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achieve your desired level of business with one wave of a wand, where would it be? So, 50 million is the goal. Can the current business help us reach 50 million? This is unrealistic. How often have you said that to yourself? Maybe it's something you want to create, or a business you've been thinking about starting, or a different life you've potentially imagined for yourself. And that doesn't necessarily mean you think it's impossible. It's more like, " Sure, maybe it's possible for some people, but probably not for me." The chances are simply too low. This is unrealistic." I keep telling myself this, thinking I'm being reasonable. But looking back, I've noticed a
pattern that makes me think a little about how seriously I should trust this voice. I thought I didn't have any limiting beliefs, but even after this conversation I thought, " Hmm, I thought I won the personal development game, Eric." To illustrate this, I want to show you how much money I have made in the last 20 years of my life. I tried to build my first business to make money online back in 2007, and here's how much money I made that year. $50, building random websites, like for my friend's dad. Those first $50 I earned completely changed my life. But before that happened, my friend James from school told me that it was possible to make money online and that I did n't need to ask my mom's permission to do it. And I thought: "
No, my friend, this is just unreal." But after a few months of his instigation, I tried it, and then my life completely changed. So, in 2007 it was $50, the next year it was about $100, in 2009 it was practically nothing, in 2010 it was about £250, and then in 2011 it was about £100. I was a kid in school, building websites on a freelance platform, and God, I felt so rich because I was making all this money. But then in 2012, just before I entered medical school, I was scammed out of all my savings, which at the time was around £1,000. And it occurred to me that if I could build a business that could make back 10 times the money I lost. At first I said to myself, "This is unreal." But after a few weeks, I allowed myself to explore the
idea, and eventually I built my next business, which was truly successful. So we got about £10,000 in the first year, about £80,000 in the second year and then £150,000 in revenue in the third year. And then these numbers, which once seemed completely unreasonable and unrealistic, suddenly became the new norm. But if you had told me back then that one day I would have a multi-million dollar business, I would have said, of course, "No, that's not realistic." Then, in 2017, I launched my YouTube channel. For the first few years, it brought in virtually no money, but then in 2019, something key happened. I graduated from medical school. I worked as a full-time doctor for the National Health Service in the UK, while running my first
medical school admissions business and maintaining my YouTube channel. At the time, this YouTube channel was making around £3,000 a month, and one of my mentors, Rohan, told me at the time that I should hire a And hiring such an editor would cost around £3,000 per month. So I said to my mentor, "I don't mean anything realistic. "I can't pay £3k a month to an editor when a YouTube channel is making £3k." But he encouraged me to try, and over the course of many conversations, he convinced me to do it. And so Christian became the first full-time employee I ever hired. And thanks to the freed up time, the business was able to grow from £30k a year to around £300k a year, which is around seven or eight times what I was earning working as a doctor.
I am currently making more money than I have ever seen in my life. And then in 2020, just as I was about to launch my first course on YouTube, I talk to two other of my friends and mentors, and they encourage me to think more broadly about online teaching. My original plan was to just publish it as a video series and sell it for $200, but they encouraged me to turn it into a live cohort experience with high levels of engagement and feedback and." Luckily, I listened to these guys who have more experience than me, and I really did. And here's what happened to our business's revenue that year. We jumped from $ 300,000 to about $1.2 million. I became a millionaire at the age of about 26, which would have been completely incomprehensible to me when I was
just starting out. Then, thanks to COVID, the business grew to about $4 million the following year. And as of 2021, we are now hovering at a plateau somewhere between $4 and $6 million per year in revenue with a margin somewhere between 40 and 60 %. So you can do the calculations if you want. With all these different jumps, every time I reached a plateau in my business journey, I thought, "Oh, this is it. " I can't get any better." Almost always, a mentor or friend with an outside perspective could encourage me to think a little bigger. My first reaction is always: "No, that's not realistic." And then, because I listen to them, we eventually break through the plateau and achieve success that I never thought possible. So you would think I would learn to be a little more
skeptical of that unrealistic voice in my head. But I was recently talking to my CEO coach, Eric. And again, his outside perspective encouraged me to think a little bigger about my own business. And my immediate reaction, of course, was: this is unrealistic. You see, the thing about this being unrealistic is that it really does seem like a statement of fact. You imagine a dream you want, but you say, "Oh no, that's not realistic." kind of feeling like you're, you know, saying that you have this foundation, this solid foundation, that you know for sure that it's unrealistic.
Unfortunately, I've never recorded one of these conversations before, where my mind would break down and I could think bigger about something and then it would unrealistically turn into a possibility. But in this conversation between Eric and I, we turned on the cameras. And so, you'll see me come across an idea that at first seems completely absurd. And you'll see how an experienced CEO coach like Eric helps me process the ideas, all the feelings, and limiting beliefs that come to me as a result of this conversation. If you run your own business or maybe you're thinking about starting your own business on the side, maybe to create an additional source of income or something like that, I hope you get a lot out of this conversation. But, whatever your situation
, there is one thing I hope you take away from this video. What did you call unrealistic before you even gave yourself permission to explore it? Feel free to pause the video and think about what this could mean to you. What is your dream, something you might enjoy working towards, but you think, "No, that's not realistic. "This is impossible." And to what extent have you actually allowed yourself to explore this? Even just hypothetically, even just modeling what it might look like. So, once you have an idea, let's move on to the second section, the 10X question.
This is a completely driverless car. You could see them in some of the major cities in the world. Internet with light beams, molecular recycling, turning seawater into fuel, even teleportation. These are all projects that either attempted to be implemented or actually launched X, Google's moon-shooting factory. And the whole point of them is, how do we explore these ideas that seem like science fiction, and how do we actually bring them to life in the real world? So, X is part of Alphabet, Google's parent company, which this guy runs. Not to be confused with this X that this guy runs. The guy who runs Google's version of X is called Astro Teller, and his job title literally means " captain of the moons." And for most of us, if you offered us
the idea of building a driverless car or balloons that could broadcast the internet to people on Earth, we would all probably say, "No way, that's unrealistic." But back in 2013, our friend Astro Teller wrote a really cool article in Wired magazine where his whole argument was that 10x can sometimes be a lot easier than 10%. The idea is that if you imagine any goal, for example, say, in your business, which is generating a million in revenue per year, just so that the numbers are clear. If you were trying to grow this business by 10%, you would think, " How can I do more of the same, but a little better?" Can I maybe build a slightly larger audience, have a slightly more expensive product, can I maybe take a few extra sales calls, whatever it
is? But instead of thinking about 10 %, if you think about 10x growth in business, meaning growing the business 10x to 10 million in revenue, then chances are you can't just do more of the same things within your framework, just a little bit better. You will most likely have to explore outside-the-box thinking and do something completely different. Now, this idea that a 10x increase could potentially be easier than a 10% increase was the basis of a conversation I recently had with my own CEO coach, Eric Partaker. And before we get into this, I want you to think again. Take, for example, your own income. If you're watching this, you probably have a job where you make a certain amount of money, or you're a student studying
something where you have an idea of what your starting salary will be after graduation. What would happen if you imagined earning 10 times more? This may seem completely unrealistic, but I would gently advise you to just model what it might look like. Of course, this is easier to do in the context of your own business, where there are no limits to how much you can earn, it all depends solely on your own skills and your hard work. Compared to a job, where, you know, there are a lot of other factors that dictate how much you earn, in a certain way. But even if you're not an entrepreneur, I hope you can get something out of watching Eric and I grapple with this particular
issue. By the way, a quick word from the sponsor of this video, which is very excitingly called Perplexity Compute. Now, there's a question that everyone often asks me: what AI should I use? Obviously there are all kinds of different options and all kinds of different models, and I really don't think that's the right question anymore because you can literally have access to all the models in one place. That's what you get with Perplexity Compute, among other things, and it's one of the reasons I love it so much. Because, frankly, different models have started to specialize in different things, for example, one might be particularly good at writing, another might be particularly good at
data analysis, and that can change every week depending on what features come out. So you either need to keep all this context in your head, like I'm going to use Claude for X, I'm going to use ChatGPT for Y, I'm going to use Gemini for Z, and you have to pay for multiple subscriptions and you have to juggle that and stay on top of everything that's going on. Or you use Perplexity Computer as a single hub to have access to all of these models without having to pay for additional subscriptions. You just tell it what you want to do in plain language, and it's much more than a chatbot. It actually generates a virtual machine on their infrastructure. Something like having your own open Claude, but without any of the security implications of having your own
open Claude, if you're familiar with it. It has hundreds of built-in integrations. You can even have it create its own integrations if one doesn't exist, via MCP or API. And you can do all this without knowing anything about learning programming. You simply ask it what you want and it will do it for you, deploying whatever model is best suited for that particular use case. For example, you can tell Perplexity Computer something like: " Find me all the numbers from last week's ad." Tell me what changed and why, and write it down for the team." And so, instead of one model trying to handle all of this, it will divide the tasks based on which model is best. For example, you'll be asked to connect your Meta Ads account, and then maybe
Claude will do some data analysis in the Meta Ads account and then hand it over to Gemini, because Gemini is better at doing deep research and analysis, and then hand it over to something like GPT-6 Astra, which is better at writing data for the team. And because it connects to your calendar, email, Slack, Notion, whatever you use, it can have all that context without having to provide it every time. So, if you need to get something done in your business, at work, or even in life, I also often use it to plan trips. I would highly recommend trying Perplexity Computer. There will be a link below if you want to try it. Chapter three, achieving the 10x goal. This all sounds good.
What is step number one? So, step number one - we need to set a 10x goal. So what is the business doing now? So, we've been getting about $5 million a year for the last few years, pretty consistently. Even though they were different products and slightly different things, we always ended up somewhere around the million mark. OK. If you could wave a wand and get the business to where you'd like it to be in a few years, uh, where would it be.Where would it be? Now, and.and.I don't.Okay, look. So, this is where people start to get wrong right after that, when they consciously or subconsciously start to layer all the reasons why they shouldn't start thinking like that. It could be, "Oh, I've been here before. I've tried this before. This is not
going anywhere. We sent. We seem to be staying at this basic level of income." Or, "Oh, I don't really want this, so why think that?" So, the key phrase here to get value from this exercise is to suspend disbelief. So, pretend, like I said, you can wave a wand and just pick a number. It doesn't come with burnout. It doesn't come with added chaos. It doesn't come with my life being in danger. What number would you be if you could wave a wand? For the sake of avoiding doubt, 50 million per year would be a target of 10 times. Good. But then I think, well, 20 would be pretty sick. Yes. Even 10 would be pretty sick, that's a doubling. But then I think: well, if we're going all the way, why not make it 100? And then I also think that yes,
but now there are all these limitations because, you know, the business that we're in is not going to get us to 100 million. That's right. But he can get us to 10 or 20. And so, like.Yeah, uh, like.Yeah Yes. So you quickly jump to all the reasons for disbelief, which is a major obstacle to people getting value from such an exercise, instead of simply taking the next step, which is just say 50 million, because that's literally 10 times more? Okay, the goal is 50 million per year. OK. I say, "I don't really want this. I do n't really care about money. It's not about the money. It's about having fun.
" And all of that, but we'll just put that aside for a moment. But I want to address what you just said. I'm going to, you know, challenge everyone watching to say, "No, it's about the money." You know, everything is fine with money too. You know, people sometimes have this attitude about money where they think, "Oh, I shouldn't want this." Or, you know, is it normal to want that? There's nothing wrong with wanting that. And you don't need to prove it or justify it to anyone. I think it's totally normal and healthy to say, "Hey, it's both." It's about money." And you know what? I return to the athletics analogy. If I were an athlete, wouldn't it be great to win an Olympic gold medal? Why wouldn't you want to if you can? And
if you were aiming for an Olympic gold medal, would society say, "What's wrong with you? You know, you have such a big ego that bronze isn't enough? Or that, you know, just qualifying for the Olympics isn't enough. We would n't say anything like that to a sportsperson we admire. And the same goes for business. There's nothing wrong with aspiring to Olympic gold, and there's nothing wrong with everything that goes with it, including the money and the amount itself. So, okay. So, 50 million. This is the goal. Oh, this is really interesting to revisit because this conversation happened about a month ago when I was in London. And Eric didn't tell me much about the context of the conversation.
He simply said that there was an interesting 10x magnification structure that he would like to explore with me. Of course, when he said that, I thought, " Okay, so we're going to explore how to get the business to 50 million?" And I did n't even let myself finish that thought because it seemed so wildly unrealistic. So before we get into the details of applying this to my own business, again, to get value out of this video, I highly recommend applying it to something you care about in your life. This could be your business's income. This could be your profit. Aren't these prime numbers because you can just multiply them by 10 and see what happens. But even in your health, even in your relationships, whatever it is, what might a 10x
version of this look like that you have n't yet allowed yourself to explore? Is there a girl you want to ask out, but who you think isn't for you at all? For example, this was the situation with my wife. I've been in love with her forever, even before we met. She's the most beautiful girl I've ever met, and I always assumed, "No, that's not real." Whatever it is that you've been putting off, what would exploring a greater possibility look like, even if you're only exploring it hypothetically? It's so easy for us to give up on a goal that seems outside our comfort zone. And I experienced this firsthand during this conversation, where I see my apparent discomfort at even the thought of the number 50 million. This seems completely absurd. Even
now, it seems completely unrealistic. But this sense of discomfort with the idea of a larger purpose can be a very interesting one to sit with and explore from that space, even just hypothetically. Of course, you don't have to strive for the goal. I don't even know if I want to aim for the 50 million goal. But it makes sense to at least hypothetically explore such a possibility. Just to make sure you're not sabotaging yourself. Now, if you try this, I would be very happy if you let me know by sending me an email. My email address is on the screen, so please email me if you have completed this exercise with any thoughts or what you learned from it. But in the rest of the video, I'll
show you how the conversation went in the context of our research into the $50 million goal for our own business. We will talk about all the changes that need to happen from a business perspective, from a team perspective, and from a personal perspective. And this last part goes far beyond the business side. So below will be the timestamps if you want to skip if business stuff doesn't particularly interest you. And so, this brings us to the next chapter, opening the black box. So, okay. So, 50 million. This is the goal. Well, because. Um, so can the current business help us reach 50 million? Um, it depends on how we define current business. We would have to make quite a few changes to even think about.Yes.
Perfectly. OK. So, that's another common mistake that happens when people set a goal of 10x, is that they say, "Oh, yeah, but my current business can't do 10x." Hmm. Yes, that's right. That's the point. If your current business could grow 10x, you would probably already grow it 10x. So, the bottom line is that change is needed. And to stick with the flight metaphor, the training plane is called a Cessna, and you're not going to increase your altitude 10 times in a small training plane. We need to create a new high-performance aircraft. And we do this by redesigning the business model. So, the business model is the same airplane. I want to explain this very
simply, because when I say a term like business model, people can get a little confused, like: "Business model, what do you mean?" That doesn't sound right to me. No, no, no, to put the business model in simple terms, just think about three things. So, you have your product, what you sell and at what price. Do you have a market, who do you sell to and through what channels? Yes. And you have delivery. So, how do you actually get your product or service to them? So, to increase sales from 5 million to 50 million, let's look at each of them and I'd love to hear what changes you think are necessary to achieve a 10x result.
For example, with a product, if you're currently selling a product for a dollar a piece, okay, do we want to sell 50 million of those every year? Will this work? No, we probably need a higher priced product that doesn't create as much So, from a product perspective, if you think about all the products that you're selling right now, which ones have a chance of supporting a 10x result, and which ones , you know, are maybe holding you back? You know, there are a few. Uh, it's not impossible. And I was at a masterclass in Scotland over the weekend, where some of the people in that group were making about 50 million in revenue from expensive coaching,
consulting, or similar services. Good. So, it is possible. Yes, this does not contradict the laws of physics. Yes. Emm. So, that's what comes to mind. Good. And when you think about those businesses that you just mentioned, the products, the price at which they sell them how does that compare or contrast with what you're doing now? This is a much higher price, and they have recurring billing Good. So we need a much higher price point, and we need a recurring revenue model or a membership model.
Yes. And I think that applies to software as well as information products. I think in terms of software, I don't know of many consumer products that generate 50 million in revenue, but I can think of millions of B2B products that generate 50 million in revenue. Hmm. Emm. So, Superfocus for individuals, I think, is unlikely to help us achieve this, but Superfocus for teams, the path to 50 million in revenue seems much more well-trodden if we focus on selling to enterprises, because they have more money. If you scale your product to 25k per year, how many loyal members will you need per year to reach 50 million?
Oh, 2000. Does that sound like a huge number to you? Actually, well, I mean it sounds like a lot, but it doesn't sound like an overwhelming amount. And this. Wait, is that right? 50 million divided by 25 + 1 + 2 + 3. Hmm, 2000. Yes, 2000 customers at 25,000 per year brings us to 50 million. But therein lies the power. It's not entirely out of the question. Yes, and that's the power of carefully thinking through a business model before just starting. Yes, because you can design your business to meet the requirements of this new model.
Yes. Again, it's interesting for me to look back on this because I remember my visceral reaction when I thought, " Wait a minute." 50: Oh no, no, no. That's 50 million divided by "ah". I thought, "Oh. Damn. It's 2,000. It's just 2,000. It's. I mean, it's a big number, but it's not some crazy big number. I can imagine getting 2,000 customers for something. We have an audience of about 8 million across different platforms, about 2,000. Getting 2,000 people to buy something, if it doesn't violate the laws of physics. That's so interesting. And so before I literally just crunched the numbers, I immediately dismissed 50 million as completely
unrealistic and insurmountable, and it's, uh, not even worth thinking about. But when you start breaking it down and doing the math, or even just breaking it down into. Okay, hypothetically, what steps would that theoretically take? They're still complicated, but now they seem doable, not completely impossible In statistics, there's something called a normal distribution, and in a normal distribution, there's always going to be data points that are outside of the normal distribution. the mean, outside the mean, and those are outliers. So I have a liberating way of thinking about it, which is that since data points tend to follow a normal distribution, a lot of
people cluster around the middle, and then you have a small number of outliers. That's always the case, so inevitably, no matter what you do in terms of business, there's always going to be someone who's going to take those outlier data points. So why not do it yourself? Why did these people on this team take those outlier data points? But why does it have to be them? Why can't it be you? And when you think in that way that someone is going to take those outlier data points, someone is going to be an outlier. Okay, objection, Yuvana. Yeah. One thought that immediately comes to mind when you say all of that is, "But I don't want stress."
A. We'll come back to that later. Because you can't be an outlier and burn out at the same time. Okay, so, outlier, let's Let's go back to professional sports. These professional athletes, when you watch them, are they burned out? No. Because they couldn't compete if they were burned out. Yeah. Right? So the dropout case by definition, taking that data point, means you're hitting dropout in a sustainable way.
Okay. And you can only do that if, which we'll come back to later, you find leverage. So you find the 20% that's going to create 80% of the growth. For example, we're talking about leverage within the product right now. Because if you can increase the value of what you're providing so that your product sells from 15,000 to 25,000, even without the software, with only 2,000 people, are there 2,000 people in the world who could benefit from your advice? With just 2,000 people, you're going to reach 50 million in annual recurring revenue. So it's possible. So we talked about product, we talked about market. Now the last component of the business model is just delivery. So to get to 10x and provide the scale that serves, what do we need to change in
our current delivery model? So we do a lot of one-on-one consultations with our students right now. So each coach can manage 30 to 50 students. Okay. Based on that. Right now it's 30. Our goal is to get it closer to 50. We have friends in this field who are able to get a coach to manage 50 students. So if that continues, one-on-one sessions, about 50 per coach, are you going to need coaches? 2000/50 you're going to need 40 coaches. Oh, that's not so bad actually Are there 40 young, smart, bright, ambitious people who would like to have the opportunity to work with you?
Yeah, we got 1200 applications when we were trying to recruit coaches. We hired seven so far. So there's no limit here? No, not really. There are other coaching organizations in the world that have hundreds and thousands of coaches. So 40 is not a big number either. No. And that's if we keep the same one-on-one coaching model that I like because I think it's great. And again, this is another point where my brain just breaks down, because when I do the math, I realize that's only 40 coaches.
You have 1,200 people who have applied to join our team as coaches, and many of them have had a lot of experience and so on. Hmm, interesting. By the way, if you're an entrepreneur watching this video and you want to apply these principles to your own business, Eric has very kindly created a completely free resource for us called "How to Grow Your Business 10x Without Working 10x Harder." The link to it will be in the description of the video. If you want to get it, it's completely free. So, we set a goal of 10x as a thinking tool like Peter Thiel's, right? Um, and now we've reworked our business model to do this, and in
doing so, we've both checked our common sense and checked our numbers and realized that, you know what, it's all within reason. It's not as, you know, um, crazy as it first seemed. And I'm going to give you another simple framework that I created to help you think about how achievable a 10x increase is. So I call it my 3172 method. And you just think in terms of that. If we triple our leads, 1.7x our win rate or our deal rate and double our price, let's see what happens. So let's take a quick look at the before and after. Let's say you have a business that's doing 1,000 leads a year. And our win rate is 20%. So we close 200 of them. And then we sell something that costs $10,000 a year.
Multiply all of that together, and you have a business that does 2 million sales a year. Now let's apply 3172. So if we multiply the number of leads by 3, we're going to go from 1,000 to 3,000. If we multiply the success rate by 1.7, so instead of closing 20 deals at 20%, which is one in five, we're now closing 34%, which is one in three, which is, let's say, the best-in-class closing rate. And if we double the price instead of 10,000, we're adding more value and charging 20,000. Now when we multiply all of that together, and all of that individually seems reasonable, what happens? Yeah, we get a business that does? 20.4 million at 10.2 x.
10.2 x, right. So that's just another way, if you, you know, break the problem down into its component parts and then solve for the individual components, it becomes much more achievable. Because now we can come up with OKRs, or goals, or strategies, that, okay, how do we triple the number of leads? You know, maybe we need to pick one dominant channel, LinkedIn or Instagram or something, and get really good at that. How do we increase the success rate by 1.7x? Well, maybe we just need to get world-class people on our sales team or train them better. And then how do we increase the price?
Well, add more value. And then make sure that you're pricing based on the outcome that you deliver, not, you know, the hours that are spent on your product. For example, in our previous conversation, you talked about how the outcome that we achieve is that we We help someone you know build a business that can generate a million dollars in sales a year, and they keep 500,000. Well, now 25,000 in terms of the bottom line is a small thing. Yeah. Right? Um, 3,172 is another easy way to think about 10X, just playing math with just three levers. You know, what's interesting is that to me, 50 million before this conversation seemed like an absurd number that I had never even
thought about. Because it just did n't seem like it was worth it, it was n't even worth thinking about. And then when you thought we had okay, 2,000 customers, I thought okay, 2,000 is not that bad. I mean, we have about 30,000 customers now who have paid us a certain amount of money. So 2,000 seems reasonable. And then when it came down to the whole this whole coaching thing, I immediately thought, my brain didn't even fail me. I thought it was going to be like 400 coaches. Hmm. And then I thought, Wait a minute. Wait what? 2,000. Oh, [__]. That's 40. 40 coaches is not bad. No. I thought, that's surprisingly possible. And, and, and what do you do? So, remember when we talked earlier about one of the most common mistakes
people make is they don't suspend disbelief. And subconsciously, all these limiting beliefs are saying, no, that's impossible. Yeah. And one of the easiest things you can do is just do the math. Yeah. You know, again, with 3,172, you're getting 3x the lead, 1.7x the win rate, twice the price. You're getting more than 10 times. And all three of those components individually, you can strategize and work against them, and they seem achievable. You know, I thought I did n't have any limiting beliefs, but even after that conversation, I was like, "Huh. I thought I won the game of personal development, Eric."
We didn't talk about the software side of things. Um, but I intentionally didn't mention that for the sake of simplicity. Um, I think if you apply that same thinking to software, it becomes even easier. Um, because it's an industry that's kind of based on that kind of thinking. Yeah. Um, but what we're trying to emphasize here, and I think it's even more valuable, is that this way of thinking can be applied to anything. It doesn't have to be just high-tech, you know, software. Great. That's good. That's good stuff. I mean, I even read that 10x is lighter than 2x. And I just brushed it off. I thought, no. Oh, okay. So at this point we've talked about what might need to change hypothetically.
Again, we're just exploring the hypothetical from a product, marketing, and delivery perspective. Now we're going to the next section, which is entirely about achieving the 10x goal. So now we're going to the execution side. And it's almost like we've got this airplane, it's sitting on the runway, but we need to get it in the air now. And that's where we use the physics of flight. We need to increase lift, reduce drag, create thrust. So we need to lift, eliminate, and execute. And we're going to do that in three areas of the business. So the airplane itself may still need some work: the management or the team, yeah, the crew, and then you, the pilot. That's 3x3. Your limitations for 10x growth, for 10- multiples of elevation will be contained in one
or more of these nine boxes. So next I want to go through each of the boxes and I'll tell you what it's about. And you just quickly assess whether you feel like we're doing well here or is this an area where we might need some work? And then at the end we'll look at all the areas that need work and then come up with some very, very simple things that we can do in the next 30 days to make progress in each of those areas. Sound good? Yeah, it sounds good. Cool. So let's look at the intersection of elevation and the company. Thinking from this 10x elevation that we want to achieve. With that goal in mind, how do you feel about the ambition of the company, its vision, its
offering itself? Is it elevated to the level that it is now, you know, to the level that it needs to be to achieve that goal? I would say it's yellow. I think with a few minor changes we could to achieve it. Uh, the proposal is almost, almost done. We've actually been campaigning for a price of 25 grand for a while now. Okay. And I thought, "No, that's too much." But really, if you think about it, if the goal is to get them to a million dollars in revenue, which, you know, they are, then it's nothing at all. And from a vision perspective, I think our mission is to build the
world's best online business school. I don't really talk about revenue metrics with the team. I don't think many people on the team are intrinsically motivated to grow revenue, other than our marketers and sales people. So I'm not sure how to say something like, "Hey guys, we're aiming for 10x revenue." But also, to build the world's best business school, we would have a bunch of students, and they would all be successful, and we would have the funds to hire a world-class team and offer world- class support in non-scalable ways, like one-on-one mentoring, etc. Hmm. And that would still be cool. So if we're at a standstill right now, if this square is yellow right now, what could we do in the next 30 days to create some momentum to go from yellow to
green? Even just setting that as a goal. Telling our team that we're now doing 5 million a year. We. we were doing that, but now we have a world-class team, and we want to build the best online business school in the world, and there's no law of physics that's stopping us from doing that. But that means we need to, yeah, just improve everything overall, which is great. Okay. So it looks like the next step here is to share that thinking and vision with the team. Great. Okay. So we're moving within the framework. Now we're talking about elimination. Where do we need to reduce resistance in the company? So here I want you to think about, is there any complexity, waste, low-value products, low-value customers
or things that compete for your time that might create resistance and keep us at our current height from getting to that 10x height? What comes to mind? Well, first of all, if you were to say it's a red, yellow or green zone? I would actually say it 's green. Okay. I think. So let me just talk for those who are listening and for whom it might not be green. What are some common things that might make it yellow or red? I'll give you an example now. Someone just does the exercise that you did and realizes, " Wow, in my current product portfolio or on the shelf with this new product that I came up with, I see a clear path to achieving 10x growth with
the company. But right now they're working with a bunch of customers with a product that's keeping them at a 1x or 2x height." Yeah. It takes time. It focus. Everything has its opportunity cost. So time and energy going against these competing interests, it doesn't get to 10x growth, never happens, they're left frustrated, overwhelmed, because they have this vision, and they now know that it's possible, but they're actually working on the wrong things So in our case, we have a bunch of much cheaper products.
Hmm. But, uh, what I'm working on, or what we're working on, is it connects them to a funnel of higher prices. Okay. Uh, one option is to just eliminate the low- value products, and that would simplify things, because that would mean we'd only sell two or three products, and they'd all be expensive. Yeah. Uh, that could be one option. But at least what we've found so far with our current expensive offering is that actually all of our best customers have come from the cheap ones. We were selling a thing for $1,000, and then they were impressed and had a great experience with the $1,000 thing, so they wanted to apply that to the $15,000 thing.
Okay, there's a clear progression here. Yeah. And it's backed by data, not just hypotheses, right? Um, it's backed by one or two key data points, and then the rest, and the rest is a hypothesis based on those two, extrapolating those two key data points. And by two data points, you don't mean two people. Um, no, I mean about two. Yeah, I mean probably about 300 customers. Okay. Um. But the two core products, like our YouTube Academy and our 1K Challenge, are actually pretty. In particular, the 1K Challenge has led a lot of potential customers expensive projects, yeah expensive, which are not yet this 25K thing, right? Not yet, not at all.
Um, okay. No, I'm pretty optimistic about the low-quality ascent model. Okay. Yeah. So let's move on to the last part of the company line. So we're talking about promotion, elimination, and execution in the company's leadership. So we've done the company and promotion. We've done the company and elimination. Now let's do the company and execute. So if you think about it from a partnership perspective, if you think about driving the operational rhythms in the company to achieve your most important goals, from an execution perspective, how would you assess the company's infrastructure and/or its strategic partnerships to enable this new 10x growth?
What do you mean by strategic partnerships? For example, let me give you an example with Skype. When we were building Skype in the beginning, from a business development perspective, one of the things we did was we went into every major market in the world, identified the largest ISP or the top two or three, and then partnered with them, where Skype was kind of bundled with whatever software that they were distributing, and we used their distribution. So for you, you could have an 80/20 partnership, where someone has a list that's a good fit for what you do, or, you know, something like that. Yeah, okay. In that context, I don't think we need that right now. Um, I think we can get to 50 million without bringing in external partners. But in terms of the current
operational infrastructure, to operate at that scale, I would say we're red. Okay. What's the first thing that comes to mind, if you make some progress in the next 30 days or so, would you at least raise it to yellow? Uh, one thing that's already happening is a more disciplined process or project management system within the team. Uh, we had our first project management sprint yesterday, and it was like, "Wow." It was like, "Yeah, we're assigning tasks and dates, and in a two-week period cycle. And something like, "Oh, that's cool." So if that continues, and it will, it will greatly improve our internal operational capabilities, let's say Okay. But also, I think,
right now some of our stuff is on Circle, some of our stuff is on Slack, some of our stuff is on Google Sheets. etc. I think if we really wanted to serve 2,000 students at a cost of 25k, there would be quite a few operational hurdles here. So maybe this falls into the " exclude" category. Well, it's more of a systems optimization that would allow us to have 2,000 students instead of 200. Because systems that work for 200 are probably going to break at 2,000. Okay. But we're not going to have 2,000 students in the next 30 days, are we? No. So, speaking of focusing on the most important and effective things we need to do right now, it looks like you're continuing to improve from a Perfectly. Now we will move on to the leadership line.
Yes. So, the crew, right? We talked about the company, the plane itself. Now about leadership or the team, the crew. So let's look at the intersection of elevation and leadership. Yes. In terms of this new 10x goal, 50 million. Do we need to raise the bar on talent and/or culture? Hmm, would you rate this as red, yellow, or green at this point? Talent bar, standards or culture? So, that is, um, raising our expectations of what we need for people, from people, the type of people that we hire.
Not really, to be honest OK. I think if we could just clone our team's current standard, that would actually make us who we are, we would have no problem achieving that goal. We need someone to be responsible for sales, but we are still in the process of hiring such an employee. But beyond that, we actually have, I hope, good leaders for each of the major departments. So I think that's actually normal. OK. I'm just wondering, am I kidding myself about this? No, I don't think so. Yes. OK. Hmm, maybe we have two more categories that people need to cover, so we're not done yet. So the next thing to do is to remove or reduce the obstacles. Do
we need to eliminate any inappropriate behaviors, hires, maybe role confusion, or bottlenecks, like founder-induced bottlenecks, anything in that area that might be holding us back and creating obstacles from that perspective of that goal 10x? Would you rate this area red, yellow, or green? Uh, I would probably rate it yellow. There's one important thing that comes to mind, which is that I'm still a bottleneck for things like Vibe Coding, which help businesses, and I'm currently trying to find a developer who would take the development out of my hands, ahem, and actually put it in the hands of a competent professional, not me.
Good. And with this newfound time, given what we just discussed, what we're trying to create here, with this freed up time, what then can that time be used for? Definitely, in creating more educational content for a 25k product that currently has little curriculum and therefore needs to be very aggressive in terms of coaching. Good. Yes. So, that's what's at stake, right? Do we now have a clear path to achieving the goal of 50 million per year? Hmm, this requires some of your time in terms of product development. Uh, but we need to find a developer to free up some of your time.
Yes. Okay, great. And then, on the executive side for leadership, here I want you to think about going back to the strategy of getting to 50 million a year. Yes. We have a completely different business now. We have 2000.Well, not really that different. We simply have a developed business. Yes, it's not that different from what it is now. Yes, yes, yes, that's probably the most interesting thing about this. Hmm, we have 2,000 people. We have 40 coaches.
You work on product development and inspire people with content to build all these Based on the strategy needed to achieve this goal, not every role will be critical. Yes. What do you think would be the places 10 times bigger to achieve this result? What are the most important hires or roles? Don't think about the people of today. Yes, of course. What are the most important? What are places 10 times bigger? Places 10 times bigger are, uh, student success, i.e. responsible for trainers, uh, product, i.e. responsible for the product. Accordingly, a developer 10 times larger on a
product team would have incredibly high leverage to do this. Are these down? Yes. Good. Marketing and sales. Marketing leader and sales manager because we need the leads to keep coming in and converting. So, student success leader, product manager, developer, marketing manager, sales manager. These are roles 10 times bigger. If you have all these people in these positions, they should help make this goal inevitable for. Oh, yeah. OK. Light. So, if we were to take a simple action over the next 30 days, I would recommend you do one thing: check these places 10X. You model how much these people cost, when you can afford them, and then what is the sequence? What is the
hiring schedule? Yes. With the goal of trying to reach that 50 million within a few years, right? So, over the next 30 days, you're just going to map out, these are the positions at 10X, and when we need to fill those positions. Yes. Only then do you look at your current people and say, who of our current people can fill these positions, who of our current people plus training could fill these positions, who of the people are not really suitable, um, and what, um, positions do we need to find new people for? already have three of them, and we are currently hiring four and five. Perfectly. We just need to speed up the process.
Good. And the last thing we will talk about is about ourselves. So, we're talking about promotion, elimination, and execution again for the company, management, and yourself. This is the Scale OS height matrix. So, regarding ourselves, let's start by intersecting ourselves and raising. So, we increase the raise. Is there anything you need to do to raise your personal standards, your own identity, your own productivity to achieve this goal? Do you believe, for example, that you have what it takes to build a $50 million-a-year business? I didn't believe it before this conversation, but now that I see how ridiculous these numbers are, I think I do now. And that's the power, again
, of breaking things down into components and then solving for the components, right? What lures people in is that they think about a lofty goal but don't break it down into pieces. And so they, they, they hold it in a lofty realm, and it seems awesome and amazing, and then they think, well, there's no way I can achieve that. OK. So, it sounds like this is a green zone for you. Maybe, but then again, I know what I don't know. So I'm wondering if I need a mindset coach or something? Yes, I don't know.
OK. You said you know people who already occupy these data points that are outside the norm. They built such a business. To help you get that last bit of self-belief, why not schedule a few conversations with them over the next 30 days? And ask them what you had to change or not change about yourself, how you work, what you believe in, to achieve the result you are living in now? Let's talk about elimination and ourselves. So, are there any downsides to, um, these kinds of habits, distractions, things that slow you down, ways of working, things that Ali tends to do that actually make you, you know, fly low instead of high?
is, um, participating in But then there is also the founder's regime. And sometimes participation is useful for creating a good product. So I often struggle with this balance between hiring good people and getting out of the way and letting them do the work. But, you know, I have high standards for how I want things done, and I often think that the way I would do it is better, much better, than what they would do, sometimes. And in this context, I could just ask myself: Do we have the right people?" Are the expectations clear enough? Is the training clear enough? Because of course you can't be the only person in the world who can do these things."
I think I'm moving more and more away from the fact that we now have, in particular, two senior staff members who have been successful with students and with the product. Hmm. Previously, these places were occupied by both me and Angus. So, it's like " yes". But now that I see both of these girls doing their jobs so well, I'm like, "Hmm." It gives me more confidence not to get too deep. Or, if I just need to talk to the leaders instead of trying to. well. talk to the team.
Again, we are looking for leverage here. Yes. Right? So every hour each week that we can save allows us to focus on achieving that 10x height and not get in the way of. Yeah, um, it greatly increases our chances of success. And that also, um, directly addresses your point of view: "Yeah, but how do I do that without feeling burnt out or, you know, overwhelmed?" Well, if you keep interfering in all these areas because you feel like you have to Yeah. And if we keep using the founder's regime as an excuse for this. Yes. It will be very, very difficult for you to simultaneously do everything you have to do for 10x height. By the way, the need to intervene is something that
CEOs constantly face. And usually the root problem is a painful discussion that many And Marshall Goldsmith wrote a book called "What Got You Here Won't Get You There." And this phrase directly applies to people. I've never seen a single case, not once, and I've built many businesses myself, helped over 500 founders and CEOs scale their businesses, a single data point where the 10x version of the business had even remotely close to the same people as the 1x version. So, in the end, you have to ask what's most important, right? The future you're trying to create, or, you know, the past that got you to this point. And, you know what you want to protect the most? Yes, Patty, what's her name? Is this Patty McCord,
Netflix's former chief talent officer? She has this amazing quote. She said there is a big difference between families and teams because families strive to stick together no matter what, while large teams are optimized to always win. So you have to ask yourself: Am I building a championship team, or am I trying to keep, you know, a family together? Um, I'm not saying you have to go through this and everyone is out. But you need to ask yourself, starting from this 10x increase goal, along with the areas you find yourself having to intervene in, do I have the right people in the right positions? And are there any conversations I avoid?
Good. The latter is the intersection of performance and self. So I just want you to think in very simple terms, a typical week for you. What percentage of your week right now, thinking in terms of this 10x increase goal, is going against the highest leverage activity that will generate that 10x increase result at this point? Okay, so the two activities with the highest impact that will lead to this outcome are, essentially, curriculum and content, which are basically the same thing. Expressed differently, right? One is free, and the other is external, internal. And so on. The reason I have a hard time with this is that one of my days is software day, because we also have It used to be spread over three days, but now it's been
compressed into one day to avoid context switching and all that stuff related to multiple things throughout the week. So Thursday will be software day, and then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday will be working on a 10x goal for the non-software part of the business. But then Monday will be full of team meetings. So, in a way, team meetings are very useful as a way because it's like a function of influence, etc., etc., but they're also not directly my content capture. And that's why I hesitate, because where is the place for team meetings in this situation? Well, the first question I would ask is: to what extent do you need to participate in these team meetings? And again, if we have the right expectations, the right level of
people, we have 10 times more people for 10 places, do you need to be present? Can we exclude you from some of these meetings? So that would be the first thing I would ask to free up your time, right? Make you less operational and more strategic. I would say that in the short term I need to be in almost all of these meetings because our new senior leaders are quite young. One started last week, and the other started 3 weeks ago. And so, although the product is going through a lot of changes right now, so in the short term I have to be in meetings, but I think the goal should be to get me out of the operations meetings as quickly as possible. Does that sound reasonable?
Yes, and in the next 30 days, I think it would be good if you had a plan and a timeline for achieving that goal. Hmm, with the goal of creating the perfect week for your 10x week, where the majority of your time is actually spent, and only without interruptions or distractions, on the activities that will lead to that 10x result. Yes. We have already considered nine squares. You have a business and you clearly understand how to increase your flight altitude 10 times. And if you're not doing that for some reason, that means you're still, you know, flying at low altitudes, and your limitation or one of your reasons for doing so will
fall into one or more of these nine boxes. Hmm, to use a slightly different metaphor for flight, but flight nonetheless. If you imagine a hot air balloon, you know, it has sandbags on it. When we cut those restrictions, we cut those sandbags, and the ball goes up, right? Okay, so let's quickly summarize the key limitations and things you need to work on So, first, we need a much more scalable product, a 25,000- unit product that's marketed to an audience that's looking to build a business with an annual turnover of $1 million or more. Second, we need to achieve this new goal 10x, build the world's best online business, share it internally with the team. Third, we need to continue to develop Sparkle OS, and, you know, our improvements in project management
. Fourth, we need to free up your time by finding a developer as quickly as possible. Fifth, we need to think about what all the places are needed 10x to achieve this plan and what the approximate timelines for adding them to the team will be, and last but not least, we need to create this ideal 10x week for you and schedule what will come out of your calendar to make all of this possible. Which of these things is the most important thing to do next? Um, okay. What am I? So, thinking out loud, at first I thought the developer would actively buy out my time, which was good. But then I think I don't need to hire a developer either, because if they're under the leadership of our product, which they are then
, she can totally hire a developer. Actually, this first step, such as actually codifying the 10x goal and distributing it to the team, would be the next step. Perfectly. Yes. After this conversation, we are currently hiring a developer. We just brought on a new sales manager to lead our sales team, and this is what's happening. And, at this point, I don't know if we're even going to go for the 50 million goal, but it was super-super- helpful just to explore it from a hypothetical perspective. So whatever your 10x goal is, it's at least worth exploring. Now, if you enjoyed this talk and you're perhaps an entrepreneur thinking about
starting a business, wanting to potentially grow it to a million dollars a year, here's a video where I break down the plan step by step. So, thank you very much for watching. Have a nice day, and see you next time. Goodbye.
