Do You Plan To Sell Your Business?

0:00All right, I got a bunch of questions from Ivan on Twitter, and I'm going to answer each one because I asked basically, is there any topic that I that you think I should cover on my podcast that you don't hear a lot of other businesses talk about? It's number one more things about focus as a key skill. So I obviously if you're if you've been listening to this show for a while, I have maybe I think it's nine episodes about focus, and all of those episodes are me trying to refocus myself. I tend to go off script, I tend to get a little crazy, have too many ideas, and I have to kind of bring it back to the one thing. So for me, and this is sort of a quick answer, but the book, the one thing, is the key, I think, to unlocking focus.

1:01Once you understand, because I think there's two, there's there's basically two steps to focusing. The first step is realizing that you can really only prioritize one thing or focus on one thing. And you can do that in different disciplines, but but the first thing you have to accept is that you're really only going to be able to focus on one thing. And so pick it, and that's really hard to do. And I think honestly, that's the hardest thing to do. Is accepting that you have to pick one thing. That's like once you solve that problem, the actual practice of focus becomes easier, because you have solidified in your mind that this is really the only thing. And if it's the only thing, well, then it's kind of easy to just go, oh, well, I'm just going to work on that every day.

2:05So, great. The practice becomes easier. I can tell you from experience, at least on my end, that that was the hardest thing to accept. I still kind of, you know, I guess I believe it less, but there is still a part of me that's like, I can do multiple things. You know, this is a, you know, I can multitask. And I believe you can multitask in different disciplines, but you cannot do all of the things. So you have to accept that, and this is a phrase that I've been saying a lot, which is I can do anything, but I can't do everything. Which tells me it's like, yes, I can do anything I want to do. I can, if I want to learn a new language, like, I can do that. But I can't learn a new language and lose weight and do, like, there's so many, like, you start stacking them on top of each other. And it's like, okay,

3:09at a certain point, because you can stack a few things. Like I said, they can be in different disciplines. So in, you know, my two examples was, can you lose weight and learn a language? Of course you can, right? Because, and the reason why I believe that you can do that is because your entire day is not filled with, oh, I'm just learning a language all day, every day. You can't, you physically can't do that. And the same thing with weight loss, you physically can't lift weights for 12 hours a day. You can't do it. So what are you doing the rest of the day? Here's where I think it's, it gets really difficult. I think people, I don't know if I want to say, I don't know, I don't know if I want to make this generalization, but I'll just say it, whatever. It's hard to accept that your daily existence has too much shit going on in it.

4:18So when I say focus, it's like, yes, you can't focus on being a good parent all day every day. Like you, I don't think you can do that, because there's just going to be times where you don't have to, right? Night time, for example, the kids are asleep or they're off at school all day. Like you just can't do it 24 hours a day or even 12 hours a day. So you can do, you can be a good parent and and focus on being a good parent, focus on losing weight and focus on your one business. Like you can do all three of those things, but the more you stack on top of that, the harder it becomes. So like if you have more than one kid, for example, like you're stacking responsibilities, if you have an ongoing house project, if you have a, you know, a social club

5:20that you're a part of, if you start adding all of these additional things into your regular life, it's going to be hard to focus on any one thing that you're trying to grow or trying to get better at or whatever it is, because you've made your personal life too complicated. And this is where I'm like, you hear people who say, and I've heard this, I've heard this from friends. So I'm going to say it from personal experience, but I've also heard other people talk about this, which is, oh, the reason that you can do this thing is because you don't have kids. And then I've heard, so yeah, and I say to them, yeah, there's some truth to that. I'm not going to sit there and disagree with you because I can tell you that if I had kids, I would have less time. I would just have less time to focus because that would be a focus of mine. That would be something I would have to work on. And so that's going to take a chunk of my time away from the other things.

6:26So I've, but I've heard people say that shouldn't be an excuse, you know, like when they go to sleep, you should be working and I'm like, okay, sure, kill yourself. You know, if you want to like push yourself to do things, it's like your, your life is just too busy. So once you accept that reality, focus gets easier. I have chosen to not do things in the name of focus. Just that simple. Like I have a, so one thing I did not expect as an example of this was having this house. I thought, oh, I want a house. Like once I have a house and I can build a studio, I can build a brewery, I can do all these things. And it's like, yes, you can. But you also have to take care of the house. Now in hindsight, I should have, I swear to God, I thought about this. I should have bought new

7:31construction. I did not. And I'm glad I did not. But if I had bought new construction, I would just have less shit to do. But God, the heater goes, the ponds need cleaning, the backyard. And it's like, and I had the bigger the house, the more you have to take care of it. And I'm like, oh, shit. That's taking time away from something else. It just is. Now it's not, again, it's one of those things where it's not, it's not a 12 hour a day worry. I can do other things, but I can tell you this, business, running a business takes up a lot of time. It just does. Even if you delegate. So this is why I can't imagine now having more than one business because, oh, you have kids and you have a house and you have a golf weekends and you have the, and you're trying to build not one,

8:35but two or three businesses. How the fuck are you doing that? Impossible. And you go to the gym every single day, like, no fucking way, you could do all that. No way. I sometimes look at my friends and go, yeah, how the hell are you doing all of this? I would be so stressed out all day if I had my, my calendar looked the way that your calendar looked, but my calendar doesn't look that way. So for me, once I understood that my business, the thing that makes me money, is swim university. And I went, okay, that's all I'm going to work on. That is, and what is its purpose? Its purpose is to make money. So, and at the same time, I wanted to make money without me having to put eight hours a day into it and weekends. It means that I have to accept

9:42that it's never going to be this giant multi-million dollar business. And I'm cool with that, because my life is super chill and easy. But once I understood that, oh, then everything became easier. The focus was simple. I'm like, oh, all I have to do is this. That's literally all I have to do. It's breaking everything down into the individual parts and just going, just do that. Cool. And if you relieve a lot of your other duties, it's easier and focus is super easy. So, that's my, that's my take. Number two, the biggest mistakes you made during the journey. Well, the, the first big mistake that comes to mind was delegating and trying to scale too fast

10:45without having money during the off-season of my business. So, a big mistake is not understanding that my business is seasonal. Even though I look, I'm not an idiot. I know my business is seasonal. For some reason, I'd made a decision back in, I think it was 2017 or 2018, where I, where I hired a bunch of people to write content for us in September, which was like the beginning of our off-season. And while a lot of that content did help us in the future, it crushed cash flow at the worst time, and I was forced to let everybody go, and I had to sell another business, just to cover the cost of that mistake. So, that was one mistake that I made, which was

11:45not that the, not that the decision wasn't correct, or at least like the action wasn't correct, which was we should write more articles for our website. That was the, that was a correct decision, or a correct path, but I implemented it the wrong way. I did not do it slowly. I did not, I didn't do it during a time of high cash flow. There's a lot of, so, so I now realize that, and I learned from that massive mistake, and it's been very helpful to have that mistake. And it didn't cripple me. Of course, like, I think it's one of those things too with, if you are a business owner and you're somebody who's like, there is no such thing as failure, in my opinion, then like, everything's just a lesson, right? Unless, unless, you know, you

12:47physically take away every single piece that, of me that can do that business, like it's still going to happen. So, that was one mistake. The other mistake was a recent one. I'll give you some more that are older too. A recent mistake was, and I've talked about this on the show many times, the decision to start selling chemicals. While it was, it had every good intention behind it, it ultimately ended up being a mistake, and I only saw that in hindsight. The problem that I was trying to solve, which again, was the correct path, was how do I create recurring revenue from a single customer? That was the problem I was trying to solve, because at the time, all of our products were one-time purchases. And so, we were working very hard to get these customers, and then we only have one thing to sell them. So, I thought, hey, what if,

13:55the only thing that makes sense to me is if we sold them something that they can buy, that they need, that they buy over and over again, and for me that was chemicals, like physical products. So, we, I, you know, got, I basically went all through this, successfully sold chemicals, but made so many mistakes in the process, and survived it, like nothing bad happened. In fact, a lot of good things came out of it, a lot of like unknown buy products, for example, because we were selling physical products, we, I learned what 3PLs were. So, recently, we just started working with a 3PL, and it's been an absolute godsend, and I only knew about that because of my experience with selling chemicals. And also, we got on Shopify, which then allowed us to start shipping our own books, which was a very good move, but, and I would not have done that, had it not been for the chemical. So, there have been some buy products from that experience that have led to good outcomes,

15:00but the initial problem we were trying to solve in the way that we solved it was an actual mistake. And it was, but I learned a ton again, doing it. So, you know, an expensive mistake, we'll call it, but a good lesson learned. Trying to think, early in my career, or early in my journey, I'll say, because I don't know if career is the right word, but when I was building Swimming University, it's hard to call it a mistake. It was a mistake, but I wasn't alone. It wasn't a sole decision of mine, which was the whole like, article spinning time, where I was, I was part of a community called the Keyword Academy, and all the intentions behind this place were good, but in the end, what we were doing was manipulating the search engine, Google, by, by creating a lot of low quality content

16:02in an effort to get backlinks, to boost our good content, and that was a mistake. But none of us knew that at the time, because it was pretty common practice. But again, in hindsight, I'm like, yeah, duh. So, and you think about it now, you're like, so you wrote good stuff for your own site, but then wrote a lot of bad stuff, like before AI, like worse than what AI would create, just to get links to your good stuff from other low quality sites. It's like, yeah, I guess that sounds stupid now, but at the time made perfect sense. But a huge mistake, a huge waste of time, like writing those bad articles, like purposefully writing bad articles. There was a, again, this is before AI, and to be honest, the way I just see it as the same thing, but we used

17:03to have a, God, it was called the product was called unique article wizard. And if you've been in this game long enough, you may know what that is. But what you did was you wrote, if I can remember this correctly, you wrote sentences that were so generic that the sentences could be remixed into multiple articles. So, all this product did was basically randomize sentences to create new articles. Basically, what chat GPT does, you know what I mean? It's just rearranging shit that already exists into new shit. So, take that for what it's worth. I don't know, but those are all some mistakes. Number three, what things do you delegate and what things do you not delegate? Well,

18:06currently, I have delegated everything in my business, and I will tell you what those things are. The things that I don't delegate are filming. So, I am still in front of the camera reading a teleprompter. I do not delegate that. I don't have anybody to help me. I do that by myself. I do all of the graphic design. So, everything you see in emails on our website, in our app, like I design the app. Our books are designed by me. Like, I am literally designing everything. So, any photo you see, any graphic, even sometimes some motion graphics, you see, those are all done by me. Another thing is I do not have an operator. So, I do all of

19:09the operations along with Steph. So, Steph and I are kind of like co-CEOs. Like, we discuss, we're like partners. We discuss everything together. And then, I'm usually the one who builds the SOPs and communicates with the team and puts it all in place. So, that's, and I say, team is four of us. But, I don't delegate that, and I probably never will. That would probably become more of my job in the future. So, and I'll end. I do not, any website coding. So, any technical problems that arise with our company, not the app, but everything else, that's all done through me. So, I, yeah, any coding work needs to be done, any sales page changes, any, I don't know, any problems with Shopify or whatever. Like, I still handle all of those

20:12tickets, basically. And, yeah, what I do outsource is we have someone who helps us with customer service and social media responses. So, every email that comes through, every comment, every DM is handled by someone else other than me. All of our content, our books, our courses, our scripts, our articles, our, yeah, anything content-based, whether that be for marketing or product, is done by Steph. So, Steph does all of that, and I am more of a packageer. And that has, that's the first thing I outsource when I could was hired a writer, because I know I'm a better packageer than I am a writer. I've always been a bad writer, and it's always been a bottleneck for me.

21:18But, even though I had all the knowledge, it's like, hey, instead of me writing this, let me just review it and package it and make it better. But, like, I need to place the star, which is why AI has been so helpful because it is sort of like a first draft maker, and because of that, I can just focus on packaging, which is sort of my thing. I do not do any video editing anymore. I used to do, I used to do a lot of it, then, Steph did a lot of it, and now my brother does all of it. So, I do, I don't edit any videos anymore. I am still the overseer of those, like, I think we still use frame, so I still like work with editors and improve edits, and build tools and systems to improve future edits, but I'm not physically editing videos. And really, that's kind

22:22of the whole business. I also outsourced our bookshipping and book printing to two different companies. So, our team, really, is a, we have one person that works in customer service, and, you know, I basically call them like a community manager. Steph is the contents are, so she is in charge of all things content. She generates written content. I am sort of in the between of packaging, so I packaged the articles that go on WordPress. For now, I am recording the videos to get those started. I am, you know, and then my brother edits those videos and publishes them, or I publish them on the app, or in the course, or wherever we're putting them. So, I'm, again, more of a packageer at this point, but one thing that I'm trying to do, and I think we'll talk about this in another episode,

23:26there are two other positions. Oh, so, by the way, so it's contents are, video editor, community manager, me, which I would guess call like a CEO and marketing director, and then we have our shipping department and our printing department, which are two different companies. So, that's the entire team. I am looking in 2026 to expand that into, I do want some to take over graphics for me, or all things design. So, besides the app, because I still like designing the app, they will probably be doing like all of our social media content, and if we start running ads, or creating images for our articles, going out and taking photos, things like that. So, a general like graphic designer or slash photographer type of role,

24:29and then the other role, we're probably going to end up hiring toward the end of 2026, will be a salesperson, who will help us transition into B2B sales. So, that'll be interesting. And then I will basically be just in charge of all SOPs, having meetings. I'm still going to be filming, and I'm still going to be working on the app in terms of like design and features and things like that. So, that's that. Okay, and then the final question is, do you plan to sell your business? Interesting. So, the answer to that is no. I have no plans to sell my business, but I am slowly putting systems in place to make the business more saleable than it currently is.

25:35And there are two reasons for doing this. The first reason is because I am trying to transition into a new type of person, which is a, and a true CEO role. What I realized this past year, in 2025, was after we simplified the business and made it much better and made it much easier, and, you know, we did some proper delegation this time, slow delegation, I realized that a lot of, I have a lot of creative energy. And that creative energy, because I was so focused on swim university, was being channeled into swim university, which, because, so think of it this way, I was overflowing with creative energy. And that flow, that abundance needed to go somewhere.

26:37And I kept, because of the act of focusing really hard, I thought it all had to go into swim university. Now, the problem that presents, is the business, if a business is a cup, I am flowing all of this creative energy into a cup that is of a certain size, and it's overflowing, and it becomes unmanageable. This happened when I did the like urine bottles, for example, and I was like trying to, like, I would just have an idea. I'm like, I'm going to build this whole new sales page, I'm going to build this whole new thing, and I'm going to put all of this time and effort into it, because I needed that creative energy, that idea machine, to be funneled somewhere, and I kept trying to funnel it in the swimming university. But after the act of simplifying the business, there's a clear, like the business needs these things, and it currently does not need that abundant creative energy. So that creative overflow needs to be channeled or divert it somewhere

27:44else, because it's not going to stop coming out of me. And that's why, toward the end of the year, I realized, okay, I need to have a side project that is not tied to income whatsoever. It needs to be simply a pure art project, a pure creative expression, and it was very obvious that that was doing through cabin videos. And that's been so far, I'm like, oh, okay, cool. So like, now I can focus on like what swimming university needs, rather than what I need and is overflowing from me and is being like pushed into the business. So because of that, I now think, oh, okay, I actually don't have to, like, I was so busy working in the business of swimming university, because I needed my creative energy to go somewhere. Now I realized, oh, I actually don't

28:50have to do that. I can just be a very small cog in the machine and then just be sort of the actual CEO of this business entity and grow it that way. So it's a whole new skill level that I'm transitioning to in 2026, which is like becoming a good director CEO manager type figure. And I am still able to get nitty gritty with all the things I'm interested in, all my hard skills, like video editing and graphic design and all of that, through this other side project that is not tied to income. And I can do that at my own pace. So I think that was important. As soon as I, because, because brew cabin used to be a money maker. And that was a bad idea because then I was splitting my time between, well, swim university and brew cabin both make money. So I need to work on them both equally. And I would feel bad when one got neglected. Now I'm like, oh, no, swim university

29:59is my business. As long as I accomplish the things that I sit out to do for the business, I'm good to go. I could spend the rest of my time just being creative in something that has no revenue goal tied to it. So I found a good balance there. Now, the second reason is so, so meaning the delegation, I am sort of removing myself from the business so that my creative energy doesn't overflow the system. Okay. But the second reason and sort of a more of a like byproduct of doing this is the way that I'm approaching removing myself from the business is by being the guy who is focused on building systems. I'm building SOPs for the six things that, the six core things that our business does. And because of that, we have a very well oiled

31:02machine. And my personal goal is to make that machine like, it's already pretty impressive, but I'm like, I can make this thing really sing like I'm really interested in making that whole machine better. You know, and not trying to make it bigger, you know, like the machine gets bigger just because of how well it runs, right? It can travel a far distance because I'm taking good care of it. Because of that, that is what people buy. Yes, my brand is important. It's been around for 20 plus years. It's only going to continue solidifying itself and getting more entrenched into the culture of our industry. So there is inherent value in just that. But the problem is,

32:04is that I am the face of the company. And if I can basically create a machine that doesn't revolve around me, where I am not the linchpin, whereas if you would have removed me, the whole thing falls apart. Right now, technically, you could replace me in one day and nothing would change. The business would make the exact same amount of money. It may even do better because maybe my face sucks. I don't know. Maybe I could, maybe there's a better version of me out there that could be, that could replace me. That is happening. And I, that's not the intention. I'm not trying to remove myself in the business in order to sell it. I'm, I'm simply trying to remove myself in the business in order to grow it because I believe that I am the one standing in its way. I am the bottleneck

33:07because I'm doing all the graphics. I'm doing all these different pieces. And it takes me a long time to do those pieces, whereas if I had individuals in place and systems, I could get out of my own way or get out of the business's way and just let it grow. And, and think a level above where I sit to really try to grow the business intellectually and with precision as opposed to just brute force. So it, those are the two reasons for doing it. And I believe it will make the business more saleable, but that is not the goal. Now, if in the future, I have achieved the number that I want to hit, which is my retirement number, where I can actively choose not to work anymore, although I still will. And somebody wants to buy it. I'm going to be much more open to that discussion because,

34:10oh, I truly, I mean, then I could like get out. But I'm also okay with not selling it and just letting it coast and just kind of always working on it or maybe installing a new CEO in its place, or whatever, and just kind of having it always. I'm totally happy with that decision. I'm actually sort of anticipating that's how it'll go is that I basically still own it, but I don't have to do anything anymore to it or worry about it. So no, I do not plan to sell it, but I am putting pieces in place by default that makes it more saleable if that answers your questions. So I will be talking a lot more about delegation in 2026. It is the year of more, which means we are doing more content, more product development, and more data analysis to make the pieces of content better. And more,

35:22we're going to have a bigger team for sure next year, or I should say in 2026. So this year, and yeah, that answers all your questions. If you have any other questions like Ivan, please shoot me an email, madatmoneylab.co, or you can even reach out to me on Twitter, Threads, or LinkedIn. I am actively looking at those spaces for ideas. That's it, and I'll talk to you next time.