Yeah. So and and there is a relationship there. Right? You two have heard me tell the story because early on when business went well and, you know, we the first company, the the first company I built was we sold it and I was still 20, and we sold the business for millions of dollars. And there was a time where I sort of felt guilty. Right, because it it came I I don't want this to sound wrong, but the business part came relatively easily for me. Most people were spending their whole lives trying to get success, and I was 20, and we already achieved that. So I was feeling, kind of a little bit guilty about that and guilty about, you know, making money or success early on until I discovered what we just talked about.
That, the well, you've heard me say this before. That women's shelter, when the woman was on the news, I did that whole thing anonymously. And so they were talking to this woman and they said, What happened? And she said, Some man just paid all our bills and took care of the house and everything. And she said, It was a miracle. Well, I was sitting home watching TV. They didn't know who who it was. And I was like, It wasn't a miracle at all. I'm just a hard worker. Because I work hard and run good business, I was able to help those women.
So I wrote down on my wall, I wrote, your success is someone else's miracle, right? Because I never made that connection. And that changed me starting to think there's no shame in life and making money. The shame is in not using it to help others. However, there's a fundamental truth. If we don't run a profitable business, I can't pay for that house for those women. So the truth is whether I like it or not, money solves some of the problems in the world.
And so that's when we I made that connection where the more let's go back to work, right? The more profitable businesses all of all of the GoBundits women build, the more lives they can change, right? So that matters. So that's why I've been focused for all these years on helping people and that's why I come to your events with you guys. We want more people. We want more of the women in your organization to build really successful profitable businesses because then we know they'll take some of their profits and they'll go make differences in other people's lives. So that's the importance of of profitability. If you scale your profits, you can scale your your health to people.
So let's talk about a couple of, the pieces per your question, that are critical to scale. And to be honest, I didn't know any of this stuff going forward. It's reverse engineering it later in life. Right? Later in life, looking back, because people would ask, like I said, pricesign.com and booking.com and Ubid, all these startups were little startups that became, whatever, multibillion dollar companies. And later people would ask, how did you guys do that? And so I went back and reverse engineered. We obviously, something we did worked. What was it? So going back and reverse engineering it, there are clearly some things, that you have to get right. Now I know that. I wouldn't have known that before we did it, but now that we proved it and it worked.
So the first one is the fact that that I get CEOs and founders and business owners that tell me, Jeff, I'm working harder than I ever had before and I'm working longer than I ever had before, but I'm not growing faster, my business. And the reason is because you're in the way. You you can't scale until you can let go. Quit. So my first piece of advice is the key to success is surrounding yourself with people smarter than you and getting out of their way, not working harder and longer, work less and spend more time. And it was the realization that real leaders don't create followers. They create other leaders. Right? Mhmm. That's your job. Stop running the company all the time and start dedicating a portion of your time to finding rock star people and teaching them how to rise past you.
I have always had people in my company, people would ask me a question, and I'd say, I don't know. Ask Angela. Angela is a real person who worked for me for four four different companies. And they would say, okay. But you're the CEO. And I said, I'm the guy that hired Angela. And they're like, but you don't know the answer? I said, are you kidding me? Angela's 10 times smarter than me, and this is her field, not mine. So go ask Angela. And I'll get criticized. You own the company, but you can't explain all the things that are going on. I said, nope. I absolutely cannot. I trust Angela completely. She's way smarter than me, and she's crushing it. If you have a question about her department, go ask Angela.
We didn't scale until I started finding spending time finding people way smarter than me and helping them become better leaders and then just getting out of the way. So that's the first thing, is it's not about you and quit making it about you. Start looking for a rock star team, Hand them things and trust them. And people sometimes tell me, well, it's hard to trust people I have. And you know what my answer is? Then get other people. Go find someone you trust. And you know what their answer to that is? Well, it's really hard. And I have an answer for that too. Guess what else is really hard? Winning. Right? If you wanna win and come out on top, you're gonna have to work harder than other people. Winning is hard. Being successful is hard. You're right. It's hard. So quit complaining about it and go do it. Spend time to find these rock stars, make them better leaders, get out of their way. And when you're not the bottleneck anymore, your company takes off.
So that's the first one. It's all about the strength of your team and it's your job to build, mentor, and nurture that team, not just to run the business.
I would say another one. We'll just do a couple for now. Another key to growth is to stop trying to be all things to all people. I I can't tell you the amount of times I hear, the one stop shop. We're gonna solve all of our customers' problems. If you go look at the and and by the way, that includes products and services too. Stop trying to do everything to achieve. We're talking about the question you asked, Kelly. How do I achieve growth? Later in life, you can do that.
So I'm gonna tell you quickly. I learned that, talking way back in the early days to Bezos because I said, ask Jeff. People forget that for almost seven years, you could only buy a book from him. And you know what he told me? He said one day, when I'm big, Amazon will be the marketplace of everything. But he said, right now, I just wanna be the best darn bookseller on the planet. Mhmm. And we took that to heart. We were trying to sell vacations and cruises, and we were like, we gotta be the best darn something, which is the thing, and everybody listening ask yourself this, if you have multiple products in the early stages or multiple businesses.
I hear that advice, multiple income, root streams of revenue and income stream. If you wanna live a nice comfortable life, go for it. That's what you'll get. But if you're trying to scale and turn a company, if you're not, don't don't listen to what I'm saying. But the people who said, how did you create multibillion dollar companies? It's because we listened to that lesson. We stopped selling vacations and cruises. And we said, What's the thing we know we can crush? For us, it was hotels. For Bezos, it was books. For, you know, my my friend, Tony Hsieh, unfortunately, God rest his soul, it was shoes. His company was Zappos. So all these people that scaled, said I'm gonna be the best darn something. And it was one product, one service, one company. Nobody that achieved that giant success did that by running four businesses or having one business that had six different products.
Pick I call that your gold medal product. Yep. Pick the product that is your gold medal, the one thing you know you can crush and ride that to growth later, right? So for almost seven years, only you could only buy a book from Amazon. You can only buy shoes from Zappos. They didn't add handbags, earrings, just like, Amazon. And in our case, we never even had to add anything else, right? The company is the world's largest seller of hotel rooms. It sells 20,000,000,000 a year worth of product and only has one product. You don't need to solve everybody's problem and provide be the one stop shop. We don't do that. We can't help you with your cruise. Personally, we can just get you a hotel room and get out of your way.
