My Vision To Build The World's Biggest Writing Education Business

Breaking down our team's vision, mission, values, and operating principles

Feb 02, 2025

Greetings from CDMX 🇲🇽

I just published a video breaking down the “Company Ethos” powering my portfolio of writing businesses. Over the course of 91 minutes, I cover:

Our “Vision” to become the world’s biggest writing education business
Our “Mission” to make it possible for any writer to make a living
Our “Values” and “Operating Principles” that will guide our path to get there

This is the exact video I have every team member watch during their onboarding, and I’m publishing it on YouTube for 2 reasons:

I wish other business owners made this type of content
I want to attract the best talent possible to work for our company

This is a long video & post, but my goal was to fully “open source” our most important frameworks so hopefully you can apply them to your life & business.

Let’s get into it 💰

For those of you who learn best via video, here’s the link:

And for those of you who learn best via audio, here’s the podcast link (Spotify & Apple Podcasts)

And for those of you who like to read, here’s the text version. Keep in mind, this was an off-the-cuff outline for the video, so I go far more in-depth over there.

Vision

Our vision is to build the world’s biggest writing education business.

Why this vision versus a smaller one, like:

“A highly-profitable $5m education business?”
“A small lifestyle business for our entire team and employees?”
“The world’s best writing education business?”

3 main reasons:

Having a bigger vision allows us to attract the highest-quality talent
- We want to attract team members who have ambitious goals for themselves, whether that’s to ascend to a high-level position within a big company or to eventually start their own business
- Therefore, we need a vision big enough that anyone we work with can achieve their ultimate vision for themselves within the business, or at least arm themselves with experience that lets them start their future endeavor more effectively
- If we had a smaller vision, it would limit the ultimate size and scope of responsibility / impact someone could have within the business, which means we would lose out on the opportunity to work with them
Building a massive business requires a world-class suite of products & services
- There are many small businesses out there ($0-$5m in revenue) that have mediocre products & client experience
- They continue to grow only because they are expanding the number of people who know who they are, then selling them their product.
- This works in the beginning because there are so few people who actually know about you that it’s easy to keep finding new ones
- But at a certain point, you’ve exhausted the small group of people in your niche, such that everyone who knows about you or bought something from you is disappointed in their experience. This means they won’t buy from you again, and they won’t recommend anything you bought to other people
- So to achieve a large-scale education business, you must have 1) customers who buy from you over and over again and 2) customers who tell their friends about you
- And this only happens when you create something people genuinely love and gain huge value from
- So having a vision of this size basically forces us to (selfishly) create something of the highest quality, because our vision is impossible to achieve without it
The bigger the business, the bigger the impact
- Building on the point above, revenue generation is a scoreboard for value creation. Over the long term, the more value you generate, the more revenue you generate
- This is true if and only if the products and services you sell create a surplus for the consumer or business who purchases them
- But since building a big business requires a great product, it follows that we can make a bigger impact by having a bigger vision. Bigger vision -> requires better quality product -> ultimately results in bigger positive impact since more people purchase and more people experience the surplus our products generate

So to summarize, casting a vision this big allows us to work with higher quality people, forces us to build higher quality products, and ultimately those two lead us to making the biggest impact possible on the world.

Now what is the impact we’re trying to make?

That takes us to our Mission.

Mission

To provide the education to help anyone make a living as a writer.

To explain the importance of this mission, let’s start with 3 core beliefs we have about writing and business:

On average, businesses create a consumer surplus, creating more value than they capture
The best way for a business to scale its advertising is through the written word
Writing is the best tool for an individual’s personal and professional growth

Therefore, starting with the end in mind:

As a company, we want to make the biggest impact possible on the world
Which is accomplished when as many businesses as possible scale their advertising, because if they create a surplus, more overall impact happens the more people who experience that surplus
Which means if we want more businesses to scale their advertising, we need to educate more people on how to provide their writing as a service, because there is a shortage of people able to do so right now
Which means if we want more people to provide writing as a service, we need to educate them on how to charge enough to make a living
But even before that, we need more people in general to understand the benefits of writing for their personal and professional growth, so they give writing a shot to begin with

So now starting from the bottom up, our mission unfolds if we:

Educate the masses on why writing is the best tool for personal and professional growth
Once they’ve started writing, we educate them on how to provide their writing as a profitable service, should they want to pursue that as a career path
This ultimately leads to more people seeing the opportunity to make a living as a writer, which leads to a large pool of talent for business owners to employ
This ultimately leads to more businesses being able to scale their advertising, which ULTIMATELY leads to the largest amount of impact

However, if we fail to show up every day to accomplish this mission:

Fewer people will understand the benefits of writing as a potent tool for personal & professional growth, which means fewer people will give writing a shot
If fewer people are writing, fewer people will attempt to make a living as a writer
If fewer people are making a living as a writer, then fewer businesses have the ability to scale their advertising
And if fewer businesses are able to scale their advertising, less value overall is created for the world

Which ultimately means the more we can educate the world on the importance of writing and arm them with the skills to make a living from it, the more directly we can impact the GDP of planet Earth, and thus the well-being of everyone who lives on it.

Core Values

Before we talk about our current values, here’s how they have unfolded at each stage of revenue & team size.

From $0 to $10k per year (2020)
- I wanted to make $10,000 in side income from an internet business
- If you had told me this is where we were going to end up 4 years later, I would have laughed in your face
- I didn't even consider this a company, let alone have vision/mission/values/principles
From $0 to $1m per year and from 0 to 3 team members (2021)
- We had no vision, no mission, no values, and trying to construct them would have been a complete waste of time
- Instead, all we were trying to do was sell something to someone hoping that the vision, mission, and values would emerge from the way we operated as a default
From $1m to $3m year, 5 team members (2022)
- We created an informal mission to just do “more” of what we were currently doing, which was helping people start writing online
- We had no real understanding of the long-term benefits or eventual impact we could have on the global economy. Thinking that big was unfathomable.
- All we were trying to do was help more people experience the benefits we had experienced from a daily writing habit
- And because we were not scaling our team members, there was no reason to cast a bigger vision or define the way we operated. Again, trying to do so would have been nothing but productive procrastination.
From $3m to $6m/year, from 5-30 team members (2023 & 2024)
- At this point, we still did not have any real “vision” for where our business could go. However, we had a better understanding of the mission we were trying to accomplish, which we knew required more help from new team members
- We knew we wanted to attract people who wanted to be part of a similar mission, which ended up being mostly people who had been a part of our products/communities already and wanted to help us reach more people
- But as we started to scale the team, we needed to scale our culture, mantras, and ways of operating to everyone new who joined
- So rather than come up with anything fancy, we took a look at the way we currently operated as a small team and formalized some of those behaviors into values we could repeat and reinforce
  - Extreme ownership
  - Relentless tempo
  - Championship energy
- These 3 values were all based around individual responsibility, speed, and competitiveness. And they were the exact right set of values to get us to our current revenue level and team size
From $6m to $20m/year and 30+ employees (2025+)
- At this point, the vision, mission, and values, and operating principles reach a new level of importance
- We first must scale the vision to allow more people to achieve their personal visions inside of ours
- We must establish a mission that allows us to achieve that vision and unifies our efforts behind a big “why”
- We must evolve our values into ones that can support a mature, growing company, rather than one looking to gain traction as quickly as possible with as few people as possible

And this ultimately leads us to our new set of core values:

Set the Standard
Peaceful Iteration
Dynasty Energy

Let’s break down each value and its evolution:

1. Set the Standard (upgraded from Extreme Ownership)

In our early stages, Extreme Ownership helped everyone take on as much responsibility as possible and own the outcomes they generate
- However, this was a relatively limiting, narrow value that better suits a team of individual contributors rather than a mature business who rely on one another
- At this point, we want to broaden this value to encapsulate the traits and qualities of the products we create and the people we work with
And that means Setting the Standard in everything we do, both personally and professionally
- We want to Set the Standard for product quality & client experience in the education industry
- That requires each department to Set the Standard for all other departments to try and emulate
- That requires each team member to Set the Standard within their department, being the performer that everyone tries to emulate
- That requires each of us to Set the Standard in our personal life, with everything from our relationships to our health to our habits to our mindset, everything working in harmony to allow us to perform at the highest level
So this value leads to some simplifying questions when making decisions:
- When hiring someone new, are they someone we could see Setting the Standard for the entire department or organization?
- When evaluating our own performance, is this a behavior that is Setting the Standard higher or lower than it is currently?
- When creating a product or service, is this Setting the Standard higher relative to things we’ve created in the past, or lower?
- When looking for personal areas of improvement, where are my standards lacking, and how can I raise them?
All in all, our goal is to Set the Standard higher and higher with everything we create, everyone we work with, and everything we do.

2. Peaceful Iteration (upgraded from Relentless Tempo)

In our early business stages, our only operating goal was to move quickly on everything we did, trying to collapse time down as much as possible. We prided ourselves on doing more in a week than other businesses did in 6 months
This served us well for building our initial products, created a culture of speed, and prevented any kind of overthinking or productive procrastination.
However, that came with a tradeoff of either
- Moving quickly on the wrong things, prioritizing speed of execution over deliberation on what to execute
- Rushing the execution of something that led to lower overall quality than we would have liked
As the company has grown, there is a “undoing cost” to working haphazardly on the wrong thing or doing the right thing but with too little precision.
- So now, we must be more methodical in the way we do things, which will ultimately let us move faster in the long-run.
So there are two important parts of this value: peaceful & iteration
- Peaceful means we do not things with any unnecessary rushed energy or stress. We are deliberate in choosing what to fix and what to pursue, rather than jumping at the first opportunity or reacting emotionally to whatever life throws at us.
- Iteration is the process of making small improvements on something over time. And that is what allows us to reach the next level of our business. It’s not about doing a bunch of new things, it’s about finding the incremental upgrades to the machine we’ve already built, each iteration compounding positively on the one before it.
And there will be many areas in which we will Peacefully Iterate:
- Brand assets
- Sales processes
- Client experience
- Meeting agendas
- Marketing funnels
- Content cadences
- Team member performance
- The list goes on and on

3. Dynasty Energy (upgraded from Championship Energy)

When we first started to grow the team, we needed to take an approach to winning our first championship, which was the origin of this value
- Winning your first championship usually happens accidentally. Most people aren’t quite sure how it happened. There are typically a handful of ultra-high performers that will the rest of the team along
- Then that winning culture attracts new players. And when they come in, they adopt the baseline behavior of the championship team, which Sets the Standard for all team members going forward.
- At the same time, the lower performers are unable to keep up and they churn out. This makes the higher performers happy and clears space for more high performers to join them.
- This happens year after year, compounding positively with higher standards, more winning, and more championships. This is how Dynasties are formed.
And so as a team, we are going to evolve from one who saw winning as the goal to one who sees winning as the standard.
- We must become a Dynasty - one marked by win after win after win - run by a group of of people who do not tolerate any kind of behavior that could contribute to the dynasty falling
- We are going to win, and keep winning, and keep winning, such that there is absolutely no shadow of a doubt that we are the best writing education company on Earth. This paves the path for us to ultimately achieve our vision of becoming the biggest.

Operating Principles

What are operating principles and how are they different from values?

Think of the values of the “what”
Think of this principles of the “how”
- How do we Set the Standard?
- How do we Peacefully Iterate?
- How do we show up Dynasty Energy?
- How do we combine all of these to effectively to achieve our mission?
These are the nitty-gritty frameworks that describe how we operate
- How we make decisions as company?
- How we see the world working?
- How we effectively get work done?
- How we create an amazing client experience?
- How do we communicate our expectations using shared language?
We cover all of these in our ever-growing list of Operating Principles
- Importantly, none of these are set in stone and are set to change should we find a better way of explaining the concept

1. Every problem is solvable

This is the frame we take whenever presented with a problem in the business
- Unless it defies the laws of physics, we have the ability to figure it out
There are endless resources of information at our disposal to solve problems
- Courses
- Podcasts
- Masterminds
- The list goes on and on
Not to mention, AI tools like ChatGPT can help you think through any problem, diagnose its root, and source the information for you
- The amount of “thinking” you can do with 90 focused minutes in ChatGPT is astonishing and it’s only getting better
Importantly, we expect every person on our team to take ownership over solving problems they come across the moment they notice them
- This doesn’t mean that you must solve them on your own, but we expect you to push your capabilities and explore all potential resources to solve it
In practice, we expect you to present problems in this way:
- Here’s the problem I am experiencing
- Here’s why it is a problem (using data)
- Here’s my proposed solution AND what I’ve already done to explore its implementation
Problems without a clear hypothesis for how the business will improve from solving it AND your progress on the proposed solution will not be entertained

2. Everything is learnable

Building on the point above, we view everything as a “skill”
- Sales is a skill, writing is a skill, editing is a skill, giving feedback is a skill
And furthermore, we view every “skill” as a subset of microbehaviors
- Sales is made up of on-the-call skills and off-the-call skills
  - On-the-call skills include things like building rapport, closing skill, empathetic listening, etc.
    - And you can continue to get more and more specific
And finally we view every skill as learnable on a spectrum from difficult to learn and easy to learn
- Just because a skill is hard to learn doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn it, it might just take more time
Combining these first two principles, the solution to a problem always involves a skill of some kind
- Which means that any problem is a SKILL ISSUE that is 100% in your control to acquire
This is the most empowering combination of beliefs you can to effectively contribute to the success of a business.
- The highest performers are constantly identifying high leverage problems, then rapidly acquiring the skill to solve them
- From there, the next highest leverage activity is to train those two skills

3. Everything is trainable

If every skill is learnable, then every skill is trainable
- And each sits on a spectrum of easy to train and hard to train, similar to easy to learn and hard to learn
- Which means there is no one in the company who can do something that someone else could not do
Now, importantly, this doesn’t mean that any one person is entirely replaceable by another person
- But there are individual behaviors that are replaceable by someone else. It might just take multiple people to replace all of the behaviors of that person
- If you want to replace a unicorn, you might not find another unicorn. But you can combine a horse, a rhino, and a bumble bee and get pretty darn close
Once you have effectively learned a skill, you can ascend within the company by learning to pass that skill on to someone else
- It’s only through trying to teach something to someone else that we can fully understand it ourselves, which not only makes you more talented but ends up making the person you’re training more talented, because you’re passing off a “better” version of the skill than you had originally
This combination of beliefs
- Everything is solvable
- Everything is learnable
- Everything is trainable
Is how we can peacefully iterate in the fastest way possible. Identifying problems, learning the skills to solve them, and then training others to execute those skills, that is how you build an engine of continuous personal and professional progress

4. Praise over punishment

There are two ways to reinforce a behavior: praise and punishment
- Rewarding a good behavior with praise will make the person more likely to repeat it in the future
- Punishing a bad behavior will make the person less likely to do it in the future
Importantly, these two reinforcement patterns work in different ways
- Punishing a bad behavior will change the behavior the fastest
- Rewarding a good behavior will change the behavior the longest
On top of that, the amount of behavior change that a punishment or reward provides is directly related to the time between the behavior and the reinforcement
- The time between a punishment/reward must be a close to the behavior as possible for it to be effective
For example, let’s pretend we are training a dog to not use the bathroom in the house
- If you want to effectively change its behavior, you would do the following:
  - The next time it uses the bathroom in the house, you will punish the dog with a stern tone of voice
    - Ideally, this is IMMEDIATELY after it happens. If you wait 6 hours until you get home, it will have no clue why you are punishing it
  - This will change its behavior immediately. It will associate the bad behavior with a punishment which will keep it from doing it in the future
  - Then (and this is the most important part), you will wait until it uses the bathroom outside, and then MASSIVELY reward it for doing so
    - The bigger the reward, and the closer the time between the behavior the reward, the more likely it will do this again in the future
  - Then, you will CONTINUE TO REWARD the dog again and again and again, each time it does the correct behavior
    - Repeating this process until it is automatic, where you can then slowly phase out the reward and make it more “random” until the behavior is just a natural habit
- Now, where most people go wrong, is they ONLY punish
  - If they only yell at the dog when it uses the bathroom inside, it might stop it for a little bit of time. But the second the threat of punishment is gone (for example, you leave the house for an entire day) it will return the old behavior
  - The punishment will stop its behavior only when the threat of punishment is present. It must be met with equal and opposite reward for it to change over the long term
And this is the same behavior change pattern we all experience, whether we know it or not
- We repeat things that reward us and we stop things that punish us
And so when we are building a culture internally, we want to use punishment as little as possible - only when necessary to immediately stop a behavior
- During that process, we should clearly communicate the expected behavior and reinforce doing so immediately after it occurs

5. Airtight communication

You can solve most business problems through better communication
- Clearly communicating the companies mission, vision, values, and principles
- Clearly communicating the current goals and initiatives of each department
- Clearly communicating the expectations of a role (and how well someone is meeting those expectations)
- Clearly communicating the status of a project such that everyone understands its progress
- And on and on and on
Our goal with communication is to minimize the number of open loops & uncertainty people experience
- We constantly “close the loop” when someone has assigned us something and it’s now completed
- We constantly share the roadmap for what is being worked on, why we’re working on it, and how we’re going to accomplish it
There is no such thing as overcommunicating within our company
- This does not mean we are constantly talking for the sake of it
- It does mean that we understand everyone is busy and everyone has their own priorities and projects, which means they are thinking about your projects FAR LESS than you are
- So if you’re ever deciding between giving someone additional information on the status of a project or the rationale behind a decision or the granularity of specifications, ALWAYS AIR ON THE SIDE OF AIRTIGHT COMMUNICATION
  - That way, nothing slips through the cracks

6. No decisions without data

Put bluntly: we do not make emotional decisions
- We do not use words like “it feels like” or “it seems like” when proposing a change or improvement
- These feelings can be signals that something should be changed, and they should not be ignored
- However, if that feeling cannot be supported by data, the only action item from that feeling is to start capturing data that would allow you to make a data-driven decision in the future
For example, let’s say that we think carousels are fatiguing on LinkedIn and we should stop posting them
- This likely came from a recent post of a carousel that underperformed. Because of recency bias, we are more likely to overweight that data point and use it inform our decisions
- However, unless you can verify that the average engagement on our carousels over the last 180 days has trended downward, we will not make a change on that type of post
- That data is likely findable, and therefore the problem is solvable, but we would only act if the necessary data was presented as a problem WITH the proposed solution, as talked about in our first Operating Principle
This idea works in reverse as well: no data without decisions
- It’s tempting to think that we should capture tons and tons and tons of data as business
- But data is useful if and only if it changes a decision or behavior for a team member or department
- So to stress test something you want to start tracking, you should be able to articulate what you would do exactly if:
  - The number was higher than you expected
  - The number was lower than you expected
  - The number was spot on with what you expected
- The goal is to capture the least amount of data possible to make all the necessary decisions. And this framework is what allows us to do so

7. End of day default

We expect each member of our team to accomplish a large amount of work on a daily basis
- If that makes you uncomfortable, go ahead and click the big red X on this video because there are other places that will expect less of you
When we set deadlines for accomplishing something, we always start with the end of the day and work backwards
- Most companies start with the end of the week. Which means we can get 7x more done in a week than other people just by making this our default expectation
If we cannot have it completed by the end of the day, we will ask:
- Why not?
  - Most of the time, it can be if you decide it can
- If you believe it can’t, what is keeping you from giving it your full attention?
  - Is it that there are other things you are working on?
    - If so, are they more important than this thing?
Now, sometimes there are valid reasons why something cannot be completed by the end of the day, and that’s okay.
- But the important distinction here is not whether or not something can be done in a day, but how much of that thing can be done today or what parts can we finish today?
For example, there are certain things that cannot be completed in a day
- Creative work, hiring someone, making a curriculum improvement, etc.
- But all of those can be MAXED OUT in a day, which is what we expect
The most important part of this framework is the prioritization thought process that it requires
- If you are constantly asking “what is stopping me from completing this today” you will look for ways to work faster, more effectively, or with more stamina, all of which will increase your output and thus the output of the entire company
Speaking of prioritization…

8. Solve in sequence

Every time we create a task list or a project list, we use numbers to prioritize them
- Just this simple habit will force you to prioritize what is the single most important thing
The goal is then to work on the first item and only the first item until it is completed OR until you have done the limitation of what could be reasonably completed for the day
- This is true on the micro level on a day to day. Your tasks on any given day must have an order with the most important one given your most important and most productive time
  - Then, only when you have exhausted all resources (time, energy, attention) on that thing or that thing is completed, you move on to the next one
- This is true on the macro project level as well
  - We should focus as much of our collective resources on the project that has the highest impact
“Multitasking” is not what people think of like trying to make a phone call and read a book at the same time. No one actually does that
- Multitasking is far more insidious, because most do it without noticing
- Trying to complete 1 thing on 5 projects in a day is multitasking
  - This “feels” productive because you’ve moved multiple things forward
  - But if you were to repeat this over 5 days, you might have 5 things done on 5 different projects
- It’s far better to define those 5 subtasks for the MOST IMPORTANT PROJECT that you would complete over a week and complete them in sequence before working on another project
  - Chances are, you could knock those 5 subtasks out in half a day, given you are not context switching between thinking patterns
  - Then you could repeat the process for another project during the afternoon, and repeat it again the next two days
  - At that point, you will have all 5 projects completed in 2.5 days, rather than in 5 days
    - You are moving 50% faster
- Of course, this is an over generalization and there are nuances. But what’s important is the thought process of looking to move forward one project as far as possible in a day

9. More, better, new

This is the foundational framework we use for peaceful iteration
To progress any area of the business that is input-driven, the lowest risk-adjusted decision is to just do “more” of that thing
- More emails, more tweets, more writing time, more client 1:1s, more hours, whatever the input is
We will continue to do “more” of that thing until we reach the point of negative marginal return
- Meaning when the return of doing another unit is actually negative,
  - Like posting multiple times on a platform that really prefers once a day
  - Or forcing yourself to write for 3 hours and creating lower quality work as a result
  - Or adding an additional 1:1 call with a client that overwhelms them rather than helps them
Once we have reached that point, we keep the same level of volume and focus on doing that volume “better”
- Better posting, better emails, better 1:1 calls, etc. etc.
- This is where the majority of business value comes from. Finding the sweet spot where volume is maxed out and now we max out what we get from that level of volume
Most businesses struggle with doing more in the first place. They are simply not doing enough volume to see any kind of progress
- Those that do enough volume are then often not doing that volume with enough intention to see results
- Instead they think the solution is to hop to “new” which is almost never the correct choice
The only time we move on to something “new” is once we have fully maxed out the volume and have a clean process in place for iterating that volume on a continuous basis
So the focusing question with anything we’re looking to improve
- Can we start with just doing more?
- If we’re maxed out, how can we do what we’re doing but better?
- If we’re already doing the most and have a process for improving, do we need to just let time pass, or should we jump to something new?

10. Total trust

If you are a member of this team, we have total trust in your abilities as a DEFAULT and will treat you accordingly
You will start with a full trust battery, not an empty one
- Some businesses operate that trust must be “built” up over time, like charging a battery from zero
- We operate on the other end of the spectrum, such that we will treat you as if you’ve got a full trust battery
- Importantly, this means that you can lose trust should you underperform or give us evidence that we cannot trust you to own an outcome. But this is rare for members of our team and we have a short tolerance for underperformance
If we assign a project to you, we have total trust in your decision-making capabilities to move it forward in the best way possible
- In making those decisions, they will exist on a hierarchy of easy to undo and hard to undo.
  - Hat decisions: easy to undo instantly, just grab a new hat. We want you to default to making these without approval from above in the interest of speed. We will be frustrated if you are constantly getting feedback and approval on hat decisions.
  - Haircut decisions: take a little bit of time to undo, especially really bad ones. But for the most part, we will be okay if we get a bad one. We trust you to make haircut decisions, but be thoughtful with them and make sure you’re clearly communicating exactly how and why you made that decision.
  - Tattoo decisions: extremely hard to undo, very painful. If you think something might be a tattoo decision, get approval before making it and explain why you think it’s important to do so. We will never be disappointed if you get 2-factor authentication on something you deem to be a tattoo decision.
- Almost all decisions in business are hats or haircuts and we encourage you to make those decisions yourself to the best of your abilities.

11. Simplicity is velocity

As a default, operate with Occam’s Razor: the simpler solution or explanation is usually the correct one
- We strive to operate on the right or left side of the midwhit bell curve. Extreme genius and extreme ignorance usually default to the simplest solution
The simplest choice is often the one that requires the least amount of operational complexity or change
- The fewer number of steps, or decisions, or conditions, or people, or tweaks, the more effective the solution will be
With anything that involves a big change or increase in complexity, discount the expected result by 20%
- Which means if we want to improve something by 20% in the business, but doing so requires an operational change, we should expect the change to deliver AT LEAST 40%, if not more, to be worth the effort, due to the 20% discount
Your first pass at something will often involve complexity of some kind, so expect the true solution to come after additional simplification
- Get feedback from others you are working with through the lens of “here’s my v1 solution, how can I make this simpler?”

12. Delight with details

We are not in the product business, or the education business, or the marketing business
- We are in the hospitality and accountability business
This is where most education-based business go wrong
- They think that the best product, or the best marketing, or the best branding, or the sales team is what drives their success
But in reality, our long-term success will be driven EXCLUSIVELY by the experience of our clients
- Specifically, how we make them FEEL during their time working with us
- If they feel frustrated, or helpless, or lost, or ignored, no matter how good our educational materials are, they will not recommend us to their friends or buy from us in the past
- If they feel heard, supported, at easy, and attended to, the outcome they unlock will simply be the cherry on top, because the way they feel about the process has already gone above expectation
Now this type of experience does not come from one thing done remarkably well. Instead, it comes from hundreds and hundreds of small details, each iterated over time, that eliminate as much friction, risk, difficulty, frustration or question as humanly possible
And we can apply this to not only our clients, but the way we manage our team members
- Employee experience works in the same way as client experience
- We want every member of our team to tell all their friends how incredible it is to work here, and that starts with doing the smallest of details at the highest level
For example, we recently attended a workshop at Acqusition.com
- This was their 9th or 10th workshop — and their attention to detail (and their process of iteration) was extremely apparent
- Every single decision of where to go at what time was made for you and clearly communicate
- The greeting basket they gave us was personalized and thoughtful
- The signs on the wall clearly showed how to get to the bathroom and the meal zone, never leaving it up to you to traverse the building
- The meals were exceptional, far above expectations of other workshop-style events
- We left the event feeling great about the process, but for no one big reason, simply the hundreds of small reasons that kept showing up again and again

Aaaaand that’s it!

Hopefully you walked away with one or two golden nuggets you can apply to your business or your team to help take it to the next level in 2025 and beyond.

That’s all for this week. I’m off to hit the sauna and then smash some tacos 🌮

See you next Sunday!

-Dickie Bush

PS… If you missed last week’s edition, I summarized everything I learned during Alex Hormozi’s $5000 Scaling Workshop. You can check out that full breakdown here: