A Recipe For Domination: Long Term Thinking, Moats And Asymmetric Warfare

everyone's Sam Evans here and today I want to talk to you about long-term thinking moats and asymmetric warfare so some pretty unique things probably haven't heard about those probably not

really popular things that people are talking about right now but there's a reason for that and really you know the people who do the best in their markets you know the the kingpins

of their different niches and the market leaders and really the captains of industry and the people who just dominate everybody else they don't think like everybody else and they do things

almost polar opposite to what most people do and this is a really big lesson in life in business and I'll tell you what I mean so most business owners

and most entrepreneurs most CEOs they think and they ask the question what is something cheap easy and fast that we

can do to gain a competitive advantage right they want to Kevin advantage they want to have an edge because you need that to win and you need that to differentiate yourself and business is

so important but they ask the question how can we get an edge with something that's easy cheap and fast right but people like Jeff Bezos and you know

people were like billionaires they ask the opposite question they they say like what is something we can do that is expensive

takes forever and is excruciatingly ly hard that gives us an advantage and think about it for a moment you'd be like what why would they want to do that but what would they just want the easy

advantage well here's the thing easy advantages quickly like they quickly found out by other people and they're quickly implemented because they're easy and as soon as other people

implement them they are no longer advantages and when they're no longer advantages your advantage ceases to exist and then it's irrelevant in a pretty much isn't an advantage and

this is the importance of long-term thinking and most people that I see in business today they don't do this they only really think about now they're basically just fly-by-night op

- nests looking to get some money so that they can look rich on Instagram or looking to get some money to buy a car and you know buy a Rolex and things like that and you know don't get me wrong

there's nothing really wrong about doing that but that sort of mentality in the long term is going to absolutely wipe you out because other people are going to be smarter than their and they're

gonna be thinking more long-term and in business what I see these days is most people just thinking what's something really easy cheap and fast to do so that we can get an advantage things like all

we should run Facebook Ads we should set up this funnel or we should do you know this this new thing like we should jump over to Bitcoin and start talking about that or chatbots let's go talk about that but let's go use that but the thing

is is these things are only advantages for a short period of time and then they are no longer advantages once other people find out about them and do it so if you really if you want to win in

business long term and all businesses as long term you know if you don't win long term you don't win so if you actually want to win in business you need to start thinking long term and when you

start thinking long term you really want to start thinking like how can I gain a competitive advantage that other people can't get easily or cheaply or in a

short amount of time and I'll give you a perfect example a lot of people think Amazon is an internet business and it's you know it's just got a good website a good brand and they've got like good

marketing and good SEO but that's just the start of it what Amazon's real competitive advantage is is its fulfillment

so it has factories it has ships it has Airlines it has fleets it has it's probably the largest distribution in shipping network on earth and you know

you can guarantee it like they're going to take over DHL and all of those other shippers and in logistics businesses they're going to just steamer all of those people they're already the largest

shipper in the world so then they have the most logistics in the world and so that's what really gives Amazon the advantage because it's easy to just put up a website and sell a bunch of

products but nobody out on earth can ship someone a product in one day for free and at that price nobody and if you don't believe me try

and do it try and start a little e-commerce business and then notice where you get screwed it will be in the shipping because you'll buy something drop shipping something from China it'll take like 30 days before it gets to the

damn customer and they'll have to pay for that and so that's what you're up against when you're competing with Amazon it's not just about buying ads it's not just about setting up a Shopify store and then you know having a clip

funnel it's not about that it's about something much deeper and much harder that no one else can do because if you want to compete with Amazon in that way you've got to go and build all of that

stuff and that's going to cost you billions billions and billions of billions it's going to take you 25 years and it's going to be excruciating ly painful and you're going to need half a

million human beings to do it now that's a competitive advantage and so what I see in the marketplace right now is people are doing you know they build

their website on WordPress with a template boom done and then they will copy somebody else's funnel and yet they'll use clickfunnels which is a software you can get in they will deploy

that funnel boom then they'll look at Facebook heads because everyone's doing them and then they will just copy someone's ear boom done and then their product will be Janeiro can pretty much just a knockoff of somebody else's that's watered down and not as good

launch it and then they try and make money out of it and at this venture pretty much always fails and if it does succeed it will only be short-lived because as soon as other people notice

that you're making money doing that then they're going to come in and compete with you and if it's easy to knock you off then they're gonna win and they're gonna steamroll you and you no longer have a business but if you start

thinking longer-term how can you do things that others can't this is where the real magic starts to happen how can you develop long term

competitive advantage that other people can not imitate or do on their own now when it comes to doing this there's four main things that with is this infinite

things that you can do that will give you a long-term competitive advantage but there's four things that I want to tell you about right now that you could deploy right away the first one is just

is just straight-up like how good you are at what you do or how good your product or service is because at the end of the day the most important thing in the world is how good the product or

services because there's that's the main thing and you want to make sure you get the main thing better than anybody else and so if you're like selling if you're a consultant or a coach or a service

provider you want to make sure that your work is as good or better than anybody else's and if it's not well you the most productive use of your time right now is

figuring out how to be the best because when you're the best that's hard for somebody else to replicate it's not like you're just using Facebook Ads someone can knock that off in a day it's not

like you're just using like a funnel or some software someone can knock that off in a day but to be the best well that's gonna take thousands of hours and years of mastery and commitment and practice

things that other people aren't going to have the stomach for and they might think I'll have a crack at competing with this guy and then they'll try it and then they're like screw that man I'm not doing that I'm not doing that that's

too much work for me and you want people to do that you know a lot of the time when people are building businesses they think oh well you know this is hard work man this is real hard work and this is

taking me a long time and I didn't know I was gonna be this hard but I like that stuff because the harder it is the you know the the more grueling it is and the

more gnarly the problem is that you battle through in conquer the cool thing about doing that is that you know that everybody else has to go through that whole fire to get to where you are and

you know that that's gonna burn all of them and only a few are gonna be strong enough to make it through there so I take a different sort of view on things I try to do the things that are really hard that no one else wants to wants to

tackle so that I can get on the other side and then have that fire kind of as a shield protecting me and this is with the more of those things that you tackle and the more of those fires that you walk

and conquer the more competitive advantage that you have and this is what's referred to as having a moat so you know like a castle has a moat around it like it it's a like a little river or

a canal thing that goes around it which makes it harder for people to to raid it and climb the walls back in the times when castles always got taken over and when you have a business you want to

have a moat too and it's not a physical moat but it's a an abstract mode so basically competitive advantages that are hard for other people to imitate and

there's there's only a few ways things can be hard one is because it's complicated and you'll figured it out the other one could be that it takes a long amount of time and you've put in that time or the

third one is that it's very expensive and you've put in that money right three things complexity difficulty and time

and cost all right and if you think about what makes em is on a great business its tackled the most complex problems how to ship things all around the world like in one day it's take hold

the longest things that's taken at 25 years to build that stuff it's hired six hundred thousand employees right imagine doing that it's a big thing and it's cost huge amounts

of money it's cost hundreds of billions of dollars all right those are things that are hard to do it's not because they've got a funnel it's not because they're running ads it's deep so deep

that most people would look at it and think oh well I'm not even gonna have a go and even if they wanted to have a go no bank would back them because they can't raise as much capital as them and

they their chances of competing with them are very lot so this is an example of a competitive advantage you want it to be you want it to be hard complicated

you want it to be long term or expensive right now these there's one thing that you can really focus on here in your business right now and it's systems so

systems are awesome things systems give you an advantage because most people they run their business in a way that's just like it's what's a good way to refer to it they just

I'm guessing all the time and they just kind of they just kind of do things based on the day you know they wake up they come to their computer they check Facebook they check Gmail and then they're like what should i do today oh I

might do this or I might write a blog or I might start chatting to this person on here or I might go over here and watch this podcast oh I might do a tweet I might do a post that's that's the game

plan right that's what they're doing each day now like someone who's doing that they're not doing much they're doing something but it's not much and if

you have systems that means that you can just follow the systems and you don't get lost kind of in a labyrinth or a maze and you don't just do a whole bunch of things that really don't don't align

and their purpose or their objective and you get to focus on specific things that are really going to drive progress and drive you towards your goal so let's let's get some examples of some systems

so instead of just marketing everywhere by writing blog posts and things like that you can choose a channel and master it so you could choose Facebook ads or you could choose YouTube ads or something and master that thing and

channel all of your energy into mastering that thing instead of it just going everywhere another example is instead of just relying on people to email you or

stumble across your staff create a funnel creator system so in my business I mastered Facebook Ads that's where I got most of my traffic from I wanted to be the best at that thing and I didn't

focus on anything else I just shut off everything else and got good at that did I needed a funnel to really take that traffic and convert it into customers and instead of building a bunch of funnels I built one and I've

honed and refined one funnel for like four years and I've put thousands of hours of effort into one funnel and that's a system now I've got two systems working together like I know Facebook

Ads like no one else and then funnels like no one else so then these two things together hard to replicate most people don't have the discipline or the relentless single-minded focus no not

many people are willing to put five years into one thing all right that's what gives you an advantage most people are only willing to put a day or a week of some of work into something

like sometimes I'll put 12 hours a day of work for four years straight into one thing that's what gives you an advantage because other people aren't what they don't have the guts to do that that means that you're you know you're here

and they can't get there because they're not willing to do what it takes to get there now another thing other than systems is like a brand so a lot of people they launch like a like a product and then they launch another one and

then another company and then another thing and all of their effort and their energy goes into all of these different areas and then they might close this brand close this thing close that close there and really that means that it's

all going to waste and you have no long-term compounding interest on one particular thing so a really powerful thing you can do from the beginning is

to to create a brand now if your brand's going to be your own name like Sam ovens common it could be some ovens that's what you could use right that's a good way to start building your name as a

brand and then you can start you know posting different thoughts that you have about it you can start growing your audience you can post some different videos and then as you're advertising you're growing your awareness and you're

building a brand because over time a brand becomes a very hard thing to compete with you know Amazon is a very trusted brand because so many people have interacted with it every day for a

long period of time and they know if they buy something from that thing it's just going to show up they people don't even think about it whether it's going to show up or not because it has that brand recognition that's another thing

that makes it hard to compete with them so in my business I'll give you an example of this so I decided to create a brand and I bought the domain name consulting comm which cost me a lot of

money and then I put the time and effort into it to develop like content and things like that so that we could build something for the future now here's the thing in the short term move like that

isn't going to give you much of an advantage it's actually going to cost you money I lost money initially on that because it's a very expensive domain you have to build all the stuff very expensive and in the short term you lose

and most people aren't willing to lose short term but in the long term that will give me huge competitive advantage it all have SEO rankings and it will have brand and all of that plus it's expensive to

buy a domain like that and it takes time and if it and you have to lose money in the short term something most people aren't willing to do you know one of Emma's ons biggest advantages is that

they're willing to go underwater with big oxygen tanks longer than anyone else will so another way treason why Amazon's

demolished the competition is because they they haven't made a profit in like 25 years right most people in the in my industry like online courses and

coaching and engineer marketing these guys need to make a profit every week because they need to pay you the payments on their Lamborghini and they need to pay for their did private jet

trips that they can get some Instagram photos and pretend to be rich right so they need that profit they absolutely need it to feed their lifestyle all right it's like they've got to feed this

hungry beast over here that mr. lifestyle and so they it it takes a toll on the business and the business just ends up being this like neglected like

thing that doesn't get by any attention and it's just being choked all the time for money to feed the hungry lifestyle and when you get into that situation it's dangerous no one ever survives that

in the long term it takes everybody all the athletes that like an NFL and everything that started making a lot of money they got started having flashy lifestyles the lifestyle started to pull

on them and then you know the the career kind of dried up a bit the market moved buh gone and you don't want that to happen to you so you want to try and you

know if the the thing that can kill a business like that is doing the opposite so if you start to make if someone's business if you're competing with a business that has to make profits so

that they can feed their lifestyle then if you turn your business into one that's not making profit and you're not taking it out to feed your lifestyle but you're recycling that money within the business so that it can gain competitive

advantage it will crush that other business and then when it crushes it you get to like absorb all of that money and then in the long term you can have a way better lifestyle than the person that

you just overthrew and decimate it so this is the thing right most people don't think long they just think short-term how can I get money for me me me me today instead of

how can I beat everybody long term so this is something that no one talks about but this is the stuff that will turn you into like an eighth figure earner and you know a nine figure earner and a billionaire and all of that

it's long-term thinking how can I get an edge that nobody else has another thing you can do is build a team so a lot of small businesses stay small because they're not willing to do what it takes

to get big and to get big you have to number one like take more risk you have to invest more money you have to go from making profits to breaking even or

making losses in order to grow and you also have to hire a team and with a team comes overhead in complexity and all of these things that suck and that you've never had to deal with before and you're

like why do I you know this business is just giving me money for my lifestyle why would I want to go through this crap well most people aren't willing to go through that and so they don't and if you go through it and you build the team

you develop the culture you absorb those costs and take that those hits to get there well long term you win and so a lot of people in business they think I

don't hire a team just outsource it you know put VA s overseas and all of that stuff and just use a bunch of contractors but when you do this you can't gain an itch and in business you

need an itch and if you're using a contractor to do your ads and he's doing everyone else's ads well then you're gonna only gonna have ads as good as everybody else that sucks because now

you're out you know you're not gonna beat everybody you're just like everybody else so that's not an advantage but if you hire someone in-house put them in-house you train them and you turn them into an animal

then you've got something nobody else has and then you can start running circles around them so a lot of people in my industry they try to outsource everything use contractors for everything and never build anything you

know every software application that they use is somebody else's that they just license then every person they use in their business is a contractor that everybody else can hire this means that

your entire business is replicable where somebody else almost overnight they can find the software you're using and use it and they can find the people you're using and use them that means that they can quickly take your

advantage of you if you have an in-house team other people can't get them to work with them at the same time also if you build your own proprietary systems then

other people just can't use those huge advantage things and a lot of the time when you're just starting out these things aren't things that you know available to you as options because you don't even make that much money or

something but later on this is when you want to start thinking about these things and the fourth one really brings me to technology and this is a huge thing that you can have is a competitive advantage

so in Amazon was building their business they noticed that all the technology out there wasn't good enough for them and they wanted to be better than everybody else so they had to build their own

everything when it came to processing orders you know they just didn't use a Shopify they built their own when it came to using a website they couldn't just find a wordpress template so they

built their own when it came to hosting they didn't just use WP engine or Bluehost they built Amazon Web Services they built their own when it came to shipping they didn't like how long it

took with the DHL and FedEx so they built their own then when it came to everything they built their own now most businessman these days and entrepreneurs these days that think dude don't do

anything yourself don't do anything just use other people to do everything like use like all the software that's on the market use a wordpress template use contractors you can hire but this is a

great way to start don't get me wrong because it's fast cheap easy and anyone can do it but long-term you ain't gonna build a killer business if you do these sorts of things you want to start

building your own technology you want to start you know being a pioneer and trying things that haven't even been done like a lot of the things we've looked at in our business just haven't been done yet like a lot of the stuff

that I've wanted to do I'll give you an example like multi-channel attribution now this is complex might a lot of you probably don't know what this is but it's when you have like you're running YouTube air

face book heads Instagram ads you're running all of these different ads and someone might click on that one then that one then that one then that one then that one then that one then that one and then you've got to figure out

well who what channel actually actually created that sale was it Facebook was it YouTube what was it it's a problem and nothing I've found out there can do it

and we've looked hard and we've looked into everything so instead we just built our own and now it's one of our best competitive advantages because we know for a fact where that thing came from

and that enables us to have better information that nobody else can get and it enables us to make better decisions clearer more accurate more factual scientific decisions that nobody else can make and when we make better

decisions than everyone else and act on better information than everybody else we get to beat everybody else and so this is something in it's cool because it's not just an advantage that someone's going to share in a Facebook

group and then it's gone because it's hard and it's costly it cost me more than a million bucks and it cost me about 18 months to build this thing right so another example

it's not a amazon advantage like because amazon has you know so much time invested so much money so many people so much complexity that they've conquered but it's still an advantage that's

that's been good enough to give me you know an edge on some of the competition and really what this is is it's asymmetric warfare and what asymmetric

warfare is is it's playing by different rules so in any game you if you've got a competitor then you don't want to play by the same rules as they are that's a

surefire way to lose because most of the time when you're a small business it's like David versus Goliath right you've got you don't have that much money you don't have that much manpower and so if you just play by their rules they're

going to absolutely demolish you so you've got to play by different rules that's the secret to it and that's what asymmetric warfare like is is about and

so examples of this is if everybody's doing that well then how can you do something else if everybody's doing Facebook Ads then maybe you want to look at doing something else or if everybody is in this niche

then maybe you should go into that niche or if everybody's doing it this way what if you do it this way you want to start looking at doing things differently and playing by different rules because when

you start to play by different rules you can defeat the enemy by ways they didn't know where possible and you can be much more efficient at it a perfect example of this is Emma's on versus Walmart you

know Jeff Bezos red made in America by Sam Walton awesome book if you haven't read it you got to read it I got a copy of it right here it's probably one of my

most favorite books of all time but likes the Jeff Bezos got the the inspiration and the idea to build Amazon

from reading that book and so he built a modern-day Walmart and that's what really Amazon is and if you read that book you'll see exactly what I'm talking about a lot of the DNA of Amazon was

extracted out of Walmart he basically made the online Walmart that's what Amazon is and it emma's on is now beaten Walmart and so they played by different

rules Jeff Bezos wasn't trying to make more physical stores and you know and be better at like operating physical stores in supply chain then Sam Walton and Walmart that's that would be a hard

battle probably a battle you don't want to do but what he did instead is he did it online playing by different rules and when you play by different rules it's much easier to defeat the competition

and that's what asymmetric warfare is so that pretty much brings me to the end of this video I just wanted to tell you about long term thinking you want to think long term in business if you want

to win think years ahead what you want to think five years ten years out and make decisions today and take actions today that are going to give you big

competitive advantage in the long term also moats think about your business does it have a competitive advantage that other people can't emulate or if

they try to emulate it is it hard and the third one asymmetric warfare what game are you playing who is your enemy and how can you change the rules of the

game and find their blind spot and get them so that's what this video is all about and if you implement the stuff like no one's talking about this stuff most of what people are talking about on the internet

when I check like Facebook which isn't very often for the for this reason but they're talking about things that everyone else is doing like all I use this funnel I run ads like this I'll put a chat bot

up oh yeah that small amount of money you've got left in your bank account put it into a Bitcoin right no one ever got rich doing that [ __ ] they actually lost their money and got their ass kicked so

you know what's popular is often wrong and what hasn't been done is often the things that make greatness so you know just become more of a contrary in like

don't just listen to everyone and what they're saying and what's popular and everything learn to think for yourself and think long term and think how you can get an edge and think how you can

get a competitive advantage in whatever it is that you're doing so that's it for this video if you liked this video just click that like button and also let me know what you think in the comment

section beneath I'm gonna be checking all of the comments myself personally and I'll reply to them myself so let me know what you think also click that subscribe button on YouTube to subscribe to my channel and get more videos like

this I release one each week thanks for watching and I look forward to sharing the next one with you soon