till till lunch he you know he's pushing updates at two am and like we we weren't working then so we weren't involved with it and you know what's his deal this guy dropped out of college he's not like classically trained so like what what are we gonna do with this guy and in my head i was like alright one of two things is gonna happen either this guy is gonna it's gonna be like organ rejection he's gonna have to leave because he just doesn't fit or it needs to be that like the thing where the hook like the oregon like the host takes it that the the the guest takes over the body i was like okay so i went out with him one night and we we're at a bar and i was just like look i can't this is not official but you're gonna be running this company and i need you to start building out the team the way you want it to be built and you should work the way you wanna work don't try to fit because we're gonna change this whole company with you kind of driving that that engineering change i was like this is how a startup supposed to feel you're doing it right and so pretty quickly i just told him you hire your own people and they don't have to interview with everybody else or you don't need everybody's blessing to sign off on a hire so they don't to interview but if he liked the person he could hire them under his team for his eventually he became cto he became my cofounder and you know he became like you know leader of the company but i had to basically like amazon is his phrase bar razors it's like you you you hire somebody and then they raise your bar of what could what good looks like he was a clear bar razor and there was a part of us that like didn't know how to deal with that and the right way to deal with it was to totally lean into it and be like oh that's the new normal for us that you're the new normal you're the new bar bar center of like what what what our engineering team should look like did the other people quit or like who who won i mean obviously he is still there or he was there well a couple people adapted they were like cool i'm not and my lifestyle is not that i'm gonna be up to it two am but i'm gonna crush in my nine to five and i will work at that pace and like cool you're gonna work a crazy schedule i'm not gonna work a crazy schedule but like i'm here for it i wanna work at that pace i wanna be like that effective and i wanna change the expectations of what speed looks like inside the company and so a couple people became that and then a couple people we actually had a legacy business that was making a few million dollars your profit and so we spun out the rest of the team onto that business i was like you guys work on that company in that schedule and that pace and this team is gonna work in this pace so we split we basically split the company in half like a like a divorce and like like more of the flies like like a like a happy merry divorce i was like you guys get custody of those assets we're gonna have custody of these assets that's pretty fascinating it's like throwing people out on the different island and just saying like you better figure it out survive and you losers are gonna go to this dying thing it wasn't dying i mean it was like fine it was it was honesty it was what some people wanted some like not everybody wants to to like grind like crazy and what this was a very good way to do is to be like there are two two paths you keep your same job your salary all that stuff one is a certain lifestyle one is another this lifestyle is easy this lifestyle is hard self select and the self selection was very helpful dude tastes pretty bad ass we should have him on again now he's got like his space in fort mason i think it's called yeah he's the man we should have him on again yeah of course love talking for forgot what do you think is that it i don't know exactly where i wanna go with this but i just wanna share this with you so i've been trying to help certain people in my life like either start businesses or upgrade their business right so people who listen to you no no like my my like micro like people who i care about you know like i like my trainer for example my trainer today he's got a training business where his calendar is full he's got more clients on his roster than he can handle but you know he's he's trading time for money still so he's he's not scale he can only train so many people per day right so he's doing five six sessions a day he's driving to people's locations and he's training them but like you can't do twelve people per day for example he couldn't double his money if you wanted to he definitely couldn't do his goal which is you know make twice as much money with half the time invested like half to you know with double the time flexibility and so he's been starting he started like a a drink and energy drink company started like a like a apparel company like trying to do these side hustle but all of them i'm like to dude the beverage industries like brutal right and this is like a brutally competitive business to be the apparel business just a brutal business to be in i to like get another trainer yes so i'm like hey if you thought about getting another trainer or like in and in this case i was like what would be like an appealing version versus was like here's some ways you could scale so i was like you could start a studio and he's like oh i would love to have my own space my own studio and i'm like okay that's a way that you could get to your goal if he started a studio and it's been very interesting to see kinda like how he would approach it versus how i would approach it so i basically told him i was like look the way i wanted to get in shape and instead of just being like i guess i'll just wing it i guess me who's never done this we'll just figure it out i was like no let me get a coach somebody who's already done this before and i hired you as my trainer i was like i think you should basically have me as your trainer your business trainer and i was like don't pay me anything all you gotta do is book your what do you call your first session an assessment book at assessment and he's like alright went tomorrow like yeah let's meet tomorrow so we started talking we started doing this thing where basically i would we would talk and i would just give them i was like how do i keep this so simple because at at the in prior times that i talked to him i remember like i was such a terrible coach i was like a trainer who would come in and try to train all your body parts in one session and like be showing you like the beginner thing but then couldn't resist showing you the advanced thing and then you're gonna do you're gonna get hurt you're gonna pull back muscle so i've been trying to be a better coach and so i was like alright how do i keep this super simple and so i leave them every time with one blue sticking out with one thing it's alright this the one should do this between now and the next session and we're good and it's been very interesting to see how much progress we can make just doing this very simple method i'll just share with you kinda like how this works so the same way that at the dance studio i was like picking up information on unless i was learning about a business while i was there watching my daughter i also learned a little bit about a business i basically realized like that's something i've been doing for about fifteen years now and i think most people if you just started doing that one thing just start like paying attention to the business around you and start doing a little bit of napkin good math right try to figure how many customers a place has times the price every customer pays gives you a good approximation of top line you could just google or ask ai what's a good profit margin for a fitness studio typically are they a ten percent forty percent fifty percent twenty percent like what is the net profit margins for for these things and so what i realized is that most people don't as i've been helping two or three people in my life do this most people don't approach business this way and i think if they did they would have a lot higher chance of success i think that hiring a fitness like i i was reluctant to hire a fitness coach but then it made total sense because i remember i was like well i was the best at whatever sport i wanted to do in high school when i you and then college where i played for a little while when you are basically like a professional athlete you have someone just telling you what to do every single day you just do what they say and i remember being so reluctant to hire a fitness coach and then i did and i started seeing like my body changed in like two months and then i was like yeah that works and then i was like well maybe should i get a nutrition and i being again so so reluctant to do it and then i got i use my body tutor and i was just like doing exactly what they told me to do so i had accountability but i also had education they were teach me and i just kinda hit me i'm like why have i always been so reluctant to pay someone money to just tell me what to do and once i kinda let go of that i think i realized and i've learned this in business as well there's a lot of creativity that you need to have but in general there is like a process that you can follow where in a lot of cases you will get to be fairly successful like you you know you still have to invent stuff and you still have to like stick with it for years but in general just like with changing your body it's just like if you do these five things you will get eighty percent to where you want to go and just only and you don't need to think you just need to execute these five things and i think what people don't understand i think you and i understand it a bit even though emotionally sometimes we forget it but a lot of the listeners understand this which is business is the exact same where there's a series of steps where you can sort of iterate your way there just like you can with your body with your nutrition and things like that yeah totally the way i think about it is you're gonna have some rate of learning some learning curve right so it might take you six months might take a year might take you two years you could definitely get there on your own a coach is pretty much just a guaranteed way to speed up that learning curve and that's like the first benefit you get and then the second benefit you get is you're much less likely to quit during plateau because the coach has some accountability a coach has also seen those plateau many time before and a coach can get you out of through the plateau faster than you're gonna get through it yourself and so those two reasons i think i have probably five active coaches right now what what it's what i would insane roughly what category are they in so you have a fitness i think you all use my boot body tutors so have new nutrition so i have exercise and then i have food mh and food coach which is probably the one that felt the weirdest to do and now is in retrospect the most obvious snow brainer of it's almost like a therapist too food is a weird thing it's more of a therapist than it is anything else yeah yeah it's like i think would people think food judge oh so they're giving a meal plan in macros like no no she's helping me to figure out why i don't stick to any any food plan or macros that i've ever set for myself in the last ten years yeah and and slowly uproot those and like being in my corner along the way i started learning the piano this year and so i got panama that i got ended up getting two like two different ones to try to do that because one of the other realizations i had is that there there's a massive difference between an average coach and a great coach so like in the same way that in in tech there's this phrase about like ten x engineers there is for sure a ten x coach or here hitting your piano coaches like you know miss linda and like like these two these two old ladies like to each other like you know miss linda said we should do it this way what do you think about that i don't even say anything i just show up and i'm better and they're like wow you've been putting in a lot of work i'm like well but had a couple great sessions you know okay so you got two piano coaches that's pretty wild yes business coach executive coach like a yeah like a yeah yeah like i know what do what you executive coach think got executive coach i think those are all i have right now i had a pt briefly for my knee rehab but yeah basically anything i do now my first step is to but first step is to start the same day i have the idea that's like my rule oh you wanna do x great like same day you need to do something in that area you need to go have your first session in some way drop everything and do it so i have this sort like drop everything and do it rule and then the next thing that i'll do is i'll trying to find a coach because i know a coach is gonna speed me up in the process and it's like obviously these things cost money so you can't like always get coaches for everything but you kinda can like there's a guy in our basketball elite this guy alex and he's just nasty on the he's so good and i'm like wow alex what did you do do and he's he's smaller than me he's quicker but he's not like he's not it's not his athletic system is why he's so good these guy's just better at basketball and growing up i thought i was training to be good at basketball i was like a goal of mine and it's just i never had any coaches and never i did tickets seriously i didn't know how to i didn't know how to train properly and he told me the store i was what were you doing differently and he he basically was like when i was young he's like i didn't have any money for a coach but i saw i was at the gym training myself and i saw this trainer training this other kit so i went up to the trainer and i was like how much for a session he's like i was like seventy five dollars like oh my god no way my parents are gonna pay seventy five dollars for a session and so he goes he asked a great question which is he he's like is there anything i could help you with that you would be willing to give me a session for if i if i helped you with that thing like you know for example do you have another session coming in like could i be could i run around and just be a rebound or s balls for you could clean up could i show up early could i do could i do you know help you with your your text messages to your all people go you're scheduling like what can i do and the guy was like alright like that's end enduring look fine and so he he lets him basically like help him during sessions and then that that way he was actually like learning while teaching somebody else and then he'd have his own session at the end and he's like cool give me thirty minutes give me forty minutes at the end he just did that and he got so good as a young kid just doing that and eventually built his own business training while he was getting trained you know what i mean and and and ended actually turning it into a a revenue generator versus just a cost for himself okay so i am so bought into to everything you're saying i i do this as well i've got all types of coaches to add to it what the second thing that i do after getting a coach is i put a date where i'm like i must perform on this date and one of the ways that i got that idea so like for example if it's like a fitness thing it's like i wanna achieve this body fat by this time or i wanna run this race on this state or you know wanna be able to do x y and z lift this a goal but it's not just a goal it's a performance is that what i'm hearing i tried to make it up performance so for example if it's just like a five k just i wanna ride a five k in in twenty one minutes that's not particularly fast but it was hard for me and it was just a really nice thing to work back from so there's an end date so it's a it's i find it quite motivating or i wanna bench this amount of weight like on this date and do you remember that tv show on mtv called made where they would teach people how to learn something in approximately thirty days and so it was that show i love that show so what they would do is they would take like this young woman that she was like i wanna do a back flip on a b x bike and or i wanna win like like i wanna be able to win a skateboard competition like these like kind of like crazy ideas are like i wanna be i don't remember if the back flip one always stuck in my brain and they like hired a bm coach and this little girl her whole stick was like she's like a pretty cool popular girl there's no way she wants to do this nitty gritty bm a x thing you know with the kids from the other side of the railroad tracks and she ends up doing it and in a competition she did a back flip on a bike and i remember that show we should do an m version of maid where everyone just it doesn't matter what the it doesn't matter what the thing is you just gotta pick a thing it could be like i wanna go try to like meet a girl but use their language like in a foreign country or like you i wanna go like ash directions in spanish or whatever like i wanna go enter a chest competition just something where it's like you have a very short amount of time and you have to hire help and you have to kinda jump off the cliff a little bit to master your skill or just even you learn your skill so for you it would be a piano side or like i wanna have friends over and i wanna play a song for them right yeah i think that's great i love that idea it's look kinda like we did the my first muscle challenge last year i think it's a it's like a a cousin of that i'm totally on board for this i did a thing once that was that was similar in australia we were three of us and we basically each wrote down a thing that we would love to have done but are scared of shit to do so for example one's person was to do like perform a stand up comedy set like just out go on and the open mic do five minutes one of the guys he had been in a long term relationship with a girl from high is like high school girlfriend they just broken up like five years later or something and he really he was like i've never asked anyone out and he's like i just wanna he's like i wanna be out somewhere see someone i things he's saying i wanna approach her i wanna ask her out and he's like i just wanna like like not i just wanna overcome that one and like he's like i i know that sounds stupid like no it doesn't sound but everything's everybody's got these things right another another person was to god how they're phrase if it was i've i remember was something like you know what parties when like the dance circle forms yeah they wanna one one go win one and do a thing and then get out yeah and i was like what it's a week took out hip hop dance class together with our friend and this girl who she's a great dancer she's like a professional dancer and me my buddy trevor and her went to a hip hop dance class just prepping for the circle like the whole time by the way when you go to that class it's two different classes if you just show up to a class just for whatever or you show up thinking can this is me going in the circle at some point yeah it's the best right you're i'm gonna julia styles of some bitch and like get we got kind of addicted to it we would start to make new ones to do every few days so it'd be like i'm gonna go for a walk right now but i'm gonna have like three i like i'm gonna have three like converse like you know i don't know whose conversation was like on my walk i'm not just gonna smile a nod like i'm gonna gonna basically give a smooth compliment to like you know three people along the way i noticed something i like i'm gonna say it and it's gonna go well i'm gonna have that interaction or like i'm not gonna answer the question how are you today with the word good exactly exactly yeah my friend noah ke and used to have a saying where he was like every single day he's like was i was to get my business going i would ask for a discount on every single thing that i bought he's like i just needed to get over like the nerves just be not afraid of confrontation and asking for things yeah that's amazing yeah we we in our our living room called we reversed courtney name was fear nation we just wrote everything we'd have be afraid of and then you you try to cross them out you pick one each day and you try to cross it out or pick one every couple days and try to cross it out we're gonna do m made instead of mtv made we're gonna have m made that that what what sure gonna be that's an interesting question i would need to think about it i i don't think it would be a fitness related thing because that's too easy but i would have to pick like an emotional thing like be equivalent passing girl i think it happened be dancing dude that would be the worst maybe that would be yeah i would rather like punch myself in the stomach twenty times and not going there all you like they're might edit this out we're we're not doing this episodes what do you think is that it that's it amish dying pets fe con very ec episode kids playing the battle you never knew you wanted it alright that's it that's a about i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to from at all in and like a days off on a goal travel never looking back