Hey everyone, hope you’re having a great week!

It’s been a while since my last email, and a ton has happened. Today, I wanted to talk about something that I think every single business owner needs to be thinking about right now… which is getting your team to actually use AI.

This has been my biggest focus over the past few weeks, and I wanted to break down exactly what we’re doing.

The Problem

So here’s the thing. We’ve had AI tools available to our team for a while now. We have a Claude Team plan that everyone has access to. But when I actually looked at the usage, it was pretty bad.

A lot of people were barely touching it. Maybe using it once a week to write a quick email or something. That’s like buying a Ferrari and only driving it to the mailbox.

And I realized this is probably happening at most companies right now. You give your team the tools, you tell them, “Hey, use AI,” and then nothing really changes. The output stays the same. The hours stay the same.

It’s super frustrating because I know how much of a multiplier AI can be when you actually use it well.

What We’re Doing About It

So about 6 months ago, I brought on an AI implementer. Someone whose entire job is to get every single person on the team comfortable and productive with AI.

Here’s what that looks like:

1. One-on-one calls with every team member

This has been huge. Our AI implementer is hopping on individual calls with everyone on the team. Actual one-on-one sessions where they sit down, look at what that person does every day, and show them exactly how AI can make their specific job faster and better.

A video editor’s workflow is totally different from a recruiter’s workflow, right? So the training needs to be specific.

2. Getting everyone on Claude Co-Work and Claude Code

We’re pushing hard to get everyone using Claude’s newer tools beyond the basic chat interface.

Claude Co-Work is pretty wild for non-technical team members. It lets them work alongside Claude on real tasks in a more hands-on way.

And for our dev team, Claude Code has been a game changer. We’re seeing people write code and build things way faster than before.

3. Building custom skills and agents

This is where it gets really fun. We’re building out a ton of custom skills and agents specifically for our workflows.

Think of these as specialized AI assistants that know exactly how we do things at our company. We have agents for content research, recruiting workflows at Paired, and channel management at Academy.

Stuff that used to take hours now takes minutes. We’re building these out constantly and adding new ones every week.

4. The internal dashboard (this is the big one)

Here’s what I’m most excited about. We built an internal dashboard where we track everyone’s AI usage. And yes, there are leaderboards.

I think the accountability piece is super important. You can tell people to use AI all day long, but if you’re not measuring it, it’s just a suggestion.

So now we can see who’s actually using the tools, how often, and what they’re using them for. And the leaderboard gamifies the whole thing. People are naturally competitive, and nobody wants to be at the bottom.

The Goals

Here’s what I’m expecting in terms of output:

• 30% increase in output within the next few weeks

• 50% increase after that

• 100% increase, meaning doubling output, as people get more comfortable

• Long-term goal: 3x to 5x output per person

Is that aggressive? Maybe.

But honestly, when I look at how much time people spend on tasks that AI can do in seconds, I think it’s very realistic. The people who are already using it well are already seeing those kinds of gains.

Why Every Company Should Be Doing This

Look, I know hiring an AI implementer sounds like an extra expense.

But think about it this way. If you have a team of 20 people and you can get even a 50% productivity increase across the board, that’s like adding 10 people to your team without the payroll. The ROI on this is absolutely insane.

The biggest mistake I see companies making is treating AI adoption as optional or self-serve.

People need guidance. They need accountability. They need someone showing them exactly what to do with these tools in their specific role.

The one-on-one calls, the usage tracking, the leaderboards, all of that matters way more than just giving everyone a login.

If you’re running a business right now and you’re not actively pushing AI adoption across your team, you’re going to fall behind. It’s a matter of when, not if.

Start now, invest the time, and the returns will be massive. My company Paired Recruiting can help you guys find an AI implementor, just book a call with us here.

Hope this gives you some ideas for your own team!

Have a great rest of your week!

- Charlie

Top 5 AI Tools Every Business Owner Should Be Using (2026 Edition)

I just dropped this one and it ties perfectly into what I talked about above. I go over the 5 AI tools that I think are non-negotiable for business owners right now and show you exactly how we're using them.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke's AI memo on X

If you haven't seen this yet, go find it. Tobi posted an internal memo to his team saying that AI usage is now a "baseline expectation" at Shopify and that teams need to prove why AI can't do a job before requesting more headcount. He also made AI proficiency part of performance reviews. This is the direction every company is heading. The line that stuck with me... he basically said opting out of learning AI isn't a viable path forward. Agree 100%. If you're a business owner, this memo is worth reading in full.

Lessons from a Tough Month at Paired

My company Paired had a negative month in October, and I wanted to talk about some of the takeaways and lessons from a particularly stressful time in the growth of that business.

So if you’ve been following my Paired updates, you’ll know that generally the business has been great. The fulfillment side is dialed, and our incredible testimonials from clients mean that we can actually recruit really, really well. 

On the client acquisition side, this is currently where we are struggling a bit. We have organic running smoothly, bringing in a solid amount of our business. This comes from social media, YouTube, and our network. 

Our referral business is also strong and brings us great leads each month.

Now, the reason why Paired lost money last month was mainly for 2 reasons: delayed invoicing and increased marketing costs.

When a client hires someone, it usually takes a few weeks to pay. Some people haven’t paid us in months (we’re working to get outstanding invoices handled). So while we closed a solid number of roles in October, we didn’t collect as much as we wanted to.

Now, let’s talk about the increased marketing costs… one thing we’ve been trying to crush is paid ads. Yes, running ads on Facebook… something I never thought I’d do. But, I realized that if we want to scale and grow beyond a certain point, we absolutely need to do ads. Because the goal is to be able to set up a system where if we put in $1 in ad spend, we get $X in revenue. 

So far, our ads have not been profitable. We’ve been testing a bunch which means we are burning money. And it’s crazy because the performance of ads varies so much.

The creatives you use as well as the landing page both are incredibly important, and we’ve seen some creatives just perform atrociously whereas some perform much much better. So internally, our team has been scrambling to figure out this leakage of money. If we can solve this problem, our business will grow exponentially. But in the meantime, it does hurt to see so much wasted ad spend 🙁

These are growing pains that every company needs to go through if they want to scale beyond organic, slow growth.

Okay, so here are some takeaways from the month about business in general (and my media business):

• We’re growing different divisions within my media company. And we are rebranding to a better name! Goal is to build a media conglomerate in the education and lead gen space.
  

• I decided to shut down a couple projects we had invested time/money into. Focusing on better stuff.
  

• Brought on a couple new important hires to the media business - a full-time head of finance and GHL specialist. Both overseas positions.
  

• Realized I was blindly delegating too much stuff without following up properly and overseeing progress. Getting better at being more involved in operations.
  

• Realized I need to focus more on two things besides the above: filming and writing. For YouTube and for my newsletter and LinkedIn page. Two of the highest ROI activities I’ve been slacking on.

Overall, October was a memorable month. I also moved into 2 new houses and am splitting time between Los Angeles and Orange County! It was absolutely crazy and I am so glad that we’re mostly settled in by now.

Have a great rest of your week!

- Charlie

I Make $300,000/Month with 50 YouTube Channels

Asking IRONMAN Athletes What They Do For a Living!

5 Systems Every “Scalable” Business Needs

Looking back at the first few years of running my business, I have a lot of “oh my god, I can’t believe I did or didn’t do that” moments. As in, I was basically running around blindfolded, trying to grow a business that just couldn’t really grow.

Back in 2021 and 2022 I had hit a pretty hard ceiling in terms of my revenue. I was stuck and I know exactly why I was stuck… it’s because I didn’t have the right systems in place for my business to run without me and to actually grow.

So, let’s go over these 5 systems.

1. Content System

Your content system is how you get eyeballs on your service, product, or offer. Building a content creation system that runs by itself is one of the most important things you can do for your marketing.

Essentially, turning an idea into a fully finished video - that gets posted without your input.

This requires a big team - but once it’s running you’ll get infinite content, which means a steady flow of leads.

2. Sales System

Some businesses won’t need this, but if you have a course, offer, or service - then having a dialed sales system is crucial. The content system will generate leads, and the sales system will turn them into actual clients.

I run all my sales systems in HighLevel, where we create workflows and automations to effectively qualify and convert leads.

You’ll likely want to have some type of sales person on the team who is able to take calls - this is very, very important.

3. Finance Systems

Finances are the boring part of any business, but it’s crucial. Building out a team and systems for your company finances is very important. At my companies, I have a finance person who handles bookkeeping, invoices, 1099s, forms, and keeping track of income/expenses.

We have systems in place to communicate with the team to figure out who is owed how much based on deliverables, and it’s pretty streamlined. Set up this finance system once and you’ll save hours each week.

4. Fulfillment System

Being able to fulfill without your own active involvement is very important. As the business owner, you should not spend all your time on fulfillment- your team should be doing almost all of the heavy lifting.

Building out systems so that your clients and customers get GREAT service is incredibly important. It essentially transforms you from being a freelancer into having an actual business. The earlier you learn that you don’t need to fulfill everything yourself, the faster your company will grow.

You’ll need a ton of SOPs made, a COO, and reliable people in place for this to happen.

5. Hiring System

Hiring is one of the hardest parts of business. When you have hiring systems in place to find great talent, that’s when all the systems above work. With bad talent, your company is doomed.

You can create an in-house recruiting system using your own team, or you can rely on an agency to do it for you (my business Paired Recruiting does just that). 

But no matter how you actually find great talent, you must prioritize the hiring portion. Hire to grow. Grow so you can hire more people. Being able to rely on a system (or an agency) to intake 1000 applications and narrow it down to the best fit for the job should be one of your biggest priorities as CEO.

Hope this helps, and in future newsletters I’ll try to dive deeper into each of these. I also talk about this stuff a lot on my secondary YouTube channel called Charlie Talks Business.

Have a great week!

- Charlie

Quick side note: I’ve been using HighLevel to run every one of my businesses, and it’s easily one of my favorite tools of all time.

If you didn’t know, I run an overseas recruiting agency and a media company with multiple projects going on at one time. HighLevel powers all of them. From automations and pipelines to landing pages and contracts, it literally replaces 10+ tools we used to pay for separately.

It does have a learning curve at first since the platformit can do pretty muchalmost everything, but once you learn, it will change the way you look at every backend system. I made a full YouTube tutorial showing exactly how I use it across all my businesses. You can watch it here:

If you sign up through my link, you’ll also get $15K worth of templates, automations, and snapshots, plus free access to our private community with office hours and support.

— only my link gives you a 30-day free trial + completely free templates and bonuses!

Trust me, learning this platform is one of the best investments you can make in yourself as an entrepreneur. It’ll 10x your business by helping you automate follow-ups, simplify client communication, and build pipelines that handle the tough decisions for you. The result? A business that’s scalable, sustainable, and built to grow: and one that you can pass on to your clients and customers.

TL;DR: Every business needs to use HighLevel, but most aren’t.

Anyways, there’s my rant about HighLevel. Try it out if you haven’t yet!

- Charlie

P.S. I do make a commission if you sign up using my link. But you’ll get thousands of dollars of free stuff so my goal is really to overdeliver and reward my affiliates!

Interviews we did at my recent half IRONMAN race!

All my marketing knowledge packed into one video

It’s the beginning of Q4, which means Q3 is officially over. I wanted to take this time to reflect on some of the wins, and losses, of my own Q3. Hopefully you guys can take some inspiration (as well as learn what NOT to do haha).

We had some pretty big new projects that were launched Q3 this year - most notably doing a big push for some of my info products. We built a few new courses and communities centered around helping content creators monetize better, personal branding, and helping businesses do YouTube.

We also launched a full service agency called Done For You YouTube (I talked about this before) where we help strategize, edit, run, film, and manage YouTube channels for people. We have 1 client so far and it’s been going well! Here’s the link: www.dfy.yt if you want to check it out.

In terms of revenue, we’ve held pretty steady at what we are used to, maybe a slight uptick over the last couple months. Nothing too crazy here, but the expenses and payroll are certainly creeping up. A lot of projects and channels we are working on are still losing money, which is still completely fine with me. 

If you had told me a decade ago that I would be spending up to $30k to launch a single YouTube channel (and doing that many times over) with no guarantee of any income, I would’ve called you crazy. But that’s the norm now and it’s the level of risk I am willing to take. I’m very much operating on the belief that 80% of results will come from 20% of what we do. We’re determining what those 20% of things is, and while we have a good idea what they are, we’re trying to find more and more of those “20 percenters”. Finding these winners takes time, money, energy, and resources - and I’m okay with the losses of working on the “losers”.

For our courses and communities, sales are not good. I’ll admit that while I’m proud of the products themselves, having a super successful info product is something we haven’t been able to crack yet. I’ve built many offers, and as of right now the time spent on those has been a super low ROI. Definitely not worth my time. We are definitely too scattered and trying to launch too many at the same time. I’ve seen this bite me in the butt in the past.

But.. and here’s where the mindset comes in - I believe that if we keep cracking at it, we will identify and find one info product that does extremely well. It hasn’t happened yet, but with some grit and consistency, we’ll find it eventually. 

Over at Paired, we’ve been cooking on a lot of interesting stuff. The biggest project of this quarter has been completely revamping our website and branding, as well as hiring a head of growth to help us scale with paid media. These updates have been brewing for months now and we’re going to be ready to launch in the first couple weeks of Q4. I am beyond excited and very optimistic about Q4.

I realized that to scale beyond organic marketing is what takes a company to the next level. To scale Paired beyond what we’re currently doing, we need to spend on ads and we need to have really good ad creatives. This is how you unlock the magical phenomenon of a good ROAS. Then business becomes a math equation where you can scale by putting more money into ads, increase the fulfillment team, and repeat.

Revenue at Paired has held relatively steady and while we didn’t have any record months, it’s been sufficient to keep hiring, building, and investing back into the business. Jeff and I also began taking payroll this quarter! $2,000 per month salary for each of us, which is more of a formality and requirement of having a C Corporation.

In Q3, I trained for and finished a half Ironman race, travelled to Mexico City, and overall had a great time. We also signed the lease on an office in Jakarta, a new office in OC, and a house in LA!

Excited for Q4, and I hope you guys are too. Q4 is usually a pretty exciting time for everyone, and I am looking forward to celebrating the holidays with family and friends.

Hey everyone, hope you’re having a great week! 

I wanted to give you an update on some new stuff I’m working on in the media side of the business.

I made $9,000 last month with a new service I launched called Done For You YouTube. Here's a rundown of the service, what I did, and how I got my first client.

So first, a bit of background of what the service is:

We essentially are a done for you service helping business owners get on YouTube. We do everything - scripting, strategy, editing, revisions, thumbnails, A/B testing, titles, descriptions, channel creation + management, even finding a host + filming if needed.

So a couple months ago I thought, what service can I offer that people ACTUALLY want and that I could fulfill with my existing team?

In talking to my business owner friends, it seemed that everyone wanted to do YouTube, but no one wanted to or knew how to run a channel.

Then I realized that I already had a huge team that could fulfill this service for others. We have essentially been doing this same exact service (but internally for my own channels) for years.

Voila. It was perfect.

So, we got the website and infrastructure up and running really quickly, and I posted a story on my Instagram.

3 "sales calls" and 1 ended up becoming a client.

$2k setup fee, $7k per month retainer.

In my opinion, this is a steal. It's cheaper than hiring one full time video editor in the US. It's also a lot of work to coordinate and run a full team to run a YouTube channel.

The numbers work because my team is mostly overseas. I actually don't make too much profit so I'm bumping up pricing starting now for new clients. Economies of scale and a large existing team/infrastructure are what make it possible with these numbers though.

Just thought I'd share a little behind the scenes of some new stuff I'm building. I’d always used to get interesting ideas seeing what other founders were working on behind the scenes, so hopefully this gets your brain juices flowing - you might be able to think of a service that fits perfectly with your existing team. 

In other news, I finished my first Ironman 70.3 Triathlon this past weekend! Made a trip to Santa Cruz, CA and got to enjoy a beautiful day swimming, biking, and running. Finished the race in 6 hours and 36 minutes which was a bit disappointing but it was such a cool day. My friends, girlfriend, and family were there to support me and it made me super grateful for my circle.

Quick side note: I’ve been using Omnisend a lot lately and it’s hands down one of my favorite tools for email and SMS.

If you’re a business owner who has been thinking about setting up email automations to get more out of your customers, I can’t recommend it enough.

Here’s the thing:

Automations = 2% of emails but result in 37% of sales

For most businesses, I recommend getting the Standard plan since it gives you 6,000 emails. That way, your welcome flows, cart reminders, and follow-ups can keep sending out without limits.

Plus you get access to all the templates and features that make your emails look clean, which means people are more likely to read and engage with it.

Use my special link below to get started:

^ Use code CHARLIECHANG30 to get 30% off your first 3 months!

This past week, I’ve been filming a lot of ads. Yup, ads - something I never thought I’d be doing. Paid media, Facebook ads - featuring my face. 

A little bit of context - we hired a Head of Growth at Paired (my overseas recruiting company) and one of the main initiatives we are launching is paid media.

We spent 2.5 years growing the company completely organically, using word of mouth, referrals, and social media. Since we’ve basically capped out at about 100k per month in revenue from organic, now we know we need to tackle paid media. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to really scale the company.

I wanted to talk about some of the things I’ve learned thus far in this paid media initiative - hopefully it can help you guys out in whatever business you’re building.

1. Paid media is all about testing

We are testing out a lot of creatives. The cool thing is that our ad creatives are not too hard to produce. In fact, it seems as if most “under-produced” ads are outperforming high production value ads.

For videos, we are doing a lot of selfie videos just talking to the phone camera. My founder and I are just giving context, our offer, and connecting it to the audience. A cool trick is recording a bunch of different hooks, and AB testing those. Simply replace all the hooks one by one, keep the same body, and you can also experiment with different call to actions.

For example - 3 different hooks, paired with 1 body, and 3 different CTAs would result in 9 variations.

We’re also experimenting with static ads. Low production pictures (e.g. of a post it note) as well as text message conversation screenshots. Lots of random stuff like that. You really have no idea what is going to resonate and perform well until you try it.

2. Don’t try to do it yourself

You should absolutely learn the fundamentals, but there is no way a beginner is going to crush it without a lot of failed ad spend. 

Hire an agency, hire a key person with ad experience within your business - doesn’t matter. This is the shortcut and I highly recommend you guys do this instead of trying to run it yourself.

3. Be patient

It’s really a numbers game, and a math game. ROAS and all these metrics help make informed decisions about which ones to pump. But the unfortunate thing is that with ad fatigue and changing markets, what works today won’t work forever. So it’s like a constant battle of ad variations and coming up with new concepts.

We haven’t even fully launched yet and I’m already feeling impatient! I know this paid media game is a long road to get right, but I’m excited for the results.

And a quick note before I forget - make sure you have enough money to test ads. You’ll burn lots of money at the beginning so keep that in mind. Over time the algorithm will get smarter and be able to optimize for your desired outcome and audience.

Business is super like being in school for the rest of your life. I feel like a student every single day and that isn’t me just saying it for this article. Every time I go to sleep, I think to myself woah I learned some cool shit today.

P.S. Paired has room to take on a couple new clients this week. If you’re looking to hire overseas talent, you know where to find us: www.paired.so

Hope you’re all doing great - it’s been a while since my last email. Today, I wanted to talk about something that’s super important for anyone that’s trying to make a lot of money in their lifetime.

The art of being different.

Being different itself isn’t necessarily good, because there’s a reason why a lot of society follows certain rules, traditions, etc.

But what I can tell you is that those rules and traditions don’t govern how rich you’ll get. They won’t help you get there. 

Why?

Because since everyone follows those rules and traditions, it’s now an “average” way of life. It will help you blend into the crowd, but it won’t help you get ahead.

And I assume the top 1% is where most of you reading this want to be at some point.

To be in the top 1% in the US, you’ll need a net worth of about $13 million.

It’s a high number, but it’s easier than most think. But to reach it, you do have to be different in many ways.

If you did the most average actions every day, I think we’d all agree that it would make sense that you’d end up living an average life. And the median net worth for people in the US is about $140,000.

So essentially, you need to 100x that to be in the top 1%.

After I graduated from college, I quickly realized that a normal life wasn’t the right fit for me. I also realized that if you have big audacious dreams, most people won’t understand them. So as a result, you’ll lack the support you’d want from those around you.

This is evident in the way that others view a lot of non-traditional moves in life. If it’s not the norm, then it’s immediately frowned upon in a sense. It can be the right move for you, but it’ll be the wrong move in everyone’s eyes.

I think the framework that I try to follow these days is this: if other people aren’t willing to take the risk, I should take the risk. The reason I like this is because it fits perfectly into life.

There’s a lot of things where yes, we should do what other people do. Those aren’t generally risky things.

Now, the risky things I’m talking about include:

1. Betting on your business

2. Wearing clothes that you like, even if others don’t

3. Starting side quests

4. Learning things that most people won’t learn

5. Putting money into riskier investments

6. Hiring that new team member

7. Trying out a new vertical inside your current business

8. Building a new project that could or could not fail

9. Taking the leap and talking to that person you’ve always wanted to talk to

In each of these cases, there is something to lose. There is risk involved. And yeah - that’s why most people don’t do these things. Things fail all the time, and that’s part of it. But the universal rule in life seems to be this: If you take calculated risks, you’ll lose a lot. But the things you win in will more than make up for the losses.

Hopefully this resonates with you - I know that calculated risks tend to be different than what others are doing because of that element of risk. The fear of losing.

Get over that fear and you’ll crush it. 

Everything great in my life is non-traditional. My career, the way I make money, my friends, my day-to-day, my outlooks on life. Everyone should have more non-traditional actions and thoughts, that’s just my opinion.

Cheers to living a life that doesn’t need to be so normal :)

First off - I want to say my apologies for not sending out an email for the last few weeks! It has been absolutely insane with travel and I have a lot of cool stuff I want to share. 

Traveling all over Asia, New York, and now Portugal has taught me a lot of important lessons and I’ll begin to share those over the next few weeks.

In today’s email I wanted to first talk about AI and AI search.

A couple weeks ago, my friend sent me a screenshot of his ChatGPT search query. He had asked ChatGPT what the best way to get to and from Las Vegas was. And lo-and-behold, my video popped up as a reference.

This got me thinking - ranking on AI search is the new SEO.

Instead of traditional SEO, where the goal is to rank on the first page of Google, the new gold standard is to rank on ChatGPT.

Can you imagine how crazy it would be if someone searched up “What is the best mobile car detailer in Los Angeles?” and your own business was linked in the answer? That would be insane.

I think that’s the direction that search is headed in.

Instead of searching on Google, seeing thousands of results, and manually clicking on 5-10 results, now people will just ask ChatGPT and get a direct answer.

I guarantee that in 10 years, people will think we were crazy for having to look at multiple sources when searching on Google. That’s the dinosaur method now.

So- what does this mean?

It means that it’s going to be really, really tough for SEO. There’s only 1 spot and there’s going to be a lot of competition.

Now obviously, you have no shot at ranking on ChatGPT if you don’t rank on Google. So you need to chase traditional SEO rankings as well. But this is just going to be the new way of staying relevant when it comes to search.

The question is then- how do you rank on ChatGPT? How do you get ChatGPT to recommend your website over others?

Here’s my take: it’s going to be a combination of traditional SEO (backlinks, web authority, etc) and video content (get ranked on YouTube). I think ChatGPT has a much easier time recommending a video rather than a blog article. It just feels more genuine and video has a much higher perceived value.

I think AI will recommend non-AI generated content by personal brands more. In a world where creating content is super easy now, it’s looking for actual videos by actual people with actual personal experience on a subject matter. AI-generated garbage is pretty useless and will never be recommended on ChatGPT.

This whole AI-search thing will transform how people ask questions and get answers online. It’s really going to consolidate the whole process and save people a lot of time. But that means that the search industry will definitely be interrupted heavily.

Btw - just launched Smart Affiliate - my new program teaching people how to make millions with affiliate marketing. It covers the exact way I structure my affiliate marketing business and scale it without being in videos (never shared this before and I’m only letting people who are serious into the program). To learn more, go to: https://smartaffiliate.yt/start-now

Quick side note: I’ve been using Omnisend for a while now, and it’s honestly become one of my favorite tools for email and SMS marketing.

If you’ve been meaning to scale your emails (or finally start), I highly recommend checking it out. 

Here’s why:

• Their platform is super intuitive, powerful enough for current marketers, and easy to pick up for first-time users.

• Tons of email tools built for ecommerce and small business owners (e.g. segmented campaigns for higher conversions, automated workflows for abandoned carts, and A/B testing for optimized results).

• Lets you automate abandoned cart flows, welcome emails, and product follow-ups in minutes

• They have tons of templates that actually look good (a big part of email marketing is the aesthetic)

Use my exclusive link to get started with Omnisend's email & SMS marketing plan for FREE:

^ Use code CHARLIECHANG30 to get 30% off your first 3 months!

Data, data, data. A word that everyone knows, but not a lot of people pursue. Here’s what I mean by this:

Everyone knows that data is good to have. The more data you have, the more informed your decisions can be. Data influences what we know, and allows us to take more precise action.

That being said, data is also a tedious process. It’s hard to collect data and it takes effort.

Fortunately, it’s getting easier and easier to collect and present data. There are tons of AI tools available that can automate data collection (this saves our team hundreds of hours a month) and there are tons of services out there too that can help you collect data.

This past week, I decided that I was finally going to get a blood test so that I could get 100+ different tests run. Testosterone, food allergies, biomarkers for heart/immune/disease, stress, aging, and a ton more. For decades I’ve just been okay with “feeling okay” rather than actually seeing what the data is.

And believe me, this is a big step for me. I am super afraid of needles and blood, so doing this test took a lot of mental preparation. If a scaredy-cat like me can convince myself to get a blood test, it’s for a really really good reason.

The service I’m using is called Function Health. I found out about them through a ton of different entrepreneurship podcasts, so it really seems to be the go-to health testing service for business owners and fitness freaks. It’s $499 a year, so $42 a month, and comes with multiple lab tests, clinician reviews, and tons of data. I HIGHLY recommend it - it has been a breeze and it has saved me thousands of dollars. Doing all these tests separately outside of insurance would cost about $15,000. So it’s a great deal.

This post is not sponsored by them lol but feel free to use my referral link if you want to give it a shot: https://bit.ly/functionhealthtest

Anyways, I’m waiting for my results to come in and will keep you guys updated. With this data, I can change my eating habits if needed, as well as pretty much every other habit or decision I make on a day-to-day basis. This data is going to be invaluable for helping me live longer and at my peak performance. And I’m super excited!

This got me thinking about the other data that my business could (and should) be collecting and interpreting. While AI sometimes hallucinates when interpreting data, it is currently supreme at collecting it.

So we are using platforms like Browse and Make to set up automated data collection for our YouTube channels, as well as key performance metrics within our team. Having to input data manually has some positives (like ownership) but it just isn’t feasible with the amount of data we should be looking at.

This applies to businesses of all sizes - so even if you have a smaller business, I would recommend getting more data. It will help you make better business decisions.

In this video, I discuss how I structure my 50-person media team. Subscribe to this channel for more intermediate/advanced business topics!

This past weekend, I went to Miami for the Grand Prix Formula 1 race - met up with a lot of entrepreneurs who are extremely successful, and I wanted to share my takeaways from all the conversations we had.

When I say that masterminding is important - I really mean it. Every time I go on a trip and spend multiple days with other successful people, I learn a lot. It really is so exciting getting to talk to others about what’s working for them, how they’re running their business, and challenges they’re facing. And since this entire trip was a work trip, you can bet I had a ton of interesting conversations.

Let’s start with my greatest takeaways - lessons that I think anyone can learn from. Of course, it hits differently when you get to experience these first-hand, but it’s definitely still useful to read about.

1. Content is king. Content really drives so many businesses out there, and I got a look at how people are funneling people from their social media to their offers and businesses. You don’t need to have a personal brand as a business owner, but you sure as hell can’t argue at its effectiveness. A personal brand can drive insane organic leads for almost any type of business. If you look at how a lot of social media entrepreneurs make content, you might think they’re flexing all the time or just saying controversial things for the sake of it. There’s a lot of thought behind their content strategy, and I just really had this point reinforced while on this trip.

2. The art of clipping. Clipping = paying people to cut up clips of your interviews and content, and repost them on multiple channels. I’m not a fan of this as I think it’s ruining the internet (it will definitely ruin the internet in the next year or two) but it’s definitely effective. A thing I learned is that you should try to run this “in-house” - meaning you should build out your own team of internal clippers rather than just paying $X per 1,000 views. When the incentives are only based on view count, people will clip the most insane things you say. Being able to control the narrative is important, and when external clippers eventually stitch up things in a way that is harmful to your reputation (it’s bound to happen) then things will go sour. So if you want to go the whole personal brand strategy - film, vlog, and get as much content out there as possible.

3. Sales teams. Every entrepreneur with a sales team is crushing it. Whether you sell a service, or info product, or anything else - if you have a sales team it means you must be doing well. The hard part of course is getting leads - but if you have a personal brand or ad strategy, then it can get those appointments filled. I’ll be trying to really build a sales team this year, and as long as I can get leads, then you should have a great business.

4. Be less frugal. Miami is on the outer end of spending habits - meaning everyone spends a LOT of money. Being surrounding by this was motivating in a way, because usually I’m quite frugal. Seeing money spent as if it were worthless is very interesting because it allows you to view it as being able to be regenerated easily. People in Miami spend as if the money will come back and continue being made. I have a more conservative approach usually, but it was cool to see this type of mindset. So I’ll be trying to be a bit less frugal going forward (because I can with my income).

5. Miami isn’t the place for me to live, but I think it’s a fun place to visit and get inspired in short spurts. It’s a very interesting city, with lots of fake (and real) flex-ers - but the “get money” energy is real and there are a lot of great entrepreneurs in the city. I’ll try to visit more to soak this energy in.

Those are 5 of my takeaways from the weekend. Formula 1 was fun (and very loud), I’m tired as hell from no sleep, but now I’m home and ready to get back on the grind. You can really tell when you put a pause on your health (no working out or eating right) that your energy levels take a dip, so it’s back to the gym for me.

Hope you get some value from these takeaways!

How I Grew from 0 to 100K Subscribers in 5 Months (Nobody Teaches This)

She built 3 companies worth $100M+...now she’s sharing her best ideas

Earlier this week, I cold DM’ed someone on Instagram asking to collab. This person is a very successful entrepreneur, living in a $20M house and 10+ supercars - I say that not to make it sound vain, but this person truly has set up a life of financial success.

Within a few minutes of sending the message, he responded. I responded back, and he asked for me to give him a call. I called him, and we agreed on a deal and a day for the collab.

What took most people 2-3 days to do, took about 15 minutes.

The best entrepreneurs move with speed - and I know you’ve heard this multiple times already but I really wanted to talk about how and why they do everything in life with speed. 

This is a phenomenon I think about a lot. I interact with a wide range of people, and I usually try to spot the differences in how people are versus their “success”.

Usually, the 3 main factors are:

1. Curiosity

2. Speed

3. Action

Yeah, there are a bunch of factors too (like risk-taking) but these ones are universally present.

Curiosity in new things, speed in everything they do, and of course actually doing things instead of just saying you’ll do it.

The most broke people in life are really, really slow at things. They feel like they have all the time in the world, and there’s little to no urgency in their actions.

Successful people value their time, and value other people’s time. That’s why they move really quickly, and with lightning precision.

It’d be unfair for me to say that speed and financial success are caused by one another, but they are certainly correlated. And of course, not every successful person moves with speed either.

Exceptions always exist, but the correlation is very clear.

You also have to realize that not every broke person moves slowly. Some broke people don’t have a broke mindset and are on track to be successful - these people move fast. But also, I can almost guarantee you that someone who has been broke for many many years, probably is slow. 

If you’re reading this, I encourage you to go about life with this mindset. Be fast not just at the things you say, but at the things you do. There is a huge difference, and when you know that the most successful people in the world are moving with speed, that should make you want to move with speed too.

this is how i launch a new company (step by step guide)

I Left The U.S. For India And Built A $23M Burrito Business

Something I’ve been struggling with is feeling a bit overwhelmed with the amount of projects I have going on, businesses to run, and things to learn or do. And when you balance that with hanging out with friends, it feels even more impossible!

I’m sure many of you deal with something similar - if you’re motivated and like to do a lot of things, it can definitely feel overwhelming.

Here’s what I have found works well for me:

1. Systems. Obviously, you need to have systems and SOPs in place. No matter how big your team is, you need to have things documented so that other people can help you. If you don’t have this, you don’t have a business - you have a job. So my number one tip - document, teach, and hire others to help you run things.

2. Manage. Managing different projects and team members also takes a lot of brain power, time, and energy. You should have managers on your team that can help you manage your team because I’m sure you can’t (especially if your team is big). Build systems with your managers so that they can manage the rest of your team.

3. Time block. Set aside specific time to do specific tasks - that way you’re not bouncing around aimlessly and reacting to things. Use Google Calendar or whatever works for you - and put some deep work session blocks and what you’re working on in each. This allows me to hold myself accountable, and I can use it as a checklist for the most important tasks that need to be done on a certain day.

4. Save TV watching for when you eat. When you do this, it’s like multitasking - just be sure to not continue watching TV for too long after you finish eating!

5. Meditate. Take 3-5 minutes a day to calm your nervous system down, relax, and realize that we’re all just on a spinning ball of rock in outer space, and nothing needs to be as serious as it seems.

Many of you reading this are blessed (or dare I say cursed) with a desire to be the best version of yourself. And you’ve probably realized that to be the best version of yourself, you can’t spend your day doing a lot of the things “normal” people do. There are just not enough hours in the day, and to have an extraordinary life it really is necessary to do actions that are not ordinary. Inputs equal outputs, and it doesn’t take a math whiz to know that we need more inputs to be the best version we can be.

If there’s something I can say - I’d say stop comparing yourself to others as cliche as that is. Be the best version of yourself that you can be, without any external forces muddling what you ACTUALLY want. Only you can understand yourself, and at the end of the day it’s a you vs you battle.

Inside Faze Clan’s $2.5 Million/Month Empire

We Sold Our Business For $180M, Now We're Building Again (With AI)

Let’s talk about tools and software - an integral part of how I run my businesses.

I spent 2 hours trying to list off every single piece of software my team and I use to run my businesses, and boy - after reading through this list I’m speechless at how long it is.

Please note - just because a tool is on this list doesn’t mean you should use it. Every business is different, and businesses at different levels aren’t going to use the same things.

There are also countless alternatives for each of these use cases, but we’ve landed on these specific tools.

• ClickUp (for task management)

• HighLevel (for pipelines, CRM, automations, calendar bookings, funnels, and much more)

• Slack (team comms)

• Google Workspace (team emails)

• CapCut (short form video editing and translations)

• Loom (screen recordings)

• Frame.io (video editing collab and storage)

• Hubstaff (time tracking)

• Deel (contracts and payroll)

• Payoneer, Wise, PayPal (payments)

• Mercury (business bank account)

• Quickbooks Online (bookkeeping)

• Paired (does all my hiring for the media business)

• Submagic, Opus (short form edits)

• Canva Pro (PDFs/Design)

• Webflow (website)

• Kajabi (online course platform)

• Google (docs, sheets, etc)

• LinkedIn Recruiter (for Paired)

• n8n, Browse AI, Make (AI automations)

• Hostinger (VPS, web hosting)

• ChatGPT (research, outlines, corrections, general AI assistant, image generation)

• Typeform (fillable forms)

• Notion (our second task management tool, outlining online courses, etc)

• Northwest Registered Agent and Bizee (business formation)

• TubeBuddy and VidIQ (helpful YouTube creator tools)

• Beehiiv (newsletter)

• Artlist, Motionarray, and Epidemicsound (stock footage)

• Omnisend (email marketing)

• ADP, Gusto (domestic payroll)

• SeekOut (AI recruiting software)

• Riverside (remote podcast recording)

Some people like to stay super lean with the amount of tools they use - and I agree, keeping track of all these tools is hard. But when you do it correctly every tool you onboard should make your team MORE productive, not bog them down.

Let’s say we assign a 3x multiplier to my set of tools I pay for. That means, with a team of 70 people, they should be able to have the output of 210 people (without tools). Pretty solid ROI right?

That’s the whole purpose of tools, to make everyone’s life easier. I suspect as AI becomes more and more powerful, we’re going to see AI versions of all these tools. Soon, you’ll be able to do any task way faster than you can now.

Now, for the cost:

The cost for the tools I listed range from a few dollars a month to about $5k a month. Yup - LinkedIn Recruiter + Job Slots really costs our recruiting agency that much money 🙁

Lots of these tools cost more or less depending on how big your business or what your use case is. For example, I pay about $200 a month for our Google Workspace accounts (having different emails for the team, etc).

Anyways, hope this list was helpful in some type of way. It’s also interesting to see the tech stacks that people use to run their businesses, and this should give you some insight as to how we run our businesses.

The Marketing Tool That Replaced Half My Software

I used to bounce between five different tools just to send emails, follow up with leads, and book calls. It was frustrating and messy. Then I found HighLevel. I’ve been using it ever since.

• You can set up automatic follow-ups by email and text

• Everything’s in one place: email, CRM, bookings, funnels, all of it

• You can build pages and courses with simple drag-and-drop tools

• It even has an AI that answers calls and messages for you

• It works great when you’re just starting out and keeps up as your business grows

If you’re still jumping between apps or losing leads, this might be the thing that saves you a ton of time.

MCP Explained in 31 Minutes (Without The Hype)

The ONLY GoHighLevel Tutorial You Need 2025: How to Use High Level For Beginners!

The US tariffs have been crazy!

Auto sales are on a 'roller coaster ride' as tariffs are expected to increase prices

Stocks fall after day of wild swings as markets digest Trump's tariff reality

In March, my company Paired closed the biggest deal of my life - placing an incredible amount of talent for 1 client of ours.

With a few days left in the month, we finished fulfillment and our team was finally able to take a breather - phew!

Now, I can’t say much because we are NDA’ed up the booty - but the way we found this client was actually through LinkedIn.

Yes - my frequent posts on LinkedIn actually resulted in a 6 figure payout on ONE SINGLE DEAL. If that doesn’t encourage you to post more content, then I don’t know what will.

That’s why if you’re a founder, I think one of the highest ROI tasks you should be doing is bringing in new business. Marketing, content, outreach - these all bring in new clients or customers.

And if you actually look at my LinkedIn posts - they’re not incredibly good. They take me about 15 minutes per day to write - and yes it is me writing all the posts. I don’t outsource writing and don’t plan to ever (especially on this email).

The thing is - I showed up consistently and wrote posts, even though the leads we got from LinkedIn were pretty sparse. I’ve definitely wondered at times if it was worth it to keep posting, but then things like this deal happen which make me VERY grateful I stuck with it.

You honestly just don’t know when that one person will see something at the right time and place, and use your services.

Or, it will just keep you in their mind as the “go-to” person for a certain type of service. And if they happen to need that service, they’ll think of you first. Voila.

By taking an omni-channel approach to content, we’re able to really generate a steady stream of leads and business. Without the marketing, there’s really zero business. Just a team that is ready to handle, but doesn’t get the opportunity to. Sad 🙁

So here’s a breakdown of our current business lead generation:

YouTube - 1-2 leads per day

Cold email - we got our first client! Only tried a small batch but it’s looking real good based on our current test

Referrals - up to 1 per day

Existing customers - a few per week!

LinkedIn - every once in a while

Social Media - comes and goes in waves (when I post)

Cold calling - no clue yet as we haven’t started, but this is something we are about to do!

Paid media - no idea yet but we plan to start this in late April or May

Advisor - we just brought on an advisor who will help us out and send us leads!

Jeff (my co-founder) and I spend all of our time figuring out new systems and channels to install, so that we can get more clients. I enjoy doing this, as you really have no idea what will and what won’t work. It’s sorta like the lottery.

I hate gambling but I guess you could say that I enjoy risk when I’m in control of most of the outcome.

Anyways, that is what happened over at Paired and I’m only sharing these details with you. Please keep them to yourselves if possible!

This weeks article is on the shorter side, but wanted to give an update on how we are getting leads at my company. I think this is really valuable for business owners, especially those running service based agencies - however it does apply to any type of business!

Asking Young Ecom Entrepreneurs How to Become Successful

We Asked Young Millionaires in Singapore How They Got Rich

It wasn’t until pretty recently where I realized that starting a business wasn’t only to make cash flow. As a primarily YouTube-focused media company with high margins, I had grown accustomed to building businesses to generate cash.

Each month, hundreds of thousands of dollars would come in - and a big portion of it would be profit.

This was great for my lifestyle and investing - I was able to get a nicer apartment, cooler cars, and invest a lot more money.

However, there was a big catch - while I was generating cash flow, I wasn’t generating any equity.

And in addition to that, I was paying a f*ck ton in taxes. Like, 7 figures a year.

Let’s talk first about the lack of equity - because it’s actually a pretty big issue for lots of newer entrepreneurs.

When you think about a business, you think about the profit it brings in, as well as the ability to sell it. If you can’t sell it, you really don’t have “real” business. And what I realized was that my main YouTube channel (Charlie Chang) was entirely based on my own personal brand.

This means that it’s impossible to sell unless I stay on as the main contributor. And knowing me, there’s zero shot I would work for someone else and be okay with it.

So in building up this portion of my media business, I was wasting a lot of time. You see, most business owners who strike it BIG do so by selling their company. And well, that wouldn’t be me if I kept at what I was already doing.

So that’s where I pivoted - I started creating new channels that were not based on my own personal brand - channels that could eventually be sold in the future. I’m not planning on selling them as there is still so much work to do (getting them monetized properly) but it definitely is an option in the future.

Now that we have a large catalog of channels, I could package them up in the future and sell it to a new operator. Woohoo!

To diversify even more, I knew I had to get out of YouTube only. You never know when you’re reliant on a platform - something could happen and my income could basically drop to zero.

So in 2023, my business partner and I started Paired, an overseas recruiting agency. With this business, I actually make no money. We haven’t paid ourselves a single cent in over 2 years!

However, we’re becoming profitable and therefore I have high hopes that this business can be sold within 4-7 years timeframe. Our best month so far was about 45k in profit, although this past month has seen a pretty big dip. Agencies aren’t the best type of business to sell as you can’t get a high multiple on sale - compared to a tech business for example.

Here’s a little “mindset” shift that definitely influenced me: Building and selling businesses allows you to leverage “multiples” to your advantage. If you can spin up a company that generates $1M in net cashflow, you can sell it for let’s say 3-8x. This means you’re fast forwarding 3-8 years of cashflow and getting it all at once. If you’re good at this, you can repeat this in a new business, sell after a few years, and keep this cycle going.

Of course it’s easier said than done, but with this type of build and sell mentality, you should be able to increase your assets at a much faster pace than if you were to just continue running the business and never starting another. This isn’t taking into account if your cashflow were to increase year over year, which is definitely possible. As well as if you pour resources into a new business that doesn’t end up working out.

I’ve been trying to keep this in mind with new projects that I start - making them not tied directly to me and really just trying to operate as a real business owner rather than an “influencer”. 

Best formula in my opinion for influencers? Get an audience, and then build an equity-focused business using your audience as free marketing.

That way you can have the best of both worlds - a solid cash flow business (your “influencing”) paired with equity in a real business.

I Worked Out Like David Goggins for 100 Days

The ONLY GoHighLevel Tutorial You Need 2025: How to Use High Level For Beginners!

The Email Marketing Tool I Wish I Used Sooner

Most businesses are losing out on revenue because their email marketing is either outdated, clunky, or just plain ineffective. I’ve been there.

Nowadays there are so many online email marketing platforms, but the one I recommend (and personally use) is Omnisend.

Here are just a few thins you can do with their platform:

• Automate sales on autopilot – Emails & SMS that actually convert

• Target the right people at the right time – Smart segmentation that boosts revenue

• Seamless integrations – Works effortlessly with Shopify, WooCommerce & more

• Proven email templates – No more guesswork, just high-converting emails

• Scales with you – Whether you’re just starting out or hitting 7+ figures

If you’re still relying on generic email blasts, you’re leaving money on the table.

I hired my first overseas team member in late 2020 - a video editor from the Philippines. To this day, he still is one of my editors.

Now, since then, I’ve built a team of close to 70 people - with most of them living in countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, Argentina, South Africa, China, and more.

I cannot stress how impactful building a worldwide team has been for me and my businesses. And if you’re reading this, I hope you’ll understand just why you need to start hiring overseas, ASAP. Like, right now.

Let’s go over the reasons:

1. If you’re a new business owner in the US, hiring your first team member in the US is challenging. You’ll need to make enough, and to hire someone making $5k per month, you’d probably want to be making at least $10k per month in net profit. That takes time, and for that reason many businesses need to delay hiring, which makes their business grow a lot slower. Also, spending half your net income on 1 team member is ballsy so many people wait until they’re making at least $15-20k per month net to get their first hire. This is way too long. Hiring overseas allows you to find quality talent for around $1k USD per month. You do the math - it makes hiring accessible to a lot more early stage businesses.
   

2. For companies that have great cash flow, their teams are probably not optimized. If I audit 100 businesses in the US, 99 of them are incredibly unoptimized. There are many things they are overpaying for, or not delegating properly. Their payroll is likely way too high for the output, and that’s because most of their team is domestic. If you’re a business owner and you’re not constantly optimizing, you’re not doing your job. Replacing domestic workers with comparable overseas talent will save you 80% or more.
   

3. For growing companies that want to build new projects and expand, a lot of the team it doesn’t make financial sense to hire domestically. Why? Because most of these projects will take months or even years to make a profit. For example, my media business is currently expanding A LOT. Like, 90% of the output my team does generates zero revenue (for now). I have an overseas team to optimize my costs so that I can take the risk of building these new projects without any additional cashflow. There is zero chance I would do this if I had to have a domestic team, because I would be in the negative by way too much for me to handle.

Sometimes, I think about the lack of optimization in US businesses and it makes me anxious. I’m a logical guy, and it makes no sense for many of these businesses to operate this way. They’re throwing money away, quite literally.

Now, this doesn’t mean a company can or should be entirely overseas. That can be a bit challenging and while it is possible, I think a great blend is to have a small team domestically and a much larger team overseas.

You might be wondering if you can have your executive team overseas or not. My question would be - how is it different from having an executive team based in the US that is all remote?

The answer - it’s really not that much different. There are people living all across the world who would be fantastic head of operations, COOs, head of marketing, CEO, etc. I know it’s possible because part of my executive team at my recruiting business is overseas.

As the world gets more and more integrated, more people will realize that the barrier between different countries is small. It’s not zero, but it is smaller than most people think. A lot of people go to university in another country and then return to their home country to find work. And so, people can be “western thinking” from all countries.

If you’re reading this, I encourage you to do an audit on your current team. Or if you’re a new business owner, think about the timeline of hiring your first assistant. I’d encourage you to hire sooner than you think you need to, because the earlier you hire the earlier you build a real business that isn’t reliant fully on you.

If I were to go back to my mid 20s and started hiring earlier, I would’ve made much faster progress on my business growth. 

Looking back, it was too reliant on myself and my own time. I could’ve been building a business but I was too busy building a 9-5 job. It irks me that it took me until 2020 to start hiring overseas but it is what it is.

If you want help finding the best overseas talent possible, check out my company Paired - we’re a full service overseas recruiting agency. Would love to see how we can help. And yes, an A player is 100x better than a B player. B players are everywhere, but A players are extremely hard to find - but we are very good at it.

Anyways, that’s my rant about hiring overseas. 

You’re one hire away from changing the trajectory of your business.

Narendra Modi: Prime Minister of India - Power, Democracy, War & Peace | Lex Fridman Podcast #460

I made $50,000,000 Buying & Running Boring Businesses

The Most Epic and Dangerous City (Cape Town)

The more I travel the more I realize… that the world is gigantic. There are so many people in the world. The scale is just way beyond what most people think, and it limits their expectations on what is possible.

So over the last year, my team and I have been focusing really hard on getting our content seen in other countries.

^ My Indonesian channel

I figured, why does it make any sense to just post in the US? We make English content, but the fact is that the interviews, tutorials, and life lessons apply to anyone in any part of the world, no matter what language they speak.

If you make content, I encourage you to do something similar. Because you’re essentially doing the people a disservice if you’re not providing them access to your content.

So, I wanted to break down how I turn my existing content into content that we can post in other countries. It’s pretty rad and I think it can be applied to a lot of you (especially if you have content).

So the first thing is realizing what countries there are in the world and what their content consumption is like. Eg: where they watch content, what types of content they watch, and what they do with the content.

Usually, the platforms are quite similar with China as an exception. We’ve been realizing that YouTube is good for a small Chinese audience, but the vast majority are going to be on platforms like Douyin, Wechat, Bilibili, and Red Note. 

For other countries, they usually use pretty similar platforms when compared to us in the states.

Now, the types of content watched are also pretty universal. Entertainment is entertainment, no matter what the language. Humor transcends borders usually. Same thing with education - people are constantly searching things up and learning how to do stuff through videos.

So if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense to try and get content out there - there’s a good chance other people would get value from it.

We have since hired a lot of people to work on these language channels, and we usually have 1-2 people in each country.

They help with voiceovers, subtitles,  thumbnails, descriptions, titles, and editing long form videos to have the local language. It’s a lot of work but we are consistently investing about $1-3k USD per month in each language.

Haven’t seen monumental results yet but I know this is a long term thing, so I have no problem investing a solid amount of money in something I believe in.

We’re also building out native channels in each country - for example a tutorial channel with a native Russian host that’s fully in Russian. We’re essentially doing the voiceover approach with existing English content, but also expanding with native channels.,

Goal: have 100 channels in the portfolio within 2 years. I think it’s do-able.

The latest language project we are working on is trying to figure out China. There are a lot of content consumers in China, but it is certainly a lot more challenging. Thankfully I do know Chinese and I think that will help us with this expansion.

For a lot of Chinese social media platforms you need a Chinese phone number. And getting a Chinese phone number is extremely difficult unless you’re physically located there.

But, we just brought on a social media manager who is based in Shanghai, and he will be helping translate all our existing content and posting it on the Chinese platforms. I’m really excited about this and will update as we start seeing some results.

And yes - in terms of translation tools there are plenty. In fact, YouTube can automatically translate videos natively and embed directly into the original upload. But I am taking a more hands on approach as I feel like it will give us an advantage over AI generated stuff. Natives can definitely tell right now when something is AI - a lot of the translations are still super weird.

We are using tools like Descript, Captions, Heygen, and CapCut to help with these translations - and I definitely recommend having your team do the same as it will make the process more efficient.

But I guess the point of this article is to really emphasize that repurposing your content is the highest ROI thing you can possibly do. And with how big the world is (and how universal everything is becoming with AI and cross-border hiring) I think it’s the move for a lot of business owners.

I made a full tutorial on how to use DeepSeek AI:

Tips on using mental models to improve business decision-making.

The Man That Makes Millionaires: Turn $0 to $10k With This Step By Step Formula! (Alex Hormozi)

The secret role your business needs

Ok, so it’s no secret that I love hiring and delegating. But there’s a particular role that many people don’t think about when expanding their team: the versatile Project Manager.

I wanted to share with you guys why I think having PMs will change your business - it sure changed mine.

Within my media business, I currently have 3 PMs and we’re going to add another soon.

At my recruiting company, we have 1 PM.

What does a PM work on?

At my companies, they help with new projects, delegate manpower, assign tasks, set up new systems, incorporate AI, and much more. 

It’s the only reason why I am able to work on so many new initiatives and projects at once.

Now, very large businesses will usually have people that have much more narrow roles and more specialization.

But for small businesses who can’t afford to hire 1 web designer, 1 copywriter, 1 manager, 1 social media person, etc - it makes a lot of sense to train one person to be able to help with everything.

That’s sort of the approach I’ve taken with my business - and the great thing is that as you grow the team, you can see which things they are best at. And move them to a more specialized position if needed.

It’s funny that I prefer hiring generalists rather than specialists, because I’m a complete generalist myself. I always tell other people, I’m decent at all lot of things, but 100% not specializing in any one thing.

The other great part is that your PMs can be overseas. There are a lot of really smart people who are trainable hustlers who are eager to learn new skills.

So yes if you’re wondering, all my PMs are overseas in Indonesia currently. Although we plan on adding 1 in China and maybe another in LATAM.

For now, this structure works quite well and I’m sure it would work well for many of you reading this email.

So yes - go get yourself a PM and train them to tackle new projects!

I came to the conclusion that my cars take up a good amount of mental space.

What I mean by that is, they distract me from things.

It’s not all bad, but if it weren’t for my love of frighteningly loud and fast cars, I’d get rid of all of them and just uber everywhere instead.

Current fleet: Lamborghini Aventador SV Roadster, Ferrari 458 Italia, Range Rover SV Autobiography, Mercedes Sprinter Van (Entegra Launch).

I hate letting go of cars, so instead of selling the 458, I’m going to get new wheels, new tail lights, and just give it a good refresh. Maybe wrap it later on. I feel like this is a good way to save money on cars - refresh them when they get boring.

I mean, I already paid the California sales tax (about $15k) - so might as well keep the car.

I’ve also always talked about how getting into nice cars helps you make more money.

Completely true up to a certain point. Right now, I think my cars might slightly add to my “income” by getting me certain networking opportunities, but that’s about it.

That being said, if you’re reading this and you’re motivated by cars, absolutely go out there to crush it so that you can buy nice cars. It was a huge part of why I wanted to make money, and it was evident by my vision board back in 2019 (there was a picture of a Lamborghini on it).

I made a full tutorial on how to use DeepSeek AI:

A very solid and in depth video on how to Build AI Agents (full walkthrough):

Very eye-opening talk about success from a secret service agent:

I don’t know how many of you reading this have large teams - but if you do you’ll know this. As you grow the business, your company's structure needs to change.

We’ve been facing this both at my media business, as well as at my overseas recruiting agency.

Media business has over 45 people, and the recruiting agency has over 20 people.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that company structures can have HUGE inefficiencies. Like, company A could have 1 structure and be 50% more efficient than company B.

Company C could have 35% fewer people than Company D, but output 10% more. You get the idea.

As bad as hierarchies seem to most people, I think they’re pretty important for businesses. It allows you to separate the company into teams, that all sorta funnel their output to a group of people that oversee and manage everyone.

At Paired (my recruiting agency) we have my co-CEO and I, and our head of operations Reinaldo.

Reinaldo runs operations and manages individual recruiters, as well as a project manager that helps with miscellaneous tasks. That PM then manages other contractors like social media, hosts, etc.

As we grow, we’re going to need managers to manage the recruiters, and have the managers report to Reinaldo. This is inevitable, because there is no way Reinaldo will be able to effectively manage 10+ recruiters himself.

Same thing at my media company (Charlie Chang Media) - we have myself and my COO Joey. He handles all operations and manages a team of 3 (soon to be 4) project managers. The project managers help manage teams of contractors, and they report to Joey. 

So essentially, Charlie Chang Media is one notch ahead of Paired, which makes sense since it is over double the size.

Do I know how to run a company with 75-100 people? No way. But we’ll figure it out when we get there, which should happen in 2025 at some point.

As your business grows - study how other similarly sized businesses are structured. Usually if it’s a successful business, the structure will be relatively efficient. Implement this in your own business as a way to ALLOW your business to reach the next size or optimize for its current size.

Remember - what works well for a team of 5 isn’t going to work well for a team of 15.

We finally hit an $83k month at Paired in January - meaning it took about 2 years for us to be on track to hit a 7 figure year.

When Jeff and I first started building the company, we were the only employees.

We'd work on our other businesses during the day, and then work on Paired at night.

It was EXHAUSTING.

Now, we have a team of over 20 amazing people. It's really cool.

Even though we hit this accomplishment, we're still at the early stages. It still feels like a very small business that is able to give our clients a very personalized and intimate experience.

We're hiring 1-2 recruiters per month to help meet the demand, and we're finding that a lot of people love hiring in LATAM. Almost as much as Indonesia.

We're also growing the social media as if our lives depended on it. Small audiences still, but we have 4 YouTube channels under the business that help generate client and talent leads.

We invest a lot into content production.

Anyways, I'll continue sharing updates about the growth of this company. I never thought I'd get into overseas recruiting, but boy and I glad I did.

*This is an excerpt from my LinkedIn - I share a lot of stuff there as well. Follow me here

MrBeast gives a deep and fascinating interview

^it’s very interesting to see into the mind of YouTube’s top creator and how it’s an impossible feat for anyone to beat him. Lots of great nuggets, but also a reality check on what is needed to be the best. Spoiler alert - It’s not for the faint of heart

Only one snippet for this week since I think everyone should watch this video!