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(PODCAST) Codie Sanchez is the biggest name in small business investing with 3+ Million followers

I'm a big fan of Codie Sanchez. She an excellent entrepreneur who has built a massive audience on the internet in just a few years. 2 Million Instagram followers. 1 Million TikTok followers, and hundreds of thousands on Twitter and Linkedin. Her megaphone is huge.

We talk about her reflections on how to build a cash flow stream for your life, why it's important to build an audience and much more...You can listen to our interview on Spotify, Apple Podcast and my YouTube channel.

My friend Cole told me an interesting story this week...

Cole's friend Ian was a mediocre student. But he was crafty. And wanted to get into an Ivy League college.

So he looked up the easiest sports that could help him get accepted into a top school.

He picked Fencing.

He started as the worst fencer on the team in High school. But he studied fencing and talked to dozens of fencing coaches. He practiced all the time.

He learned one move that became his winning move. It was not the most elegant move. And it didn't work against the best fencers in the world. But it worked well enough to get him into the top 100 high school fencers in the US.

This landed him a spot at Harvard on the team. On the first day of college, he informed the Harvard coach that he will not be fencing for him...and that's the end of the story.

I've seen other people follow a similar strategy. I don't condone or scoff at it. But it leads me to the importance of picking the right time to stop a strategy.

Because Ian could have easily continued as a fencer.

He was ranked well. He was winning competitions. And he was getting the affirmations of his friends, family, and others about his fencing. But Ian knew his goal. Get into a top school.

It was never about fencing. Many others in his position would get caught up in the momentum, and spend years trying to be a great fencer. Not Ian. He knew where to direct his attention and set his sights on his other life goals.

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This story made me think of my first business after college...

I started a student note-taking business.

People would take notes in class, and post them on our website. Then they would market their notes to their classmates by sending an email to let everyone know about their notes.

We focused on hiring note-takers in large public schools (big classes, more buyers).

We used Facebook ads to attract note-takers.

It cost us $2 per lead for people to sign up for this job. Once we covered all the big schools with more than 25,000 students. We started hiring at smaller schools with 10,000+ students. All of a sudden our lead cost went up by 400% to $8. It was much more expensive to recruit people for this role at smaller schools.

At the time, we were growing fast, from $400k in revenue in year 1. To $1 Million in revenue in Year 2.

We reached $3 Million in revenue in Year 3. But then everything slowed down for us.

We were no longer growing as fast, and we were spending a lot of money on marketing...we were losing money!

The strategy that worked for the first $3M in revenue was no longer working. But we kept pushing the gas because we were excited by the growth. We burned through $1.2 Million on advertising. Ouch.

We assumed our growth was going to be linear, and that we should push the same strategy for a long time. Rookie mistake.

Looking back, we should have been tracking profitable growth slowly. And found a new product or strategy to pursue before spending more. We could have saved the $ 1.2 million...

Here are my takeaways:

Consider carefully the strategy you're pursuing in your personal journey...

What are you spending time or money on today that is no longer serving you the way it used to?

• re-assess the strategy regularly
• question your strategy. Don't assume because your strategy was right before, it's still the right decision now
• TIME is your most precious resource. By focusing on your current strategy you are saying "no" to a lot of other opportunities. If you stop pursuing your current strategy you open yourself up to more opportunities that you would have not otherwise noticed

And, please tell your nieces and nephew there are many ways to get into a top college...you may need to get crafty like Ian.

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🔑 Reader Response

In response to last week's newsletter, a reader named Luke shared the following on how he's seen his boss build the Well of Influence (original article here).

Check-out the story he shared...it's full of gems:

To share an example of building a well, the current president I work for has an INCREDIBLE amount of influence both upwards to ownership and downwards to all his people.

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The way he's accomplished this is whenever he does site visits, he makes sure to take 2-day trips and actively sits with front-line staff and middle managers for a minimum of 3 hours during the visit. He'll take random people out for lunch regardless of the level they're at...It gives them a chance to ask those questions on why we are doing things a specific way and a way to cross-check if I'm telling my people "the truth." ...

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He used to do them 4x a year, but as the division has grown (50m to 800m - you can see why he has influence with ownership), he's now down to one visit. The SVP level will visit once a year to help shore up the in-person meetings. All my people complain that the new SVP doesn't sit with them, doesn't get to know them, and they all give him side-eye in lack of trust. This has been the same message for the last two years, regardless of what I tell the SVP when he's coming to make sure he connects with the front-line people.

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Have a great week,

Sieva

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Disclaimer: nothing here is investment advice. Please do your own research. The information above is just for information and learning.

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