If you want to grow your business to $100m there is one thing you need to understand… Capital allocation and leverage. The vast majority of businesses start as the following: - one or two founders - sitting in their garage - ready to do whatever it takes Because you have no budget and no savings, you can’t hire anyone meaning you have to do everything yourself. It could be cold calling, facebook marketing, organic social etc. Eventually as the business grows, you have to do everything to the half of your ability because you are so time constrained. Logically, you decide they need to hire… You have a few options here. You can: a) hire a cheap contractor b) hire an expensive agency or full-time role c) keep doing something half assed as its technically not broken This is a huge inflection point and depending on whether they understand the concept of leverage and ROIC is whether they will grow or fail. Leverage is often used to refer to debt. In this situation I am referring to the businesses power to influence a person or situation to achieve a particular outcome. There are a ton of things that impact the leverage a business has for its marketing efforts. Let’s use obvious extremes to illustrate the point of leverage. Ronaldo apparently charges $3,200,000 per Instagram post. If I were to create a new fitness tracker that cost $90 to get to a customer and sold for $200 (meaning $110 profit) I would need his post to sell 29,000+ watches from that post to break even. Chances of that happening on a fresh brand = 0 A brand like Whoop or Nike though can afford this because of the leverage they have. A brands marketing leverage is affected by: - its brand awareness/affinity - its unit economics - its repeat purchase rate - its marketing funnel Even if Ronaldo doesn’t convert enough to break even on the post directly for these brands, they have so many other supporting factors that allow the campaign to eventually convert profitably. So what does this have to do with your small to medium sized business.