You’re Not Behind: My System for Outworking Everyone
(Alex Hormozi video transcript)
Source
Transcript
If you’re a business owner or work for one, this presentation may be the most tactical thing that I can do to make you money. I think this one’s going to be a really big hitter, which is why I wanted to do it live for you guys.
So, let me ask you guys a question: who believes that you have to work hard to make money? Real question.
Okay, who believes that no one can outwork them?
Good, at least some honest people in this room. Well, I’m going to attempt to prove some of you wrong who believe that you can never be outworked because I see that on the internet all the time and it drives me bananas.
The reason this is so important is defining work. All of us claim to work every day and yet most of us can’t even define the word.
So, how do you define work? We can use the science definition, which is, you know, work equals force times distance. The problem is that that’s not very useful for knowledge workers, for what we do.
Do we use the time on clock definition, you know, time spent working as our inputs? The problem is, you know, work 16–18 hours a day, and so if everyone is already doing that, then how can one person work harder than another?
So then, do we define it by how hard you try, so the effort that you expend is the work that you do? Well, do you want participation trophies and people just saying, ‘Yes, you tried your hardest’? Is this how you want your employees to gauge themselves? ‘Well, I tried really hard, even though I suck.’ It’s like, well, okay.
If work isn’t force times distance, if it’s not just the time you put in, and if it’s not just how hard you try, then what is work?
We better be clear on what it is we’re trying to do to make money, right, if we’re going to do more of it to make more money.
So, this is my definition, which is: work equals outputs, and outputs equal volume times leverage. Some of you guys have seen this from me before. The plain speak is the number of times you do something times how much you get out of each time you do it. Fundamentally, that’s what it is.
The next question that follows is, well, then how do we work faster, or how do we do more work per unit of time? That’s volume times leverage divided by time. The plain speak is output per unit.
If you want to produce the most per unit of time, please pay attention because I do think this will help you.
How can we get more out of the time we put in, which in the game of business is money? Now everyone’s attention perks up, they’re like, ‘Ah, that stuff, I would like that.’
So, visual for you: volume is the number of times you do the thing, leverage is how much you get out of each time you do it, equals your output. How many times you do it times how much you get equals your output.
Some quick examples, and you guys can tell me whether it’s high or low.
Alright, is this high output or low output? This is low. It’s very hard to do that with very low leverage.
High or low? High. Great.
High or low? Higher. Exactly.
High or low? Highest, because we have a lot of volume on good leverage.
Now we understand what work is: you can either do more activity, do more stuff, or get more for it to get higher output.
Normally, I spend the vast majority of my career talking about leverage, but today I actually want to talk about volume. The reason for that is because, talking to a lot of businesses, I have taken for granted that people do all the volume stuff, and it turns out, after talking to many of you, that is just not true. Here I am talking about leverage because I just assume you work your ass off, and that’s fundamentally false for most of you. I am baffled by how little people actually work when they think they are working.
So, I’m going to cover two things today. Number one, get clear on the input that grows your business the most. Two, remove everything that isn’t that from your life.
My disclaimer is that this is for business owners and specifically your highest-level employees. If you’re taking notes and you’re like, ‘Hey, I want to send this to my team,’ I would recommend because my team saw these slides beforehand, and I had like two guys being like, ‘I’m going to change a whole bunch of stuff,’ and I was like, ‘Great.’ That’s my sign for a good presentation.
Figuring out the right input: let’s say that you want to grow your business. You can either get more customers, or you can make them worth more. That’s it. You either sell more units or increase LTV. Done.
Breaking this into actions: for customers, you either get more traffic, or you convert a higher percentage of the traffic you have. That’s the action. Making them worth more: you raise prices, decrease your cost of goods sold, get people to buy more stuff more times. Those are the things. That’s all you got.
If you look at four things, what do you actually do? Well, to get more traffic, you have to advertise more, better. To increase your conversion, you have to practice sales, or you have to improve your offer. If you want to raise your prices, you just have to grow gonads and decide. By the way, gonads are both sexes, so there you go, there’s my PC for the day. Buy more times, which would be decreasing churn, you have reach outs, you have exit interviews, you do prepayments, you improve your onboarding, you get faster results, you hold events to appreciate members or clients.
But if you look at your time, you do almost none of these things. You’re not doing this stuff now, and that’s why you’re probably not making money, or as much as you want.
If you don’t do this stuff, all the time that you spend ‘working’ has the same impact as doing nothing. It’s kind of like spending your entire week thinking about how you’re going to build and redesign your website and then deciding not to do it, except it’s just more tiresome than just watching Netflix and relaxing.
You’d literally be better off doing nothing than doing the work that you claim to be work that actually isn’t. That’s why most of the businesses here are stuck and why many people watching this at home aren’t growing as fast as they want.
For most of you, especially the smaller businesses, your effort should be disproportionately here (highlighted on the slide above): on getting more traffic, advertising more, advertising better, and higher conversion.
Meaning, your actual activities on a daily basis is letting more people know about your stuff and practicing getting them to give you money when they find out about it. That is what you do on a regular basis with a vast majority of your time.
After all, if you do not have customers, then there is no one that you can raise prices on and that you can get to buy more times and increase their lifetime value.
Let’s pick apart this first one first: advertising more and better. You advertise better by advertising more. Excellence comes from repetition. We even use volume as a measure for skill. I’ve taken 4,000 sales consults; we even say that. We use it as a proxy, and yet we don’t think about that for our own skill in business. If you want to get unreasonably good at advertising, do so much advertising that it would be unreasonable for you to suck after doing that much of it. Again, we’re just defining inputs here.
If you run ads, it means you commit to spending four hours a day scripting, analyzing, writing copy, recording ads, which may mean learning how to use editing software or an iPhone.
If you use outreach, it means spending four hours a day reaching out to people across social media platforms.
If you use content as your primary advertising, then you make content for four hours a day every day, and you make it on every platform.
If you use partners and affiliates, it means spending four hours a day doing outreach, ads, or making content to help your affiliates send you more customers.
These actions become the volume that creates the outputs, which for many of you is more leads.
If you’re hearing four hours a day and thinking, ‘How will I have time to do everything else?’ remember that doing everything else is what’s not growing your business.
This is what your time looks like when your business is stalled.
This is what your time looks like when your business is growing.
So, too many of you, if you’re honest with yourself, your days look like this…
…and expect results that look like this.
So, before you say, ‘But I need to keep doing [insert whatever thing that isn’t growing your business],’ remember, you guys can do whatever you want, but if you keep doing the same stuff and your business isn’t growing, then the stuff that you’re doing is wrong. It is not the right stuff, and you have to learn how to let some fires burn.
Some problems are problems, but they are not the problem of the business today. This is the essence of strategy. You learn to prioritize. Some things are more important than others, which means, yes, you can neglect them for a season.
Then, when they actually become the true limiter of the business, the true constraint, then you focus on them four hours a day until you solve it.
So, if we use these four things as our guide, let’s say you master traffic and you’re getting loads of leads, but you can’t close a barn door if the wind was behind you, right? Then conversion becomes your limiter, and so then you train someone else on the advertising stuff you do because you mastered it, and then spend four hours a day trying to optimize your conversion.
Which might look like this: you might actually track your close rate for a change, you might actually record all your sales interactions and do them from behind the person, you actually see their identity. This is for brick-and-mortar people, and have a sign on your door that says that you record so you can do this legally. Watch game tape of sales that actually worked every single morning. You practice your script out loud, every single day. You hire someone who can give you feedback, ideally daily, on how well you sell. You have a two-minute mental prep before you take consults, every single time. You give a pre-sale questionnaire to every person who walks in the door, if you’re brick-and-mortar, or you have some sort of thing online to get them ready for the sale. You qualify people on the phone better to pre-sell them, and then you actually do that — every time.
You guys getting this? Cool.
All problems are solvable with skills, and all skills are attainable with repetition and feedback. Once you have a skill, you can do it in less time, which gives you leverage. So, you get more for what you do, the better you get at it, the less time it takes for you to do it. You get more time back.
In other words, once you get great at sales, you don’t need to spend as much time on it and you’ll still close the same percentage. You go from growing a skill to maintaining a skill, and it’s much easier to maintain a skill and continue to stay at that same level than it is to gain a skill. It’s kind of like maintaining weight. If you’ve ever lost weight or gained weight, once you get to that level, it’s much easier to stay and maintain than it is to break the…whatever the word is, homeostasis. Same thing for gaining muscle.
Everything you spend your time on has to clearly ladder up to one of these four things. So right now, if you look at your schedule and you’re not laddering up to these four things, you’re not doing the stuff that makes money.
Otherwise, you’re just doing this…
…rather than this.
Still, some of you guys are going to be thinking to yourselves, ‘Well, with what time Alex? I can barely keep my head above water as is. I’m very busy.’ Understandable.
If you have a special snowflake excuse, ‘I’m special,’ you’re totally right. It’s literally impossible for you to do what I’m saying, and that’s why your business will never grow. Cool. That is my talk for today. Of course, you’re right. It will never grow, right? Happy now? You’re totally justified in not achieving your goals. Consider yourself excused.
Alright, so for everyone else, we just have to face reality. Success, the marketplace, your customers — they don’t care about whatever your excuse is. It may be entirely justified. It also doesn’t matter, and they also don’t care. They just care about output. They care about what they can get from you. What’s in it for me? So, if you’re open to the idea that I might know a little bit about making money and growing businesses, I want to get to the second part of my presentation.
That was my 11-year transformation. That’s my before and after.
How to make this easier for you.
So, I said I was going to cover two things. The first is how to get very clear on the inputs that grow your business. Everyone feel very clear on the four things that you need to do and how they ladder up to activities that you spend four hours a day on?
You’re like, ‘Great, but I don’t have four hours a day.’ Well, that’s why we’re going to do the second part, which is removing everything else that isn’t that from your life.
The nice part about this second half of the presentation is that there’s nothing to argue about. It’s just facts. We all have 24 hours a day. I’m good there so far, I’ve just stated facts? Ok.
People who move faster just do better things with their time. You can cut grass with scissors and it will take all day, or you can make one call and have someone else do it. In either scenario, both people get the grass cut.
So, we outlined that you need to spend your time working on those four levers in your business at least four hours a day.
I’m going to show you how to find the time with a combination of habits and buying time. This may be one of the more tactical things that I give you guys that will probably change your life from this whole experience.
First, we have to find time, and second, we will buy time. Let’s start with finding time. There are two types of work that every entrepreneur has: you’ve got maker time, you’ve got manager time.
Maker time is long blocks of uninterrupted time, four to six hours. You only have 14 work blocks per week of this maker time. It’s very, very valuable. It’s low urgency, high importance work. That’s the stuff that moves the business forward. A productive maker calendar is an empty calendar. An interruption always destroys an entire time block. Who here has had a time block where you’re really excited and then a one-hour call comes in at 10:00 a.m. and you’re like, ‘Well, there goes my morning’? Yes, we’ve all been there, and you hate that person.
This is what maker time looks like. Looks great. Look at that beautiful blue space. So much work, so much money to be made.
On the other hand, you’ve got manager time, and we manage both of these things. These are time blocks as small as 5 to 15 minutes. You have 100+ of these per week. The goal is to fill your calendar with these slots if you’re in your manager time. You are a maximally productive manager when you have no gaps. This is usually when you’re spending time training teams, coordinating, communicating, putting out fires.
This is what it looks like when you’re on manager time. This is also my calendar when I’m on a manager day.
Both of these work styles are important. Everyone here has worn both of these hats, right? Okay, but the moment these two hats meet is when disaster happens. If you try to insert tiny slices of management into your making time, you kill half a day. It doesn’t work. And, if you have lots of empty slots between your managing time, it’s also inefficient there too because you’re not doing anything with that time. You might as well fill it with more meetings.
You have to understand what type of work you’re doing when you start the day and explain to your team the difference between these types of work and the importance of those time periods and why you have to prioritize them so the entire business can grow.
Beyond explaining the difference in the type of work, here’s what I did to facilitate maker time because manager time kind of always happens.
Here are the maker habits that I have. One is I decide the one project I need to work on that’s most important, and yes, it can be the same thing for a while. I woke up at 4:00 a.m., I worked until 9:00 a.m. on that work. Five hours. That’s how I work. I turned off all my notifications. I have a dark room. My office now still has no windows, no sound, earplugs. I keep it very, very simple. I want to put everything out of my world besides the work, and I realized that there are no emergencies.
This is something that for all entrepreneurs we have to understand: there are no emergencies. There’s 911, if someone’s dying, in which case call them, not me, and then there’s the emergency that your business isn’t going to grow for the third year in a row, which you need to solve now.
This also means going to bed at the same time every single night, which is a habit that served me very well, and that also includes weekends. If you’re like, ‘How do I do that? I always go to sleep late,’ just wake up early once and be tired. That’s how it works. That’s my brilliant idea. Treat weekends and weekdays the same and realize that drinking costs you two days: the day you drink and the day you recover.
Some makers work late at night after their kids have gone to sleep. Anyone here who have that as their time slot for making? Okay, cool. It doesn’t matter what your time slot is as long as you make time for it. Just find the four to five hours that you can turn everything off.
Working weekends is also a hack that so you can move forward. It’s 104 days a year. The number of entrepreneurs that are like, ‘I take weekends off,’ like 104 days of uninterrupted time? Okay, got it. Understood. Well, I’d love to compete against you. Anyways, those are some of the habits that help me find time to do the things that matter most.
The second is buying time, so let’s talk about that. You are the most valuable person in your business. You produce the most value for the company. If you had a star employee, you’d want to maximize their every waking moment, right? Everybody here has some person they’re like, ‘Man, I just want to clear the way for them. I just want them to keep working, working, working.’
We often do this with our teams, right? We try to empower them, we try to clear their calendars, try to give them help, but we don’t do this for ourselves.
There’s the myth of work-life and personal-life integration or whatever, and this isn’t that talk. Believe me, I don’t care about that talk. What I mean is that we all have one battery, and the problem with your spouse and your kids and your chores and your employees is they all drain from the same source.
You become more productive by eliminating the things that make you unproductive more than you have some Pomodoro time hack.
This is what I really want to have sink in: you will become more productive through elimination than by adding optimization. Just by taking away all the things that are not the things that grow the business.
I also bring this up because no one ever sticks with that stuff anyways. We all see the TikTok hack of ‘put a timer and then take a walk.’ No one does it. No one does it. So, let’s just forget about it. Why bother? But cutting things out, they are permanent reductions in energy drainage that you can reallocate to making more money, doing the stuff that matters.
If we all have 24 hours a day, someone who works on the most important stuff for 16 hours six days a week is going to move way faster than someone who does it three hours per week in real work time. Some of you guys, if you look back on your last week, you’re like, ‘How much real maker time did I make for myself to work on the stuff that grows the business?’ Many times, if you’re really honest with yourself, it’s like four hours.
There’s a reason that someone could actually move 30 times faster than you, and that’s the difference. If you’re doing three hours of productive work or 96 productive hours, it’s just the math. It’s not even close. That’s how you move 30 times faster than somebody else, even though both people “work all day”.
Hopefully, this convinces you about how important this is and maybe why other people you know move faster than you.
Now, let’s get really tactical. The average American spends 50 hours per month on food, groceries, eating, prepping, cleaning. The replacement cost for that is $800 a month. The average American spends 25 hours per month cleaning their home. The replacement cost for that is $500 a month. The average American spends 16 hours per month doing laundry, washing, drying, folding, organizing, dry cleaning, driving to laundromat. $200 a month to replace that.
Which means that for $1,500 a month, you can get 96 hours per month back. That’s two full work weeks every single month.
That means if you can make more than $15 per hour with your time, you should make that trade seven days a week, twice on Sunday, and once for your mom.
This is very much a form of reinvesting in yourself, but you have to use the time that you buy to work to make even more. This isn’t the ‘I will spend $1,500 a month and then I will get 96 hours back and I will watch 96 more hours of Netflix.’ This is not that plan.
I bring this up because I’m amazed at how many people feel like they’re being irresponsible by spending this money. The amount of entrepreneurs that I talk to that will happily hire somebody for $50,000 a year and are unwilling to think about the idea of spending $1,500 a month on things that make them feel fancy or frilly or like excess expenses — is ridiculous. I’ll say that is silly.
But if you could spend $1,500 a month on your most valuable employee, forget about you for a second, your most valuable employee, to have 50% more out of them, wouldn’t you do that every day of the week and twice on Sunday? Of course.
But you are that most valuable employee. You are that person in the business, by far, not even close. It’s you.
I didn’t even get into the free 40 hours a week that people spend. Following sports teams, four hours a week. Replacement cost of not following sports teams? Zero dollars. Watching TV, 21 hours a week on average. Replacement cost? Literally nothing. Scrolling social media, 17 hours a week. Also, literally nothing. Driving to and from work and refilling gas, four and a half hours a week. Replacement cost is $700 a month for Uber. You have somebody else drive you. I tweet on my way to work and I tweet on my way back, it’s where I get my content.
For $1,500 a month, you can still do those fun things. I’m not even taking those out because you’re not going to do it anyways. You’re still going to watch TV, you’re still going to scroll social media, you’re going to do all that stuff. Not even going to try. You can still do that stuff and spend $1,500 a month and get 96 hours a month back.
I want to be clear, this is a one-time investment. You will never get this back. I can’t re-spend the $1,500 and get another 96 hours back. You only get to pull this trigger once.
I’m still amazed at the businesses that are doing 50, 100, $500,000 a month, and they still are analyzing this bill as something that they have even hesitated to spend money on because of whatever narrative they have around why it’s good to clean your own laundry or cook your own food. Sure, if you like cooking and it’s recreational, then fine. But you and I both know that’s not what we’re talking about. It’s lunch on Tuesday. That’s what I’m talking about.
There are so few things that you can spend $1,500 a month on and get 96 hours per month back, and you can only pull the trigger once.
This advice is so simple, and yet when I see rooms like this with the same problems again and again and again, I had to make this incredibly obvious presentation because the only thing that’s easier than doing this is not doing it, which is what most of you will probably do.
You will nod, and you will think about it, and then you will do nothing. You will still cook your food, and you will still drive yourself to work, and you will still clean your house. You’re like, ‘Well, I like my clothes folded a certain way.’ Who cares? Is it worth the business not growing by 50% this year?
Somehow, those of you who do nothing will be amazed why a year later, you’re still in the exact same position, while someone else who took these simple steps 30X-ed their output.
This is how you can actually do your day job as the manager while also giving yourself the time to do what matters most as a maker. Those 96 hours, you can take those four hours a day, and it’s there. That’s just from the stats. That’s not just me. It’s right there. You can have it.
This trading up for time is buying time, and it literally never ends. It’s less valuable work that you trade money for, for more free time to do more valuable work that you then trade to get more money. And you never stop. This whole process never ends.
Bringing this all together, that’s the stuff that actually grows your business. If you work on the right stuff, your business will grow.
Getting more customers, making them worth more.
You want to do as much of that as you can to grow your business as fast as you can, make sure your day looks like this…
not like this…
To do that in the real world, you eliminate everything else that’s not that.
Which you do by:
Understanding and explaining the difference between maker and manager time to yourself and your teams, and giving yourself time every single day to:
- decide the project that matters most,
- wake up a little bit earlier,
- turn off your notifications,
- get in a zone that you can actually work
Investing in your most valuable employee by eliminating 96 hours per month of work for $1,500 a month so that you can actually work not to 2X or 4X more effective — Let me say that again: so you can work not just two or four times more effectively than your competition, but 30 times more effectively than them.
Because they’re, like you, super distracted, have their notifications turned on, are taking calls in the middle of the day, and they too are only working three hours of productive hours a week.
You can absolutely murder them in their sleep by how much you crush them in business if you actually spend the time to do the things that matter, which almost no one does.
It’s crazy because I spend all this time making all this business content about LTV to CAC ratios, and decreasing churn, and making sure your onboarding is streamlined — and people are like, ‘I don’t have the time.’ Find the time. Buy it. It’s right there. It’s for sale.
You maximize your time and actually work on the things that matter, which everyone else will then wonder, when you actually do this, ‘How does he move so fast? How does she move so fast?’
But you will know the secret is that there is no secret. You have one battery, and you just try and eliminate as many drains as you can that aren’t aligned with your goal.
That’s how you can compress multiple lifetimes of growth into one.
Audience Q&A
Any questions on this? Was there anything that was unclear about that presentation?
“What time do you go to sleep?”
“I get in bed at 9:00, I go to sleep by 10:00.”
“You get up at 4:00?”
“I’m probably up — well, today I was up at four, but most of the time I’m up by five. 10 to 5 works fine. I haven’t had an alarm in five to seven years. A long time. I’m a big fan, so I probably should add this, that I think you should have a sleep alarm, not a wake-up alarm. I mean, sleep as long as you can. I don’t know about you, but if I get nine hours of sleep, I’m like, I can cure cancer today. I so rarely get nine. If I get seven, I’m fine. But nine, I literally look at Leila, I’m like, ‘Give me the hardest problems today.’ I’ll just sit in discomfort.”
“Is it okay to make your goal eliminating manager time?”
“Manager time, sure. So, I think — okay, so the question was, is it okay to make your goal eliminating manager time? I see it as a continuum rather than an absolute or a binary.
It’s not like I am 100% maker or I’m 100% manager. I think it’s just how much of that. So, like, Leila’s calendar is flipped from mine. I have four days a week of maker time and one manager day on Mondays, which I just stack the living hell out of. I’m just like, just destroy me, just put everything in there. I expect to accomplish nothing, and I will just make all the decisions and talk to everybody about all the stuff.
The other four days, I work on things that I think matter most, and I also work the weekends. Her schedule is more like this, where she has four days a week where she has her manager time and one day a week that’s maker time. She also spends the weekends doing maker stuff. That’s kind of how she balances it. Because Leila actually runs everything in the business, I take credit for running everything in the business. That’s kind of our division. It’s worked well for us for years. So yeah, recommend.”
“How much time do you spend on fitness stuff in general?”
“I just tweeted about this like ten minutes ago, which is great. So, how much time do I spend on fitness stuff in general?
So, my big advice is get in shape between 18 and 24, and then after that, the maintenance of being in shape takes like 10% of your time, which I was alluding to in the presentation. It takes me very little time to maintain this. I now have a gym downstairs, so it’s super, super easy. But I work out when I can. I usually probably work out three, four days a week, and it’s just downstairs. I do it in the morning or I do it in the afternoon.”
“How do you keep the relationship, not turn off, make it more of a business relationship?”
“So, how do we — I’m repeating it because no one has a mic, just so you know. So, how do we manage being married and being co-managers of the business?”
“Not always talking about the business.”
“Oh, we always talk about business. I think what we don’t do is judge ourselves for talking about business. I think more people get stressed about what they think they should be doing rather than just being like, ‘This is our relationship, these are our rules, which we make, and we don’t think they exist.’ It’s worked fine so far. If one of us wasn’t into business, it would suck. It’s all I want to talk about.”
“Do you have fun outside of work?”
“This is awesome. So, the question was, do I have fun outside of work? The majority of my fun is in work, but Leila and I take like one or two vacations a year that are like three or four days. We try to do it with friends of ours because most of the friends that we have don’t live where we live. Most of the friends that we have — not most, all the friends that we have are all pretty high-level entrepreneurs, and they’re really busy too.
We try and have company there while we can all talk about business and talk about what we’re excited about, and that’s what works for us. The first, I think, three years of our marriage, we didn’t take any — I mean, we didn’t do a honeymoon. We worked the day we got married, we worked the next day. But we do us, though. So, I don’t see this as prescription. We just do what we want to do.
I always hesitate with those questions because people take it as gospel. We really, really spent a long time trying to not care about what anyone else thinks about what we do.”
“How often do you review what the constraint is in the business?”
“Your business constraint doesn’t change that often once you get it right. Once you know, it’s like, ‘Okay, I need to advertise more,’ you just keep doing that until you break something else. Sometimes you can do that for a very, very, very, very, very long time. The constraint then goes — one is chunked down. So, it’s like, you’re advertising, and you’re running ads, but you’re like, ‘I need a second channel.’ So, you’re still — the bigger constraint is still the same. ‘I need more leads,’ but you need to have the constraint of, ‘I need to solve this next acquisition channel.’
It’ll move against the larger constraint of the business. Finally, all the constraints are going to chunk up to, ‘I need to get more customers, I need to make them worth more, and I might need to make them more so that I can get more customers.’ Those will oscillate back and forth on the business.
The big thing that will matter is, kind of, benchmarks. I think we were talking earlier with the guys who were there with the med spa. He had an LTV issue, he didn’t have a leads issue. It’s making sure that we’re solving the right problem. I see a lot of business owners really obsessing, trying to drive down lead costs, and I find it easier to just fix the sales process and add a zero to your price, and then all of a sudden, all your lead problems go away.
I try and find the easiest way to solve problems, which oftentimes isn’t the thing that’s immediately apparent.
So, I’ll tell you a fun story. We have the book launch that is going to come up at some point. I was thinking about some of the goodies that I was going to be giving away. One of the goodies I had was like, legit, 400 more hours of work. I started the project, and I stopped after an hour. I was like, ‘Okay, can I use my second brain cell here and think of something else that I can give away that’s more valuable than this that doesn’t take me 400 hours?’
It took me like an hour to think of something else that was better and took less time. I think sometimes the pendulum swing on the other side of this is if you have tremendous work ethic, then sometimes you want to solve problems the hard way.
This is something that I feel like I’ve found more and more as I’ve gotten doggy years aged in business: there’s usually a more elegant solution if you just take a second and you’re like — I like asking hypotheticals of ‘What would it take to — or if I had to make something more valuable in a tenth of the time, what would I do? If someone 10 times smarter than me had the same problem, what would they do?’
Cycling through those frames helped me attack the problem differently. That helps me a lot. I use those frames a lot when I’m trying to solve things.”
From Video Description (from Alex):
Want to SCALE your business? Go here: https://acquisition.com
Want to START a business? Go here: https://skool.com/games
If you’re new to my channel, my name is Alex Hormozi. I’m the founder and managing partner of Acquisition.com. It’s a family office, which is just a formal way of saying we invest our own money into companies. Our 10 portfolio companies bring in over $200,000,000+ per year. Our ownership stake varies between 20% and 100% of them. Given this is a YT channel, and anyone can claim anything, I’ll give you some stuff you can google to verify below.
How I got here…
21: Graduated Vanderbilt in 3 years Magna Cum Laude, and took a fancy consulting job.
23 yrs old: Left my fancy consulting job to start a business (a gym).
24 yrs old: Opened 5 gym locations.
26 yrs old: Closed down 6th gym. Lost everything.
26 yrs old: Got back to launching gyms (launched 33). Then, lost everything for a 2nd time.
26 yrs old: In desperation, started licensing model as a hail mary. It worked.
27 yrs old: “Gym Launch” does $3M profit the next 6 months. Then $17M profit next 12 months.
28 yrs old: Started Prestige Labs. $20M the first year.
29 yrs old: Launched ALAN, a software company for agencies to work leads for customers. Scaled to $1.7mmo within 6 months.
31 yrs old: Sold 75% of UseAlan to a strategic buyer in an all stock deal.
31 yrs old: Sold 66% of Gym Launch & Prestige Labs at $46.2M valuation in all-cash deal to American Pacific Group. (you can google it)
31 yrs old: Started our family office Acquisition.com. We invest and scale companies using the $42M in distributions we had taken + the cash from the $46.2M exit.
32 yrs old: Started making free content showing how we grow companies to make real business education accessible to everyone (and) to attract business owners to invest or scale their businesses.
34 yrs old: I became co-owner of https://Skool.com to help the many people who want to start a business online do so.
Today: Our portfolio now does $200M/yr between 10 companies. The largest doing $100M/yr the smallest doing $5M per year. Our ownership varies between 20% and 100% ownership of the companies. Many of them we invested in early and helped grow (which is how we make our money — not youtube videos).
To all the gladiators in the arena, we’re all in the middle of writing our own stories. The worse the monsters, the more epic the story.
You either get an epic outcome or an epic story. Both mean you win.
Keep crushing. May your desires be greater than your obstacles.
Never quit,
Alex
*FULL DISCLOSURE*
I make content to make money — just — on a longer time horizon than most. I want to build trust with business owners so we can find the best ones and help them scale. And if they’re awesome, write them a check and go all the way as partners.
Find Alex Hormozi on:
Books & free courses: https://www.acquisition.com/books
Podcast: Find his podcast “The Game” on your chosen platform
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexHormozi
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hormozi
X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/AlexHormozi
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ahormozi/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhormozi/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ahormozi
P.S. (from Mike)
“If you introduce something valuable to someone, they associate that value with you.” — Alex Hormozi
If you found this valuable, think of just one person who you think would also find it interesting and share it with them. Great way to build goodwill.
No affiliation with Alex Hormozi
Have an awesome day.
