Why Ambitious People Stay Mediocre

I want to show you how I became number one in different fields, industries, and even broke a world record, and how you can apply the same process to winning or getting whatever it is that you want. My name's Ashi. I own a portfolio of companies at acquisition.com that generates $250 million per year in aggregate revenue. I did a book launch that did $106 million in a weekend and broke the

Guinness World Record for the fastest selling non-fiction book of all time. And so, there's my proof behind that. So, in this video, I'm going to explain a core shift in my understanding of getting what I wanted and specifically in business. So this will be a belief breaker for you guys. So I talk to business owners for a living

every single day like every week and I have for decade plus. And one of the things that drives me absolutely nuts is the idea of industry standards. so you've probably heard this people like this is industry standard that's industry standard. And I'll tell you a real

conversation that might shift this for you. So there was a company that I recently met with that was about a $500 million company. So I have a billion dollar company. All right. And they were efficient but it was an old school model. So I met with the chiefs of that business and I met with the leaders, right? And the entrepreneur who

runs the business wanted me to look at certain components of how they do things in terms of acquisition and things like that. And when I walked them through their acquisition process, I was like, "Hey, these are some things that need to change." And there was a lady who was

there who was in charge of probably maybe half of it. And at least, it fell under her purview. And as I would, point out things that were bad, or like needed improvement, she kept repeating the same thing, which is like, well,

we're industry standard. And I was, and she'd be like, we're meeting industry standards. And she would get really flustered. And she, I would say, maybe to a degree got offended., because I was saying, well, this sucks and this sucks and these numbers aren't good., and they kept repeating, we're meeting industry standards. And so I paused and I was

like, do you wake up in the morning and just say, I want to be an average company, right? We are average. Half the people are better than us and half are worse. We are average.

Who gives a [ __ ] Right? I don't know about you, but like I didn't get in the game, whatever game you're playing, to be average. Like the average business is average. The average American is overweight. They're in debt. They're divorced. They're depressed. And so the average business makes almost no money. Why would I use industry standards, industry averages, anything like that at

all? And I say this because I have people who will push back on some of the things that I talk about with regards to margin when I think things I talk about in terms of timeline, when I talk in terms of pricing, right? And they'll say something like, well, in HVAC, it's different or, in SEO it's

a little bit different or, we've got XYZ issue in trucking and it's different. It's logistics, it's different. No, it's not. You get what you tolerate. You get what you accept and deem good enough. You are the

standard setter. It is the highest and most important job in the company. And it is why some companies prevail and some companies fail. It's the reason that Jobs was so important for Apple. Elon was so important for Tesla and XAI and all the other things that he does. And like at a certain point, you cannot

do anything in the company except for hold the [ __ ] line. And the person who should run every department or every division should be the person with the highest standards, right? And this applies to everything, right? Sales rates, closing percentages,

profit margins, cash flow, the people you date, the body fat percentage you hold, how fast you expect something to get done. everything. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage road map from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of

companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business. What the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it. And then

what steps we took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brickandmortar, all of this. And it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap.

Just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you. All free. So, let me tell you a story about a billionaire mentor of mine. Again, had a conversation many years ago., and he said this thing to me that I'll never forget. He said, "Profit is unnatural." And I was like, "What does he really

mean by that?" He said, "It's common and normal for people when money is in a bank account to spend it." And that's why most people don't have money. He said so if you have a company and it makes money and it starts to succeed that success has this constant

pressure of normaly that fights against it. And so there has to be someone who holds the line and is like no we will not spend more but we will keep making more. We will get more customers and we will not hire more people. We will find a way to service these customers better

than we did our last customers without adding headcount. And we're going to do it even better, even faster with less. And so let me tell you another example of something that just happened in one of our portfolio companies. So they needed to add 15 sales reps to

hit their Q1 goals, right? And so the leader was saying how his plan was to hire five reps a month, right? Every single month. And doing it this way, he said would, stretch the team, but it would still like, ensure quality, make sure the culture wasn't, too stressed, etc. And honestly, it was a fair plan,

right? But for this business, the extra sales guys were going to add about 4 million in profit that quarter. that's how much extra he was going to add just that quarter. So I pushed back and I said why can't we do it in a month and he had a lot of different reasons of and