12 Business Cheat Codes I Wish I Knew at 28

12 Business Cheat Codes That Top CEOs Don’t Want You to Know

I’ve been in the business world for over 17 years, and I’ve learned a thing or two about what it takes to succeed. These business cheat codes have helped me generate over $7.8 billion in sales and build a team of over 100 employees. I wish I had known these secrets when I was 28, but I’m excited to share them with you now.

Each of these cheat codes builds upon one another, forming the ultimate cheat sheet for success. If you want to buy things without looking at the price, you need to be able to work without looking at the clock. When you’re passionate about what you do, you can lose yourself in your craft for hours on end.

Longer games have less players, and you want to play in decades, not years. Most people have a short-term focus, but the most successful people in the world have a longer time horizon. They think about what their business will look like in 10 years and build the type of team needed to reach that goal.

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The Value of Value

People buy value, not price. When I first started out, I thought lowering my prices would lead to more sales. But I quickly realized that people are always going to object to price, no matter what it is. The key is to focus on the value your product or service provides, not the price tag.

The hardest steel is made in the hottest of fires. In business, the problems never go away. They just get bigger as your team grows. But by facing these challenges head-on, you become stronger and better equipped to handle whatever comes your way.

Build a business that you would want to be a customer of, and don’t chase trends. Your business should be an extension of your soul. If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, you’ll never be able to build a truly successful company.

Planning for Success

Plan out your year in advance, not just the work stuff. Think about when you’ll take holidays, when you’ll deliver on big projects, and when you need to tackle major milestones. This gives your year a rhythm and cadence, allowing you to sprint hard for 90 days and then come up for air.

When it comes to building a team, there are three vectors of value: salary, experience, and learning. Most people over-index on salary, but if someone is only interested in the paycheck, they’ll leave as soon as someone offers them more money. Focus on providing value in all three areas.

A compelling offer is 10 times more powerful than a convincing argument. My litmus test for a good offer is if it doesn’t keep the founder up at night, it’s not strong enough. A weak offer means higher customer acquisition costs, so it’s better to have a strong offer that brings in more people, even if it’s less financially rewarding on the front end.

Embracing Discomfort

Comfort is the enemy of progress. The only way to grow is to stretch yourself beyond what feels normal and comfortable. The skills that got you to this level won’t get you to the next, so you need to constantly be learning and becoming a beginner in new domains.

Expect more from yourself than anybody ever could. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking “poor old me” or looking for ways to justify how hard you’re working. Have the belief and expect more of yourself than anyone else in your business and life expects of you.

Average is the enemy. Whether it’s an average landing page, offer, email, or piece of copy, nothing amazing happens in average. Look at what everyone else is doing in your market and think about how you can dial it up to 11.

The Art of Sales

Don’t ask somebody to buy until they are already sold. It’s marketing’s job to make sales easy. If you’re constantly answering the same objections on sales calls, your marketing isn’t strong enough. You want your funnels to warm up that cold traffic, sift, sort, and siphon, educating your marketplace to preempt all those objections before they even get to the sales stage.

Everything is your fault. When there’s a problem in my business, I never look at an outside source. I take extreme ownership and recognize that I haven’t trained my team enough, hired the right people, or set clear enough expectations. Most business owners only want to take credit for their successes, but never for their failures.

Just focus on the creative. When I first started running ads online, I thought all the growth was in some secret Facebook ads course or account structure. But the reality is, the creative is what matters most. Focus on the psychology, not the technology.

Investing in Yourself

Don’t pay for something with time when you could pay for it with money. Time is the most expensive currency you have, because you can never get more of it. If you can buy back your time by hiring a consultant or paying someone else to do a task, it’s far cheaper than doing it yourself.

Partner your activities with days and say no to absolutely everything else. Batch certain activities on certain days, and never try to mix problem-solving with creative work. Block out entire days for deep work, and schedule all your shallow work like emails and admin on the back end of two days per week.

80% of copywriting is knowing what to say, and 20% is how to say it. When I first started in copywriting, I got obsessed with headlines and checklists. But the real winning is done in the research, understanding your prospect better than anyone else in your market.

Hooking Your Audience

One good hook is worth more than a thousand words of the most masterfully crafted copy. If you can’t hook somebody’s attention in this chaotic online environment, it doesn’t matter how strong the rest of your copy is, how good your offer is, or what price point you’re selling at.

Whenever you’re launching a new service, offer, or product, first validate the front end with a small test. Once you know there’s an appetite for it, spend 10 times more effort, time, and resources than you think is required to create an exceptional product. No one will be able to compete with you.

Once you’ve completed 90% of the work, you are halfway there. It’s a Japanese proverb, and it couldn’t be more true. The greatness lies in taking something from 90% to 100%, because so few people are willing to labor through that excruciating pain. But that’s what creates a remarkable product that people can’t help but tell their friends about.

Delegating for Success

Most people in business understand that they need to hire help at some point. But what I’ve seen is that they’re not willing to hire that same help for their home. If you can get a cleaner, gardener, or cook for cheaper than your effective hourly rate, it’s not costing you money to hire them. In fact, it’s costing you money not to.

Compete on economics, not on marketing. People can rip your funnel and copy in an hour, but they can’t steal your economic model. Build a business with a moat around it, one that provides exceptional service so customers stay with you for longer periods of time. That’s the economic advantage that allows you to spend more money to acquire a customer.

Culture isn’t just important, it’s everything. As you scale your business, your ability to keep talent density high and maintain an incredible culture is what will allow you to attract the best people and keep them for years to come. The number one thing that drives culture is having a culture of winning. People don’t want to work at companies that aren’t working on exciting projects and winning.

Building a Strong Foundation

If a team member can leave your business, steal your customers, and set up a shop that legitimately threatens your livelihood, then you don’t have a business. You’re just a highly paid consultant. Your business needs to be a big operation with a lot of complexity in how it delivers value to the marketplace.

Ideas are cheap; execution is where the fortunes are made. Everybody has an idea, but if you don’t take great pride in being able to execute an idea better than anybody else, it will always feel like a chore. And things that feel like a chore are a chore, and you never get good at them.

You can teach hard skills, but you can’t teach soft skills. Don’t try to find someone with great skills but a bad attitude, thinking you can train them. You can teach skills, but you can’t change someone’s character or values. Look for people with integrity and strong alignment to your business’s values, even if they are less skilled, and teach them the hard skills.

Finding the Right Fit

Hire missionaries, not mercenaries. Mercenaries have a lust for making money, but missionaries care about creating meaning. They want to work on big, creative endeavors that constantly stimulate them, in an environment where they’re free to do their best work.

90% of the time, volume is the answer. When people aren’t seeing the success they want, it’s usually because they’re not doing more of the actions they know they need to be doing. Instead of looking for some new thing to do at a lower volume, take the core fundamentals and crank them up.

Never not have a split test running. Split testing is the easiest way to increase your profits by 10%, 20%, or 30%. If you can increase the conversion rate on any landing page by that much, which is very doable with a split test, you’re dramatically increasing the profitability of your entire business.

Lighting Up the Room

Whenever you’re about to walk into a room, think about how you can light it up. Whether you’re walking home to your kids, your family, or your spouse, close your eyes, take a breath, and think about all the things you like about that person. Then walk in with a pep in your step and a bit of energy. It doesn’t cost you anything, but it adds a lot of value to everyone else in your life.

But none of these matter unless you apply these last eight business cheat codes. Don’t make ads; create campaigns, and do it in sprints. Think about what your campaign will look like for the next 90 days, and sit down and plan out how many individual ads you can get from one campaign. Shoot multiple hooks for the same ad, but instead of launching them all at once, drip feed them out over 90 days.

You do not need any more data. You already know what to do; just go out and do it. You don’t need to validate anything else. Just go out there and do the boring work.

Driving Performance

Add a big benefit and a huge amount of intrigue to every single ad you create. Nothing drives performance more than having a big benefit and a massive amount of intrigue.

You do not need cheaper traffic; you need a better funnel and economics. Don’t obsess over where to get the cheapest clicks. It’s not too much money; it’s too much money for your shitty funnel. Spend 80% of your time focusing on how to increase the lifetime value of a customer and 20% on how to reduce your customer acquisition cost.

When it comes to marketing, never underestimate how stupid people are. Don’t take for granted that people will know what you’re asking them to do, what the next step is, or where they should click. Be extremely explicit in your instructions to maximize the conversion rate at every step of the funnel.

Staying Focused

People that you love and trust will hurt you. They will do bad things to you. But you must never act in malice. Don’t even give these people the time of day. Yes, it’s going to be disappointing and you’ll be let down, but those emotions will pass. Just focus on winning and let the winning do the talking.

Buy a good pair of shoes and a good mattress, because when you’re not in one, you’re in the other.

Most people know what to do, but don’t do what they know. Don’t go seeking answers to problems you don’t even have in your business right now. I used to obsess over wanting to upskill, read books, and learn things to arm myself with information for when I inevitably encountered a problem. But the reality is, I already had information to solve problems I hadn’t even tackled yet in my business.

Instead of focusing on solving those problems, I tried to go out and get skills for problems that didn’t even exist. Execute on the boring fundamentals better than any of the competition, and you will be rich beyond your wildest dreams. All of these business cheat codes form my master cheat sheet, which you can use to take your business to the next level.