Longevity Protocols

Longevity is a massive buzzword in health and fitness right now.

Guys like Peter Attia are talking about living to 100 and the “Centenarion Decathlon” (essentially the ten tasks you want to be able to do at age 100). Andrew Huberman has multiple episodes on longevity practices. Heck, there is another guy, Bryan Johnson, who spends over $2M a year trying to figure out how “Don’t Die”.

Beyond the celebrities, thousands of health gurus and longevity experts are out there sharing knowledge on how to live longer.

And there is a lot of knowledge, practices, protocols, and supplements that promise to extend your healthspan and youthfulness. The problem is that there are so many we can’t do all of them. It takes too much time and it’s too costly.

Most people just want to know the MVP (minimal viable product) - meaning “What can I do that takes the least amount of work, but gives the most return?”

It’s a fair question. To answer it I’d like to look at business growth & longevity protocols.

Business Longevity Protocols:

I am not an expert on health & wellness. I know a lot, but it is not my area of expertise.

Business Growth is.

Before longevity was a health topic it was a business topic.

Businesses have been optimizing for longevity since their conception thousands of years ago. It has been vital to the health and livelihood of people for generations. Keeping a business alive meant keeping your family alive.

Because of that, I think there is a lot we can learn from how to keep a business running that can be applied to keeping ourselves running.

Protocol 1: Running a lean operation

I talked about how Operating Expenses (OPEX) can be a hidden cost of keeping your business and life from healthy growth in my 3 hidden costs keeping you from achieving your goals article.

But many companies hire big teams, pay for the best tech, and pay for agency support far too early.

Choosing to bulk up on these expenses before you have a large amount of revenue incoming can make it very hard to invest in new products or ads to help your company grow. It’s also the number one reason most brands die.

TL;DR: Lean OPEX means more profit. More profit means growth opportunities

Protocol 2: Focusing on the biggest impact opportunities.

One of my favorite quotes when it comes to business growth is “Startups don’t starve, they drown”.

But I see this in businesses of all sizes, they always want to try the next big thing rather than focusing on their highest leverage opportunities.

Sometimes that’s building new features before finding product market fit with core features, sometimes that’s portfolio expansion, trying to add more products before scaling one well. For others, it’s trying new marketing strategies.

Regardless of where they focus, the issue is the same - rather than focusing on improving their core value and maximizing return, they try and do something new.

TL;DR: Focus on doing one thing really well at a time

Protocol 3: First Order Profitability

Potentially the most important of all three longevity protocols is to maintain first-order profitability.

First Order Profitiabily means that the brand has a positive contribution margin after their sale to help cover their operating expenses. That sounds simple, but you’d be surprised how many brands aren’t profitable on their first sale!

I’ve illustrated this in the graph below, but there are actually a lot of costs that come before you recognize the revenue from a sale.

Discounts, returns, product costs, shipping, and even advertising costs all eat into your profit. Without realizing it, you can quickly take a $100 sale, and be left is spare change!

In fact, because of how difficult this can be, many brands are willing to lose money on the first order and rely on return purchases to make customers profitable (that might be one of the reasons why you just got so many emails from your favorite brands for Black Friday)

But by remaining profitable on your first purchase, you aren’t caught waiting on a positive return on a risk-prone, delayed, second purchase.

TL;DR: Healthy brands make money on the first purchase from a customer

Applying these Longevity Protocols

If you run a brand or are a marketer, and realize your business doesn’t check these three longevity protocols, I’d love to hear from you and see if I can help you solve those problems.

But most of you aren’t brand owners and are looking for personal applications.

This section is for you.

I want to give you three ways to implement these business longevity protocols into your own life.

1. Run a Lean OPEX

As we saw above, operating expenses are the number one reason brands die. When the positive contribution of a sale doesn’t cover the operating costs, brands run out of money and die.

The same concept applies to your health and wellness. Many of us run high “operating costs” that eat into any improvements from the positive interventions we implement in our lives like exercise.

These operating expenses can be looked at as “health debt”.

Things like:

• a bad night’s sleep

• sitting all day instead of getting 10,00 steps

• calorically dense processed foods and beverages

• toxins in the products we use at home or in our clothes

All of these carry a negative “debt” we need to pay off with our positive life and health interventions.

To maximize the “profit” or improvement of those positive interventions, it is important to minimize the “health debt” you have to pay off.

2. Focus on highest value opportunities

I’ve caught myself doing this too, but people love to optimize before they’ve built a foundation.

I’ve caught myself trying to build my aerobic base by staying in Zone 2 on my runs when I was injured and unable to run consistently. Instead, I should have just been focused on getting healthy! That was the highest-value opportunity.

I think we do this with a lot of things.

We do it with…

• Exercise. Rather than exercising 5x a week, we look for the perfect program

• Sleep. Instead of getting 7-9 hours, we buy red light glasses and sleep trackers

• Nutrition. Instead of eating real foods, we look for seed oils & toxins

• Stress. Rather than building a peaceful life, we mitigate stress with apps & tools

But at the end of the day, if we each look at our life, we know the one highest leverage opportunity to improve our health.

If we just did the thing we know we should do, we’d all live longer healthier lives.

3. First Order (Action) Margin

If I leave you with one takeaway from today’s letter it’s this:

Do the things that change your life today, not the things you hope to change your life months, years, or decades from now.

One of my favorite definitions of retirement is “when you stop trading today for a better tomorrow”. Our lives are to be lived and enjoyed. We are supposed to flourish not survive.

I think a lot of people get caught doing what they “should do” or optimizing towards a better state years from now, but I truly believe that by creating a better today rather than trying to build a better tomorrow you with both:

1. Have a better life today

2. Create a better life tomorrow

I say this to encourage you to look at your health & wellness protocols and ask “Does this have an immediate, positive, aspect on my life?” If it does, do it.

That could be a health practice like exercise or dieting, or it could be a supplement like protein or magnesium, but the point is to choose the things that improve your life today.

I’ll talk about Cash conversion cycles in next week’s letter, but the takeaway is profit returned today is profit that can be invested tomorrow.

The key to growth is reinvesting your profit to compound growth.

Start doing it in your own life with First Action Profitability.