Quick story from lunch last week. I was sitting across from my mentor let’s call him G. He owns 13 companies. Has a CEO installed in each of them. Every single one does over 10M. I don’t know his exact net worth, but let’s just say… he’s not worried about paying his mortgage. I was showing him how MAMOS was coming along. (MAMOS is my Mil-A-Month Operating System— the business operating system I install with clients so they can see exactly where they are on the path to 1M/month- and increased valuation. A Single source of truth.) Then I showed him the new Strategic Dominance Dossier research I’ve been running for clients. It’s a 48-hour deep dive where I analyze your market, competitors, and positioning to find the Blue Ocean opportunity you’re probably missing. G leaned in. “Run one of those reports on my new company.” The company? Lead generation for personal injury lawyers. “We just secured a 5 million line of credit from Google to spend on ads,” he told me. Naively, I said, “Oh good, that should last a while.” He laughed. “It’ll last 5 weeks. We spend a million a week on ads.” Let that sink in. One million dollars per week on ads. This is a guy who’s built 13 companies over 10M each. And he’s asking ME to do strategic research before they scale. Why? Because spending more money doesn’t create a Blue Ocean. Strategic clarity does. I took 48 hours. Did the full Dossier. Mapped the market. Analyzed competitors. Identified the positioning gap. When I sent it over, G called his CEO immediately. “We’re shifting into the Blue Ocean Mark found. This changes our approach.” A guy spending 1M/week on ads… shifted strategy based on 48 hours of research. Here are 3 lessons from this: Lesson 1: More Money Doesn’t Fix Bad Strategy G could dump 52 million a year into ads. And he’s still investing in strategic research before scaling. Why? Because he knows the truth most 7-figure entrepreneurs miss: You can’t outspend a bad position. If you’re competing in a Red Ocean—same messaging, same offer, same audience as everyone else—more ad spend just makes you a louder version of the noise.

This weekend my family and I met up with some family friends who were visiting sunny Florida from one of the states that’s experiencing devastating cold. We’re on the beach with all of our kids playing and having fun while I was recovering- (read: laying down half asleep, exhausted, sore everywhere) -from an ‘over 35s’ soccer game I had the night before. That’s when my buddy Dave leaned back in his beach chair with the smile of a man who’d already spent the money. “We’re thinking about selling the agency,” he said. “Accountant ran the numbers. 1.2M revenue, 40% margins, solid multiple.” He took a sip of his beer like he was already negotiating. “Six million. Easy.” I sat up. Sand falling off my back. “Dave, I love you man. But I need a napkin.” His wife Sarah laughed. “Oh here we go. Mark’s about to ruin our vacation.” She wasn’t wrong. Here’s the thing about Dave. Good dude. Hard worker. Built something real. But he also works 55 hours a week IN his agency and his wife works another 40 hours in it. He closes every deal. She handles every upset client. She approves every deliverable before it goes out. Their agency doesn’t run without them. And he had no idea why that mattered. What made this conversation worse? Dave knows someone—friend of a friend—who sold their agency to VidIQ for 250 million. And Dave genuinely believed his situation was “basically the same.” “Same industry. We get our clients better results. If they got 250M, we should at least get 6M, right?” I grabbed the napkin. “Dave, do you know WHY VidIQ paid 250M for that agency?” “Because they were good?” “No. Because VidIQ was a strategic buyer. And that agency had something VidIQ desperately wanted that had nothing to do with their service work.” See, that agency wasn’t just running client projects. They’d built an e-learning arm for YouTube creators. Courses. Training programs. Thousands of paying customers. VidIQ didn’t buy an agency. They bought an audience. A customer database.

Yesterday I told you about the business owner who went from 2M to 0 because of a threat he didn’t see coming. Today I want to tell you about the opposite. An opportunity hiding in plain sight that transformed everything. Here’s the setup: My client is a 5M/year roofing company. Wants to exit at 50M valuation so he can retire and make music. The problem? Roofing companies get 3X-5X valuations. To hit 50M, he’d need 10M+ in profit.Possible, but a HUGE STRETCH. We’re maybe 5-10 years off that. And he was stuck in the same trap as every other roofing company: -15% margins.-Bottlenecked by labor shortages. -Revenue tied to how many crews he could field. -Competing on price with every other contractor in town. He thought his problem was: “How do I get more roofing jobs?” It wasn’t. Here’s what we found: When I built his Strategic Dominance Dossier™, we analyzed 250+ sources. Competitors. Industry reports. Regulatory filings. Insurance data. Customer reviews. Adjacent markets. And buried in that data was a 45 million hidden asset. His real competitive advantage wasn’t fixing roofs. It was his ability to win insurance claims. He was already getting homeowners bigger and faster settlements than anyone else. He just wasn’t monetizing it. So we pivoted the entire business. OLD MODEL: Roofing company → Storm hits → Fix roof → 15% margin → Wait for next storm NEW MODEL: Capital Management company → Storm hits → Win maximum cash settlement (40% margin) → Refer wealth management → High lifetime value + Recurring revenue We repositioned him from “local roofer” to “claims advocacy + wealth platform.” The result? A roadmap from 5M to 50M valuation—not on construction multiples (3X), but on wealth management multiples (10X). Same guy. Same skills. Same market. Completely different business. Now he only needs 5M in EBITDA to hit the same 50M exit. We made the finish line way easier to hit by using strategy—working SMART, not just HARD. Here’s the thing:

They shutdown his business- don’t let this happen to you Today I received a VERY sad message from a business owner I know and like , He went from 2M in 2024 to being FORCED to close in 2025… Draining his family’s wealth because of all of the refunds they were obliged to make. NOT because of bad marketing. NOT because of weak sales. NOT because of a bad product. Because of something he never saw coming. You see, at the end of 2024, I was in talks with this entrepreneur about working together. He ran an education company in Canada. 2M a year. Stuck. Wanted to scale. We had extensive conversations. In the end, he decided not to invest in coaching. I reached out to him today just to catch up. This is what he said: “The Canadian Government shut down the bootcamp business.” “They gave us an ultimatum – come under their wing as a regulated career college or shut down. We chose to shut down.” “Had to pause programs and issue refunds. Otherwise they were threatening fines and jail time.” “100s of customers affected.” “Fired a lot of people in my team.” “Revenue went to 0.” One regulatory shift he didn’t anticipate. It’s not fair and I hate it! The government shouldn’t be able to come in and just shut him down like that. It’s a government shakedown- it’s criminal! But now, his business gone. He’s already rebuilding – launched a new company in December, signed 4 clients in 3 weeks. But imagine if he’d seen this coming a year ago. Different decisions. Different outcome. Maybe a pivot instead of a shutdown. Part of what I do for my 120K/year executive coaching clients is called the Strategic Dominance Dossier. (It falls under the DEFINE stage of my 3D Scaling System) I review 250+ sources in your industry… Competitors, regulations, market trends, industry reports, influencer movements, review sites… EVERYTHING! Then I run the research through the Harvard’s Business School’s, Blue Ocean Strategy Framework….

My home team, Manchester United just fired their coach. (Yes we’re talking about soccer AGAIN because… Elite sports IS high-stakes BIG business and you can learn from it). You see the coach, Ruben Amorim lasted just 14 months. And everyone saw this coming from a mile away. And if you’re stuck at $2M-$5M, you’re probably making the exact same 3 mistakes they made. Let me break it down. Amorim came from Sporting CP in Portugal. Built a dynasty there. Won trophies. Had a system that worked. So United brought him in with a massive war chest. £250 million in new player signings. 14 months later? The team is 7th in the league. Not up to Manchester United level. More money. More players (think hires). More tactics. Same result: stuck. Sound familiar? Here are the 3 lessons for you scaling to a million a month without working more hours: Lesson 1: The Tactics That Got You Here Won’t Get You There Amorim had a signature 3-4-3 formation. Worked brilliantly at Sporting CP. Back-to-back league titles. Made his reputation. So he brought it to Manchester and tried to run the exact same playbook. Different players. Different league. Different context. Same tactics. Complete failure. Here’s what Amorim missed: The tactics that worked in the past don’t work anymore. His 3-4-3 wasn’t a strategy. It was a tactic that happened to fit his old situation perfectly. At Sporting, he had years to recruit players who fit. The whole culture was built around it. The Portuguese league played to his strengths. At United? None of that existed. He tried to copy-paste his old success into a new environment. And it broke. I see this all the time with entrepreneurs stuck at $2M-$5M. “What funnel is working right now?” “Give me the ad strategy that crushed it for your last client.” “Can I just copy what Hormozi’s doing?” Copy. Paste. Pray. But here’s the thing… The tactics that got you to $2M won’t get you to $10M. Your market has changed. Your competition has changed.