The $100M Entrepreneur Podcast

The Power of Leverage: Work Once, Get Paid Forever

11 min
Jan 7, 20263 months ago
Listen to Episode
Summary

This episode explores the four types of leverage—people, systems, marketing, and finance—that enable entrepreneurs to scale exponentially by doing work once and getting paid repeatedly. The host emphasizes that $100M companies are built on leverage rather than effort alone, and provides real-world examples of businesses that transformed by shifting from transactional to recurring revenue models.

Insights
  • Leverage through recurring revenue models (subscriptions, memberships, repeat customers) is fundamentally more scalable than one-time transactional sales
  • The mathematical principle of 'divide to multiply' means delegating and systematizing work below your hourly rate threshold multiplies business output
  • Marketing should be measured as a financial investment with clear ROI metrics (customer acquisition cost vs. gross profit per customer)
  • Shifting business models from product-based to service-based or membership-based creates long-term leverage and customer lifetime value
  • AI and technology platforms can democratize high-value services (like coaching) by reducing per-unit delivery costs while maintaining quality
Trends
Shift from transactional business models to subscription and membership-based recurring revenueIncreasing use of AI and automation to scale service delivery without proportional headcount increasesGrowing emphasis on customer lifetime value and repeat business over one-time sales metricsDelegation and systems-building becoming core competencies for scaling beyond solo entrepreneurshipMarketing ROI measurement and customer acquisition cost optimization as fundamental business metricsVertical integration and value-add strategies in commodity industries (e.g., dairy to specialty cheese)Outsourcing and partnership models replacing traditional employment for scalabilityTechnology platforms enabling democratization of premium services to broader employee bases
Companies
Action Coach
Host's business coaching company that developed the ABOS (Action Coach Business Operating System) framework with 3,50...
People
Jerry
UK construction entrepreneur who pivoted from high-end home building to scalable shipping container storage facility ...
Quotes
"Do the work once, get paid forever. That is the definition of leverage."
HostEarly in episode
"$100 million companies are not built on effort alone. They're built on leverage."
HostMid-episode
"The mathematical formula says divide to multiply."
HostEarly in episode
"Marketing to me is the ultimate investment."
HostMarketing leverage section
"If you can pay someone less than $20 an hour, I'm never going to do it again."
HostOwner work section
Full Transcript
Systems, processes, automations, checklists, technology, these things help you scale with less effort. Ultimately, the mathematical formula says divide to multiply. You get a customer once and they keep coming back forever. You know, you don't want to work harder, you want to work smarter. My first book I ever wrote, Instant Cash Flow, that thing still sells today, still makes me money today. Marketing to me is the ultimate investment. The power of leverage. Work once, paid forever. Ever. From people to systems to money. In this episode, I'll explain the four types of leverage that create exponential scale for you and your business. Do the work once, get paid forever. Yes, that is the definition of leverage. Now, it's mathematical formulas different. I'll explain that in just a moment. But my ideal understanding of how you become a hundred million dollar entrepreneur, how you do that is through leverage. How do you do things that you do the work one time and they keep paying you back 10 years, 20 years, 30 years down the road. I still look at it and you start thinking about work that I did. My first book I ever wrote, Instant Cashflow. That thing still sells today, still makes me money today. Now, I didn't get paid a dime to write the book. My pay per hour for writing the book was $0 an hour, right? However, over the 20-something years that that book has been out there, hundreds of thousands of dollars have come in from that sales. Does that make sense? Our job as a business person is to do the work once, get paid forever. Okay, now let's break that back down. Why is leverage the ultimate multiplier? You hear the statement of, you know, you don't want to work harder, you want to work smarter. Well, in the beginning, you got to do both. You got to work harder and smarter right in the beginning. Ultimately, you want to be just working harder, just working smarter, should I say. So there's a good Freudian slip, isn't it? And here we go down that road. $100 million companies, let me state that correctly, are not built on effort alone. They're built on leverage. So what are the formats of leverage? You can leverage through systems. You can leverage through marketing. You can leverage through finance. You can leverage through people. Getting leverage is what we're going to look at. So if you want to score yourself, what's your leverage through people? What's your leverage through marketing? What's your leverage through finance? What's your leverage through systems in your business right now? Ultimately, the mathematical formula says divide to multiply. So if you've studied my five ways formula or you've studied the ABOS system, ABOS, we break building a business down into 3,500 strategies. Now, you won't need all 3,500. When you install the Action Coach business operating system, you might use 200 of the strategies over a period of a year or two to install that and build a business that runs so you don have to But ultimately what we aiming to do the difference between a non business and a leveraged business is, yes, it's going to grow massive. Why? Because simple things. You get a customer once and they keep coming back forever. If you've got a business where you get a customer, you make a sale, and to make the next amount of money, you've got to get another customer, there's no leverage in that. I want to have membership subscription. I want repeat business coming into my business. So let's go back through those four types of leverage and just explain each one of them. Leverage through people. You got to build teams. You got to build networks. You got to build partners, affiliates. You name it, you've got to build it. Networks who multiply your output type thing. If you build that, then you're multiplying the output of you and your business. Systems, processes, automations, checklists, technology. These things help you scale with less effort, okay? So putting the systems in place will allow you to leverage far better in the organization. Marketing leverage, everything from content that you build, everything from the brand that you build, the campaigns that keep working once you've created them. Like if you create a campaign that works and that campaign runs for six, 12, 12 months, two years, that campaign has been a phenomenal thing. You built it once, it makes you money long term or forever. That's what we got to be looking at. How do we create leverage through marketing? Marketing to me is the ultimate investment. I learned this back when I had a dog food business, right? Our average customer, yeah, we home delivered dog food and we delivered every six weeks. It was made fresh so that it was never more than six weeks old sort of thing as you're feeding it to your dog. We would do a 17 point health check on your animal when we were there. Our delivery drivers were veterinary nurses who could help administer your dogs of flea and tick and pills and you name it sort of thing every time they did the delivery. Well, here's the amazing thing. When we had a van-based business, you know, it's a delivery-based. Each van has to have this many customers per week. I had to learn out how to buy that exact number of customers per week. And so I sat down and went, hey, hang on. I've got to buy this many customers. If I bought too many customers, and for each van it was 60, right? 60 was the ideal number of new customers per week with a van on the road. if I bought 120 that meant 60 of them didn't get great service they had to wait two weeks before they got seen for the first time so I didn't want to buy that many if I only bought 20 we didn't have a good finance the finances on the on the van were not great so I had to buy 60 customers each and every week and so I had to work out the numbers now in that business we made if I remember of the numbers exactly it was was the first sale on average out of that was GP right Gross profit to us So my marketing expense had to be less than $38. Now, here's the simple thing. My radio ads were $24.50. So for every $24.50 I spent in radio, I got a new customer. So if you don't know these numbers, by the way, these are great numbers to get to learn for your business. How much does it cost you to buy a customer? And this is why I say marketing leverage is amazing leverage. For me, $24.50 went out and $38 in profit came back in, in gross profit. Now, if you went to the bank and gave them $24.50 and they gave you $38 back, would you keep giving them $24.50? Of course you would. That's what marketing should be when you're testing and measuring. If you haven't studied marketing with me, my two-day course, all my books, my 30x business, do all of those things. Financial leverage, using other people's money, credit, being paid in advance. These are some of the things to fuel your exponential growth. So when you think about leverage, it's, I've taught it to you as do the work once, get paid forever. Let's break that down just a little more. Employee work is do the work once, get paid once. So if you say in the, I don't know, the plumbing business, actually cutting pipe, doing the piping, employee work, do the work once, get paid once. Managers work, do the work once, get paid long term, meaning training people, hiring people, systems, planning. These are managers jobs where you do the work one time and it pays you back over a period of time, not forever, but a period of time. Owners work, do the work once, get paid forever. You as an owner of the business have to at some point set a limit and say, okay, if I can pay someone below this hourly rate to do it, I'll never do that job again. You know, I remember as a young man saying, okay, if I can pay someone less than $20 an hour, I'm never going to do it again. You know, so it meant I stopped doing things like mowing the lawn and doing any housework and doing any of that sort of stuff because if I paid someone to do that, I could be doing A, I could have family time or B, I could be focused on the things that make a lot more than that per hour. let me give you another example of leverage when you think about the movie business okay you make a movie once how long do you sell it for forever think of long tail really is a great way of thinking of leverage how do i do something now that pays back forever i'll give you an example of one of our clients in the uk uh their coach phenomenal coach came in they in the dairy business right They had cattle big farm and they sold their milk to the co Well what he taught them over a period of time was how to move from just selling the milk to adding value to it, to eventually running a program that had get customers once they stay forever. He taught them how to go from being in the milk business to being in the cheese business to being in the cheese of the month club. Now they buy the milk from all of their local other farmers to build their cheeses to be in their cheese of the month club. They went from selling a product that they could only sell at one time to now getting customers that keep coming back forever and ever and ever. That's leverage, my friends. That's a way of changing up a business so that it moves from doing one thing. Give you another example. Jerry, he's a phenomenal example. He was in the construction business building high-end home, multi-million dollar homes in the UK. And part of his business was he would buy the land and hold the land. And the way he did that is he would buy shipping containers and put storage facilities on the property. Well, what Jerry ended up working out was that there was a lot more leverage and scalability built into that shipping container business. And so all of a sudden he says, okay, I'm going to sell the construction company and focus on this thing that is leverageable, scalable. And now he's building hundreds of these things around the world with, you know, puts up the right fence and the right security system and has the app built and, you know, much less employees, much more profitability type thing. Very, very powerful stuff when you start looking at real examples of people doing that stuff. I even, you know, for me, a simple example, when we have ABOS, which is our action coach business operating system, and we coach to that, Now with AI, creating that in an AI platform where we go, holy heck, it's the same material, but now we can sell it in a way that democratizes coaching. It means every single person in every single company can have a coach, not just business owners and CEOs and executives, but every employee across the entire company can have a coach. Just phenomenal what we can do with that sort of stuff. So think about this in your business. Where are you getting leverage? Where are you doing the work once, getting paid forever, doing the work once, getting paid long term? How can you shift more of your time into those tasks and less and less of your time in the doing the work once, getting paid once stuff? How do you keep getting paid forever rather than one at a time? Because we want you to become a $100 million entrepreneur. Thanks for joining me on the $100 million podcast. If you've got value from today's episode, make sure you've subscribed and share this with all of your friends. Never miss a strategy that could change your business and your life. And remember, the fastest way to scale is to learn from those who've done it. That's what this show is all about. See you on the next episode.