Never Fully Read #9

🧠 Quotes that make you think:

• “If it’s important enough, I’ll make the time. If not, I’ll make an excuse.” - Marie Forleo, Everything Is Figureoutable

• "Your life right now is a result of what you did a year ago. Your life a year from now will be a result of what you do right now. Act accordingly" - Steven Bartlett

• "The biggest risk is not taking any risk..In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks" - Mark Zuckerberg

• “If you only ever did the things you don’t want to do, you’d have everything you’ve ever wanted.” - Mel Robbins, 5 Second Rule

• “One cannot step twice in the same river” - Heraclitus

• “Our need will be the real creator” - Plato

• Most of us have two lives: the life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance. - Steven Pressfield

🤖 Tech News This Week:

• 🧬 WHOOP® Raises $200 Million Financing Led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 at $3.6 Billion Valuation

  • WHOOP is now the most valuable standalone human performance company in the world. The past twelve months have been marked by rapid growth in WHOOP membership and additional product enhancements to its technology.

• ✂️ Barbershop technology startup theCut sharpens its platform with new $4.5M round

  • “Kush and I both had terrible experiences with haircuts, and decided to build an app to help find good barbers,” Omile said. “We found there were great barbers, but no way to discover them. You can do a Google search, but it doesn’t list the individual barber. With theCut, you can discover an individual barber and discover if they are a great fit for you and won’t screw up your hair.”

• 🎤 Callin, David Sacks' 'social podcasting' app, launches and announces a $12M Series A Round

  • "As live audio becomes more and more popular, co-founders David Sacks (former COO of PayPal and CEO of Yammer) and Axel Ericsson sought to combine social audio and podcasting into one seamless app. The resulting app — Callin — launches today on iOS with an announcement of $12 million in Series A funding co-led by Sequoia, Goldcrest and Craft Ventures, where Sacks is a founder and partner."

• 📞 Goodcall picks up $4M, Yelp partnership to answer merchant inbound calls

  • "Goodcall’s free cloud-based conversational platform leverages artificial intelligence to manage incoming phone calls and boost customer service for businesses of all sizes. Former Google executive Bob Summers left Google back in January, where he was working on Area 120 — an internal incubator program for experimental projects — to start Goodcall after recognizing the call problem, noting that in fact 60% of the calls that come into merchants go unanswered."

• 🌮 Taco Bell names Lil Nas X 'chief impact officer' in latest pop culture activation

  • “Taco Bell has appointed musical artist Lil Nas X as its "chief impact officer," an honorary position that will allow him to collaborate on the chain's development of its brand experience, per a press release.

  • In his first 60 days in the position, Lil Nas X will team up with Taco Bell to offer an exclusive experience surrounding the release of his upcoming album, help to launch new menu offerings and use his experience as a former Taco Bell employee to drive brand impact. The partnership begins with a breakfast campaign titled "Breakfast, In Bedtime Stories," which was also announced today, per details shared with Marketing Dive.”

• 📺 Netflix Turns to ‘Stranger Things’ for First Test of Gaming Strategy

  • "Netflix launched the first test of its plan to use mobile games to boost its core streaming-subscription business, with the introduction of two “Stranger Things” games for Android, available — for now — only to users in Poland."

📈 Trends Of The Week:

The Next Great Rollup Opportunity: Car Washes

• "Coldwater Capital nabbed No. 27 on this year’s Inc. 5000, generating ~$12.7m with a portfolio of 14 local car washes and an app called Coinless, which helps car washes switch to contactless payments.

• One of the biggest players -- Mister Car Wash -- IPO’d in June and has a market cap of ~$5.5B as of this writing. In March, they had 344 locations and $595m in net revenue over the previous year, with $76m in net income."

(Source)

Sports Equipment Rental Is Set To 🚀

“Bat Club USA (No. 326 on the Inc. 5000) generates $3.1m/yr. renting high-end bats and other baseball gear to parents.

Serious youth athletes (or more often, their parents) face constant pressure to buy new equipment as they outgrow gear, or as new technologies emerge offering them an edge.

You can also apply this model to other sports, like tennis, lacrosse, and field hockey, all of which are seeing increased participation, and all of which require expensive rackets and sticks.”

How sport participation is changing:

(Source)

🎤 Podcast Recommendations:

• Jimmy Wales - Wikipedia’s Real Genesis Story, The Questioning Mind, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show

  • “Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, on Wikipedia’s Real Genesis Story, Best Business Decisions, Understanding Financial Markets, Developing a Questioning Mind, and the Value of Optimism | Brought You Need A Budget.”

• Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory Hold Yourself ACCOUNTABLE and Take ACTION By Following These TIPS

  • “You are the most important person in your life that you need to impress. So, even if you are in a room with the president of the country, your mother, your boss, and your future spouse, there is no one more important to impress than yourself. If you’ve been here before you’ve probably heard it said, the only thing that matters is how you feel about yourself when you are by yourself. Can you trust yourself to show up and get things done when you say you’re going to? Or do you not believe yourself when you tell someone that you will be there or you will have this done for them by a certain date? It is critical to your future success that you earn trust and have credibility with yourself more than anyone else”

📚 Book I’m Reading:

• The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

  • “What's the secret to sales success? If you're like most business leaders, you'd say it's fundamentally about relationships - and you'd be wrong. The best salespeople don't just build relationships with customers. They challenge them.” (Link to book)

“What exactly does this mean?

It means approaching sales differently than you might’ve in the past. Rather than being apologetic about trying to sell to the customer, you’ll own the conversation. As a Challenger, you’ll have an in-depth understanding of your prospect's business and push back at the right moment to drive the customer toward making a decision.

In the study they conducted 40% of high sales performers primarily used a Challenger style.

• High performers were more than 2x likely to use a Challenger approach than any other approach.

• More than 50% of all star performers fit the challenger profile in complex sales.

• Only 7% of top performers took a relationship-building approach — the worst performing profile.”

  • (Source)

“Written in 2009, Moore’s provocative methodology was a startling revelation for many companies who were desperately trying to understand how to salvage their business during the “Great Recession.” A decade later, Challenger remains a popular adaptation of Moore’s methodology, encouraging sales teams to develop three essential skills:

1. Teach customers something new and valuable about how to compete in their market.

2. Tailor their sales pitch to resonate with the decision-makers’ specific issues and get buy-in from the entire organization.

3. Take control of pricing discussions by focusing on value and applying pressure to persuade buyers to close.”

• (Source)“The 5 types of Sales reps:

• The Hard Worker

• The Relationship Builder

• The Lone Wolf

• The Reactive Problem Solver

• The Challenger”(Source)

⏰ Timeless Insight:

&

Steven Bartlett: