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Every issue of this newsletter gives you the exact systems, strategies, and principles I’ve used to generate 8 figures (almost entirely) with email marketing. So you can build your own systems that will carry you through the next algorithm change or recession. This is what actually works.

The first three years of hiring people to work in my business were brutal.

I had people miss deadlines. I had people flat-out lie to me. I had people steal from me — both money and leads. The most painful one was my own brother, who worked for me for a stretch and ended up walking off with my customer list.

Then there were the unintentional disasters. An email blast went out to a hundred thousand subscribers with a dead link. That single mistake cost me a fortune in lost revenue. I've been hacked by Russian hackers, by Anonymous, and by ransomware crews who encrypted every file on my server and demanded bitcoin to give them back.

For a long time, I told myself the same story most business owners tell themselves when their team disappoints them.

These people are lazy. These people don't care. If only I could find better people, everything would change.

I spent the first six months of that period quietly furious. I'd lie awake running through every conversation, every missed deadline, every dropped ball, convinced that the world was simply running out of competent humans willing to do honest work.

Then I read two books that broke my framing completely. The first was The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. The second was Work the System by Sam Carpenter.

Before we go any further…

They fail at the decision point nobody talks about: choosing the wrong business model to begin with.

The wrong model means you spend months building something before you realize the traffic costs more than the product pays, the platform owns your audience, or the skill set required belongs to someone ten years younger with nothing to lose.

I made $25 million online and created Zero To Online specifically to solve this problem.

It walks you through a 7-step framework for evaluating any online business opportunity before you commit a single dollar or hour to it. It breaks down 7 different business models with brutal honesty about what each one actually requires, and lays out the 14 myths that keep people broke and starting over every six months.

Mark Morgan Ford, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestselling author, wrote the foreword after reading the manuscript.

The Zero To Online Starter Pack gives you everything you need to go from picking the right business model to building it, generating income from it, and eventually running it without trading every waking hour for money.

Just cover shipping and the entire starter pack is yours.

Now, as I was saying…

Both books said the same thing in different words. Your team is rarely the real problem. Your systems are.

That hit me hard, because I'd been operating on a fantasy. I was trying to replace myself with people who didn't have a tenth of my passion for the business. I expected them to care the way I cared, work the way I worked, and pay attention to detail the way I did — on a fraction of the equity and with none of the context.

That was never going to happen. They were just people doing a job.

People get tired. People get distracted. People have bad weeks, family problems, and Mondays when their brains refuse to switch on. Expecting consistent peak performance from a human being is like expecting your phone to hold a charge for a month. That's simply how the hardware works.

Once that landed, the question shifted for me. I stopped asking "how do I find better people?" and started asking "how do I design a system where an average person on a bad day still produces great results?"

The clearest example of that principle is McDonald's. Ray Kroc didn't build the biggest fast food empire on the planet because he invented the best fries in human history. He built it because he figured out something far more valuable.

He systematized everything.

The patties were the exact same weight. The fries were cut to the exact same thickness. The frying time was timed to the second. The bun was toasted at a precise temperature for a precise duration. Every drink was poured in a specific order. Every counter interaction followed a specific script.

The result was that a sixteen-year-old kid on his first day could produce the same burger, the same fries, and the same milkshake as a twenty-year veteran. Thousands of times a day. In thousands of locations. Across dozens of countries.

That's the entire secret. The product was almost beside the point. The genius was the system that produced the product.

Most business owners miss this completely. They hire someone, give them a vague description of the role, and hope for the best. When the new person inevitably fails to read minds, the owner blames the hire and starts the search again.

This cycle can go on for years. I watched myself do it. I watched friends do it. I watched coaching clients do it.

The honest truth is this. If your business depends on someone caring as much as you do, you don't have a business. You have a personality. And personalities don't scale.

Systems do.

A system is just a repeatable process documented in a way that a stranger could follow it without you in the room. Step by step. With checks built in at every stage where mistakes typically happen.

When I shifted my energy from finding better people to building better systems, the entire experience of running a team changed. The same people I'd been frustrated with started producing solid work. The system caught the mistakes before they could become disasters.

Roughly sixty percent of the team problem solved itself the moment the systems got tighter. The other forty percent came down to training people to actually run the checklist instead of skipping steps.

There's a saying I've always liked. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

I'd take it one step further. Don't hate either of them. Just play the game the way the game is designed to be played.

If you build a business that requires every employee to care like a founder, you're playing on impossible difficulty. You'll burn through good people and bad people equally fast, because the design of the game is broken.

If you build a business that runs on systems, the people you hire become operators of those systems. Their job becomes simple. The instructions are clear. The mistakes get caught. The output becomes predictable.

You stop needing heroes. You stop praying for unicorns. You start hiring humans and getting consistent results from them.

That's the game. Those are the rules. You can complain about them, or you can play to win.

I'd suggest playing to win.

P.S. Want to know why I care so much about this topic? I broke it down on this podcast episode. Listen, and you'll see why it should matter to you, too.