Anti-Scale, Cozy Creator, and Slow Content

0:00I read a newsletter from Justin Welch called The Case for Anti-Scale, and basically he tells a story about you know attending this mastermind and everyone in the mastermind is just trying to scale their business from one million plus and in the moment of them all talking they're all really stressed out and he then he relates a story about himself and how he started planning all of these steps in order to scale his business and hire new people and and then realized in the moment that like his life was pretty chill and he made a decision not to scale and I've also seen this movement of what's called slow content, right or cozy creator this idea that it's not really about well it's just an idea it's just a it's just some sort of movement it's sort of anti-hustle anti-scale

1:04anti-growth and just kind of like staying where you are sort of all of these phrases right all of these words can be pretty much encapsulated into what I talk about which is lifestyle business that's the word that I choose to use or the phrase I choose to use I wouldn't call myself a cozy creator because I don't have cozy viby content like that I don't believe in like the word the phrase anti-scale is I'm not anti-scale like I'm not anti-growth and these words I know are like sort of the they push back they're they're meant to push back on the idea of hustle culture right the anti-hustle anti-scale you know the opposite of like hectic and stress would be cozy and

2:07the opposite of like you know you just you just hear all of these people who are like I reject this the idea of slow content as opposed to fast content all of these words are in opposition to the thing that people are creating content around you have Gary Vee who's like you can just kind of fucking post more and in an automosey who is just like brute force violent fucking you know but just bro energy but there's also women who do it let's be honest there's also like people who are like it's all about fucking scarl and pushing and blah blah look there is nothing wrong with that that's it there's nothing wrong with the way that these people want to approach business there's nothing even wrong with them saying that this is what you should do

3:11in the same way that there's nothing wrong about anti-scale or being the complete polar opposite of that it's the same energy it's just feels better because what you're saying in these in these areas is you're saying I reject like you know the way that you do things is not the way that I prefer to do things so I'm gonna tell you that this is the way right so in the outtermosey Gary Vee world of like super hustle even like a Cody Sanchez which I know she's fairly different but she still has that mentality I think her thing is like a contrarian or whatever in a boring business as is her other thing right but these are still like scale right there's still very aggressive that is the way that they prefer to live life and that's the way they

4:12prefer to do business and because they prefer it that way that's what they preach then you have people who who absorb that information and go I feel so terrible I feel so stressful how could you be so stressed out it sounds stressful but here's the thing I understand this and I and I am on the side of the slow content cozy entrepreneur anti-scale I'm on your side but what I don't like doing is making the argument against it is being contrarian for the sake of contrarianism that's that is just like and that is a push that's a fight right and I and I don't want to do that the what I'm trying to say here is it's just the other side of the coin

5:15and so now these other people are seeing that rhetoric saying to themselves or it's subconsciously I don't I don't like the way you live I don't prefer you living that way right and so what they do is say like they're projecting their own stresses on other people again I'm not saying this is a bad thing just saying I'm just pointing it out I do it as well and I say well I think you should do it this way I think you should not try to scale your business I think you should be more cozy in the way that you create content I don't think you should be posting as often we should let's start a slow content movement that's more intentional and here's the thing you can do that and you can

6:17promote that and you can preach that and but obviously this it's no different than the other side of the coin it just feels superior you know but the other person on that side also feels superior they are the antithesis of what you believe they believe that oh if I just work eight you know okay cool you want to be the cozy entrepreneur who releases a video once every month right and the video does fairly well well I'm going to violently brute force a thousand videos in that same time and one of my videos is probably going to do better than your video that took you all month to do but it's going to take me all month to produce a thousand it's the same thing it's just different ways of how you spend your time I feel like I see both

7:23I respect and understand the pure volume game not to be confused with the old school place where you discover music pure volume but this like I understand that and I understand why that works like I fundamentally get it and I and there are certain types of content that I consume where volume is appreciated and then there are the other side of the coin where it's hey we take our time we're more deliberate we we we like to put you know a lot of them say hey it's all about quality but that doesn't always like that's a subjective term I will have to admit just because something takes longer doesn't necessarily mean it's better sort of thing and I get that I personally resonate with it I'm like hey that fits that fits my bill a little bit better because I'm a lifestyle

8:27business type of guy right I'm the guy who's like yeah I don't want stress I don't want you know I don't like managing a ton of people I don't like growth for the sake of growth right I'm that type of person too but I feel like I fall somewhere in the middle not necessarily the direct middle I think I go I sort of ebb and flow in the middle I'm also the type of person who rejects anybody who tries to tell me one way of doing something I love hearing both sides I love you know not in every case but in this case I love seeing what like shitty creators to me do I'm like all right what are you doing okay that's fucking insane but all right interesting you know what I mean and I look at that and go all right what are some nuggets in there that I feel like

9:27would fit me a little bit like it's like oh I see what they're doing I understand it I'm getting to the fundamental root of like what they're trying to do how can I use that but in the way in the way that I like to approach business I think again I fall more in line with the anti-scale cozy creator slow content movement but I do not come from a place of active rejection and fighting the other thing of course I don't make that type of content anyway I do talk a lot about lifestyle business and I talk a lot about managing stress but I feel like I have that pretty well under control and that's sort of been this you know not all cases but it's been this underlying driving force for decisions that I've made not again not all the time I mean I think

10:28but I learn very I learn and I I'm okay making adjustments so an example of that would be like me getting into the e-commerce business with you know pulling hot tub chemicals and realizing after a few years oh this is this is going to cause a this is the this is an anti-life style business decision and so we need to reverse this it took two years to get there but you know it wasn't like when we started we went we weren't I'm never an aggressive starter I just sort of start and keep my eyes peeled along the way but the article or the newsletter from Justin gave me pause and when I saw all stuff about slow content like just the just the naming of it and just the idea around it I went okay I need to clarify my thinking around my word of the year

11:37which is more I stuff also challenged me on this word more she's like that doesn't sound like you where did you get that like like why that word that word sounds like the aggressive you know you just got to do volume and violent agree you know I'm like yeah I understand why that would feel that way but I didn't use I feel like the word more is such a it's a soft word it can be what you make it in the same way that like simplify is a soft word simplify it could mean many things it could it could it takes multiple forms but it's a driving word to just think all right it's the it's the kiss acronym right keep it simple stupid and that phrase helps so let me clarify what I mean by more

12:50what I meant and what I'm thinking internally when I use the word more is simply output I am not thinking in terms of oh I'm going to work more or harder I'm going to do more things or make more money that those are not what I'm thinking about I'm thinking purely output more output now let's break that down even further to talk about what that actually means in the term in the world of swimming diversity specifically but I'm not just talking about swimming diversity I'm talking about my my other projects which I've started now and so that that is just more things in my life more output so output to me is content and to get even more granular it's videos videos articles

14:03stories social media video you know posts things like that and what I am not trying to do is work more so simplification or simplify in 2025 was an interesting word because what it did was I basically said okay I'm going to remove the things that the business does and the things that the business has to worry about it was a lot of editing and when like that I'm so happy that that was my word but I have edited it down to the bones like swimming diversity is as as simple as a business as you can get it is a collection of I think it's six SOPs that's that is the entire business it is six Google docs

15:04and I can break those all down and I'll break them down because there's really five that we did in 2025 customer service right so answering emails making sure people got their books I'm also going to add shipping in there because that's what we did in 2025 then you had social media so we were publishing three posts a week that's really it we have YouTube that's a whole nother SOP because that's a long-form video it's a very different thing we have email marketing so customer service YouTube email marketing social media the fifth one was development development is you know just keeping up with our website changing sales pages and also working on our app it's a product device and that also could include you know

16:07rewriting the books and and creating the new products and stuff like that those are the five things that runs swimming diversity now in 2026 we've added a sixth SOP which is articles and I have talked about that already my our frictionless SEO system six that's it we're not adding any more to that to those SOPs we are sticking with that number the the other word that I was contemplating for 2026 was the word optimize but I felt as though optimize didn't really have a clear action to it why are you optimizing well you're optimizing to get more sales to create more content to you know work less hours I don't know like there's those are all those are all like the the outcomes so I was just like well

17:09then if I if I'm striving for the word more while at the same time reducing my physical hours because I think that is what I'm not saying in the word more and I think when I said it to staff she's like that doesn't what do you what do you mean more like how much more do you want to do and I'm like no no no I don't I don't want to do anything more I want to produce more this is it feels like I'm trying and she said this too and I and I think I agree which is like I am trying to shoehorn this word in the to the year and here's the thing it's the complete opposite it feels like the opposite of the word last year and I think this is why I fall in the middle which is I am saying that in the word in 2025 the word simplify like everyone's like yeah that feels

18:13right it feels easy it's comforting but then when you flip it it feels uh oh he's he's flipped he's he's now Gary V and it's like no I'm not that's not I'm never gonna be that sorry what I would like to do my goal is to improve our SOPs so that we can put out more content and more advertising and create better products and tell more people that our product exists without us having to do any more work than what we are already doing but in 2025 we just replaced things so for example this is a this is a great example in 2025 in our customer service SOP we were Stephanie right the two of us we were answering emails

19:21we completely ignored social media comments and DMs because we just couldn't handle it we were shipping books we were ordering books we were uh ordering you know pieces to shipbooks managing all that the amount of man hours between Stefanide the two like basically heads of the company we kind of act as one person like one like super CEO right we were doing all of that work and we were those hours were were not spent doing any output we were just being reactive we were you know they had those tasks had to be done no don't get me wrong but the fact that we were doing them is insane now at the end of 2025 i removed those tasks from our to-do list which freed up a ton of hours right now

20:29even in 2025 we i to be honest and somebody can ask me the other day like how many hours do you think you really work a week and i was like well on swimming diversity maybe 20 maybe which is not a lot now i spend a lot of time you know doing this podcast and you know i've been working on brew cabin stuff in the last few weeks and i'm you know took some meetings and bit on the computer so it's like am i but but like the real work yeah maybe maybe 20 hours so it's not that much but those hours last year were taken up a lot by tasks that i read that really weren't creating any output they were just again they were reactive they were like somebody would order a product and i would have to ship it like that would just be how it worked right or somebody had a problem with uh something and they emailed us and i had to respond to it

21:32that's not output that's just that's just daily task that we have to do right so i outsourced all of that at the end of uh 2025 so about September we now no longer staff and i no longer do book shipping at all we don't have to order any product the only thing we have to do in the shipping department is make sure that the inventory is stopped and that's really i get an email from the company that says like hey your threshold is below 100 can you send us some more i click i click a couple buttons and i'm sending them a whole nother lot of books so it's like that's a five-minute thing that happens once a month at that even if that you know what i mean so it doesn't take up any time customer service i have a meeting every week and i uh which usually lasts about 30 minutes and i'm pretty sure that that meeting is going to get

22:33less and less frequent right now it's weekly because we're kind of like learning and learning and updating and optimizing but over time i think it'll be every two weeks it might just be once a month that's i i can see that happening right um and honestly like it's not we don't even have enough volume to pay the person that we're paying to be full-time it's not even a full-time job so i meet once a week and then i review a customer service document uh once a week as well so really like it's between 20 and 30 minutes a week dedicated to just actually improving customer service not even doing it right that to me yes that is an optimization it's not scale i'm not it's not that i hired uh people to help build the company that's that's not what i did i hired people

23:35to take over jobs that we were doing so that we can focus on the important jobs the ones that i believe drive the company growth which is putting out content and improving products just plain and simple and because now we gain those hours back we're not working more we're just able to put those hours into more output which we didn't do the previous year so the previous year we the only content that we really did was we sent out between four to between two to four emails a week we did three shorts a week and one long foreign video a week in 2026 already we're doing all of that plus more emails plus articles

24:39so that is just more more output and we're not working more i may there's only one other position that i think i may need to hire for and part of all of this is to just look at the sop's and think all right where is the constraints and that's pretty much been my job like i have i am in Justin's newsletter he talks about do you want to be the type of person who works on your business or manages people to work on your business right do you want to be CEO or do you want to be or do you want to be like manager or maker and when i would when i would be to ask that question i would always lean towards maker

25:42like yeah i don't really want to manage people i'd rather make stuff but something has shifted in that i do really want to make stuff but i think what i realized in the last couple of years is that what i want to make is highly creative stuff i have put 20 years of my life into swim university making it a thriving business that has paid for me and my family to live on this planet very well my ultimate goal is to eventually not have to do that anymore not it may you know it and that may come with selling the business or just making enough money to where we don't have to produce the output anymore

26:46and we can sort of just like dissolve it which to some people that may sound absolutely insane but i'm like it you know it is a job i created myself a job and my fulfillment doesn't come from making the content at swim university like that's it doesn't i don't get that doesn't drive me anymore the business itself is like it used to drive me but i'm like no it's it's good it's a good business all we want to do is stay the course and increase the output that's it to make a little bit more money keep all that money and then eventually retire that's the idea i'm 42 like i have to start thinking like that i'm on the second i'm on the back nine i'm in the second half so you know that's that's what i got to do but my fulfillment as a maker i started doing that with brew cabin

27:52again and i went oh oh right i do need to make stuff i do need to put an absolute ton of effort into something as a person i need that whenever i try to do that in money lab or in swim university it just but it's just met with i don't care who cares and and what's interesting is i realized that to some people and in i was this person for sure which was like i sort of sunk my creative value into swim university that was my thing when people asked me like oh what are you what are you working on what are you doing like it's swim university it's the most boring business though it's like running

28:52a laundromat it's it really even though it's like i know i have like a contractor to come downstairs in my basement and they see that i have this like studio with the youtube plack and i'm like oh what the fuck do you do man and i'm like it's not as cool as you think because it's like everyone's like oh my god you're a famous youtuber and it's like bro i am far from that if you knew what i actually did you knew what my job was you'd be like i'd rather i'd rather do anything else right i just personally like it but i don't need to make the most amazing pool care video back in the day that was certainly true i end up putting that effort toward other things that constantly shift my attention away from swim university towards something else and usually when i did that swim university got neglected because it was all hinged on me

29:56to get to do the output but now i realize that oh swim university is literally just a boring content business and i'm going to run it like any other regular ass business where there are inputs and there are outputs and you know what because now i feel like i have a full on creative outlet where i can be a true maker of things it means that i'm okay being a manager at swim university and in fact it is a skill that i that i severely lack i'm very i've always been a bad manager i've always been bad at communicating with my team i've always been bad at you know direct giving orders and delegation and and and culture and all of that stuff and i'm like you know

30:58what this year i'm going to change that about myself i'm going to actively try to be a good collaborator and a good manager and somebody who it's like hey i really like working for this guy and i like the idea of team building it's a small small team and i am almost not even a part of it i am just the kind of the captain of the ship and that kind of feels good and i like that role and it gives me time to work on my other things that are that are truly creative and if i want and sometimes i do i get really deep and focused and creative within swim university when it requires it and those don't happen all the time last year in march i did that i worked really hard and deep on the hot tub handbook

32:03i didn't have to do that but i was like no this is i'm sinking my teeth into this project because once i do it it's such a it's going to pay off for years right when i work on an SOP as an example that's going to pay off for years and i realize that like managing is really just making sure the team has what they're doing keeping an eye on everything just sort of like making sure everybody you know making sure everybody's happy and developing systems and processes to make their jobs easier and more fun and your job easier and more fun. Optimization and the goal is more output without sacred without forcing people to do just the most intense labor possible now i don't think that that is

33:04i don't think i could say that for every business but i do think i can say it for swim university we have found ways to be efficient with our time that a lot of companies haven't really figured out yet and or may never figure out and that's okay that's to each their own like if you look at brew cabin as an example there is no efficiencies there in fact it's so inefficient that it's like oh my god why would you put this much hard work into something like you know that there are ways in which you can create content more frequent you can have more output if you just created better systems and i'm like yes that's not the point though and i like this dichotomy of having two different worlds one world in which i can use my optimization brain which i i mean i love that

34:06it's a puzzle i love thinking about ways of making things better and easier at the same time but then on the other side of the coin i like doing full on art projects that don't have a process and i'm making shit up as i go and i'm doing and i'm being as silly and as wild and as expansive as i can possibly get but i will say this i do not think that those two worlds mix very well when it comes to money and i understand that that sort of negates like well then what about Hollywood and i'm like well actually whatever i don't know that world but i'm saying in my world it's really hard to be just like wildly massively creative and also making a ton of money yeah i don't know if i want to say that because that it doesn't make any sense because i can

35:07think of a billion examples of like people who are super super creative and make plenty of money it's just not in a it's just not in the swimming diversity online business type of way so yeah scratch that because you can certainly make money being wild like like brew cabin can certainly make a lot of money if it wants to if the videos let's just say get wildly popular and i'm making money through ad sense or i have a private community like there's ways to do it there's ways to do it but the other thing too is like the difference is at brew cabin i'm choosing to be creative for entertainment purposes and at swimming diversity like dude people are just trying to get their pools clear like they're not investing and they're not fans and they're not like they're not obsessed with your company right

36:07they're just like wow this company was very helpful thank you so much for your products this is great move let's move on like no one's becoming like a super ambassador for us right so i don't know that could be that could be a limiting belief but anyway that's i just wanted to clarify that and i'd be curious to hear your thoughts so shoot me an email mad at moneylab.co i'll talk to you next next time next next