_{Inside the Deal Room is where I share what’s happening behind the curtain as we source, negotiate, acquire, build and scale businesses through Vyterro and our deal ecosystem.}

Early in my career, my strategy for building wealth was simple: work as much as humanly possible. I didn't understand leverage, so that seemed like the obvious answer.

During my first year out of college, I'd work my 9-to-5 during the day, bus tables at night, drive Uber after that, and somehow still manage two side businesses behind the scenes.

Looking back, I'm glad I did it. Those years taught me discipline, organization, and time management faster than almost anything else could have.

Over the next few years, I started trading lower-leverage hours for higher-leverage ones. I dropped the restaurant and Uber gigs and focused on one of my side businesses. Later, I traded that for real estate. Eventually, I left both my corporate job and real estate to go full time into acquisitions.

I still wasn't a master of leverage, but I had started to understand the game. The answer wasn't just to work more hours. It was to make each hour more valuable. From that point on, my focus became clear: keep the work ethic, but continually increase the leverage behind it.

The concept of leverage was popularized by Naval Ravikant and has been expanded upon by countless others since. While there are many ways to define it, I think of leverage as anything that allows your effort to produce a disproportionately larger result. Put simply, it’s anything that makes each hour more valuable.

Broadly speaking, there are four forms of leverage:

Labor: Other people's time. The oldest form of leverage. Hiring employees, partnering with operators, or building teams allows work to continue without requiring every hour to come directly from you.

Capital: Other people's money. Whether it's an SBA loan, outside investors, or seller financing, capital allows you to control assets and opportunities that would otherwise take years to afford on your own.

Code: Software that works around the clock. A relatively newer form of leverage. Automation, SaaS, AI, and custom systems can complete tasks thousands of times without getting tired or asking for a raise.

Content (or Media): Work that scales infinitely. Another old form of leverage, redefined by the internet and social media. One podcast episode, newsletter, or LinkedIn post can reach thousands of people, and you only have to create it once. This creates opportunities long after you've hit publish.

The common thread is simple: leverage allows one hour of work to create far more than one hour of output.

The catch is that almost nobody starts with much leverage. Most people begin with nothing more than their own time. This is why so many people’s first job is an hourly, minimum-wage position (pool maintenance at a local water park for me). 

Over time, the goal isn't to work more – it's to gradually earn access to more and more leverage. The difference between a high school kid earning $10.50 an hour and Elon Musk, capable of creating millions of dollars in value in seconds, isn't that Elon is 50,000 times smarter or works 50,000 times harder. It's that he's learned to use leverage on an entirely different scale. 

The challenge is that leverage isn't something you just decide to have. You have to earn access to it and develop the skills to deploy it effectively. 

We have a 19-year-old intern on the Vyterro team right now. A lot of this playbook isn’t available to him yet, and at his age, it wasn’t available to me either.

Access to leverage is usually limited early in your career. You don't have capital, a team, a reputation, or the skills required to effectively use those things. What you do have is your time, your energy, and your willingness to work. That’s what you need to lean on.

But before you can try to gain leverage, you need to understand that it exists. 

Most people never begin building leverage because they don't even realize there’s another game to play. They spend their careers trying to get ahead by working more hours or chasing raises, but both paths are ultimately limited. Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day, and most companies have finite budgets for compensation. Eventually, even the hardest workers hit a ceiling. Without leverage, your earning potential plateaus.

Getting the light bulb to click is one thing, but awareness is only the first step. The hard part is doing the work to actually build the leverage. 

You have to earn access to it and develop the skills required to use it effectively. 

Capital requires someone to trust you with their money, but it also requires knowing how to deploy that capital effectively. Labor requires people to trust your judgment and leadership, but it also requires knowing how to train, delegate, and manage. Code just requires a laptop, but that's useless unless you understand a problem deeply enough to identify a solution and have the engineering skills to build it. Content requires credibility and attention, but that attention only compounds if you know how to consistently create and distribute valuable content.

You earn these things by proving yourself over time and continuously developing the skills necessary to take advantage of the opportunities in front of you.

Working hard is one of the fastest ways to build your skill set. Taking on more responsibility, putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, and getting more reps all accelerate your learning curve. But no matter how disciplined or talented you become, you can only accomplish so much if every outcome depends on your own personal time.

The goal isn't to replace hard work. It's to make your hard work compound by applying it through leverage: people, capital, code, and content. 

Early in your career, hard work is what builds the skills and credibility that allow you to access leverage. Then, once you have leverage, applying that same work ethic allows you to create outsized results. 

Those long hours in the early years are tough, but that’s the tuition you pay to eventually make each hour worth more later on.