How to Use Leverage to Grow Your Business at Massive Scale with Eric Jorgenson

Key Takeaways

hello and welcome to the copyblogger podcast my name is tim stoddart thank you so much for joining me a few months ago i stumbled across the work of eric jorgensen eric had recently published his best-selling book entitled the almanac of nival ravikant in this book eric breaks down and articulately conceptualizes the business concepts of leverage which were introduced to him by a very popular twitter thread written by naval ravikant leverage is a word that gets thrown around a lot but how do you actually define this concept more importantly how do you use leverage to generate massive scale in your business these days it's not uncommon for a one-person business to generate a million dollars of revenue it's not uncommon for a billion dollar company to have only 10 to 15 employees how is this possible in this episode eric gives us an in-depth master class on leverage in addition we went through some of the specific modules in his course and he gave us a behind-the-scenes look at the material he teaches this is a special privilege given to you as a member of the copy blogger community eric was great he's generous kind and easy to talk to check out his course at ejorgenson.com leverage the link to his course is in the show notes of this podcast which can be found anywhere you listen to podcasts i'm excited for you to listen to this episode please help me welcome eric jorgensen what's up eric thank you so much for joining me on my show i'm glad to be here glad to be here cool man uh well you and i were talking a little bit before we started recording um however this particular circumstance i think needs to be put in some kind of documentation where the hell are you and what is going on behind you oh yeah i got a little bit of an away game situation so i'm i'm uh at university of missouri kansas city this week uh kicking off kind of a tech stars cohort um this is a bunch of awesome companies downstairs kind of working on pitches and meeting mentors and stuff um and i just like snuck up here to this weird little conference or barricaded myself in with a bunch of chairs and hopefully we get through this without me interrupting somebody doing something important yeah that's amazing uh well as i said before thank you so much for for taking some time out of your busy schedule and chatting with us all right so let's get into it i start every episode with the same question the background photo on your twitter tell me about what it is and what it means to you i cannot remember what the background photo of my twitter is right now i remember i got like three or four i used to have one that was like an american flag in the back of a boat i had one that was like the tesla that got shot into space yeah looking back at earth oh it's my book now actually i should probably know that um yeah it's the it's the like banner thing like a little graphic that scribe made me for uh for my book after i became a amazon bestseller yeah first of all congratulations with that um great idea great topic and i was even thinking like man how many times has eric been on podcasts talking about his book um and so i i have a lot of material that i want to cover that is more so about some of the topics and the ideas that you promote which i think is actually going to be like more useful to everybody than talking about the book itself you know but while we're on the subject your book is called the almanac of naval ravikant i'm sure most people know who he is they've all got very famous on twitter especially through some of these ideas and some concepts that a lot of people like you and myself have found a lot of value from and so on that note i want to hear about like the manifestation of this book i always find it to be a fascinating conversation because there are some things where you can just take an idea and sit down for a couple hours and then you have something but with books in particular there's a very long process it's very focus oriented um so talk to me about like that moment where you had the idea and the process of going from idea to bestseller yeah i kind of painted myself into a corner a little bit by like having this idea and tweeting it when it was like a very tiny kernel of an idea that i not really considered and uh i woke up to find that naval had retweeted my half-assed idea and like five thousand people were like oh yeah we want that like please make it and naval was you know willing to support that and kind of was like yeah go ahead i was like oh well this is this idea this got very real very quickly um and so it was my first book i had done a lot of writing but uh never a book before and so i just kind of you know i was a little naive i was like okay this will be like a six month project and like three years later published a book um so yeah it took a long it took me a long time to wrap my head around like what the medium meant and like figure out all of the details of it and it's one of those things that's like you know you it's hard to continue sometimes and then you look back at how far you've come you're like i can't give up now can't give up now um and so you just kind of find some more energy to keep moving and uh every step like builds on itself and then you've got something great at the end of a bunch of work there's a lot of people in copy vlogger that have dreams of publishing a book myself included likely um [Music] i think it's it's that it's a grandiose idea right it's kind of like the writer's version of of making it onto the big screen what about for my own like selfishness being able to live vicariously for you like what is it felt like to have something that you wrote that you put together that has been accepted by by your peers and other writers as to be like a really great piece of work uh i mean it's real cool um but i can't i don't give myself a lot of credit for this because like all of the i think most of what people get the value out of is naval's ideas right like all the brilliance here is like the raw material that naval has spent his life kind of distilling um and you know i had great puzzle pieces to work with and i worked hard at kind of making something beautiful out of them and making them accessible and putting it into kind of like a professional published polished thing for people um but i don't i don't get like this i don't get like the same as a writer also like i don't get the validation of like wow like people love my writing um i only really have that for like my editing process in this which i'm i'm legitimately proud of and work hard on um but it is a little different than like you know dreaming of putting out a novel and like putting on you know putting out a novel and having people love it um that's like this very creative work that's interesting to hear there's another side of me that thinks uh i would feel the same way i don't want to say like you're not giving yourself enough credit i think what's going through my mind right now is that in the last 10 years let's say the value of being a curator has like skyrocketed just because there's so much out there and there's so many people that are saying so many things and right like 99 of them are probably worthless with respect to everybody that's tweeting 8 000 times a day and uh and so the it's like seth godin says it's the emotional labor right we're not digging ditches we're like having that internal battle with ourselves and like how the hell do i take all of this and format it in a way that is valuable to people so so the curation element i i do think presents like a different skill set yeah tell me where i'm wrong there no i mean i i totally agree with that and i i think um that's been something i kind of think about because i'm naturally like much more of a curator like i love um and i think of it like a spectrum i like i think you're totally right that the need for curation has gone up and and like it will continue to go up maybe even faster than the rate of creation so as fast as people are creating new stuff curation gets even more important to like distill out that stuff and um help people find the most important thing for them and that's been kind of a theme in like my side project career at least is curation um and i think it also comes maybe a little more naturally to people earlier in their career yeah you know when you're trying to learn and you just don't have a lot of like i don't have a lot of like as many battle wounds as like naval does and life experiences and stuff like that and so i kind of um i feel like it's a little bit my role in the ecosystem right now to like be work on the craft of curation and sharing and compilation um but i do think it's a spectrum too right i think one of the things i've learned is like spending so much time on the curation side of things is i start to see creation as just like a very very advanced form of curation um and all the creators are really sort of pulling inspiration from a ton of different places and whether they even recognize it consciously or not is maybe less relevant even like it's just they are all in product of all their experiences and all their inspirations and all the people that they've learned from um and so i see it as a spectrum and i expect to kind of move along that spectrum for different projects at different points in my life um but i you know i still try to like be honest with myself about what i'm doing i think that is such a cool thing for you to say it's uh still like an artist right like austin cleon made an entire series around the idea that like there's really no such thing as original ideas anymore and uh and there's i i find especially with writers just because writing is so hard that there's a huge pressure on ourselves on yourself to come up with something unique right like oh that's already been said before like i want to be known for something in particular like what is my brand you know and um i think it takes time just because you have to almost get comfortable with the idea that like you're not that special and you're not going to do well i shouldn't say that i don't want to diminish uh original originality but i think what you're trying to say and i'm agreeing with you is that there's just as much value in taking things that have already been said and creating your own spin your own format your own way of like presenting that information uh because you're in in the same respect like you can curate one person's stuff and put it in a particular format or you can curate like 10 people's stuff and build an idea around that like me i'm just a byproduct of seth godin basically brian clark who's my partner a copy blogger um i got a lot of inspiration from mike rowe actually the dirty jobs guy he's awesome he's so cool right and he's a great storyteller and like he doesn't take himself too seriously and and really between the three of them that has been like wait and a combination with myself and my own identity that has been how i have found my voice basically um yeah i think it's good to talk about that yeah i i that like a pattern that i keep seeing from people who who become like really really good at their craft is that they spend time shamelessly copying people that they admire basically until they like get an intuitive feel of what it's like to produce that kind of work and like then it becomes adapted to their personality um so like it is a longer journey that feels you know you you can't skip to your ten um and it like feels maybe like a little gross to just like when you start out just copying somebody's work like that's not what you want to be doing um but i think it's helpful to understand that that's like a very normal uh and probably expected like stage of what you got to do agree totally well thank you so much for that insight i'm going to switch it up a little bit i want to talk about some of the actual ideas you write about this in your blog a lot the idea that naval put forward are all pretty similar to i think you've what we just talked about you may have molded yourself around some of these ideas so yeah uh you speak a lot about leverage and this form of leverage has been all over the internet for the past five years but i i think people still don't quite get it because they look at it as like a shortcut rather than a tool to be used and and like a frame of thinking so i'm not looking for like a particular answer here i'm looking as to how this idea of leverage and this idea of like specialization verse generalization first came into your mind frame and like how you have applied that into your life yeah um i don't know the leverage i think you're totally right like leverages a mindset and uh in a frame a set of ideas um and that it's an easy thing to feel like you look at it at first night and you're like okay i get it um and if it doesn't change how you make decisions and how you approach your work um it is easy to underestimate i guess kind of in the same way that like compounding is easy to like someone explains it to you and you're like oh yeah cool i get it um but if you take it seriously it can come to completely define your life and your decisions and your outcome and it's one of those things that feels too small to be [Music] for the first kind of few times the first year periods of compounding or the first few you know months or years of working towards building leverage but when you see people who are later on in that journey whether it's compounding or in building leverage they have what seems like an impossible amount like in a possible outcome um and it's just that process of looking at how that has been built slowly and methodically and the time that it took to do that and the attention and the mindset and decisions that go into that so these people that get to like what seem like impossible or unfair things are just thinking about it slightly differently i don't think most of them aren't working you know that much harder than the average person they may not even be that much smarter they just have this simple idea that they let kind of guide their decisions and they take it seriously and they let it run for a long period of time i was just i'm doing a four-week course right now on uh on brian clark's other brand called unemployable and i've run an agency for years and uh i've had this really particular mindset about it where what's what's one of the downsides that everyone talks about with agencies right like you get burned out and you're dealing with clients all the time and i've been really really trying to apply some of these principles where it's like if you're working more the bigger you get then you're totally doing it wrong and uh one of the visualizations that i put together because when it comes to leverage like you had this great visualization on your blog with the seesaw with the one eye holding up like 50 people and i'm reminded of uh a i don't know sixth or seventh grade it was a science class and i remember this guy saying like by the end of this film i'm going to push this train with one hand and he's pushing against it if people can see me on video he's got both his hands and like he's really leaning into it with his feet and then by the end of it he's just got a lever which is a stick with some kind of gear like force ratio multiplier on the end of it and he sticks it under the wheel and it pulls it down and then the train moves two inches and for me once i was able to actually visualize it like oh i get it leverage is the pool leverage is just the thing that i stick on the wheel of the train so that when i pull it the force that like my muscles create is multiplied times like i don't know how much 10 000 and i can move this impossibly heavy train that i wouldn't be able to move on on myself just elaborate on that for me yeah i think the um the visuals helped so much like i try to get get decent at like drawing some of the graphics and showing that um i think for some people the math helps too that's like you can't lift 800 pounds most people can't just like walk up and lift 800 pounds you might be able to do because i've seen your your workout fleets and your pieces but thank you that's really flattering uh i can't either um but maybe one day uh there so there's like but with a 20-foot lever like almost anybody like the average person can lift can lift 800 pounds um and i think it's easy to like glaze over that and if someone comes around and tells you like you too can lift 800 pounds you're just like man [ __ ] you like i'm checking out like that's not real um but but it is like as you say like it's a mindset to not just dismiss the possibility but start looking for looking for those leverage opportunities and they come you know in many forms right like as you said like there's tools like literally physical tools that can increase the amount of work that you can do per hour um there's products like podcasts and writing and books and media movies um there's people so you built an agency you know that like you start consulting and you can only work so many hours a week but when you hire somebody you can build out that team you get more billable hours or you build an audience and all of a sudden it's not just you talking about you like people can share things that they appreciate on your behalf um and then the fourth way is capital so when you when you get some money you can put it to work for you and like buy assets that are that are working for you or investing back into those other tools and products and people that can help kind of get more work done and i think you know i've been trying to distill this into as few words as i can and i think maybe the two most helpful things that i have so far just like leverages the art of accomplishing more and and it's focusing on doing the work that gets more work done so just looking at that believing first that you can change over time your your efforts to output ratio and then spending the time to do the work that changes that ratio so that in a month or a year when you spend an hour working on something you know you publish it to 10 000 people or 100 000 people instead of instead of 100 or you know you record the same podcast but it goes out to many more or you know you push an update to your users and it you know increases the price of your product or all of these things i think you know leverage is inherent in what most writers do but they may not think of it that way so especially i think for for the writers in the audience like it's worth taking some time to step back and think about how you're how you're building leverage over time and that's one of the fearful things about this mindset is in order to do it you have to like stop doing what you're doing right now and i really think that's like the trap especially with the agency right it's like how on earth can i possibly do this when i have seven clients emailing me every day and like i'm always i call it feed in the beast you know what i mean you can only look as far as the next email the next invoice is being sent to you and you know what um i'll actually give myself a little shout out right here because as you were saying that i wrote in my blog i read a morning blog post every day and something i wrote yesterday or it was two days ago seemed to really resonate do you know i'm totally gonna butcher his name and i talked to him on twitter sometimes and i'm sure you know this k high k h e h y is his last name yeah yeah the 10k work guy i know for sure yeah the 10k workout yeah and so uh what i was really distilling from it is that one of the cool things about it is when you start applying the 10k work mindset right and you start applying the the work that you do today that's going to have an exponential payoff in the future what it reminded me of is all of the really long form blog posts that i wrote on stadzi on my agency because you publish a blog and nothing really happens right and it's the exact opposite of you know okay you're hiring me right now like i'm gonna make this design and i'm gonna send it to you and i'm gonna bill you for it like that's a one-to-one type thing and uh and three years down the line you know my site probably although there's others i'm sure but i think i can confidently say that it's probably like the most um authoritative marketing educational website out there for healthcare and now all of that [ __ ] that i spent three years working on is worth who knows how much like 300 times the hours that i spent on it and so again once you see that visualization that the work that you do now has a disproportionate payoff in the future i think that helps like motivate people to take a step back and be like okay let me stop sending these invoices for this hour that i just built for and actually build something that can like work for me in a in a time in a future in a future moment yeah i think i mean i think that's part of the power of that writing so like that lives on and you can reference back to it it's building traffic like your writing is out there advertising for you yeah every minute of the day and um all of that in each additional post that you make compounds like how long have you been doing your daily vlog uh well my personal blog um man i've been doing that for years i i wish i was daily on it for years i don't there's some days where i'm just like i'm not doing this today um yeah but yeah i mean a real writing habit on on tim stods but on stadium the agency i've i've published like a 3 000 word article at least every other week on tough stuff to write about you know like really sales oriented type material that like i don't have a sales team i don't need to hire sales employers i literally have a website that doesn't even like really exist in like the physical world yeah driving phone calls to me every day and um and it's ideal yeah that's amazing you know no ongoing costs like you just kind of deposited that in there and i'm sure um i mean correct me wrongly you probably wrote when you were writing those posts it was like helping you work through a client problem or process something it was like you know um i think to your point of people like have a hard time not just feeding the beast like most of the stuff it does double duty and you can find a way to like yeah it's client work but like you know you put in your contract like after six months i can put it on my portfolio or i can publish a case study on this or you just kind of keep an eye open for ways to create those you know especially in this context like those assets that work for you um or ways to capture client testimonials like somewhat automatically or you know record your brainstorming sessions and just like publish them on your site as a you know kind of a transparency piece or um there's a million ways to do it for each individual business but i think people underestimate it um especially over the long haul you know it may take like you said three years to like let this work compound and build and you know if you keep changing directions every six months you might not see those results um but over time like those levers get longer and longer and longer and so it's like not that exciting to get a tiny little lever that goes and lifts 200 pounds and you're like i can lift 200 pounds that doesn't mean anything but like the fact that that lever gets longer month over month over month and when you come back in nine months you can lift 800 like that is pretty exciting and then like lifting a thousand pounds you come back and lift in a truck like after two or three years of work metaphorically um that's that's exciting um you take it for granted because it happened so slowly but it's it's like a tiny little miracle that's available to you um yeah just just let that seed grow cool and um i do want to move on to this topic of of specialization versus generalization because i think that's also very important but i want to stay on this for just a little bit longer give me just a moment i'm going to read from one of your blog posts because i do think what we talked about before this idea this idea of leverage being an idea um and something that people need to like conceptualize is important so i'm just gonna read this and then feel free to extrapolate leverage is a mental model an idea to guide decision making a mental model is a simple idea that represents a big complicated and important idea this simple idea is easier to remember and act on as we go about our work there are many mental models inversion compounding 80 20 principle principle agent problem many many models but this post is about leverage and personal leverage so here's my definition of leverage and this this really stuck out to me leverage are for force multipliers leverage is the art of accomplishing more technically this is about changing the everett the effort slash impact ratio and that is so cool when you actually say it that way achieving the same result with less time or achieving significantly more with the time you have so yeah i mean we've we've gone pretty in-depth about this topic but um i thought that was just a great summarization and what i want to finish on this is if somebody is listening to this and they think damn i i i quit my job to be my own boss and now i'm working 70 hours a week and i got 12 clients totally breathing down my neck right like how would somebody practically like what are the instructions for them to take a step back and say okay how can i start applying this so i can really start like buying my time back just give some advice there yeah i mean this is the exact kind of situation that i was in like a little more than a year ago it's kind of like what led me down this path like i got pushed into this idea because i went from like one and a half jobs to five jobs very quickly for like whatever it's a long story but like all of a sudden i had an impossible about to do on a daily basis for like for my family and my business and my job and everything um and it just instantly sort of uh forced me to change how i approached everything that i did and i got it was a messy process but like i got better at using these frameworks and prioritizing and i had loved this idea of leverage from the book but i didn't really i didn't have a great methodology for applying it yet and so i kind of forced myself to figure it out and it was like clumsy and messy and i have now kind of like tried to capture as i built out this like course in the community i've tried to pull what happened like in my subconscious into a replicatable process like for myself and for others so i can't you know it's not like i've been doing this for 10 years but i have been through it very recently and i really love pulling people together that are going through the same thing um and like helping everybody develop like a common language so that we can all help each other go through this and so it's really like my advice to people is um i think this this work happens kind of at two levels and we go we got like frameworks for this kind of in detail in the course but there's ways to look at it at a problem level so you're sitting in front of one specific problem or opportunity and our method there is to like bring solutions reframing the problem as many times as you need to along the way and then triage those by whether they are leveraged solutions or not um a lot of instinctive kind of first responses aren't going to be high leveraged solutions especially for people who are kind of new to this idea but once you've been through a few iterations you get to something really good um and then the other is is kind of at a broad like a broad level so especially relevant for this person who's kind of you know 12 clients 70 hour weeks no time to breathe you know try to get 20 minutes and like just map out like your problems and your opportunities in leverage by type so um you know our framework for this that we use in the course is like it's pretty simple it's four columns you know tools product people capital and what leverage is actually working for us now what's available to us um and that really like you know you got a problem that's top of mind and you start inventorying what you have and what's available it's a simple tool but it's amazing how often you make new connections or see new opportunities um and when you're doing it in this this mindset you solve problems in like a much more permanent way so you stop putting out fires and you start kind of preventing them or building fireproof assets or things like that um and it's really exciting to see you know we have such a variety of people in the community so developers and writers and entrepreneurs and investors and um people running agencies of all kinds and everybody has like an inherent talent or a bias towards like one or two of those types and they're just totally blind to others or feel like they don't have the skill set to use them um and so everybody's kind of helping each other like unblock skills or access things that are like you know what one guy's got a 21 step zapier process that like runs his entire business for him but like has no idea how to hire or manage or bring on new people but somebody's like they're running an agency knows exactly how to do that but no idea what's available to them in the software tooling side of things and somebody's a writer a podcaster is like yo like you guys did it you don't have to like hire sales people like look at what my content like engine can do for you so it's really cool to see everybody kind of like share those expertise and bring each other along and share their recipes and problems that they solve okay i changed my mind because i love getting into some nitty-gritty stuff i'm gonna map this out as well i'm not gonna give away too much because i'm gonna point people to your course which they should definitely buy but we got products tools people and capital you said yeah i use a slightly different order but that's yeah tools tools product people capital okay so i think one of the first places that people start is with tools and a great example um is like invoicing software it's crazy how much time automated invoicing will get you especially for people that are just starting out that say damn i can't spend the 70 bucks a month on quickbooks right now i'm just gonna make an invoice template on word and like in the beginning that's what you gotta do i'm not everybody's gotta start there but i think a good example of tools would be quickbooks am i getting that right yeah hell yeah yeah and when you look at that like if the main stressor in your life is like oh god it's an 8 p.m and i've gotta like i gotta go do another hour and a half of invoicing that you're doing every week or every month like the not only do you save the time from doing it you save the stress of having that additional thing to keep track yeah and if you can if you were reliably billing your time at x rates um that's another exercise to go through the course is like mapping out your hourly rate and your aspirational hourly rate and using that as a guide for making some of these decisions like when you think about quickbooks you're like i don't like i'm a frugal person i do not love spending money and so 70 bucks a month to me is like an easy no like zero dollars a month i'll take that all day and then all of a sudden you're like wait a minute that's eight hours like that is a i am spending a value of 800 a month for a tool that i can buy back all the time for 70 and not have to think about it anymore because it's automated um so you're shifting some of that stuff from like whatever instincts you have to like changing turning those instincts into like making leveraged decisions and understanding that your time is like the fundamental denominator of all of this and if you can put the tools and the products and the people to work for you buy back that time whether you use it for work or leisure or just be with your family like this is your business but like like you know understand all these opportunities that are available to you and like you know there's somebody standing there trying to sell you the thing that's going to help you move the train so like let them sell it to you and move that train this is so fun okay so then what's the difference between tools and product okay so this is a common one product product is like a confusing word to people because they're so used to thinking of like software products yeah um i think of our defined product in the course as a a product of your mind or experience or talent or skill so these are usually digital sort of uh i call them like thin digital clones of you that are purpose built so like this podcast is a product of this hour that we have spent together and it is going to be served up to people in parallel and well into the future um if you write an algorithm and encode it that's a product of you if you write a tweet if you write a blog post if you write a screenplay or a movie like that is you creating a product that can then go function independently on your behalf got it i love that and i'm interested in your viewpoint on people as well i've thought about people a lot simply because for for stasi we drew it like an assembly line basically and we actually drew it on a board and we said like okay these are the five departments it comes here with me as the marketing and sales and design and development and invoicing and then account management and client services right that's exactly where it is and so i have seen and basically through my own experience learned that when you bring on new people the goal is to make it so it's not one person plus one person equals twice the amount of output i and this is just my experience i'm interested to hear yours my experience is that you want to find people that fit a very very very specific role so that that role can be like replicated many many many times with the constraint of time that that people have so for me i try to make it so that like if i'm one person and my output is one and i have another person whose output is one how can the two of them form like one thing whose output might be like five or even ten so i've thought about this a lot and i've had a really really hard time explaining it in a way that is simple it seems like you've also done this and you've come up with some really like quaint little packages to present it to people so how how would somebody who's in this stage of hiring think about it to get more output yeah i mean so i don't i don't want to pretend to be an expert in the agency world um because i'm anything but uh anyway the the people um the people word is pretty carefully chosen and i think the instinct um i you know neval originally called it labor and i reframed it to people because i wanted to include um much there's so much broader uh types of leverage than like direct employee employer um so even in the world of compensated leverage like hiring a full-time employee is like scary and intimidating and expensive and high commitment and you're like oh my god like i'm feeding someone else's family like i better go bring in some business like what if this doesn't go well it's just very um there's a lot tied up in it logistically paperwork wise you know the economics of the psychology of it is very very challenging and so i think it's it's helpful to realize that that is like that's actually like step nine and that there's a lot more accessible um sort of low risk ways to build to use people leverage um and start applying that and get like practice with it and confidence with it and like know that you're going to get the results that you need when you do go hire someone and put them in that role um and so i think you know that might start with something as simple as like fiverr or mechanical turk and hiring people were very well defined task based things where like you know if you hire somebody full time and it goes poorly like that's a five digit mistake probably um let alone the headache and the time and the heartache and you know somebody does something that sucks on fiverr like uh it's ten bucks not a big deal like on to the next one um and there's a lot of ways to get access to kind of like part-time or pre-defined labor or to hire agencies or our specialists or to hire you know service companies like you know i published this book there's a lot of people who helped publish this book who you know there's a few names on the front of the book there's a lot more in the back and this is a huge team effort between like friends and peer readers and copy editors line editors project managers and page layout cover design like there is so much um you know anything you see that is professional and polished and like there's usually a lot of people contributing to that um and there's a lot of skilled people who are very willing to kind of do their role um and you end up with this fractional employment thing so and that's that's true and then you can progress from you know very basic stuff up to when you feel confident investing in a full-time person you know suddenly when you're spending you you hire a part-time contractor for 30 hours a week that's not a scary leap to go 10 more hours a week like you've already passed most of the it doesn't feel like a giant scary thing anymore um but also say like people leverage includes this whole big world of uncompensated leverage right like there's people that you employ but then there's people who just are excited to kind of be a part of what you're doing and they almost they're either learning from you or like find some self-expression and following along and enjoying and supporting you it's like some of the highest leveraged people in the world aren't the ones with the biggest number of employees they're the people with the biggest fan groups or the biggest followings or um things like that so i encourage people to just kind of like get a big broad picture of what's available to them in terms of people um and find the right kind of next step for you uh rather than feel like if you feel like you got to do a ton of kind of like learning and studying and you got to pick up like four or five new skills at once like you may be like trying to make too big of a leap and there may be a safer smaller next step that will help you kind of close that gap yeah really excellent um quantifier as well like how do i know if i'm not using people leverage if i'm trying to fill like five or six different skill sets or anybody is you know we want to say something no no i think that's good i mean i think it um that that de-risks it a little too uh but like the people the other underrated thing about people leverage i think is and where your kind of like one plus one equals five thing comes from is finding people who can unlock new forms of leverage that you don't have the skills to necessarily and so if you are one and you're working on building leverage and you can build leverage to like two or three and you find a partner who's you know let's say you're really good at people leverage and product and you find a guy who's like really good with tools and really good with capital and you make him your co-founder like you are now too and if each of you are levered and levering each other like now all of a sudden you're five six seven um because you don't have those bottlenecks of like weaknesses in a particular type of leverage that's holding you back such a cool thing to think about especially when it comes to web developers right well that's not true any content creator anybody it all has their own thing it's just me by myself i can sell basically anything but i can't develop a website for [ __ ] and then all of a sudden like you bring in a web developer and now like the me that is me is multiplied by this other thing behind it so i know it gets like a little meta right and you kind of start spinning in circles but yeah i mean i think this is why like y combinator does not love like what single solo founders yeah like it's just too easy for one person to have to not have all of the breadth of skills that they need and so when you get two or three people together with complementary skills all of a sudden you can you can build leveraging all of these different things you can build software and sales and relationships and manage capital well and find the right tools all at the same time and then like that growth funds itself and all of a sudden you get these kind of crazy exponential outcomes yeah excellent all right so we got one more we got a couple minutes left here i want to make sure we give a shout out to your course as well because this material is like so so valuable for people to get more time in their lives but i think capital is probably the one that is uh the most easy for most of us to understand i mean we're all basically living in a capitalist society i think what i really clicked for me was that capital doesn't have to be huge investments right when when for me i'm speaking for myself you know i grew up like pretty blue collar probably like lower middle income and so i always thought of money like oh that's for those other people right like that's never me i'm just swinging a hammer all day but eventually you realize that like 20 bucks a month adds up over the course of 20 years you realize that i mean that quickbooks thing is a good example like 70 bucks a month turns into tens and tens and tens of hours that get to be applied to something else which provides at a rate so i'm setting you up a little bit here but how would again this person in in this particular position who's trying to just make a couple steps forward start applying capital yeah i think what you said is a really good starting place i mean you you have to appreciate that eventually if you if you stick with this game like your capital can work harder than you can yeah and it's going to take a while and you gotta have faith that you're gonna get there um but you'll never get there if you don't if you don't just like suffer through it for a little while when it doesn't look like it's making progress um and it feels just kind of trivially small um so capital of my framework is is kind of goes in two directions one is like it buys you more of the other types of leverage yeah so you know what the way that you're applying leverage each form has its own kind of margin and you should be using you know your people that you're hiring or the products that you're creating or the tools that you're buying to produce more capital and then you can take that capital and reinvest it back into higher margin forms of leverage or lower maintenance forms of leverage or um more robust leverage like different different things that kind of help you kind of climb that ladder and you know as the metaphor we use in the courses like building a mountain of levers you're adding new levers and you're extending the levers that you already have until over time you're kind of building this giant edifice that like you sit on the top of you can just kind of reach out and press levers and make things happen big heavy impossible things like with your with your long levers um but the other thing that is what we were talking about i think you set me up for is that like capital is an earner of itself and like you can put that you know um the the memorable metaphor we use in the course is like every dollar is an employee like make sure it has a good job make sure there's a high-paying job put it to work either buy more leverage with it invest it in something you know whether that's whatever stuff you're comfortable with whether it's the stock market whether it's an index fund whether it's um you know buying a company like you did whether it's buying a rental house whether it's um i don't know there's so many opportunities like put money to work um and it's just this game of like you know spending or earning more than you spend until you can keep investing more than your spending ideally and then eventually like you'll find out that your bond is working harder than you are and if you can kind of keep that earnings rate like you're you're free you can retire like you're done or you can live big like whatever you know whatever way you want to do it one of the other yeah all right man um well we're at the top of the hour eric this has been like i said i really went into this conversation trying to find other things because i'm sure you've been like spitting this same philosophy for the last two years but i just i find it so interesting and the way that you're able to deliver this material is so so valuable so okay let's go ahead i appreciate it like these are these are fun these are really fun conversations and this like going deeper and deeper into these ideas of leverage and how to apply them i find so satisfying and this is about the deepest we've gotten into like practicing the framework and examples i think in any interviews so uh like this is this is really fun um and i love it yeah yeah i agree like when you were talking about building a mountain of levers there's a there's a book called think and grow rich which i'm sure a lot of people listen to this have read this book had a huge impact on my life at a time when i really really needed it and i read it at the beginning of every year for the past like eight years and there's a story in there where they're talking about henry ford and henry ford was put on trial for something i'm not exactly sure what i think it had to do with like competency like in the 1920s being an aristocrat was like a big deal and since he was like a blue collar guy he was almost on trial for not being qualified to be like aristocratic right and uh and somebody was um was just asking him questions that he would have no idea like how many british soldiers went to america in the revolutionary war and i remember he said i don't know the answer but i'm sure it's much less than went back and then finally they asked him another question and he said listen i have a a um like a bunch of buttons basically for telecoms that i can push and any question that you can ask me i can get the answer to it in like five minutes he's like so in a lot of ways i'm more qualified than you to be sitting up here because i don't need to know everything and so like when i visualize that just this little box full of a bunch of buttons that in in in this metaphor are the levers right there's nothing that he at that time didn't have access to from a simple box with some buttons on it and when you set that building a mountain of leverage that was the exact uh visualization and the exact story that that came into my mind and it's just so powerful once you start to apply these man so so basically what i'm saying is your compliment uh means a lot to me and i'm glad that we could really extrapolate some of this me too that's that's that actually reminds me my buddy joe has like this little uh it's like a tiny little ipad that he has on his desk and he's like it's like a streamer deck and he's like trained these hot keys to do very specific like multi-step actions and so if he's like looking through an email he can press one button like off to his left like henry ford and it like automatically forwards to his assistant that's like carries out this set of things or like automatically like sets a reminder for it's like so it's so cool um so yeah man i didn't know he was like living that every fourth life yeah that's cool all right so let's finish this up we got uh um well i see your course is just on your website slash leverage is there a particular url to this or is that just paste this url in there that one's good yeah ejorgenson.com leverage that's that's all the leverage stuff i got a bunch of twitter threads on there and i'll keep publishing new things um you know on that that site and uh start doing some of these leverage interviews on my podcast probably too and sharing some of the stuff that's going on in the course so excellent so ejorgenson.com leverages the course ejorgenson.com is your website i think your twitter is also just eric jorgensen with a c i'm sure that people have been screwing that one up your entire life um all right eric man what a great conversation i really appreciate your time uh anything else that you want to say before we sign off oh man i'm good this is this is fun i hope we uh i hope we get to do it again i appreciate you having me likewise all right man talk soon