[0:00]I'm going to share with you 20 quantum cheat codes that took me from broke to $100 million plus CEO. I spent the last 29 years in the fucking trenches. I've exited three software companies. I've helped people make millions of dollars. I've been advising entrepreneurs all around the world and I've learned that succeeding in life is actually pretty simple but not easy. That's why you need these cheat codes, starting with the first one, "Fix problems people already pay for." The money's already flowing. There's proven demand. A lot of people say there's competition, I can't do this. No, that's proof you should do it. For example, if somebody's already going to the gym or they're paying for accounting or they need a cleaner or there's software out there exists that they pay for every month. That is proof that people want it. Competition means there's a market. That's a good thing. Just sell and be better. And the good news is, you don't have to be the first. Apple wasn't the first one to build a computer, Google wasn't the first search engine, Facebook wasn't the first social network, you just got to be better. So here's a way to prove to yourself that people already pay for things. Just open up your bank statement and go through and circle everything that's recurring that you currently pay for, that should be proof that there's a market out there that they want what you got. To me, those are always a good place to start. What do you currently spend money on, and do you have a passion around it? Cheat code number two, "Sell before you do any work." Selling proves there's actually a need. If you just do the work, it doesn't prove anything. Pre-selling protects your time and money, because there's nothing more expensive than have people saying, you should do that, you should do that, you should do that. That's what happens. Late night friends being like, oh my god, that'd be a great idea, I would go to your restaurant. No, they won't, not every day for 365 days to pay your freaking mortgage. Show me the money. Have them pre-buy a table at your restaurant for the year. The biggest mistake that most founders make is building something nobody wants. So what you want to do instead is sell the result first. Start with the offer then work backwards. Figure out what you're going to sell, find the customers, talk to them and sell it to them. You can do it as a simple as a one-page offer. The hard part is finding the person, talking to the person, convince them they should buy and taking their money. Everything else is backwards. Cheat code number three, "Solve problems for rich people." Rich people care more about time than money, so they'll pay more to solve the problem fast. A business owner that's got money will pay thousands of dollars to save time, where a broke student can't. So what you want to do is you want to find the buyers that got the money. Find out where they spend their time, what events they go to, what groups they're part of, who influences them. Get to know those people and places and show up there and have those conversations to sell what you got. Cheat code number four, "Never discount, always add value." Discounting makes it look like you don't believe in your product. If you're trying to build a brand, trying to build something of value, the discount does the opposite. If you need to move some product or you need to give somebody a deal, add to it. Now all of a sudden, you're firm with your price, then you can add extra stuff to get somebody to make a decision faster or get people to buy a lot more. When you cut your price, you train customers to wait for the next sale instead of buying now. Apple never discounts. They just add features. They might do some bundles, but they don't discount. The easiest way to do this is just create what I call a bonus bank. Have 5 to 10 valuable things that you might have within your company, you've created for other people, and have them ready to go. That way, when you're having a sales conversation and they're like, well, I don't know, it's pretty expensive. You say, well, no what we could do and you go to the bonus bank and you go here's what we can do. We can do this plus this so that you have this. These can be product bonuses, support bonuses, exclusive access bonuses, whatever it is, you have the bonus bank ready to go to get the deal done. Cheat code number five, "Price anchoring." This one will make you a lot of money. Right now, what you sell might feel expensive, but only because there's nothing else to compare it to. Think of it like this, having a $200 steak on the menu makes your $30 steak feel cheap as fuck. So what you want to do is show you have a high price first. When somebody asks you like how much it is, just say, well, we have a few options. At the highest level, our VIP level, we have this and that should be 3-5X more expensive to the next level. Then we have this level and this is where most people start. I like to do that so that I anchor them there because then if they don't want to be like most people, they might be like, no, I want the high level. That'll make that option just feel so much more approachable because you've anchored against a higher price. Cheat code number six, "Sell less stuff." If you want to kill a business, I'll tell you how to do it. Add a bunch of stuff to the business. Complexity kills companies. Being decent at everything just stops you from being great at one thing. Anytime I think of this, I go back to Japan because that is a country that focuses on being excellent at one thing. If you go to a food court at a mall in Japan, each specific place only does one thing. I mean, some of them don't even sell drinks because they're like, we're not going to be the greatest at drinks. So you got to go buy your drink from the drink person because they're masterful at that. So here's what you need to do, you need to cut your product line down to the top 20% that makes 80% of your money and profit, always use gross margin and say no to everything else. Number seven, "Sell painkillers, not vitamins." I know, you think what you've got is like the coolest thing in the world. The problem is, is it doesn't solve a pain, it's a nice to have. You know what the easiest thing in the world to sell is? Money. That's why people that sell anything around sales, marketing, they make a lot of money because they're selling money which is the number one pain in most people's lives. So it's easy to sell. Just think about what you sell and just ask yourself, where is the pain? Where is the problem? It's like if you have a leaky roof, you get it fixed today. A nicer looking roof, maybe in 15 years when you decide you got to upgrade your house. Not a now thing. People only buy what they need right now, not what will help them later. So here's my advice. Ask your customers around what you solve for them, what keeps them up at night. Use their exact words in the pitch, it's called echo marketing. Then show them what happens if they wait. If you can do that, they will buy a lot more today. Cheat code number eight, "Make your offer irresistible." Great offers beat fancy marketing every day. Most businesses failed because their offer is weak, not because their ads, not because their website, not even because of their team. They just haven't communicated strongly exactly how they can help the customer. So your offer should only have four things. One, a clear promise. Nobody buys coaching or software, they buy the transformation. The second is risk reversal. What is the risk of me making a decision or not making a decision, and how can you give me a guarantee?
[6:37]Maybe you make it performance-based fees, or you do it done for you, or you structure it in a way that removes their fear. The third is you have to stack value. They want to feel like they're getting a good deal. So then you go into the bonus bank, and then you think about, how can I make this an exclusive? How do I use the value to get them to make a decision today? It has to amplify the perceived value of what you're selling. The fourth is we want to build scarcity and urgency, because if you don't, they're just not going to do anything. They're just going to put it off to another day. I always say, I want to help you take it off your to-do list. And that's where you have to use language like limited spots, deadlines, or maybe you have a real, don't lie, capacity cap to force the action of making a decision. Now, if you're a business owner and you want my complete offer template, including my internal Sell by Chat Playbook plus my content strategy that took me years to develop, it's yours for free. Just go find me on Instagram and message me the word, "YouTube offer," and I'll send it over. Cheat code number nine, "Partner at the point of sale." This one will change the game for you. If you start a business and you got no credibility, if you find somebody that has a lot of credibility in the market and you partner with them, you can go from zero to hero in one partnership. The way I do business, all the time, is ask myself, who has access to my customers? Because the fastest way for me to grow my business and build my credibility is to find people who have done all the heavy lifting, partner with them, and have them tell their community about me. For example, product sell faster on Amazon than any other website. Why? Because they've built the trust and they have the traffic. And you want to find other people in your industry that influence your buyers that have the trust and the traffic. It sounds hard, but it actually is not that bad, you just have to do the work. So here's my very tactical advice, find three businesses that already sell to your dream customers but don't compete with you and offer them a cut of every sale to promote your stuff. You can go from 10% to 20% to 50%. You got to look at your margins so you don't go broke. But at the end of the day, the sweeter the offer, the more they're going to want to promote, the more customers you're going to get, and it could be just something you do for a year to get some momentum and then decide to build your own marketing strategy. Cheat code number 10, "Build momentum, not motivation." Motivation fades. Momentum is contagious. It's about building a system that runs whether you feel inspired or not, while motivation requires constant refueling. I have a system I follow, my feelings don't matter. I follow it, I get results, I create momentum. If I have to ask myself, do I feel motivated to shoot this video? Guess what, I don't always, but it doesn't matter. I created a commitment that builds momentum. So here's how we do this in a very tactical way. The way I design this for my company is I use this framework called the Business Flywheel by Jim Collins in his book, "Good to Great." You essentially identify four to six different steps that you do over and over and all of a sudden it creates a flywheel. Takes a while to get going, but once it's going, it's really hard to stop. Maybe it's creating content, that gets customers, then you deliver results, then they give you referrals, and then you repeat. That would be the most basic one. Now you want to create a custom one and you can go online to see a bunch of different examples of a business flywheel. But the whole idea is follow those steps and keep spinning it and spinning it and it's going to create that momentum. The whole point is that every step makes the next step easier and that's how we build momentum that keeps going on its own. Cheat code number 11, "Think in constraints." This is how I scale companies. I always do this, I always go, "What is the bottleneck?" Most businesses say everything's broken, that's not true. There's one thing that's broken more than the rest. Fix that bottleneck first and your business will grow. The challenge is most people are trying to solve things that are just not now problems. And the right action at the right time is actually how we win. That's why I always say that sequencing equals success. I have to spend more time analyzing the game to figure out what's my right next move so that I use the resources I have to solve the biggest problem to unlock the next level of resources. If I had to visualize it, think of it like a traffic jam. It always happens at the narrowest point. When you solve that narrow point, wind it up, the whole thing freaking flows. Then all of a sudden the highway doesn't feel so freaking congested. Another way to ask yourself the question is if your business grew by 3X next month, what's the first thing that would break? Fix that and watch your revenue grow. Cheat code number 12, "Subtract before you add." Less things make it easier to grow fast because you have less pieces that could break. My rule is, you can't pick something up until you put something down. And that's why our core value in my companies is simple scales. When I look at products that people build and they add all these features, I'm like, the interface looks complicated. Why not focus? It reduces your support costs, your maintenance costs, and your complexity debt. If you don't, you'll hit the complexity ceiling and wonder why you can't grow. My favorite example is Elon Musk. He has these five things, he calls it like five optimization algorithms, and one of them is, "Remove stuff out of the process." His rule is, if you don't break things as you remove stuff out of it, then you didn't remove enough. So here's what I need you to do. Cut what doesn't work. Only keep the bare minimum. Kind of think of it like a spring cleaning. I would just list all your processes, all your products, all your systems and figure out which one are just there from old things that you were doing that don't really add value today, and just clean them up. See what breaks, add it back to the breaks. Sometimes businesses to grow need to trim, they need to clean, they need to get ready to grow. Cheat code number 13, "Have very high standards." Standards are guiding principles. It helps people understand how to interact with you, from team members to customers. But standards aren't what you say they are, they're what you accept. A standard is finishing the sentence, I will always, I will never allow. If you can go dot dot dot this or that, that is called a standard. Systems tell people what to do, but standards tell them what good looks like so that they can self-correct. Here's a trick to know what your standards are, what happens when you're not there? How do people react? How do people respond? How do people show up? That is a standard. There's not what you wish they would do, it's what they actually do that tells you the full story. So here's how you set a standard. Define what good looks like, focus on the outcome, not just the process, and then hold people to that standard. Just show them, teach them, train them, and then go, here's your work, here's the work I expect, that's the standard. Map it, it's not there, can you do that next time? You got to be super clear. Cheat code number 14, "Buy back your time." Yes, I keep coming back to this, but it's the thing that's made me the most money ever in my life because time is your most valuable resource. The truth is, is you can always make more money but you can't buy more time. Hiring a cleaner saves you hours every week, giving you more time to focus on the business. Having an assistant join your team to take over the administrative tasks so that you can do more marketing and make sure the customers are happier and do some sales processes, to me that is a great use of your time. So here's something very tactical you could do. Outsource any task that doesn't make you money. Free yourself from the admin work. My brother had a big issue when he first started his home building company because he was spending 12 hours a day just running around grabbing stuff for people. And I was like, bro, you can hire a runner to run around and do that, to bring people stuff on site so that you could be on the phone talking to clients. You're going to make more money selling a house than you are going to get somebody a brick they forgot to buy. Cheat code number 15, "Build a business that doesn't need you." When you build a business that doesn't need you to grow, that is a great business to run. And the truth is, real wealth is only created when your business generates income that can happen without your presence. Think about McDonald's. It runs the exact same whether the owner's there or not. I've been all over the world with my kids buying McDonald's and I will tell you, in Japan, to New Zealand, to the US, it's the same and the person who owns a McDonald's isn't in the building. He's probably on the beach somewhere. So here's the experiment. Imagine you took a four-week vacation and you weren't allowed to check Slack or your email. What would break? What wouldn't get done? That essentially is your hit list of things that you need to start thinking about creating system around and delegating to other people. Because great leaders, they run as fast as they can to not be needed. You might have to learn to let go. Cheat code number 16, "Look at your numbers every day." Numbers tell the truth. If you want something to get better, you need to know where you're at. Most people won't step on a scale because they don't want to know they're overweight. But the truth is, the numbers tell the truth. And once you know the number, then attention, or what I like to say, sunlight will sanitize all things, which means it'll get better. When we measure things and we increase the frequency of measurement, the number gets better. And daily tracking prevents those small little problems from becoming massive disasters. If you think about it, a fitness tracker changes how people exercise. When they start measuring and they look at it, all of a sudden they're going to make different decisions. How often do I go? How heavy do I lift? What did I eat? Those are all ways to measure daily. So, what I want you to do in your business is build a simple one-page dashboard where you track your top three to five numbers that you check on every day. I'm talking the first thing before you open your email, before you check your Slack post, before you do anything. For me at Martell Ventures, it's enterprise value created per dollar spent. I have one metric where I look at my dollars deployed to create enterprise value. That way I can focus on supporting the team to increase that. I'm just asking you to write down three to five, but if you can distill it into one, even better, just make sure you're looking at it every day. Cheat code number 17, "Measure what leads to money, not vanity." Oh my gosh, people will waste their time. They'll measure things like website traffic because they think they're rich. Guess what? Your Stripe transactions is how you get rich, not the amount of traffic you get to your website. Oh my God, I had a viral video. Did you get any customers? No, those don't matter. The vanity metrics will get you off on a tangent and distract you and your team doing stuff that doesn't matter. Make sure you get everybody focused on the thing that actually moves the needle. Stop obsessing over likes, views, team size. That's another one. Oh, how big's your team? Who cares? That's not impressive. You know what's impressive? A million dollars of profit per team member. That's impressive. Track that. Figure out how you can improve that. Get your team involved on increasing that and watch your whole life expand. Cheat code number 18, "Pay for results, not time." I have people tell me they have software installed on computers that track people. They're like, I monitor my team using software. That's crazy. I don't track my team's time, I don't care what they do when they go to the gym, how they get it done. I track the output. And the way I make it so that it's win-win is I ask myself what result I want, and then I tie their pay to that result. I make it simple. These are your personal goals, these are the business goals, here's how I'm going to measure your success and they're aligned. Terrible bosses track hours. Great leaders track output. I care about the results, not the effort to get the results. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to think about ways where you can pay people for the results, not their hours. If you hire somebody to do social media for you, maybe you give them a lower base and then you give them a variable compensation based on the growth of followers. That way the worst they perform, the less they make so they can self-correct and also, it's a great way to give them an unlimited compensation. Just make sure you give them clear goals tied to their pay that's easy to measure. Cheat code number 19, "Fire based on expectations, not feelings." Most people by the time they got to fire somebody, there's a lot of emotional shrapnel involved. My philosophy is, I set the expectation on day one. I explained to them what that looks like. If I see them fall short, I remind them in private, I coach them up to deliver. If they can't, then I explained to them, there's no place for them on this team. It's just like a professional sports team. If I hired you to be a quarterback and you can't throw the ball and actually get a reception, then I can't keep you on the team because there's a job called quarterback that needs to be done so that everybody else on the team as a team can win. There's no emotion about that. I'm just very clear. So take the feelings out of it, make the expectations clear and let people transition onto other teams where they might be world class at, they're just not going to win on your team. So here's how you do that. First off, you set clear agreements. Sometimes I call these SLAS, service level agreements for every person on your team. These are the non-negotiables. This is here's how we function in that role. That way, if somebody keeps missing them, it's probably feedback that it's time to let them go. Cheat code number 20, "Build moats." Most important, if you want to dominate in business as a cheat code, is you need to understand how to create a competitive moat around your business so that it doesn't make you so easy to compete against. If you don't have a moat, then it's really easy for people to come in, take your customers and then leave you defenseless. Moats protect profits. Many people say that monopolies is the best way to make a lot of profit. That's why you have Google, you have Facebook because technically they've built this wild moat that makes it so that nobody can attack their margins. Coca-Cola's got their secret formula. Tesla's got their charging network. Nobody can copy those overnight because they have these moats. So I want to give you something very tactical. You need to build a moat by owning something other people can't copy easily. So think about your network, investing in your expertise, the systems, maybe you're creating AI system prompts because that's intellectual property. And most importantly, as you've seen, just your personal brand, because you will take you with you for the rest of your life. Make yourself the only obvious choice, that's how we create a moat. I know that's a lot. I just went over 20 quantum level cheat codes that I've learned over the last 29 years of business and it can feel a little overwhelming. But here's what I want you to do, don't aim for mastery. Just ask yourself what resonates the most for you, and then just choose that one and say, I'm going to go work on that. And you can keep coming back to this message to review those 20, to ask yourself how you're doing. But I want you to leave me a comment below and let me know what's the one that you'll commit to this week. And again, if you're a business owner and you want my internal Sell by Chat Playbook with my internal offer template, how I create content, the exact sales strategy that I use myself to chat with people on social media, just find me on Instagram and message me the word, "YouTube offer," and I'll send it over to you. Now, if you want to learn to build systems that make business easy, click the video and I'll see you on the other side.
