Build a Bad Ass Business with Healthy Margins for a Healthy Life​ ✅

​read time 5 minutes

by Sam Mahmood

Welcome to the High Performance Entrepreneur Newsletter, where you will receive actionable tips every week on the 4 Pillars of wealth.

My 4 Pillars 🧱

Relationships: Think who, not how, when entering a new venture.

Assets: Your net worth reflects your assets, not your salary, so let's build this to its utmost potential.

Health: Life is irrelevant without your health. A 100M dollar exit can't save someone who has constant high blood pressure and one day needs to have open heart surgery.

Knowledge: Let's keep learning every day to enhance our skill sets to deploy these to their maximum potential.

In the last Newsletter, I promised to delve into building a business that would yield 30-40% margins while maintaining your health. ⚡️

A Chef went from a $78,000 dollar job to a 5 Million dollar E-commerce business with 35% net profit 🍕

Today I am going to deliver you that.

I will provide you with three examples: one involving a fictional real estate broker, another featuring a chef, and lastly, a real-life illustration from my own experience that can be adapted to your specific niche. Then I want you to translate that into your niche.♻️

You noticed I used the word niche; yes, riches are in the niches. It's best to niche down first, create wealth, and then go broad. Here's why: you can become an expert in a certain field, then speak about it, and maybe even get paid to talk about it because you're so good.

My example. I sold medical devices since I was 25. I won Presidents Club, Sales Rep of the Year every year, and the shiny trophies staggered on. My skill sets are not transferrable to everyone; they worked with a very focused group of avatars. But that customer base paid me a lot of money for my time if I showed up.

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What I'm going to say next is super important and I want you to analyze this.

If you're getting started or are established, you need to think of a number a bit far-fetched on your hourly rate. Something aspirational that someone should pay you for your skill set.

Then double that number and multiply by 1,000; that's what your hourly rate is worth.

Example: Paid $500 per hour x2 =$1,000 * 1000 = $1,000,000.

So I realized I could sell high-ticket items to surgeons, then talk about how I did it, and then translate that model into other businesses I decide to create.

This week I had a friend reach out to me after he consumed my first newsletter. He's been a real estate broker in commercial real estate, and it's safe to say many people who are trying to sell homes are having a more challenging time than most due to increased interest rates and a lack of price cuts.

He was thinking of starting a car wash or buy a restaurant because he was burnt out of being in the industry going through a dry spell with these 8% interest rates. If you're in this category, listen up! There's a blue ocean effect theory that you must look into before you just wholly make a seismic shift. It's finding a business within your business.

If you're a commercial real estate broker, there are businesses within your business.

"Focus on innovating at value, not positioning against competitors."

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​How to Blue Ocean in any Business 🌊

Real estate brokerage firms can diversify their services beyond just selling real estate. Here are five business ideas that a real estate brokerage firm can incorporate:

• Property Management Services: Offer property management services to property owners who may not have the time or expertise to manage their rental properties.
• Real Estate Investment Consulting: Provide consulting services to investors looking to build a real estate portfolio.
• Home Staging and Interior Design: Create a subsidiary business that specializes in home staging and interior design.
• Real Estate Appraisal: Start an appraisal division within your brokerage firm.
• Real Estate Education and Training: Develop a training and education arm of your brokerage firm, offering courses, workshops, and resources for real estate professionals and aspiring agents. This can include pre-licensing courses, continuing education, and specialized training in various aspects of real estate.

Service-based businesses are always just a step away from your core business. I know we forget half the crap we learned in school, but do you remember the word standard deviation? It's the distance between where you are now and where you started. Before Making the large seismic shift to leave your tech sales job and buy a brick-and-mortar business, let's analyze your unfair advantage.

Unfair Advantage:

We all have a level of depth of something. I promise, even if you think you don't you do. I spoke to a chef who works at an Italian restaurant around the corner from my house and knows how to make the best authentic Italian food for a mom-and-pop shop. He's making $78,000 a year being a chef and is looking for a higher income stream.

I told the chef how many reps he has underneath his belt for the amount of food he makes and the opportunity to create a vast digital audience who would love to see this. He started making content of the recipes, we clipped some of his videos from our company ​Winning Creative​

With his passion, he created a product called ​Baking Steel​ that makes the perfect pizza. He just took advantage of being an amazing chef to using his knowledge to create the perfect product. Knowledge is one of the four pillars of wealth.

Baking Steel is now an $5,000,000 E-commerce product after 2 years on the market. He took himself from a $78,000 created an asset for himself that he can control the narrative on, and was able to use his own charisma of what he loves doing every day.

Not only did he crush his business, but he got his health back; he lost 25 LBs and feels alive every day working on his own project.

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This is called the Onion Framework 🧅

Taking something from the surface layer and peeling it back to its core. I like to create a broad example like the real estate broker analogy than take a real-life example like Andre from Baking Steel, and it would only make sense as as the author to share my example of how I took my own skill set and peeled it back to it's core to create the most leverage for myself. 🚀

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First off, what's the Onion Framework? It's exposing your surfaced layer like an onion at a supermarket to multiple hands, and then someone grabs the onion and starts peeling it. Multiple layers to the onion allow you to get deeper to the core and, ultimately where you want to end up. The core of the onion is untouched it has to go through so many layers to get there. You create so much leverage, thereby having such depth within your craft that it should free up a lot of your time because you know something others don't, and larger margins come into play.

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How I used it:

➡️ At 24, I started selling medical devices for a company as a W2 employee.

➡️ Learned how to sell these devices very well to know this niche space to start doing this at scale

➡️ I asked the company if I could be a 1099 employee rather than a direct employee so I don't have my taxes drawn every check and the opportunity to sell for other companies underneath a Holding company to have geographic rights to Southern California.

➡️ I started to sell multiple company's medical devices underneath Surgical Republic, an asset I created for myself that allowed me to go into hospitals and have a handful of products to offer now with better margins as an independent contractor rather than a direct employee.

➡️ Instead of only being a Distributor, I asked myself how do I become a manufacturer and own the distribution nationwide.

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➡️ Simple: find one product that would solve a massive problem that I know I can solve. Again, in my niche of spine surgery, I created my depth of knowledge around this area to allow me to have a competitive advantage. In August 2022, I flew out to Germany and started designing my first 2 products I knew were going to thrive in this space.

➡️ We received the product in December after going through the FDA process through the year of 2022

➡️ The result: In August 2023 we generated a $300K net profit just a year later from that side of the business

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Naval Ravikant talks about how you should be paid for your decision-making rather than the actual doing. If you can create better decision-making through knowledge, your margins get healthier, and you physically become healthier because you create more time and more freedom.

What I challenge you to do is to write down 3 things:

• What skill set do you have the most reps completed?
• What skill set you do have the most reps completed do you enjoy the most
• From the skill set you enjoy the most, create a Vivid Vision on how you can take your skill sell that you enjoy the most and turn that into a business. Then email me that, and I will respond back with my thoughts!

Vivid Vision is one of my favorite books!

Vivid Vision​

Thanks for reading!

P.S. There are 2 ways I can help you

1. If you have a business doing between $300,000- 3,000,000 in revenue, I'd love to see how my team and I can help. I have built a few companies over the 7 figure mark and would be happy to help. I decided to create my own S&P 500

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S&P Ventures

2. If you don't have a business that qualifies for that, We have an awesome slack group that helps other aspiring entrepreneurs scale their ventures! Email me at sam@sammahmood.com

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