Stephen Bartlett
speaker
413 appearances
7 recordings
5 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 12 Jun
Stephen Bartlett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And then I would, he's like, you know, I would take some calls with other people and I would just be like, but they're not John. Yeah. They're not John. And so he would just keep working on them and working on them and working them. And so eventually they're like, you know what? Fine. They give up.
And they're like, if this guy is this persistent, he probably will be a successful entrepreneur and he will take us there. And I think that people are the highest leverage thing that you can bring into the company outside of crazy technology.
The thing is that it's just like money won't make you happy. It's one of those things that every founder has to figure out for themselves. But the thing is, and I've had obviously a bunch of conversations around this, but like... What you think is an A player today is not what you will think an A player is in five years.
And so I think one of the hardest mental hacks around this is trying to project yourself into the future, into the size business that you want to have. And say, who would be an A player at that size and scale? And then coming back to the present and saying, how do I get them to work for me today? Amen.
And so as a mental process for anybody who does have a business right now and has some employees, if you, like everybody right now, you probably have some version of your A player, because every business has at least one, hopefully, right? Besides you. Imagine your business had five of those people. Picture in your head, you've got that one person, now you have five of them. How much more...
Would you double? Would you 10x? Would you 50x? And sometimes you realize you're like, no, I think I would actually 10x. And so if that were the case, one, not only would you 10x the company, number two, the value of the company would more than 10x because it would be significantly less reliant on you and it'd be more reliant on the team that you've built.
Number three, it would happen faster because you would have more barrels that were firing concurrently, moving things forward. And those pieces, when put together, you have to then ask yourself from an opportunity cost perspective, what other activity could I be doing that would have the possibility of 10x-ing my company, doing it faster, and increasing the enterprise value multiple faster?
That's not that. And if you can't find one, then it means you're working on the wrong stuff. And I think that is one of those great litmus tests of like, if I can find something, and I'll give you a really simple one that's not human-based, the talent-based here. Something as simple as calling your leads.
So there's tons of research that suggests that you can 4-5x your conversion of leads by calling them within 60 seconds of them opting in for any product you have. if you have all of these priorities they have across the company, does any of them have the high likelihood of four or five X in your business immediately?
with very low cost of doing so, less so than just calling the leads within 60 seconds. If the answer is no, then by God, why are you not calling all your leads within 60 seconds? The FOB question would be like, well, I don't have enough people to call our leads within 60 seconds. So then we'd say, okay, what is Forex, the revenue of your company, worth? Okay.
What does it cost to hire one person whose only job is to just call the leads? Now, I recently talked to a restoration company. So they did water damage for homes when they got hit by storms. And he told me, he said he was converting 55% of his leads, not calls, leads. And I was like, how on earth are you doing this? And I was like, well, how many leads a day do you get? And he said, two or three.
I was like, okay. So what's the process? He's like, oh, it's really simple. My aunt... I pay her $60,000 a year, and she has only one job. She has no responsibility in the company besides the moment a lead comes in, you stop having sex with your husband, you stop cooking, you stop loving your child, and you immediately call the lead. That's the only responsibility.
She just has to make three calls a day at the moment the leads come in. And he pays her $60,000, and that brings in millions of dollars of revenue. And so, You're not going to pay for it out of the dollars you have now. You're going to pay for it out of the dollars that you're going to make that you're not making yet because you haven't done it yet. And so pin in that. Back to the people.
I think the hardest time, we call this the swamp at acquisition.com, but it's usually between like one and 3 million is the swamp. And I think there's a numbers reason for why it's such a painful period for entrepreneurs. let's say one million for simple math. If you have a million dollar business, let's say that you have 20% margins. So that means you're making $200,000 a year in profit.
For you to get an A player, it's probably going to cost you 100% of your profit to get that A player. And so you'll have what appears to be an impossible choice. You'll have, do I sacrifice basically 100% of my profit to bring this person in? Or do I work another six hours a day to do the job that this person is doing. Both paths work.
Both are painful and risky because the overworking yourself thing, you can get yourself through that hump, and then now you're at maybe three or four million, and that 20% is 800. You can spend 200. You still have cash flow. You can still live. The downside for the picking the person path is that what if you pick wrong?
And this, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, is why entrepreneurs get outsized returns is because we take on outside risk. And so this is the job, is that we have to be willing to make impossible choices. And the vast majority of choices for entrepreneurs in the business are impossible choices between two relatively bad scenarios.
Because the rest of the choices aren't, don't even feel like choices because they're obvious. Of course, we should call leads faster. Of course, we should follow up more. Of course, we should try and onboard faster. Okay, all these things are the obvious ones.
But when you have, man, I'm trying to think of the ones I, I'm not, I'm not, almost all the decisions that you get stuck with, and Elon says this really beautifully. He says, running a business is like staring out to the abyss and chewing glass.
So because the staring out to the abyss component of it is just the fact that this may never work and you're almost facing existential risk at all times to the business. And the eating glass component is that you will, by nature of your role, get funneled the worst problems in the business and the problems that no one else can solve. So it's one, problems that people can't solve.
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