Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/youtube-video-transcript-351/ Ashi shares his journey to becoming number one in various industries and reveals a 10-stage roadmap to business success. ## Key Takeaways - Industry standards often represent mediocrity and should not be the benchmark for success. - High standards in leadership and all business functions are crucial for growth and profitability. - Profit requires discipline and resisting the urge to spend excess cash. - Scaling quickly and efficiently can unlock significant profit opportunities. - Using multiple strategies to solve problems increases chances of success. ## What the video covers - Ashi explains how he became number one in multiple fields and broke a world record with a $106 million book launch. - He challenges the reliance on 'industry standards' and argues that settling for average leads to mediocrity. - Ashi emphasizes the importance of setting high standards in all aspects of business and life. - He shares a 10-stage roadmap from zero to $100 million+ revenue, applicable across various business types. - Ashi recounts advice from a billionaire mentor about profit being unnatural due to the tendency to spend money. - He discusses the need to hold the line on spending and continuously improve efficiency without increasing headcount. - Ashi gives a real example of accelerating sales rep hiring to increase profits by raising standards. - He highlights that success depends on how many different approaches ('attack vectors') are used to solve problems. - Ashi stresses that low standards lead to poor results and that leaders must be the standard setters. - He offers the roadmap for free via acquisition.com to help businesses scale effectively. ## Chapters 1. 00:00 Introduction and personal achievements 2. 01:00 Challenging industry standards in business 3. 02:06 Why average is not acceptable 4. 03:14 Applying high standards to all areas 5. 04:09 The 10-stage roadmap to $100M+ 6. 05:09 Profit is unnatural: lessons from a billionaire mentor 7. 06:23 Accelerating hiring to increase profits 8. 07:29 Using multiple approaches to solve problems Answers ## Questions about this video What is Ashi's main argument against using industry standards? Ashi argues that industry standards represent average performance, which is often mediocre and unprofitable. He encourages setting higher standards to achieve exceptional results. What is the 10-stage roadmap Ashi mentions? The 10-stage roadmap is a detailed guide Ashi created to help businesses scale from zero to over $100 million in revenue, covering key functions and growth constraints. How does Ashi suggest companies should handle profit and spending? Ashi shares that profit is unnatural because people tend to spend money easily. He advises holding the line on spending, focusing on efficiency, and continuously increasing revenue without unnecessary hires. ## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown 00:00 Speaker A I want to show you how I became number one in different fields, industries, and even broke a world record, and how you can apply the same process to winning or getting whatever it is that you want. My name's Ashi. I 00:09 Speaker A own a portfolio of companies at acquisition.com that generates $250 million per year in aggregate revenue. I did a book launch that did $106 million in a weekend and broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest selling non-fiction book of all time. 00:21 Speaker A And so, there's my kind of proof behind that. So, in this video, I'm going to explain a core shift in my understanding of getting what I wanted and specifically in business. So this will be a belief breaker for you guys. So I 00:30 Speaker A talk to business owners for a living every single day, like literally every week, and I have for, you know, decade plus. And one of the things that drives me absolutely nuts is the idea of industry standards. Um, so you've 00:40 Speaker A probably heard this people like, "Oh, this is industry standard, that's industry standard." And I'll tell you a real conversation that might shift this for you. So there was a company that I recently met with that was about a $500 00:50 Speaker A million company. So I have a billion dollar company. All right. And you know, they were efficient but it was an old school model. So I met with the chiefs of that business and I met with the leaders, right? And the entrepreneur who 01:00 Speaker A runs the business wanted me to look at certain components of how they do things in terms of acquisition and things like that. And when I walked them through their acquisition process, I was like, "Hey, these are some things that need to 01:10 Speaker A change." And there was a lady who was there who was in charge of probably maybe half of it. And at least, you know, it fell under her purview. And as I would, you know, point out things that were bad or like needed 01:22 Speaker A improvement, she kept repeating the same thing, which is like, "Well, you know, we're industry standard." And I was, and she'd be like, "We're meeting industry standards." And she would get really kind of flustered. And she kind of, I would 01:32 Speaker A say, maybe to a degree got offended, because I was saying, "Well, you know, this sucks and this sucks and these numbers aren't good." And they kept repeating, "We're meeting industry standards." And so I paused and I was 01:42 Speaker A like, "Do you wake up in the morning and just say, I want to be an average company, right? We are average. Half the people are better than us and half are worse. We are average. 01:57 Speaker A Who gives a [ \_\_ ] right? I don't know about you, but like I didn't get in the game, whatever game you're playing, to be average. Like the average business is average. The average American is overweight. They're in debt. They're 02:06 Speaker A divorced. They're depressed. And so the average business makes almost no money. Why would I use industry standards, industry averages, anything like that at all?" And I say this because I have people who will push back on some of the 02:18 Speaker A things that I talk about with regards to margin when I think things I talk about in terms of timeline, when I talk in terms of pricing, right? And they'll say something like, "Well, you know, in HVAC, it's different," or, "You know, in SEO it's 02:28 Speaker A a little bit different," or, "You know, we've got XYZ issue in trucking and it's different. It's logistics, it's different." No, it's not. You get what you tolerate. You get what you accept and deem good enough. You are the 02:43 Speaker A standard setter. It is the highest and most important job in the company. And it is why some companies prevail and some companies fail. It's the reason that Jobs was so important for Apple. 02:53 Speaker A Elon was so important for Tesla and XAI and all the other things that he does. 02:57 Speaker A And like at a certain point, you cannot actually do anything in the company except for hold the [ \_\_ ] line. And the person who should run every department or every division should be the person with the highest standards, 03:14 Speaker A right? And this applies to everything, right? Sales rates, closing percentages, profit margins, cash flow, the people you date, the body fat percentage you hold, how fast you expect something to get done. Literally everything. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 03:27 Speaker A 10-stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get 03:39 Speaker A through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business. What the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it. And then what steps we actually took to graduate. 03:48 Speaker A And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick-and-mortar, all of this. 03:55 Speaker A And it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap. 04:01 Speaker A Just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you. All free. So, let me tell you a story about a billionaire mentor of mine. Again, had a conversation many years ago. And he said this thing to me that I'll never 04:09 Speaker A forget. He said, "Profit is unnatural." And I was like, "What does he really mean by that?" He said, "It's common and normal for people when money is in a bank account to spend it." And that's why most people don't have money. He 04:25 Speaker A said so if you have a company and it makes money and it actually starts to succeed, that success has this constant pressure of normality that fights against it. And so there has to be someone who holds the line and is like no, we will 04:39 Speaker A not spend more but we will keep making more. We will get more customers and we will not hire more people. We will find a way to service these customers better than we did our last customers without adding headcount. And we're going to do 04:49 Speaker A it even better, even faster with less. And so let me tell you another example of something that just happened in one of our portfolio companies. So they needed to add 15 sales reps to hit their Q1 goals, right? And so the 05:01 Speaker A leader was saying how his plan was to hire five reps a month, right? Every single month. And doing it this way, he said would, you know, stretch the team, but it would still kind of like, you know, ensure quality, make sure the 05:11 Speaker A culture wasn't, you know, too stressed, etc. And honestly, it was a fair plan, right? But for this business, the extra sales guys were going to add about 4 million in profit that quarter. That's how much extra he was going to add just 05:23 Speaker A that quarter. So I pushed back and I said, "Why can't we do it in a month?" and he had a lot of different reasons and he kept, you know, like, "It'll be cultural issue, I think we'll stretch the team, we 05:32 Speaker A might lose other sales in other places," and I kept pushing and pushing but he had some reasons to come back and thankfully he's a stud and then after the meeting he messaged me back and said two of our guys have bandwidth who are 05:42 Speaker A more senior, they can assist the new manager and onboard three to five guys each. If we do that, we can actually do it in a month and boom, $4 million more potential next year in Q1. On because of 05:54 Speaker A one thing, a higher standard. Just saying like, why does it need to take that long? Why can't we have like if we were, if we were doing a billion in sales in this business, we probably wouldn't say we need to hire five guys a 06:07 Speaker A month. No way, right? We'd be like, we need to start with 50 and maybe add 50 every other week, right? The, the, it's just this minimum standard of something that you decide is enough or acceptable. And the crazy part about it 06:20 Speaker A is like we're the ones who decide this and then we're upset that we don't get or that we're upset that we got the fruit of our very low standards. And so the way that you can kind of know 06:29 Speaker A kind of what your standards are, what the standard of somebody else on your team is, is how many attack vectors you use to approach or solve a problem, right? So it's not about doing the same thing a 100 times. That's not smart, right? I 06:41 Speaker A about trying to accomplish the same goal with a hundred different iterations and angles until one finally gets through, till you pass the goalie, till you till you chop down the tree, right? It's like, well, I'm hitting it this way and 06:52 Speaker A I'm I'm getting rock. It's like, okay, well then let's try from another angle. Let's try underneath. Let's see if we can poison the tree. Like, whatever we need to do, like, can we reach out to our network and give a $100,000 bounty 07:01 Speaker A for another SDR? Is there a company with a large SDR team that doesn't make as much as us so we can buy? Can we can we hire five recruiters to speed up the process? Can we fly all of the SDRs in 07:11 Speaker A person to get them trained up faster uh to so we don't lose cultural issues and we can get them on-ramped in in 3 days rather than in 30 days? Right? Can the top two, you know, most experienced guys 07:22 Speaker A who have some blank space have them sub in? Bingo. Right? All of these have costs obviously, but of the costs, they're still worth it. So you're not getting what you want because you're not attacking the problems you have enough 07:35 Speaker A times in enough ways. So, you're trying one or two things and then saying like, "I tried that and it didn't work. I tried Facebook ads. You know, I tried making content. I tried hiring a salesman and it didn't work." It's like, 07:44 Speaker A "No, it's not that it didn't work. It's that you weren't skilled enough to make it work." Very big difference. And so, you're going to tell me that no one on earth has ever had the same problem that you have right now. And no, and of those 07:57 Speaker A many people on earth who've had it, no one solved it. You have somehow come across the Gordian knot of problems. No one has hired more than five SDRs in this period of time for a company of this size. Of course, they have and 08:09 Speaker A that's why those people won. And they didn't just accept that it wasn't possible within this timeline. And so the rules that I would encourage you to live by is that unless the laws of physics prevent it, consider it mental 08:20 Speaker A handicaps that your competition gets to live by and measure themselves by, not a suggestion, a recommendation, and certainly not a [ \_\_ ] law. Right? 08:28 Speaker A Industry standards are a handicap that you let your competitors use and think they're doing well. That is the gift that we get as soon as you get out of this belief. Because if you want to be average, use industry averages. And most 08:40 Speaker A industry average businesses suck, right? Why would we look at them to judge ourselves by like, "Oh, this guy's completely broke and distracted, has no idea what he's doing. I should look what his numbers are and say, oh, we're about 08:50 Speaker A the same." Is that an accomplishment? Should we be looking forward to something like that happen? Like if you want to be the best, use physics and math and then work backwards. And so I think something that'd be really good to 09:00 Speaker A to finish on is this great piece uh by Jeff Bezos. And I want to read it to you because I think it just really drives this point home. Differentiation is survival and the universe wants you to be typical. This is my last annual 09:13 Speaker A shareholder letter as CEO of Amazon and I have one last thing of utmost importance I feel compelled to teach. I hope all Amazonians take it to heart. 09:21 Speaker A So, here's a passage from Richard Dawkins extraordinary book, The Blind Watchmaker. It's about the basic fact of biology. 09:29 Speaker A Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself, and that is what it is when it dies, the body tends to revert to the state of equilibrium within its environment. If you measure some quantity such as 09:41 Speaker A temperature, the acidity, the water content, or the electrical potential in a living body, you'll typically find that it's marketkedly different from the corresponding measure in the surroundings. Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than the surroundings. And in cold climates, they 09:55 Speaker A have to work hard to maintain that differential. When we die, the work stops. The temperature differential starts to dissipate, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings. 10:06 Speaker A Not all animals work so hard to avoid coming into equilibrium with their surrounding temperature, but all animals do some comparable work. For instance, in a dry country, animals and plants work to maintain the fluid content of their cells, work against a natural 10:23 Speaker A tendency for water to flow from them into the dry outside world. If they fail, they die. More generally, if living things didn't work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings and cease to exist as autonomous beings. This is what 10:39 Speaker A happens when they die. While the passage is not intended as a metaphor, it's nevertheless a fantastic one and very relevant to Amazon. I would argue it's relevant to all companies and all institutions and to each of our individual lives, too. In what ways does 10:51 Speaker A the world pull at you in an attempt to make you normal? How much work does it take to maintain your distinctiveness to keep alive the thing or things that make you special? I know a happily married couple who have a running joke in their 11:02 Speaker A relationship. Not infrequently, the husband looks at his wife with faux distress and says to her, "Can't you just be normal?" They both smile and laugh. And of course, the deep truth is that her distinctiveness is something that he loves about her. But at the same 11:14 Speaker A time, it's also true that things would be often easier, take less energy if they were a little more normal. Right? 11:20 Speaker A This is this phenomenon happens at scale at all levels. Democracies are not normal. Tyranny is the historical norm. 11:27 Speaker A If we stop doing all the continuous work that is to needed to maintain our distinctiveness in that regard, we would quickly come into equilibrium with tyranny. We all know that distinctiveness, originality is valuable. We're all taught to be 11:40 Speaker A yourself. What I'm really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical in a thousand ways. It pulls at you. Don't let it happen. You 11:52 Speaker A have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it's worth it. The fairy tale version of be yourself is that all your pain stops as soon as you allow distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is 12:02 Speaker A worth it, but don't expect to be easy or free. You'll have to put energy into it continuously. The world will always try to make Amazon more typical to bring us into equilibrium with our environment. 12:13 Speaker A It will take continuous effort, but we can and we must be better than that. You have to hold the [ \_\_ ] line. Like this is the last letter that Jeff Bezos wrote. And can you think about like of 12:23 Speaker A all the things that he wanted to say, the thing that he chose to leave on was the line was this is the standard. This is what makes us different. And of course it's going to take work. Of course, it's going to take more ways to 12:34 Speaker A solve the problem. It might cost millions more in order to do the better solution than the easy solution. But like I I if I could just transfer this one thing like you can tell how good someone will be as an entrepreneur by 12:49 Speaker A the standards they keep for themselves. They continue to push back and say like why can't it be faster? Why can't it be easier? And there's famous, you know, uh, stories of, you know, Steve Jobs putting the phone book on the desk and 13:00 Speaker A saying it has to fit in there. And people saying like, "It's never been done before, right?" And you've got Elon Musk going on, you know, on the manufacturing line saying, "This could have two bolts." And they're like, "There's no way. No one's done it 13:09 Speaker A before." And he's like, "Why? Break it down to physics. Why can't we do this?" Right? And so when someone pushes back on you and says like, you know, we can't hire that fast. It's like, why? What physical law is preventing us from 13:18 Speaker A hiring that fast? If another company who's 20 times our size can hire 100 people a day, why is it taking us a year to do it? Right? what choice are we choosing or what cost are we not choosing to bear that we could bear to 13:28 Speaker A make the investment to pull our future forward and I think it's like that push that relentless energy the drive to to choose to be different right to choose to to to hold a value the perfect value that you have as the ideal and then to 13:44 Speaker A strive continuously and though imperfectly to try and live that out and I think of that as like the reason you win or you don't win and again I'm not talking table stakes if you want to average then just look at industry 13:56 Speaker A averages, right? Look at industry norms, industry standards. But most businesses, if you looked at the the the average business in the US, they break even. The median business owner almost makes no money, right? And so it's like why would 14:08 Speaker A we measure ourselves by that? We have to by very definition reject the vast majority of what other people do in order to achieve what other people can't. And I think that that is like like I would I would encourage you to be 14:20 Speaker A less reasonable. And I would say that it has been a skill that has served me well. I mean, you can imagine having saying, "Hey, we I want to break the world record that every other person who has had a book has had massive media 14:32 Speaker A empires. They've had big deals. They had national media behind them for presidents and monarchs who released books." And I'm saying, I'm just some guy in America saying like, "Let's see if we can do more than all of them." And 14:46 Speaker A we did. We [ \_\_ ] did, right? We outsold Prince Harry, Obama combined within 24 hours. And to be fair, please don't kill me for, you know, having some point of disrespect for whatever secret nations exist, right? But I'm only 15:00 Speaker A saying this to to make the point, which is like when I when I set that goal originally, can you imagine the amount of people who were like, I don't know if that's realistic, man. Like, hey, that's a really big number. Like, have you 15:08 Speaker A really thought I mean, like, but what if it doesn't happen? I had someone ask me that. They said, well, what if we don't hit the goal? And I said, we dare greatly, [ \_\_ ] That's the point. 15:17 Speaker A Like, so what if we don't hit the goal? It doesn't mean we don't we we give ourel an excuse to not try, but like try in earnest, not say like, oh, we're going to do this and we hope this 15:26 Speaker A happens. It's like, no, we want to have five different versions of this thing going wrong and it's still hitting the goal. And so I I say this because like the goals that I have and probably the goals that you have, never apologize for 15:38 Speaker A them. They're they're it's normal for them to be unreasonable, but you don't need to be reasonable. The world wants you to be reasonable. It's like you need to be unreasonable. You need to stick your your feet in the mud and there's a 15:47 Speaker A certain amount of stubbornness that's required. And I think part of the reason that Peter Teal and some of these great investors talk about phenomenal entrepreneurs is that they have sometimes they don't have super high agreeableness. Is that they don't need 15:57 Speaker A consensus. They don't need everyone else to like them because they they believe what they believe. Right? And the thing is is that in order to have an outsized return in anything, you have to bet against conventional wisdom, right? And 16:07 Speaker A conventional wisdom can be right. And so that means that fundamentally either you're an idiot or you're right and you're early. And that's where you get rewarded. And so you have to think like at least the process I come down to is 16:18 Speaker A always like what physical law of reality prevents us from selling this many books. And that's why it came down to like all right we'll have multiple generators. Like if we don't have power we can't sell books. We have to make 16:26 Speaker A sure that we have backups for internet. If we don't have internet we can't sell books. Okay do we have enough books to sell? We got to print them. Okay great. 16:32 Speaker A We have to have logistics that we have hundreds and hundreds of people ready to actually ship those books out. Okay. If we have each of these things, then all that it really takes is enough people to see it and an offer enough that is 16:41 Speaker A compelling that makes sense for a big enough audience to say yes. That's it. And so you have these problems in your business. You're not cash flowing enough. You're not hiring fast enough. You're not your your your price isn't what you want it to be. If 16:54 Speaker A you believe and you can reason it to say like what prevents us from doing this, I think that that's where you can get these special outsized returns. I think that's where you can have the unreasonable accomplishments. But it 17:05 Speaker A comes first from having unreasonable conviction that you will hold the line, that this will be the standard that you have. And the fact that no one else has ever done it before means absolutely nothing to you because there's no reason 17:15 Speaker A that they couldn't have done it. And good on you for ignoring the fact of their mediocrity. Topics: business success high standards industry standards profit discipline scaling business entrepreneurship business roadmap leadership sales growth acquisition.com --- This is the markdown twin of https://sozai.app/transcript/youtube-video-transcript-351/ — the same content, without the markup. 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