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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
They might hear that I have a portfolio and be like, okay, well, they have a portfolio, so I must model that. That guy's tall. I should play basketball. Doesn't work that way. So if I want to be rich, I should fly private. Doesn't work that way. It's conflating order. And so... we must do these things in order to get the outcome.
We have to concentrate on only one thing in order to get the outsized return. And that spreading of attention, especially when you're newer in the entrepreneurial career, it's like you already don't know so many things. How do you now want to have three sets of unknowns that you want to try and conquer at the same time?
And the fallacy of thinking is that I'm going to try all of them and see which one works. But none of them will work because you're waiting to see which one will work. Because you can force, in my opinion, you can force one thing to work. Provided, like, I'm going to just assume basics. Like, you're not selling $5 bills for $4. Like, you know, the normal economics of a business.
Like, if a real estate business exists, there are other people who are making money. There are hair salon businesses where people are making money. There are lawn mowing businesses where people are making money. You can make money in all of them. You just can't make money in all of them.
My infinite wisdom, right. Well, it's just from suffering, the woes of this. Like, the biggest entrepreneurial mistakes I've made in my career have all come from splitting my attention. Every one of them. Every single one of them. I talked about how I had the e-commerce business that I bolted onto my licensing company. I should not have done that.
As soon as I did that, my revenue started slowing down in its growth. Why did you? Because I was ADD. I was like, oh, Mike, I don't want to leave money on the table. And I want to be so violent about this. You are always going to leave money on the table. That is the result of focus.
But you're leaving a small amount of money on the table to pursue the much larger money that's on another table of just sticking with the thing that you're on right now.
Because compounding, if I were to show a chart here, it's like if you're at year three of your thing and you want to think about moving to year zero of a new thing, you have to compare maybe year zero of a new thing grows faster, right? but it has to grow faster than year three to four of the thing that you're on right now.
And I think that's the, people will compare year zero to year zero, but not year four to year zero. And the thing is, is you actually, we have a linear life. And so we, that is, it's an unfair but true comparison of the opportunity cost. And every exceptionally successful entrepreneur that I know has just stuck with one thing for such an inordinate amount of time. And I think there's a quote by-
I want to say Shane Parrish. But he said, success is doing the obvious thing for an extraordinary period of time without believing that you're smarter than you are. And it's just like, we know what we need to do. And So we don't need to make our lives more complex. Complexity will come with scale, I promise.
And so just simply trying to do more of what you're already doing well is already hard enough. Don't add anything else. And so like, if you need to write some sort of commitment of like, I'm just going to stick with this, then do that. But what happens is when we were talking about the levels earlier about like beating the bosses, right?
So what happens is, you know how to beat boss one through three of the game. And so then you just say, okay, well, I'm just going to start the game over and beat boss. I mean, this time it's going to be different. But then you just get to level three again, and then you're stuck again.
And so people just keep getting up to level three and new endeavors over and over again because they never learned how to get past that boss. And so you just have to confront the uncertainty of knowing that you don't know how to do it, but that you will figure it out if you keep doing enough repetitions. And that's where you talk to as many people as you can.
You see what they said, you consolidate it all and you say, I think this is the highest likely path. It might not work, but I do believe fundamentally that if we cut people's hair well, and we do it for a long period of time, we will have a thriving business. And if we have a really good model from that thing, we might be able to open up another location.
And if we keep our costs down, we might be able to have an actual model that we could either invest our own capital or bring somebody else and take it national. All of these, I have yet to find a business that can't get to $100 million a year, that has a permutation of it that exists. You're a dry cleaner. Fine. Well, cool. We'll build the model.
And either we can license the model, we can franchise the model out, we can get outside investors, we can scale it nationally, we can do it. But the crazy goals are only crazy because people have crazy timelines. They're actually very sane goals if you extend the timeline out. If you have a true 10-year goal or a true 20-year goal, almost anything is accomplishable. I mean...
Almost every multi-billion dollar company is about, you know, they get, it's usually between like year six and 10 when companies get to kind of like those big numbers. And most people who are listening to this are five years into entrepreneurship, but you're six months into the thing that you've been working on right now.
And you keep restarting the clock for getting to year 10 every time you start over. And I think that's the part that it took me a very long time to figure out. And I think it takes a lot of entrepreneurs. Like everyone messes around with a lot of stuff in the beginning because you just don't know what you're doing.
And so in my experience, it takes about five years for most entrepreneurs that I know to just like find something that works. Like it takes about five years to figure out which way is north.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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