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My name is Mark Rubin, and I'm a dream weaver. I hope these widgets help you weave your dreams into reality. This story is about scaling, scaling empires. This case, I suppose, the business empire, but the Empire, they all right the same way. And I observed this by walking around on old roads around the world, and modeling how they were laid out the architecture of these things. And I talked about that on a couple videos before this one. But this one's specifically about about scaling businesses. This was around 2008. In 2007, I gone to Peru with a bunch of guys that are now my business partners, and were my business partners. In 2008, we bought our first business together, which was in New York, got junk business franchise, we realize that, that there are economies of scale, in every business, but in this business, in particular, the junk business because it's so simple, and it's easy to centralize certain things and make the business more efficient. Also, in this group, partnership group, we're all good at different things. So that's good to have a collection of people that together are better, you know, the whole was better than the sum of the parts. So we decided that together, we were going to continue scaling this franchise concept together and see see how far we could take it together. And I've always felt more like a watchmaker than an entrepreneur, mostly, because I don't enjoy the sales process. And I think to be a really good entrepreneur, for the most part is there's there's a component of sales as I don't like, can that I mean, the word is convincing. But like, I don't enjoy sales, I like to just to say how it is. And if someone agrees, great. And if they don't like I don't like to have counter arguments, like I've learned, I've never been successful. If I like convincing anyone of anything, ever. I've never seen anyone convinced anything, ever. They didn't already believe in advance, or they authentically agreed with in the end, they usually just give up. But I have seen people help people reach new conclusions. And that's really what sales is. And I don't like that this is not fun for me. So given all that I never really felt like like an entrepreneur, more like a tinkerer of watches because of the way I visualize business systems in this spatial way. It looks like machinery. And so in this case, in 2008, we my partnership group, and I the same guys, I wanted to prove it. We bought our first franchise together, and we started hatching plans to scale. And I wanted to mention about scaling specifically, as it relates to two things. First, is the way the bees scale their empire, which is that the they create a clone. And so the way it works in the bee world is if a beehive is very successful, and they gather so much money from their habitat, except they call it honey. And they stored in their money bank, except they call it the honey bank in the hive. And they're out of room. They have a choice to make. And the choice is, is it better to just stay here and maximize what we have? Or would it be better for half of the bees including the successful Queen Bee, the super smart, super successful Queen Bee, leave, go to a new spot rebuild, start over and the remaining bees in the hive will use the bank energy that's left behind on the bank, the money that's left behind or the bank honey was left behind to buy time to create a new queen who will begin laying eggs. And I believe that this cycle is 41 or 42 days from the from the time they leave. And then they make a new query and the time that queen is fertilized and can can lay new eggs. So they need 41 days worth of honey if my memories right on this one. And they have to be able to start over and the time of year. And there's times of the year that this is possible, which should be like early spring or maybe towards the peak of the in summer, which looks around here like maybe be like mid June. But in the winter, they can't do this because there's no flowers. So there's no energy source. If the bees leave, there's nothing to get. And that's the same thing as expanding a business into a new market where there's no money. So I'm going to compare this to business. So if I had a snow plow company, and I was doing great in the winter, and I decided on Right after the winter that I wanted to, like, open up in a new city next door, you know, 100 miles away. And I borrowed a ton of money and I bought a bunch of equipment. And I got an office and a bunch of people. And I parked them in his new office and I brought my new machines, they're all shiny and rate, burn through a lot of money till next winter, until it snowed again. And this is the inverse of the of the problem of it that the bees have in the summer. So every business has seasonality. And I talked about this on the podcast lessons from nature podcast. And I'm mentioning this as it relates to my experience in 2000, late which was before I discovered the BS, but I knew this conceptually in terms of money and business was about a scaling and Empire, scaling a business. And scaling a franchise in particular is the same thing as cloning DNA. So imagine a junk removal company in a market. And let's say it's successful, let's say it's the biggest best one. Now, the owner of that company can decide to to keep trying to scale in that market. Or would it be more strategic to get a foothold somewhere else and prevent another competitor from coming in, by capturing market share, or a be capturing honey share from the new market that they moved into, and all the competitors there. And I at this point in 2000, they believed that we had really good systems and tools in the gochujang business, both of the corporate level and also our local stuff was solid, our processes were solid, our technology was solid, our people were solid, we were coming off a recession. So this was the time to to double down and grow because other people were shrinking and failing. And what I'm trying to relate this scaling concept to is that the the human business of scaling a business into a new market. So essentially cloning all your processes, your procedures, your KPIs, everything that was working in market a you try to clone including the people if you can in market B so that you can recreate the efficiencies you have in market a and sometimes it takes a while to get the kinks out because the people are different. People are new, and usually training is usually not as well thought out as other things. So it takes a while to get people up to speed due to the lack of training. So this is a way to explain scaling as it relates to the bee business of making honey and the human business of making money.