BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 649: Alex Hormozi on The “Weak Links” That Will Make Anyone a Millionaire

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

Alex Hormozi is quite literally the one hundred-million-dollar man. If you haven’t heard of Alex before, prepare to have your mind blown wide open. He’s the poster child for entrepreneurialism on ...the internet, founding multiple eight and nine-figure businesses, including his current venture that does over $150M per year in revenue. He’s one of the wisest founders and CEOs out there, not because he does so much, but because he knows when to do less. One of Alex’s first successes, Gym Launch, proved how repeatable building multi-million dollar businesses can be. He quickly ramped up revenue, grew a team, and began cash-flowing seven figures. But, this was just the beginning. Over the past decade, Alex has advised numerous start-ups and established businesses, blowing revenue and sales figures out of the water by introducing easily-repeatable systems into the mix There aren’t many people who think like Alex is in his industry, or in any industry, to be fair. But, you don’t need to be just like Alex to use his teachings in real life. In this episode, Alex lays out the scaling system that will make you seven figures before you know it. He also talks about the one investment every entrepreneur should make—one that almost guarantees success, regardless of the field you're in. Want to learn how to ditch the burnout, make moves that count, and start bringing in millions? Hit play on this episode. In This Episode We Cover: Alex Hormozi’s journey from complete rookie to $150M in cash flow  How to scale your business from low revenue to seven-figures and beyond  The “weak link” every entrepreneur should focus on strengthening immediately  Hiring the “stallions” that can run your business better than you’ve ever dreamt  The “prescriptions of activation” that lead to massive success, with far less confusion  Why just being “good enough” can lead to more success than people think  And So Much More! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Youtube Channel BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Pro Membership BiggerPockets Bookstore BiggerPockets Bootcamps BiggerPockets Podcast Get Your Ticket for BPCon 2022 Listen to All Your Favorite BiggerPockets Podcasts in One Place Learn About Real Estate, The Housing Market, and Money Management with The BiggerPockets Podcasts Get More Deals Done with The BiggerPockets Investing Tools Find a BiggerPockets Real Estate Meetup in Your Area David's BiggerPockets Profile David's Instagram Rob's BiggerPockets Profile Rob's Youtube Rob's Instagram Rob's TikTok Rob's Twitter The Simplest Way to Successfully Scale Your Business The Millionaire Formula—10 Steps to Hit 7-Figure Net Worth How to Succeed at Doing Anything w/David Greene Books Mentioned in the Show: $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi Crushing It in Apartments and Commercial Real Estate by Brian Murray Connect with Alex: Work with Alex and Scale Your Business at Acquisition.com Alex's YouTube Alex's Instagram Alex's Twitter Click here to check the full show notes: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-649 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Check out our sponsor page! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 649. So they have to just figure out a way to tie whatever the thing. If they're really passionate about something, by all means, go all in on. If you're IT, then you're thinking, how can I decrease page load times? How can I get conversion rates up? You start getting into the CRO side. How can I organize the data in such a way that the CEO can make better decisions? And we have real-time reporting against all the sales guys so we can optimize our funnels
Starting point is 00:00:20 towards the best converting guys, right? Like all aspects of the business can make more money, but people don't think about it through that lens. So the first thing is, how do I tie what I do every day? day to making more money in the business. You connect that dot and you improve that connection. What's going on, everyone? This is David Green, your host of the Bigger Pockets podcast here today with a special treat. We have an amazing guest who I think probably brought his best performance that I've ever heard him do online. Here today, joining me is my co-host, Rob Rob,
Starting point is 00:00:49 Robbilt Aba Solo, to take down this awesome interview with me. Rob, why don't you tell people about our guests since I know that you are a huge, huge fan? And then tell us what you like about the show. That's right. So we had Alex Hormosey on, who is somewhat of the YouTube poster child for entrepreneurs everywhere. I started noticing him popping up about, I want to say, like, six, 12 months ago when my channel was growing. And man, I just really gravitated towards all of his videos because he puts a lot of information there on how to scale business mindsets, how to manage people. And yeah, we get into a lot of the nitty gritty there of scaling from zero to one million $1 million to $3 million, $3 to $30 million.
Starting point is 00:01:31 And honestly, I felt like for as big of a fan I was, I didn't fan boy too hard. I don't think it came through. So I think I kind of held it down. No, I thought you did a great job. And Alex really did most of the heavy lifting in this one. He breaks down some of the struggles that I'm having in business and that Rob is having as well. He gave us a kind of a cool origin story of where he started and what he would have done differently as he built himself up to a net worth of. I think he said over $100, $150 million.
Starting point is 00:01:56 It was a lot. $100 million. Yep. several businesses that he's built and sold and what he learned from that, the struggle of scaling and how you need to learn how to hire and how your ego can get in the way and wanting to hire the right people, building funnels, both for leads and for hiring, like all stuff that many real estate investors trying to scale their business are struggling with right now probably worth several hundred thousand dollars. Like if you had to pay Alex to get him to tell
Starting point is 00:02:22 this to you specifically, be very expensive and you're all getting it for free here on today's show. Okay, we're going to shift gears for a minute to cover something important, especially for new landlords. The shows often talk about getting stuck doing everything ourselves and the cost of sweat equity. The key question is simple. Is my time better spent elsewhere? I use a tool that cuts down on a lot of landlord hassles. And the wild part is, it's just $12 a month. It handles rent screenings, rent collection, maintenance requests, and accounting, all in one platform via a mobile app or desktop. It saves me time in tenant communication and keeps me organized for tax season. It's called Rent Ready, and you can sign up for a six-month plan for just $1 with
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Starting point is 00:03:58 For decades, real estate has been a cornerstone of the world's largest portfolios. But it's also historically been sort of complex, time-consuming, and expensive. But imagine if real estate investing was suddenly easy, all the benefits of owning real, tangible assets without the complexity and expense. That's the power of the Fundrise flagship fund. Now you can invest in a $1.1 billion. billion dollar portfolio of real estate, starting with as little as 10 bucks. The portfolio features 4,700 a single-family rental homes spread across the booming sunbelt. They also have 3.3 million
Starting point is 00:04:31 square feet of highly sought after industrial facilities, thanks to the e-commerce wave. The flagship fund is one of the largest of its kind. It's well diversified, and it's managed by a team of professionals. And it's now available to you. Visit fundrise.com slash BP Market to explore the fund's full portfolio, check out historical returns, and start investing in just minutes. consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses of the Fundrise Flagship Fund Funding. This and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash flagship. This is a paid advertisement. Before we bring Alex in to blow your mind, today's quick tip, Alex talks a lot about how you need
Starting point is 00:05:07 to invest in yourself before everything else. He actually says you should continue to pour your money into growing yourself and increasing revenue before you do anything else. I highly recommend that you consider investing in yourself before you invest. invest in stocks, bonds, treasury notes, cryptocurrency, whatever it is that's fun. Don't forget to invest in yourself. And if it's the right fit for you, you can try that out by visiting BiggerPockets.com and checking out the rookie boot camp. So if you are new and wanting to learn how to invest in real estate, they have a course set up for you where you can show. And one of us BiggerPockets personalities will be teaching you specifically how to invest in different
Starting point is 00:05:43 asset classes that you might be interested in. So head over to the website and check that out. Rob, anything you want to say before we get started? No, no, this is really inspirational for me because I never knew that there was someone that liked Chipotle more than me. But Alex actually might top this and we'll get into that towards the end of the episode. So stay tuned. All right. Let's bring in Alex. Alex Hormozh, welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast.
Starting point is 00:06:07 Great to have you. Thank you for having me. Very honored to be here. Yeah. So for anyone who's been living under Iraq and hasn't heard about your astronomical success, amazing insight that you're giving to small business owners, would you mind giving us a background of where you started and where you are right now. All right. I'll give the world's shortest play-by-play milestones. So I was a management consultant. Went to Vanderbilt, graduated, did defense contracting for two years, really didn't like it, got my top secret clearances. Sounded sexy on
Starting point is 00:06:36 paper. It wasn't cool in real life. Wanted to leave Baltimore. Went to West Coast, started a gym. Slept on the floor for the first nine months. I was able to figure it out. By month 15, we had our second location. Every six months after that, opened a new one, had six locations. I had lots of gym owners started asking me, hey, how did you grow so fast? And so I started helping those guys out. I ended up doing gym turnarounds where I'd fly out to a gym, fill it up, fix it, etc. We did 32 or 33 turnarounds over the next two years.
Starting point is 00:07:03 And then from there, I sold my six gyms and then transition from the turnaround flying out guys to Jim's business to a licensing model because it was more scalable. And so that was 2017. We transitioned to licensing. that business scaled to, I think, 37 million a year with very good margins. And then we started a supplement company, Prestige Labs, which we sold through our distribution base. We had 4,500 locations. From there, we started Allen, which was a software that worked leads for brick and mortar businesses of any kind. We exited all three of those businesses, one to a strategic buyer for the software,
Starting point is 00:07:41 and the other two as a package deal to American Pacific Group, which is a private equity firm. just that one was 46 million, the other one. I'm not allowed to disclose it, but I can tell you that we did 12 million top line the year before. We sold it for the software company. It was an all-stock deal. And so anyways, that was last year. We started Acquisition.com in 2020, which became our holding company for our portfolio.
Starting point is 00:08:02 Right now, the portfolio does north of $150 million a year. I'm only going to timestamp this. It is currently July of 2022 because people hear these clips later and they're like, you said, and I'm like, I know, we grow. That's why the numbers change. But at this moment, north of $150 million a year in portfolio revenue between our companies, we specialize in high cash flow service businesses and things of that nature. So it sounds like you started the gym business.
Starting point is 00:08:30 You jumped into it. You pursued excellence in that area. You learned sales techniques, the psychology behind how you get people to do things. Then you learned business techniques, how to run a profitable business. You took the step that most people never take when they hit that point is you said, how do I scale this and took on bigger and more difficult problems to solve? You started solving other people's problems constantly helping them to do more. And then once you hit this point of big success, you said, okay, now what synergy do I have? I can go sell supplement products
Starting point is 00:08:55 because I understand fitness people. Trust me. And then you solve a new problem. And you said, okay, now I can have a software company that's going to help manage this. And you sort of just spread in this like synergistic way rather than I'm going to go start a gym and then I'm going to go start a car wash and then I'm going to go start something like a loan brokerage or something completely unrelated. Is that more or less a good summary of your approach? Yeah, I definitely did a whole bunch of things that I probably wouldn't do again and probably would have done it necessarily in that order, et cetera. A lot of things were more difficult than they should have been. But yes, that was 100%. They were synergistic in nature. I felt like I was leaving money on the table. And so I took those
Starting point is 00:09:29 opportunities. If I could do it again, I wouldn't have done it that way. But they were still obviously very good outcomes. But I feel like I've learned since then. Yeah. I don't think there's too many people that would be in a position to criticize how it turned out for you. I think that. If anyone is listening to I've got notes. I've got lots of notes. Today's episode, Rob is going to tear apart Alex's business strategy and teach him what he should have done instead. All right, well, thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate it. You are an incredibly intelligent man, and I'm not saying that to butter you up. I'm just saying I take a lot of what you say. It's not fluff. It is very, very practical, well thought out. the type of advice you only get from trying and failing a lot and then figure out,
Starting point is 00:10:11 okay, this is what actually works. It's kind of like listening to a gracey talk about jiu-jitsu. That's the same feeling that I get when I'm listening to you talk about business. So before we get into today's show, we actually have a fun game that we're going to play. It's going to be called Mosey Nation or Mosey imitation. Oh. So in today's episode, Rob and I are going to try to guess if a fact about you is true or not, and then you are going to let us know which one was right and we're going to see who wins.
Starting point is 00:10:36 This is great. I'm so excited. I feel pretty confident. I do watch some Mozy YouTube video, so I think I got this one in the bag. Yeah, he's been practicing. He's been researching this so that he could win. So we'll see a talent or preparation wins out here. You guys can figure out which one of us is the talent based on what we said so far. All right. Fact number one, Alex and Layla Hormozzi met on a dating app. Rob, what say you? I think I'm going to go, no. I think I'll go no they did not meet on a dating app. We met on Bumble. Okay, they did meet on Bumble. So I was going to say no. Oh, my bad. I think you had a chance.
Starting point is 00:11:14 It's okay. I did confuse you there. The reason I didn't answer right away is I remembered hearing a interview that you were talking about, I can't remember who it was with, but I remember you talking about your relationship with her and how you were super busy. And there was a time she came in the room. She was like, do you want to break up? And you're like, yeah, whatever.
Starting point is 00:11:31 Like, okay. And then at some point, you needed help on a business deal. She went out there. she actually crushed it for you and it sort of like had a paradigm shift like oh maybe this person's a little more special to me than what I thought which I frankly love that you shared that information because this is something dudes go through all the time and we never want to talk about we want to look like Batman we just show up and you know like everything goes well but that's not how real life works out so I was trying to remember if you had mentioned the dating app or not
Starting point is 00:11:55 all right that one all right I was going to say in a gym for sure but all right I'll get it on this one it's all good fact number two Alex spent $75,000 for four or private phone calls with Grant Cardone. True. I'm going to go with true as well. That just sounds like something that Alex would have done. Whoever made the question, it was a little tricky. I spent $135,000 for four calls.
Starting point is 00:12:17 We're both wrong. There we go. I didn't remember exactly. Directionally correct. But yeah, I do remember. Right. Directionally correct. I'll take it.
Starting point is 00:12:23 Yes. Did you, let me ask you this. Did you get more value out of the content of the calls or the relationship you built with Grant? If any relationship. Honestly, both. I got more than that in value very easily. I got more than that from the first phone call.
Starting point is 00:12:37 It makes a lot of sense why you'd have talked to him with the way that you've scaled. Like he's kind of the scaling expert in the business field right now in America. Yeah, in organic branding, which I had not done. And so I figured, you know, I couldn't get in touch with Gary. And Grant was willing to take the call. So I was like, hey, man, I have all the means. Just what do you? Just lay out the plan.
Starting point is 00:12:57 How would you do it? And we just kind of laid out what he thought I should do. And I was like, okay, cool. I'll do that. So it worked. Well, hey, man, if you ever need advice, I charge 100. 20 cents per call. So just let me know.
Starting point is 00:13:08 And we can get it set up. I'm on Venmo, Mozel, like all the major outlets. All right. Question or fact number three. Alex emailed himself all of his failures for the last five years. I think we'll go true on that. Not from something anecdotally that I know, but it does seem like something you would do. I could see, and then I could see how you like use that to fuel your success.
Starting point is 00:13:33 I'm going to go yes on that one. I'm going to shoot with yes, but not for any of the reasons. Rob said, it's because I watched Alex's micro expression when we asked the question. I'm just going to read him completion. That's talent. Talent, got it. Yeah, no, 100%. That was how I remembered the lessons.
Starting point is 00:13:55 Yep, that'll keep you humble too. And that's, I mean, something we could talk about later on in the show. Purposely pursuing humility when you're having massive success is absolutely, in my opinion, crucial. It's not something that just happens. You have to make an intentional effort to stay in a humble place when it feels like everything that you're doing is just falling in line perfectly. So I can see that would be very wise. All right. Number four, Alex starts his mornings with a hot sauna and an ice bath. You go first. I'm going to go with no. I think he only does the ice bath because a hot sauna would be too comforting. And that just seems like something that Alex would not reward himself with comfort before he earned it. throughout the day. I'm going to go yes because I know that you wake up at four. And that's a lot of time. You talk about how you get most done before people get more done in those hours than people do all week. And it's very time consuming to take ice baths and sit in the sauna. So I'm going to go yes. No. I wake up, I drink a cup of coffee and I work. It's my morning. So you're not doing. Also a great
Starting point is 00:14:56 answer. I love that, man. There's certain trends that you pick up on when you follow people in this business days that everyone starts saying it because everyone else said it. Like one of the really common ones that I noticed was Mark Zuckerberg was credited with saying I wear the same shirt every day because then I don't have to think about what I'm going to wear. And I am so incredibly beyond your level that that that that I don't even have mental energy despair to pick out my shirt. And we were like, oh, that sounds good. Say that. Like I'm going to start doing that too. And everyone started wearing the same shirt. And I heard him on an interview with Gary V. And he said, yeah, I just said that because really I'm not good at dressing myself and it sounded better than admitting I don't pick out clothes.
Starting point is 00:15:34 And I was like, how many of us have been repeating this as this business maxim that's super? And he's like, yeah, I made the whole thing up. So there's a lot of things like that, like the ice bath in the morning, the waking up super early, which I think is really good, especially if you're in a competitive environment where you're competing with others for business. But like if you're just someone who writes books, it doesn't really give you an advantage because then you got to go to bed at 8 o'clock at night. It's sort of a similar situation.
Starting point is 00:15:58 So I really appreciate you admitting that you're not doing it just because everyone else says they are. I could go hard on that question. Well, let's start with that. Let's hear your opinion if you think that I'm way off here. I think it's a big pile of gobbledygook, man. I mean, the amount of stuff that is espoused by the TikTok gurus of wealth and finance is insanity. You know, you've got the cold plunges, the finger tissues, the yellow glasses, the affirmations in the morning, the gratitude journal. It's like by the time you fucking do that, you're already halfway through your day and you haven't done anything.
Starting point is 00:16:27 And so if you break this down to like a first principles thinking, it's like, okay, in order for me to do more, I must do more. Anything that is not me doing more is detracting from my ability to do. And so, period. You know, like, that's it. And so time thinking about doing, time procrastinating doing, time recovering. Like all those things are just not things that are you doing. So I think the ability to work itself is trainable. And so if people like feel like they need that prep beforehand, then I think that is something that is a crutch that can be eliminated and then ultimately make you more. productive, not because you have some hack, but simply because you just put more time in. I do love the simplicity of that. It's really just kind of breaking it all through. And it's just like, oh, it's just this one really simple thing. And I remember I watched one of your videos that was like my $100 million diet or something. And then you talked about how you went into a room with a bunch
Starting point is 00:17:14 of CEOs. One had wheat grass shots. And then the other one was like meditating in the corner. And then you're eating Twizzlers. And they're like, what are you doing, bro? And then you basically broke down how all diets are sham and it shams. And it basically comes. down to calorie deficits. And ever since then, I'm like, oh, okay, I need to stop, I need to stop micro counting. It's just calorie deficit. I mean, obviously, I don't want to oversimplify, but it was just like how funny it's just like these perceptions really cloud our minds. And it's just like much more simple than what we think a lot of the times. I had a mentor who's told me this, this, this quote, it's a two-minute story. And I think it's very memorable. It's don't be
Starting point is 00:17:50 cute, right? He was like, you know, he was from Long Island. He's like, you know, when I used to play backyard football? I was like, yeah, sure. He's like, yeah. So, he's like, yeah, so, you know, you got, everybody wants to be fancy. You know, we're going to flip it to Timmy, and the Timmy's going to reverse this way, and then we're going to fake it, and then we're going to go longer. What happens?
Starting point is 00:18:07 You drop the ball, and then it's fumble, and you lose the odds. He's like, nah, we're talking fundamentals football. Put the two fat guys in the middle, run to the right. And he was like, don't be cute. And he was telling me this, because I was talking about this idea that I had for Jim watch in terms of one of the new initiative that I wanted to take. And he was like, don't be cute, man. He's like, just do more what you're doing.
Starting point is 00:18:27 And I feel like there's a lot of truth to that in terms of like people overcomplicate things that they already know because the truth is too difficult to stomach. Right. So it's like they want to they don't want to accept that they should just eat less and move more. And so they want to come up with a hundred ways to be cute rather than just confronting the fact they just need a less and move more. And like they don't want to confront the fact that they just need a fucking work. And so then they're like, I'm going to do all these things to prepare myself to work. Right. And get myself in the right zen and like have an attitude of abundance Aurora and like read my affirmations and do my daily journal and all this stuff. And it's like, dude, the work, the doing needs doing.
Starting point is 00:18:59 So it's just who's going to do it, you know? I have a theory on that that, like, our audience is particularly susceptible to these gurus that say, I will teach you how to make a million dollars by taking my $100,000 course. And once you take this course, you're going to go out there and you're going to flip 40 houses a year by showing you how I do it. And even if they gave you the information to flip 40 houses a year, you're not in shape to jump onto that level of a workout.
Starting point is 00:19:28 It would be like if the rock said, I will show you my workout, that doesn't mean you can go do his workout. It takes time to build the skills that you would need to accomplish that. And it's that like whenever someone's being taken advantage of, there is a part of them that is making them vulnerable to that because like you said, they don't want to do the work.
Starting point is 00:19:45 They're either lazy or they're greedy or there's some component of that that isn't, they don't want to accept. It's the case. And I feel like this is why there's constantly a new diet or a new trend or a new something. And if you're the person that sells that to people, they'll buy it. You'll make a bunch of money. And then it's funny because now you actually have money.
Starting point is 00:20:02 And so you can show that your system worked, but you didn't do it by working the system. You did it by selling other people on what they could be doing, which is I really like you because you took the opposite approach. You went in there and built these gyms and grinded to learn these things. And then you said, okay, here's what I've learned after everything I've done. And I love that don't be cute approach. It's just this is the fundamentals. This is how it works.
Starting point is 00:20:23 Do this better. It definitely wasn't a new opportunity. We were just like, so one of the things that we call it database marketing, but when we work with a portfolio company, especially if they're in the education space, one of the first systems that we implement is data tracking on customer success. And so, you know, we have activation points that we want to track. We know that if someone does XYZ by day 30 or whatever, the likely that they, you know, stay or a set goes up, you know, threefold, whatever. And so what happens is then we can make substantiated claims based on what we can observe. And so the more data we collect, we can say, hey, of the people who actually send, you know, a thousand emails to prospective homeowners, people who do that, on average, four out of five of them
Starting point is 00:21:03 will close a deal in their first 45 days. And so then it gives people prescriptions of activation. It's like, I can't guarantee that you're going to do it, but I can give you the data to support what actions are going to create the outcome. And so then you can start reworking marketing message rather than make another guy who's making the same promise. You just say, hey, again, I'm not making the promise. I'm just telling you what's happened.
Starting point is 00:21:21 then you can make your own decision based on that. And that's how I prefer. And it also gives you unlimited amounts of kind of marketing angles and hooks because once you have data, you can talk the top 20%, the bottom 20%, the median, the average. You can talk about people who do XYZ add contingencies to, you know, the claims that you make. And it gives you an unlimited way. But it all starts with actually focusing on the customer and making sure that they're getting what they're supposed to, you know, be getting. Right. Yeah. So I like this a lot, the don't be cute. And I am a frequent watcher of your YouTube channel. And it's a very raw channel where you sit. you talk about life lessons that you've gone through. And I really like that. I really appreciate
Starting point is 00:21:57 basically you leave it all out there for people to kind of take and apply to their life. So one of the things that I hear you talk about really often, you know, is scaling. And that seems to be somewhat of your specialty. I know that there's different tiers of kind of scaling companies, right? There's the first million, the million to three million, and then three million to 30 million. So I was kind of hoping we could dive into that a little bit because I think all the first million, a lot of people in the bigger pockets audience, they're trying to get to that first million dollars, right? And we want to really dive into some of those concepts and what's needed to really hit that million dollar mark in the company. So do you think you could just sort of walk us through
Starting point is 00:22:36 those different tiers starting with that first, how do we get to that golden egg of a million dollars for a business? I'll actually even break it down to six figures too because I was asked on a different podcast about six figures. And it actually, it's even simpler. So, you know, to get started, you have to sell something to someone. That's it. Like literally, that's all. One avatar, one product, one channel. That's it.
Starting point is 00:22:57 So you have one way of getting customers. You sell one thing to one specific type of person. That is all you need to do to get to six figures. To get to seven figures, you need to learn how to do those three things, comma, reliably, comma consistently. So you know how to sell one product, one avatar, and one channel in a consistent manner. So you start having predictive metrics on how you can acquire customers. So it's either I spend this amount of money on advertising,
Starting point is 00:23:20 and this is how many, you know, calls I get booked. And then from that many calls, I get that many, you know, sales, et cetera. If it's outbound, it's like I send this many emails or make this many calls or this many text and then this many, you know, reply back, this many schedule, this many show, this many clothes, et cetera. If you're running organic, it's I know that I need to have this many posts that I have to make across these different channels with call to actions that drive towards this page for every thousand visitors on this page, I get Y opt-ins, you know what I mean? So each of these vehicles or I have to hit my email list, you know, once a week.
Starting point is 00:23:48 and if I hit it once a week with a call to action again. So all these are the different ways you can get customers. You could also do affiliates. You can do referrals. There's many ways to do it. But the point is that you pick one avatar, one channel, and one product. And then as soon as you can start predictively, as soon as you can start predicting how many inputs it takes to get an output, then you get to a million, right?
Starting point is 00:24:09 And at that point, you're at one, two, three million-ish a year. One to three, you have to build out your core team. So that's usually like the first five hires, first five to ten-ish that are. It depends on the ticket of the thing that's being sold. You know, if you're selling $25,000 things versus $500 things, the team size is going to be different. But it's the core team at about $3 million. And that's the reason that we take companies on at 3 is usually because there's a core team
Starting point is 00:24:35 and at $3 million, there's product market fit. So they've demonstrated that people want this thing and they have enough support that we can take them from 3 to 10. 3 to 10, and this is interesting because this is a mistake. A lot of people make at 3. And I can stop whenever you want me to cut the lines of the problems that come up. But the problems that come up at three-ish are that people start getting cute, right? And they start saying, and here's what's difficult is that you get reinforced on the fact that the more you market, the more you sell, the more money you make.
Starting point is 00:25:04 Right. And it's true. And you can scale from there by doing more sales and more marketing. And that is what the vast majority of the industry will do because they got reinforced doing it early. The problem is that they switch the objectives. The objective of the first phase of business, which for me is like zero to three, is just to demonstrate product market fit and an acquisition channel that is profitable. That is the objective. Now, at this point, we transition objectives to increasing lifetime value per customer. So this is improving customer experience, putting data tracking in place.
Starting point is 00:25:32 If there's an ascension opportunity, that makes sense we need to build out that product or service line, so that, and this is the big point, so that when we do choose to add another channel or expand on our current channel, we can do so more profitably. where if you just sell a single product that might not have as much LTV as you would, you would want, as you scale or put more in, your margins begin to compress. So you might go up to 10 million, but your margins have compressed over time. And then you get in this place where you have to keep selling to maintain your overhead, but you're not really taking enough home and you can't have enough free cash flow to grow the business. And so sometimes it's like you have to take the step back, fix the product, fix the customer experience, fix the service, fix the data, fix the infrastructure that everything's built on,
Starting point is 00:26:12 probably hire and fire some people that you promoted a little bit too early that didn't have the experience because they're actually not actually running things that well. And then once we fix that stuff, then honestly, going from 3 to 10 usually almost happens on its own. Once we're at 10, then we go far more aggressively on the acquisition side, which is, you know, the easiest moniker that I use is more better new. So we do more what we're currently doing until we max that out. And then we do better of what we're currently doing. Is there any CRO opportunity? So conversion rate optimization, can we switch this headline out? Can we change this lead magnate? Can we implement some of the best practices that we know to get more people to shop if it's a service business? If it's a if it's a product business, I only focus on service businesses. So lots of me, lots of our stuff is over the phone. Can we change the video sales letters and the follow up emails, things like that? All the improvements that can happen. And then different is, okay, or new is can we add a new channel to this? So we have six that we can choose from to get new customers.
Starting point is 00:27:07 We've got we can hit up our own lists. We can do cold, cold outbound. We can do content. we can do paid ads, we can do affiliates, and we can do referrals. And so there's the only six ways to get new customers. We look at those six and say, of the skills that we currently have, which of these would make the most sense to add to it? And you can even go adding a new thing within a current.
Starting point is 00:27:23 So if you're running paid ads, it's like going from Facebook to YouTube. We're going from Facebook to TikTok. And so each one of those six squares has channels or media channels that you can, or platforms that you can tap into that give you new audiences. So that was a little bit of a crash course there. But that's what allows you to scale from 10 to 30 and beyond. At 30-ish, the founders typically will start feeling constrained because they are the two-do behind the entire business.
Starting point is 00:27:49 And please cut me off if I'm starting to bore you guys. But at 30-ish is when it stops being about the founder. Not that it was about the founder to begin with, but like you can will your way to 30. But at some point, like right around there, there's like just, you get spread too thin. And so, and this was a mistake, I state, I know, okay, I'll stop. The point the point is that you need more stallions, right? And so you have to find more people who can drive things like you do. And so this is where employee compensation and recruiting become paramount to getting to the next level. Because you need to bring people in who've already won the Olympic gold, who've already run this race multiple times at companies just like yours, but bigger and better, and then have them come and run the playbook for you so that you're not driving it, but someone else is. And so that's where compensation and recruiting becomes really important. So you can incentivize people who, who deserve. to have that level of compensation. And that's you to get to, you know, get to nine figures plus.
Starting point is 00:28:45 Okay. All right. Well, I think we're, we probably just end the podcast there, right? I'm just kidding. We've got a lot to cover on this. So let's talk about the first million because that seems to be where a lot of people are in all of this. So you talked about in your first million, you're kind of identifying a few things.
Starting point is 00:29:02 It's going to be your avatar, which is going to be your customer profile. Who is your customer profile? But then you also mentioned your one channel. Can you explain that? you mean the one channel that you're marketing or the one channel that you're, yeah, explain that. Do you mean like YouTube, like social channel? Give us a little bit more on that. Yeah. So there's, there's three variables, right? So you've got platform. You've got, you've got media. And then you've got the content, right, of whatever you're marketing. So you just have to pick one of
Starting point is 00:29:30 those three things together. So I told you about six ways to get new customers just now. Right. So there's six ways to get your customers. You pick one. You double click on that. And it's like, okay, within there, if I do cold app, am I going to do cold call? Am I going to do cold call? I'm not going to do cold text, cold DMs, called emails. All of those would be one platform. Right. So one method, and then you've got the platform that you're doing it on. And then you pick the type of media that you want to send.
Starting point is 00:29:49 Do I want to send a voice memo? Do I want to send a text? Do I want to send a handwritten card? Do I want to, you know what I mean? It depends on the platform because some platforms you can send multiple types of media. Some of them can only send one. And so you pick one channel, which is all those things together, which is just a fancy word for a pathway for a stranger to become a customer.
Starting point is 00:30:04 Right. So we pick a pathway for a stranger to become a customer, and we focus on that one thing. And do you feel that... For breaking your first million, the entrepreneur that's in this journey, is that kind of like the loneliest phase of the company? Because I feel like for me, you know, I was alone for a lot of it in terms of just in the weeds of my own businesses. And I really didn't start hiring until breaking the threshold of that in my businesses. Is that a pretty common sentiment, you think? Or is it, you know, like, do people have like well-established teams and that's how they get to
Starting point is 00:30:39 a million? No, I mean, at a million, it's usually a few hires, a few contractors. You know, it depends, again, on the number of units sold to get to a million. You know, because you've got to make 83K a month. You've got to make 20K a week, right? So 20K a week, if you're selling 20K things, it's like you're selling four clients a month. Like, that's pretty easy to manage. If you're selling, you know, $100 things, you've got to sell 200 clients a week.
Starting point is 00:31:00 So it's a little bit harder. Again, if it's a physical products business, then it's going to be mostly like support. And if you're the media buyer slash marketer, then, you know, you can probably manage an ecommerce, But again, it just depends on the type of business. But I would say from a Zoom app perspective, I think all seasons of entrepreneurship have elements of loneliness. And I think that it changes. I think in the beginning, it's a lot harder because you're really competitive. Not that you're really competitive against other people rather than being competitive against yourself.
Starting point is 00:31:27 And so like in the beginning, you're like, this guy ripped off my shit. This guy's blah, blah, blah. You have all this like finger pointing. And I was just on a podcast with Ed Milet and we had a really good conversation about it. But like the 20 year club, you know what I mean? Like I'm only in the decade. But like, you know, five years in, 80% of people are gone, right? So it's like, okay, it's a little bit friendly.
Starting point is 00:31:46 You're at 10 years, you know, at least for me, like, I have no, I just know how big the, big the world is. And so if there's, I remember when I was starting out with gym launch, I thought about doing a weight loss business because we were good at weight loss. And that was actually what ended up, we decided to do the weight loss business. And that's when I pivoted. And I told the guys, the gyms that were going to do their turnarounds the next month, that we weren't going to do it.
Starting point is 00:32:08 And the guys were like, well, can you just show me how to do it? And I was like, fine, I'll show you how to do it. And I sold them just kind of like a licensing of all my, all my ads and all my pages and everything that I already built out and tested. And then that ended up being, you know, that became gym watch and became way bigger than the little weight loss thing that we had. But when I started doing weight loss just for a few weeks, a buddy of mine who was in weight loss came up to me. He said, yo, if you do weight loss, we can't be friends. He was doing like, a 150 grand a month. I was like, dude, it's a $60 billion industry.
Starting point is 00:32:35 Like, we can't both do weight loss. He's like, dude, I was doing weight loss first. I was like, bro, I had six gyms. I've been doing weight loss, but you were 17. You know what I mean? That's crazy. That's crazy that he invented the concept of weight loss. Like, you know that guy.
Starting point is 00:32:49 That's so cool. And so I say that because, like, it sounds ridiculous. And that guy ended up becoming very, very successful, too. And he, like, later on was like, dude, I was just, I don't know. Sorry. You know, because you're so afraid. It's just fear. You're just so afraid that something's going to go wrong that you just want to
Starting point is 00:33:07 like hold on and clench and just and just pointed everybody else when it's just like, it just isn't about you. You know what I mean? It's just like if you can serve your customers, you'll have business. It doesn't matter what the competition is doing. And the market's so big. You know what I mean? So anyways, I think that's why it's lonely, but like it's lonely at my point, too, just in a
Starting point is 00:33:24 different way. It's lonely because there's just not that many people that I can talk to who are, you know, doing with the same things. Right. So do you feel, because that makes sense for me. Like I've been in a lot of moments like that where it's rare to connect to something that's going through the exact kind of very nuanced thing that you're going through. How, how, like, have you found people in your journey that you've have connected in that way?
Starting point is 00:33:48 And, like, how does one even find that? Because I think that is really tough for a lot of people to find someone that really grasp what they're saying on a personal level. So to talk on one of the points that we were talking about did in the game show earlier, I'm a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge proponent of alternative education. I love the education businesses. I love guru businesses. I mean, I love them, comma, as long as they're being done well and promising the correct thing
Starting point is 00:34:16 and really focused on the product and the customer. I love that. And fundamentally, like, guru businesses are just education businesses and they are sprouting all over the place because the demand is unmet by the formal education system. And the demand is for skills that make money. And people are not getting them, but the demand is not going away. If anything, it's grown because people are seeing. on social media, all these other people making money, and they're like, this is possible.
Starting point is 00:34:37 And so in one good way, I think Instagram and all that stuff has made more people believe that they can do it. The downside is, obviously, whenever you have upside, you've got an equal opposite reaction of people who are scamming people and things like that. And I think that the difference between a scam and somebody who is trying to deliver is intention. I think there are many well-hearted or well-intentioned educators who are really trying to do a good job, but they are poor teachers. Just like there are people who are teachers and were terrible at teaching math. And you probably had them, but they really wanted to help and they just weren't that good at it. And so I have a little bit more of a heart for both sides of the equation here, but I do think that education is the way. And how did I find people? I asked and I was willing to have people say no. And real, real, very few people said no to me, my whole journey. And I think it was because the way that I asked was I didn't ask. I went and said, hey, this is all the stuff I'm good at. And then I would just prepare stuff and I would do work ahead of time to help them with their business. And I would just get on a call and be like, here's all the value I could possibly deliver to you. And then if there was anybody worth anything because winners give back. They were like, dude, this was, I was not expecting this.
Starting point is 00:35:41 Dude, what can I do for you? I'd be like, okay, I really have this question. Do you know how to do this thing? And they're like, no, but I know a guy and I'll put you guys together. And so I, like, my first mastermind I was a part of, I got voted member of the year with like 100 internet marketers and I was an internet marketer because I didn't know anything about internet marketing, which is ridiculous. I joined it because I wanted to learn. And so I just, only thing I knew then was sales. And so all of the, I was, I rewrote so many scripts for guys in that community because it was the only thing I was good at. And so they're like, wow, this is awesome. And then they would help me out. And I was like, how do I connect a landing page to an opt-in thing? And they would
Starting point is 00:36:16 sit there and they would show me how to do it. And that's how I learned. Like, I did not, I learned like this. Like you and me on the phone right here. This is how I learned. And I paid dearly for that because I didn't buy that many courses. I actually bought way more one-on-one. and I bought a lot of my one-on-on by doing work for other people for free. Yeah, I can definitely relate with the opt-in form and connect again to the landing page. When I first launched my very first program, that was the hardest week of my life because I did all the tech and all the marketing and all the content and all the editing and all the copywriting. And it hurt my brain, you know, but at the end of it, I was like, okay.
Starting point is 00:36:53 And so I'm a really big proponent of learning all this stuff and mastering it before I can delegate it out. to somebody else because I just want to know that they are good at what they're doing. But I feel like that's not necessarily super sustainable as the organization grows. And I think you kind of mentioned this earlier where you said once you start scaling up, you have to start hiring these stallions or people that are better than you at certain functions. I struggle with that. Not because I think I'm smarter than everybody, but I'm just always like, no one knows it the way I know it. at what point is that is that a limiting belief that that is difficult to shake your entire journey are you pretty good at breaking free from that that limiting belief yeah 100% limiting belief
Starting point is 00:37:38 I mean it's it's prideful to think that no one can do something better than you so a lot of times what happens is people hire people who've never done the thing and then are like oh my god I'm better than this person's like well obviously they've never done it before hire someone who's significantly better than you who's done that thing for a very long time a comma who's not also running every other department of the business and you'll be amazed at how much somebody can do. And so in the beginning, though, just to be clear, it is normal for people to have to learn all the basics, right? Like entrepreneurship in the beginning is very much, you know, master of all trades, you know, what is the jack of all trades, master of none. Like that's very much at the beginning.
Starting point is 00:38:12 You have to just be good enough at everything. You don't have to be great. You just have to be good enough to get it done and get the first dollar across the bridge. From there, you start to begin to get more leverage. And so the entire conversation of scaling and entrepreneurship about two things, control and leverage. And so the control component is that you have, it's a consistent relinquishing of control as you move up the leverage ladder, right? Because you can't see every email that goes out. You can't approve every post. You can't review every sales call. You can't, you know, make every video that's going to be in your, in your course from what you're saying, right? Like, you can't make every one of those things. And the person who's making it in the beginning might not be as good as you. But the question is,
Starting point is 00:38:48 are they good enough? And so, like, and that's why organizations improve over time, because, like, you have to scale with good enough until you can replace it with better because you have more leverage because you have more cash flow, you can attract better people, you can fix the culture, et cetera, et cetera. And so the whole concept of moving up in entrepreneurship is trading your time for increasing amounts of money. And so if we are, if we're defining leverage as getting more for what you put in, right, inputs and outputs in a system, the discrepancy between the two is the leverage. If that's the leverage in the system, we try and use more and more leverage.
Starting point is 00:39:19 And the first version of that is labor, right? And so that's the lowest form of leverage that we can use. And so we hire people to do things for us so that we can have time back to do more, more valuable things. In your experience, Alex, do you feel that the skill of hiring well is a really big hurdle that people have to overcome? Is this one of the bigger problems or is it not as big as I'm thinking in my mind? It is the problem. Yeah. It is the biggest problem.
Starting point is 00:39:49 So think about this from a purely theoretical standpoint. If you understood what was required in a business, like what has to happen for a business to succeed, and then all you did was put the people in place to have that happen, then you would not need to work. And so the reason that things are not happening is because the people are not doing the things. And so for our ability as entrepreneurs to select, so first attract, recruit, hire, manage, and ascend slash keep talent at the high. higher up you go in the business, the more leverage you have on how much money and your time you make, it all becomes about recruiting. And so you might like this from a real estate perspective, but you know, you can buy or you can build. That's kind of an M&A thing, right? So like if we have a
Starting point is 00:40:31 new division that we want to get into, we can either build the thing from scratch or we can buy it. But if you if you zero down at a micro level, you can either build talent or you can buy it. And so it's much faster to buy talent. And so I think one of the things that people overestimate, this is a quote for my wife, but she says everyone, everyone thinks they're a good judge of character until they get judged by the people they hire. And so it's a Lela, a little Laila mic drop for you. But it's true, right? Yeah, it's true. And so if we're judging, if we're being judged based on the people we hire, I would say that in my experience, the objective facts have worked better. And so track record and case study analysis on before they start. So it's like if I want to hire a video editor,
Starting point is 00:41:17 for example, to cut content, then I want to look at their track record, show me the stuff that you've already done and that you've been doing this for a long time for people just like me trying to get to where I want to go. Those are all nuances in what I just said. The second piece is, hey, here's some raws. This is what I want. Go make stuff. And then I can have 10 guys compete. And the thing is that there's so much psychological bias of like, I like, I like this guy, he looks the way I look, blah, blah, blah, blah, that we don't let the work do the talking. And so the more objective we can be about it. So in that way, I really do believe in being like colorblind and all that kind of stuff when it comes to recruiting talent because like talent comes in all forms. And so all I really care about is the
Starting point is 00:41:53 productivity, the output of the person. And so I think for me, that's been the easiest thing. This is much more laylist department. But in terms of like how we scale businesses and acquisition.com, we consider recruiting to be our core and number one competency. Because at three million, what the business lacks is talent. And so what we do, because it's usually one founder that's breathing life into this thing with lots of little helpers. It's a genius of a thousand hands. And of course, if you remove the genius, there's nothing, right? And that's most businesses. And most businesses aren't worth anything because they're not businesses. They're very, they're leveraged jobs. And so what we do is we look at the needs of the business and then we recruit people who've done the thing already and can demonstrate that
Starting point is 00:42:30 they can solve the specific problem that we're facing. And the nice thing is that if you are hiring somebody, you should have a problem that they should be solving. And so the problem is sitting in front of you and you're like, hey, head of marketing, fix my marketing on the job interview. And two things happen. Either they don't know how to do it or they do know how to do it and they teach you stuff. And so during the interview process, if you're not learning from the person that you're supposed to hire to take the job from you, then they're going to work as a subset of your knowledge because you know more than them, which means you need to train them. And so you're not buying talent. You're building it again, but you might be paying buying it price for building it work, which is not the trade we want to make.
Starting point is 00:43:03 So anyways, I can talk about that longer. But that's fundamentally, that's how you skip. You're making me very uncomfortable because I'm realizing as you're talking here that I tend to lean towards the, I want to coach this person up. They have a great attitude. They want to learn. They're like, whatever you want, I'll go do it. And then I actually, not only am I paying you, but I'm losing money because I'm taking time away from revenue generating activities to train you to do the thing that I'm also paying you to do. And I'm just stuck in like sort of this treadmill that I can't get out of right now. But I mean, certainly, Alex, there has to be some people in your umbrella and your company that you do train up. And those are kind of the people that,
Starting point is 00:43:41 that they're like the foundation of your company, right? Or is it completely objective like you can just buy all talent when you're starting a company? Depends on the nature of the work and what you're able to pay. So, for example, like frontline work in general, you're going to get lower skilled labor. And so it becomes a competitive advantage to have a very good training program because then you're getting the work done for less than the market. Right. So if someone comes equipped with the skill, you have to pay the premium of them having already acquired the skill. If we have a really robust training system, like if you're a door-to-door business, door-to-door sales business, like solar or pest control, whatever, then a really big business will pride itself on the fact that it can take
Starting point is 00:44:18 somebody off the street, run them through their gauntlet of training, and then on the other side, they've got a $400,000-dollar-year producer. And so it depends on the nature of the thing that you're selling and what your competitive advantages are. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I think I've been so slow to hire simply because I feel like I want to have a few people that I build up and train simply because I want them to speak Rob and know Rob and write Rob, right? And think the way that I think so that when we start hiring externally, they can then train all those people because they've been trained by me. But it's harder than you think. I mean, I just hired a C.O for my education brand. And that was a really big, that was a really pride busting moment for me to
Starting point is 00:45:03 to really finally sit down and say, okay, I, it's not that I was failing, but I was failing myself from a personal standpoint of being able to be sane and not stressed and like fulfilling family needs and everything like that. And I really feel just the moment that they accepted the offer, I was like, oh, I can finally stop saying no to everything because anytime I have a new idea or something new that I want to do with my program, I would immediately say, oh, yeah, but the logistics on that are a headache. I would never do it. But it's a really cool thing. And I was in the meeting with my COO yesterday. And there was like three ideas that came up. And I stopped him from riffing on it because I was like, no, the logistics on that are a nightmare. And then I was like, wait a minute. I don't have
Starting point is 00:45:48 to worry about the logistics. It's literally your job to do that. And he's like, that's right, man. You tell me what I want to do. What you want me to do and I won't make it happen. And I was like, wow, this is, now I understand why people hire people. So I think a lot of this came down to you. Like, one of the reasons I chose him is he came for my organization. He was, paid me for a consultation. I didn't charge him 120,000 though. I think I charged him like 150 bucks like a year ago. Then he joined my program. Then he joined my mastermind. Then he joined my sales team. And then he quit because he was too busy working his full-time job. And I said, no, wait, don't quit. I need, I like you too much. Come back. And I was able to.
Starting point is 00:46:26 bring them on and integrate him. But one of the reasons I think I saw him early on was actually something that you said, and it's your philosophy on superstars. I'd like to talk about that for a second, where when you see a superstar, you know it. Can you tell us, expand on this a little bit? It's not common, and I think you get better at recognizing it over time. You know, I think the amount of people who hear me talk about superstars, and they're like, oh, yeah, so it says a superstar. I already meet a super star. They're like, I don't know, that's a superstar. Because, you know, I had a mentor who sold his business for, you know, multiple bees. And he said, you know, Alex, you have to remember that the best talent has yet to come.
Starting point is 00:47:02 He's like, the best hire you've ever made is in the future. And so it's always like this constant raising bar. But superstars, when you find them, you have to hold on to them and you have to find a way to, now, mind you, the big comma here is that as long as they do not break the culture and you're not making exceptions for them from a cultural basis. Because that's one of the biggest issues is that you've got this superiors. super high individual contributor who actually detracts and is a cancer for the overall, you know, company. And so that's, that's the hardest, that's the hardest fire to make, but it's the one you have to make. But superstars who fit within the culture, I mean, you want to give them as much opportunities you can and support them in their growth so that they can grow. But even then with like,
Starting point is 00:47:41 like, like the salesman to the COO move, I would have been like, huh, that's interesting. It's a very different character trait and very different skill set. So I'm like, oh, interesting. That wouldn't have been my first guess. Yeah. Well, I think the, salesman thing, that was definitely part of his, I think he just wanted to be a part of the organization. And so he was willing to do sales for me just to be like, hey, I just want you to know, I'm in. And I had seen him like, you know, throughout the whole journey. He was kind of not, not the ground level of like the Raw Belt channel, but pretty close to the beginning of everything. And so I was like, all right, well, this guy has been around since the beginning. He's had faith in me.
Starting point is 00:48:19 So I'm going to have a little bit of faith in him. And honestly, I mean, just in the one week that we've started, I'm already like, really I needed someone that was complimentary to me, right? Because the phrase for me that I always think about is, if we're both the same, one of us is unnecessary. And so for me, I can't work with someone who's a visionary and like has big strategy, big ideas because that's what I have. I don't need that. I need someone to actually go and run with it. So I want to kind of talk about a little bit here. Can you give me your opinion on when you're talking about scaling, what is the more difficult stage? Is it that first reaching the million dollars? Is it reaching the three or the 30 or even any numbers past that?
Starting point is 00:49:02 It's so difficult. It's so difficult to say which one's the hardest. I would say the heart feels different. So, you know, the first stage, you know, zero to six, zero to seven. The heart is that you don't know what the fuck you're doing. I don't know if I'm allowed to cuss. If I'm not, then believe me. We'll bleep me out. It's all good. Yeah. You have no idea. what you're doing. The biggest threat you have to your business is ignorance. It's just not knowing what the hell you're doing. That's the threat. Right. And that is hard because it just, you feel like you're just flying through space and you have no idea. You're disoriented. Once you cross, like getting from a million to three million is very difficult because you have
Starting point is 00:49:41 to learn an entirely new skill set, which is like you have to hire your first team. Right. And that's, that's very difficult for a lot of people. You know, three to ten. is difficult because you have to unlearn the thing that made you successful up to this point, which is you're focusing on front end rather than on product and back end. And so that becomes, it's very difficult. It's like, it's like spiritually difficult at that point. You know what I mean? Once you're at 3 to 10, you're already out of the, like, I have to work.
Starting point is 00:50:04 I have to cry my face off in terms of like hours in because at some point, the amount of work that has to get done surpasses your ability to work, which means you have to work through other people. You know, at 10 million, the difficulty is you have to give up even more control. And so at each of these levels, you're giving up different types of control. You know, in the beginning, you're giving up control of fulfillment. The next level, you're giving up control of sales. Then you're giving up control of, you know, finances, things like that.
Starting point is 00:50:28 Then you're giving up control of managing all those things. Then you're giving up control of leading, you know, the company and so on and so forth. So like there's always this relinquishing of control, which is, I would say, spiritually very difficult. And it's easy to say, very hard to do. And that's what we look for in the portfolio companies that we're thinking about taking on. we look at the CEOs and we're like, do I think this person has the humility to give up control when it is required? Yeah, David, I think you're pretty good at this. I think you're really good at finding people that you can, as you say, develop them and help, you know, run the different
Starting point is 00:51:00 companies that you've created. What's been the toughest, I guess, phase for you when it came to scaling? I'm like, I'm having a whole psychological session with myself as I'm listening to Alex talking here. I see you bring it out into hives over there. Yeah, like, It keeps on coming back that like every issue I'm having in business is a reflection or a symptom of an issue I have with myself. So like as I'm thinking about why what he's saying makes perfect sense, why don't I do that? There's this big arrow that comes pointing at some character flaw that I have or a fear that I would have or a like maybe I don't want to commit to being there every single day at 8 o'clock. And if I'm going to hire this person and pay them $300,000, I have to be just as committed as I want them to be. So maybe Alex at some point we could talk more about like what your advice would be.
Starting point is 00:51:46 But Rob, I'm sorry, what was your question there? This is how deep I am in psychics. I know. Well, I can already see the YouTube title is Alex Hormosey exposes David B. Nice click-vade title. I want to know from your standpoint, what's been the most difficult stage for you to scale in any of your companies? Was it getting to the zero to one million mark? Or was it any stage after that? I think by Alex's definition here, the three to 30 is where I keep getting stuck. So I am very good at what you said, a business is just a leveraged job. You have one person, a bunch of support pieces, right? And I get to where I max, I cannot get any higher than this. I am doing as much as I possibly can. And then I pick the person and I hand over a lot of my
Starting point is 00:52:29 responsibilities. And then I go off and I crush it in another thing. And when I come back, I'm like, ah, like what happened? And then I have to take that person out and put a new person in. And I just get stuck in that, like, leap off cycle. And then I fall right back down. And it's definitely a problem with hiring. I'm sure someone who's good at this would look at it right away and say you're doing it wrong. But I've been probably three years on that treadmill. Yeah. You know, it's an interesting concept to think about Leland and I discuss this all publicly, but it's called the hidden funnel or the missing funnel. But if you think about what has to happen to acquire a customer, right? So you have to do some sort of lead generation. There's some sort of lead nurture. There's
Starting point is 00:53:02 some sort of sales. There's some sort of delivery. And then there's some sort of retention and then some sort of ascension. Right. So those are kind of like the steps that you take for a customer. Well, the same funnel exists on the other side of the business, which is as the business grows, you need to have a funnel to acquire talent, acquire employees. And so you have, instead of lead generation, you have application generation. Instead of lead nurture, you have application nurture. So it's like, how quickly are we getting these people booked for interviews? Like the best talent finds a job in eight days, eight days from the day they start searching.
Starting point is 00:53:30 If your entire job hunting process takes longer than eight days, you've already lost all the good people, right? And then from there, the sale is the interview, right? And with good talent, it should be a sale, right? because they should be able to be picking, like, if the person that you're trying to hire doesn't have any other opportunities, do you really want to hire them? Yeah. You know, and then from there, you have the delivery, which within the context of an employee
Starting point is 00:53:52 is going to be the onboarding process of like, how am I going to acclimate you to this business, what our culture, what are our values, how do you get paid? How do we do with time off? What's our compensation philosophy? What is your career path? What is your ascension? Blah, blah, blah, blah, right? All these things that have to get covered.
Starting point is 00:54:04 And it takes time, right? Like, we onboard a new, like, senior executive, it's going to be a month of one to two hours day with the executive. And then finally, we have retention and ascension, right? So it's like, okay, now that we have this person, they're onboarding, they're productive, it's like, how do we retain them and continue to get them motivated? And that is there the opportunity for ascension? The same way, we have that with a customer. And so you really have this mirror funnel that exists in the middle of the business that's external versus internal, but the promotion process is the same. And most people build this front end and they don't have a concurrent
Starting point is 00:54:31 funnel that funnels into the business to build the infrastructure, the business to support the leads and customers that are coming in. And ultimately, that's how you were able to scale it. By having, If you remember what I said earlier, there's one avatar, one product, one channel. We can have the same process on the back end, which is like we have a specific avatar that we're searching for, and we have a specific job that we have. And then we have a channel that we're looking to get them on a consistent basis. Getting the consistency down is really what gets you from one-off hires to having a consistent hiring process. Just like your lead generation process, right? Like you get that in order to get to that point, you get comfortable with the process.
Starting point is 00:55:04 I always have to be lead generating. And then you need to sort of take that same pattern and apply it to. Well, I'm lead generating for talent at this point. Yes. Yep. So that's where I've been stuck and that's just the challenge. Until I can figure out what it is in me or find the right person that can do that for me, right? Like there's probably a person that is good at hiring people that if I had someone like that, man, I think I would 10x pretty quickly.
Starting point is 00:55:25 That's and just to. Any last advice there? Oh, yeah. And I was just going to say, like, and that's why for us within our firm, like the only thing that we keep in-house is recruiting because at least for me, I think about the highest leverage ways. Because if I were to do anything, us as a hold code, do anything for the portfolio companies actually doing this rather than advice in addition to recruiting, that means that that company becomes less sellable in the future because that hold code has to go with it. It has to sit within the enterprise for the value to be created, right, in the enterprise value itself. And so the most efficient way of us doing that is for us to hire and find that talent, which is what we can do with our reputation, our reach, et cetera, that's our competitive advantage. and we can bring the All-Star into the business, and then now the value is being created on a consistent basis, the problem's been solved for good, and then that value sits inside of the enterprise, which then makes everybody more money later.
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Starting point is 00:58:50 real estate without acquiring any skills or without having any money, why don't you just solve the problem of why you're broke, right? Get your spending under control. Get a budget, right? Here's some tools to do that. Get good at making money. because that's actually something that is possible to do, especially in America. So there's defense offense and then you invest the difference. And that will be the part on investing. In this book, I'm trying, thank you. I'm trying to come up with advice for people who are not making enough money in their job.
Starting point is 00:59:22 Because what I notice is as we talk to people like you, the constant problem is how do I get talent? How do I get someone to do a good job? It's not like we're holding people down saying, I don't want to pay you more money. money. We're desperately looking for these leads of people that can help our business. And then you've got a whole population of people that are saying, I want to make more money. There is a huge disconnect that's happening here. So do you have any advice either for me that I can put in the book or for the people who are listening who are not happy with how well they're doing for what they can do to actually bring more value to their employer and make more money? Yeah. So I think everyone needs to turn off their
Starting point is 00:59:55 their 19 year old finance expert guru and stop trying to invest in the S&P 500 and invest in the SME 500, right? They should be putting every dollar they have into themselves rather than an index, because I can promise you if they put $1,000 into themselves, they're going to make more than $100 a year off that increase in skills. And so the biggest issue that most people have is they don't have the ability to discern what their missing link is or what their next step is. If you think about the theory of constraints, which is that a system will grow until it's constraint. And so what happens is most people add potential to a system, but they don't actually increase the throughput of the system. So, for example, if I had a bridge, right, and it has a weak link
Starting point is 01:00:32 in the bridge or let's say a chain is probably simpler. So if you have a chain and you have to pull two things, the amount of force that you can put on the chain is just predicated based on the weakest link. And so what happens is that people reinforce a strong link and not the weak link in the chain. And so they add potential to the chain, but they don't actually add any more strength that can be pulled. And so if you think about the amount of money that you're trying to make as an amount
Starting point is 01:00:51 of money that you're literally trying to pull towards you, that weak link is going to be the skill deficiency that you have. And so most people solve problems that aren't really there. And they spend a lot of their time reinforcing skills that they enjoy, but that's not their deficiency. And so that's why the entrepreneurship thing is you have to be a jack of all tradesmaster of done. You have to be good enough to get the thing across the finish line to pull the money towards you. You don't have to have the strongest link. You just need all of the links to be strong enough. And so I think most people aren't good at assessing their own deficiencies. And so if the
Starting point is 01:01:19 follow-up question is, how do you assess deficiencies? How do you know what's missing? The question is, what are the revenue-generating activities within a business? How can I get myself closer to those revenue-generating activities. And so you can look at product as a revenue-generating activity. You can look at sales as revenue-generating activity. You can look at marketing as revenue-generating activity. And so if you think about those as kind of the three core pillars of what businessing is, and then you have back-of-house, right?
Starting point is 01:01:42 You've got finance. You've got IT. You've got the other pieces. But the people who ascend, even in the back office, know how to generate revenue and bottom line for their division. So, for example, my CFO, Suzanne Chiflett, she led a $15 billion acquisition, $5 billion on $1 billion. The last company she was out was $750 million.
Starting point is 01:02:02 She's been $1 to $100 million two times. So like she's been there. And the first thing she did on our first interview, she was like, oh, you won't have to pay for me. I was like, and she's paid very well. And she's like, you don't have to pay for me. She's like, I'll save more than what you're ever going to pay me. Just for the six months I'll save you that.
Starting point is 01:02:21 And I was like, oh, cool. And so smart people know how to do that. Like an intelligent, you know, video editor is going to come and say, dude, I can 10x the amount of views that you're getting on this thing because he's going to tie himself to marketing. A good product person is going to say, I can decrease our turn, which is going to increase your LTV. I'm going to be able to get more people to ascend because they have a higher MPS score and they're more likely to want to keep buying from us. So they have to just figure out a way to tie whatever the thing. If they're really passionate about something,
Starting point is 01:02:47 by all means, go all in on. If you're IT, then you're thinking, how can I decrease page load times? How can I get conversion rates up? You start getting into the CRO side. How can I organize the data in such a way that the CEO can make better decisions. And we have real-time reporting against all the sales guys so we can optimize our funnels towards the best converting guys, right? Like all aspects of the business can make more money, but people don't think about it through that lens. So the first thing is, how do I tie what I do every day to making more money in the business? You connect that dot and then you improve that connection. Let me ask if I understand your chain link analogy there because I thought that was really good. And I also love what you
Starting point is 01:03:18 said is like solve a problem for somebody, bring value to them and you're paying your own salary. You can name your own price if you're making or saving the company that money. I did a TED talk about building skills. And in it, I described how when I was, you wouldn't think it from looking at me now, but I used to be incredibly skinny. Like I was very insecure. I was a bean pole, six foot one and like 150 pounds. It was terrible.
Starting point is 01:03:40 And so it was just a challenge for me to get to the gym at all. I just was working out next to meatheads and I hated how it felt. And I was trying to work out my arm. You needed gym launch, man. Exactly. Exactly. We didn't have that back then, Alex. I was trying to work out my arms because that was the biggest area of insecurity that I would have.
Starting point is 01:03:56 I would wear like extra long T-shirts because I didn't want people to see how skinny my arms. So I'm doing these curls. And I realize I can't even get a bicep workout because my wrists would get tired before that muscle would. Like the muscles in my wrist were not strong enough to do it. And then I finally got my wrist strong and I had that same problem with my forearms. They would burn too much and I couldn't get to the biceps. So I had this like process where I had to strengthen individual links in that chain before I got to the actual freaking biceps. so I could work it out.
Starting point is 01:04:24 Am I, is that close to what you're describing that people have with their own personal skills, that they're, maybe they want to get to this part in bringing value, but they've got these weaklings. They have to strengthen before they get there. Like, it's a perfect analogy, the one that you had. It's a perfect analogy. And as a total side note, because Rob, you're in the education space, like one of the big things that people, there's a big misconception, which is that one product or one course or one coaching thing or one mastermind is going to be their Messiah.
Starting point is 01:04:50 It's going to be the one thing that says. them off. And the thing is, is that the testimonials that anybody receives is not purely because of the program that they have. And that's hard for a lot of educators to take on because they want to take responsibility for everyone's success. But the thing is, if you take responsibility for everyone's success, you have to also take responsible for everyone's failures. And so I think that a realistic approach is probably better. Like, you didn't teach the person how to read. You didn't teach the person arithmetic. You didn't teach the multiplication. And so education sits at top foundations. And so a lot of times, and this is, this is for everyone who's listening to this, who is going
Starting point is 01:05:20 through educational programs and they haven't made money yet. The point is to get is to make progress. And the hardest part in the beginning of entrepreneurship is ignorance. And you have to pay down the time tax of ignorance as fast as you can. And so you pay down that time tax of ignorance through education. And the thing is is that if you are fortifying different aspects of the chain, if there is a link that is literally missing until let's say there's, let's say there's 30 pieces of the chain that have to get built for us to pull a certain amount of money towards us. All right, just for to keep the analogy parallel. If there's 30 links, the first course you take might give you 20 of them, right, but you didn't make money. And so that person then said, they shake their fist at the guy and
Starting point is 01:05:58 say, screw that guy, he took my money, but you're 20 links out of 30, right? And then you take another thing because you at least accurately identify what was wrong and you get another eight links. Now you get two links. And then you go to this next final guy and he gives you the last two links that you need. And then you're like, this guy's the Messiah, this guy's the stuff. I did two other programs. I didn't they get any results. The thing is that you were measuring, you were measuring based on outputs, not on inputs. And you were measuring based on how much money you were make, rather than how much work you were doing on you. And so I think if people can make that shift based on them being the investment that they are making, then they will always see the return. And then it obviously
Starting point is 01:06:32 focuses more on the process and the outcome. And if you can do that, because I can tell you for me personally, you know, because I get asked a lot and hopefully it comes off the right way. Like, how did you move so quickly? Because we're 32 years old, across $100 billion net worth last year. and we get asked this question all the time. And it was because we always took 100% as much of the access cash that we had and just plowed it into education. It was all about how can I have more. I mean, my goal in life was to be wise. When I was really young, I was like, I want to be wise.
Starting point is 01:07:03 And wisdom is seeing what other people cannot say, right? And so it's understanding the circumstances and having to discern it to see what is true and what is not. And so if we look at why you're not doing well in business, it's being able to properly discern. and identify what those problems are. And you only get that through repetition. You get that through experience. You get that through mentors and people who have more context than you who can breathe into your life.
Starting point is 01:07:22 And so anyways, I'm very passionate about that. And so I just think that a lot of people do the education industry and a service because they go to college and four years later with a Spanish degree, they can barely speak Spanish. And then they take one course and they're like, I'm not a millionaire. And if it's hard,
Starting point is 01:07:36 then that's what makes it worth doing. Like if it were easy, it wouldn't be worth doing. You wouldn't even want it if it were easy. that dude that is so true i feel like the education space gets poo-poohed on a little too much especially for all the legitimate people out there teaching stuff and it's like i i i the way i've learned it the hard way so you can learn it the easy way but the bad news is is that you still have to put in a lot of hard work for it to work out it's not it's not hard
Starting point is 01:08:03 but it is hard work a lot of the time in real estate you know it is hard to if you're really getting started but i i like that you said ignore the 19 year old find finance bros because I do feel like that is the thing. I actually got interviewed for a podcast or for a YouTube video about a month ago and it was a buddy of mine and he was asking a bunch of millionaires, hey, if you were talking to someone just getting started, how would you recommend investing a thousand dollars? And every single one was like S&P 500. I would think like Solana or like Bitcoin. Really? And I was like, you're not going to make any money on education. I'm sorry. you're not going to make any money really that's like life changing with $1,000 in a stock investment.
Starting point is 01:08:45 Invested education, buy a $1,000 course or $2,500 course and learn a skill that allows you to make more money. Maybe it's video editing, maybe it's, I don't know, Amazon real estate, whatever it is, I don't really care, but learn, empower yourself, give yourself knowledge and use that to make more money because at the end of the day, starting out the $1,000, I mean, while some people have done it and become billionaires from it, I'm sure, it's not something. I mean, you know, you got to get real lucky with the $1,000 on like a Bitcoin call or something like that to make a ton of money. So I always say go learn and that is what's going to make you the money, not necessarily like a tiny little investment. In my opinion, 100% of anyone's money, especially sub 30, should be invested in only one thing which is increasing the earning capacity.
Starting point is 01:09:31 That's it. It's increasing your earning capacity so much so that you cannot spend the money that is coming in. And then and only then, when you literally can't find places to spend the money on education, which is why I get so excited to spend $130,000 for the calls with grant or anything. I've done that a number of times, $25,000 a call. I've paid plenty of those types of calls. And they've always returned. And the constant is that you have to be willing to work.
Starting point is 01:09:56 And if you have the belief, which I do, which is that I always want to be the best student. So if I go into somebody's program, I will say, if someone else can, then so can I. And then I will do whatever they did and do a little bit more. and so, or a lot more. And that way, I can always, because if it worked for one other person, then it means it can work for me. And so, like, I've always had that as a deep-seated belief, at least it served me well and maybe it'll serve the audience.
Starting point is 01:10:17 I know I went on a quick tangent with that, but this stuff, like, really lights me up because it's like what I care a lot about. I'll give you a quick example because I think it'll drive this home. So a friend of mine has a daughter. She's 17 years old. She got a job at a bowling alley. And she was making minimum wage. I think it was like $7.50, whatever.
Starting point is 01:10:32 And he's like, why don't you just get a, phlebotomy certification. It's a weekend and you immediately make $25 an hour, right? And so people think about that. I'm like, guys, it's $500 in two days. It's a weekend to get a phlebotomy certification. And forever, she will have three and a half extra earning capacity for the rest of her life. And so if you take that same $1,000 and put it in the S&P, maybe it goes up 10%. Maybe it goes up 25% because that's a crazy year, right? Well, cool. You have $250 extra. You could have $250 extra per week just by investing in that one thing where you get a 50x return or a 100 X return, right? And then you take that excess to your point, David, right? And you say, okay, phlebotomy is this skill. Is there another skill
Starting point is 01:11:15 I can stack on top of this? Maybe it's project management or management skills in general and I can manage 50 phlebotomists, right? Like it's just, it's leveling up the skill set and the opportunity vehicle that we're pursuing. So I could be a blender tender, you know what I mean, at a smoothie shop, right? Or I could be a manager a little bit better, probably still not a good vehicle. Or I could own a smoothie shop or I could own the franchise of all the smoothie shops. It's all just degrees of leverage and acquiring the skill set are required. And just as long as you know what the path looks like, then you can ask the question, what do I lack that that person has? And I think that's usually one of the more valuable questions rather than envy and point in casting stones about why someone's ahead of you and why
Starting point is 01:11:50 they were cheap and you're actually a really virtuous person and they must be doing something negative to be ahead of you. Maybe they're just better than you. And if you can at least admit that and have the humility to do so, then you can create the deficit that you can then solve. I love it, man. I think what you're saying right now has the ability to change lives more than almost anything else that could be said. And it hits right at the core of like, you are actually in charge of your own success. If you take the responsibility for building skills, you just don't hear people talk about how important it is to have skills. Like you get that Napoleon Dynamite complex, right? Girls like, guys, they'd have skills. I don't have any skills. But that's what, that's what
Starting point is 01:12:28 will put you in the position of empowerment. It's not the next get rich quick scheme. It's not some clever marketer telling you could have a Ferrari like me if you do this type of a thing. Like what you're trying to do when you're taking these courses or educating yourself really is building skills. And I think like you take anyone, you put them in a jamba juice and they're the blender tender and they take the right approach and then they learn how to become a shift manager. And then from there they learn how to manage the other people and then they get put in charge of hiring and then they're looking at company books and well, we can increase revenue if we sell up cinnamon bun with every smoothie or whatever. You're actually building skills that then
Starting point is 01:12:59 they say, let me put you in charge of the whole jamba juice. Let me put you in charge of my other five jamba juices. Now you learn how to franchise and you could buy a jambi. I mean, that's literally kind of what you did. And this is the key to making it. It's like, and for everyone's always like, I don't know where to start. Start with the money. Watch where the money goes. How does the money come in the door? Like you just have to watch the path of the money. Like from click to close, cradle to grave. So how does this person find out about whatever business you're working in? Like, ask those questions. Like that is fundamentally what you understand. of business is, is understanding how do I monetize raw attention? How do I get raw attention? How do I
Starting point is 01:13:35 attract it towards me? How do I convert that attention in exchange goods and services for dollars? Right. How do I get that good and service at person to come back and spend more money? Right. Like if you know what that path of the money looks like, and that's where you can ask, I remember when I actually was a smoothie blender tender, because I, that's why he's the example, because I was born. I remember, and if you're like, man, I haven't thought about that. It's okay. Neither did I. You know what I mean? Like I worked for two years. at a smoothie store. And every day I would look at the total sales. I would add it up. And I never actually thought about, I never once multiplied it out to see what the monthly revenue was.
Starting point is 01:14:08 It was just numbers to me. Like I didn't, I didn't care. It just didn't matter. I just came in and clocked out. But like, I'm telling you now, sitting where I'm at, if I can save you that time, follow the money. If you can follow the money and get yourself closer to the money, you will become more valuable. And if you don't know how to get closer to the money, ask. And most business owners, even if they are not, most business owners, even if they are small business owners, will know a little bit more than you. And in that, you can learn of them. Yeah, do you think the owner of smoothie king told the owner of Jamba Juice,
Starting point is 01:14:37 hey, man, you can't do smoothies or else we can't be friends? They probably aren't friends. But probably when they were starting up, and now it's, you know, both those companies are, you know, multiple decades old. You know, who knows? But yeah, I mean, that's, it's funny, though, because like Ed said, it's like the 20-year. I can't wait to get into, like, the 30- or 40-year club because, I mean, you think about a guy who's, You know, you're 65 plus years old. Do you see that guy like shaking his fist at the other? No, of course not. He's old. Right. It's like, and so if you're going to be that way eventually, why not be that way now?
Starting point is 01:15:08 I agree. I think I'm, I could be a, I'm competitive in my own respect, but like, I've had friends that have started similar things in me and they've come to me and they're like, hey, I just wanted to, I wanted to bring it up. Like, is it okay if I, like, if I, like, if I do this. I don't, I'm like, dude, I didn't invent Airbnb or short term rental. I didn't invent investing in this city. I didn't invent this concept. you can do whatever you want because I got nothing to gain from being competitive with like friends in the space right we can only help each other grow there's a lot of people right right and you also get into like psychographics which is kind of interesting if you're a mass market thing like you know anyone can do Airbnb short-term rentals right so somebody might be attracted to you someone would be attracted to me someone might be attracted to david some people might be attracted to layla so like not only do you have demographic differences in terms of like who's the avdar that we're marketing to but like psychographic we have different values we stand for
Starting point is 01:15:56 different things. And so people are just naturally going to just say, like, I want this flavor, even though the actual mechanics might be the same. It's just I want this flavor because I just prefer this community. I prefer these values. This is more my vibe, which is fine, you know. Really appreciate you sharing your experience here, Alex. This is like legit, really gold information that I think can change lines for lives. For those that have ears to hear, please listen to this one again. Let it sink into your heart. Ask yourself those tough questions because this will get you more money than you would need. And investing in real estate becomes a lot easier when you have a lot of capital to go do it. All right, we're going to move on to the last segment of the show. This is the
Starting point is 01:16:29 world famous famous for. In this segment of the show, we ask every guest the same. For questions, we will take turns firing them off at you. Question number one, Alex, what is your favorite real estate related book? Crushing it with real estate apartments. Wow, I'm impressed you had a book to say there. I was thinking you might be like, I don't do real estate. I do business. I thought you were going to say the Burr book since you've read it before. Yeah, I've read probably five real estate books. And that one is really good. It was really well written. The guy didn't sell anything.
Starting point is 01:16:59 I like he had a really cool story. That's Brian Murray, right? I can't remember the author name. I think it's Brian. It's black with a red. Yeah, it's black with the red thing. That's him. Yeah, he partnered with my former co-host of this Brandon Turner.
Starting point is 01:17:10 Oh, no, I. Brian is now the partner with him in his company, ODC. They buy mobile home parks. Super cool. Yeah, yeah. And it was a good book. Okay. Question number two.
Starting point is 01:17:19 What is your favorite business book? For what stage in business? For someone just struggling with scaling, how about that? Struggling with scaling. I think Ready Fire Aim by, what's his pen name? Mike Masterson, it's Mark Ford, who's the co-founder of Agora, which is a direct response giant. They do, I think, a billionaire. So he has a book that goes all the way up.
Starting point is 01:17:44 You said it was a... Ready Fire Aim. Ready Fire Aim, okay. Yeah, he talks about the transitions and business between each of those levels, too. Okay, great. I always write down these books whenever people say it with the aspirations to read them one day. So got it on the list. I'll give you a flip side one.
Starting point is 01:18:01 Any of the books by Patrick Plinyoni, he talks about operations. And fundamentally, like, that's why most – if you're talking scaling, right, it's people. And so those books are fables, so they're really light reads. You can read them in one sitting. And they really teach really important lessons. The book called The Motive changed my life and is what got me to break through the – That plus, you know, I was in a big reading mode because I just felt stuck in the mid-30s. I couldn't get through.
Starting point is 01:18:27 And that was among the books that most deeply, most profoundly shifted how I acted as an entrepreneur. Awesome, man. Question number three, when you're not out there building $100 million gym empires, what are some of your hobbies? I don't have many. I work out. I work and I eat. That's most of what I do. Actually, this is very topical because I am somewhat known on the, on the,
Starting point is 01:18:51 internet as the Chipotle guy. And then I recently saw that you posted you ate at Chipotle 500 times in a year one time, which is that actually does put me to shame and embarrassed me that I haven't done that before. Yeah. I did. Because I was a single guy. And so it was way more efficient for me. Money, like the amount of time it takes to grocery shop, prep, cook, clean, et cetera. It was way easier for me to just get Chipotle twice a day. And the end of the day, Chipotle was easy because it didn't to track from work. So the only thing I really had to do was the lunchbowl and I didn't eat breakfast. So I would just go, nothing, bowl, nothing, bowl. And that was all I ate. I didn't even have anything in my fridge besides egg whites, Coke Zero, Red Bull, and Johnny Walker Black.
Starting point is 01:19:32 It makes sense, though, because when you're making a certain amount of money, it might be a $20,000 lunch that you just ate if you had to go to the grocery store and you had to shop and you had to come cook your food. So that makes a lot of sense. All right. Last question from me. In your opinion, what sets apart successful entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail, or never get started? The ability to deal with short-term discomfort for long-term achievement. That comes from everything. It's like if you literally boil success down in any field, it's just the ability to endure short-term discomfort for long-term achievement. Whether you want to lose weight, whether you want to have a good marriage, whether you want to be a good leader, whether you want to have a six-pack, whether you want to make money.
Starting point is 01:20:08 It's like you have to be willing to endure a short-term sacrifice for a long-term achievement. Okay. That is very good because me and David are currently both working on our six-pack, so it really took this one. I'm starting with the four pack first, you know. Got some got the other way to go there. Okay. And then last one for you, Alex. Where can people find out more about you or what you're doing all on the internet? I have a podcast called The Game.
Starting point is 01:20:34 So you can just search the game on any place that you listen to podcasts, Spotify, Apple, all that jazz, Stitcher, all the weird ones. We're on all of them now. That's the best thing. And if you like videos, we have a pretty good YouTube channel. We're on all the social medias. So I'm just search my name, Alex Ramozian. You should find me.
Starting point is 01:20:51 Go do it, everybody. Go subscribe to his YouTube channel. I don't know. I've said this. I've watched your channel. It's been really cool to see you blow up, man. You're like the YouTube poster child for all entrepreneurs out there. So very much appreciate all the content that you put out there.
Starting point is 01:21:05 David, what about you, man? Where can people find you? Online at David Green 24 on YouTube at David Green Real Estate and on bigger pockets everywhere. So you can message me on there if you have any questions for me. Rob, how about you? You can find me on the YouTube. at Rob Built on Instagram at Rob Built. And then if you want to see me do crazy little cute dances on TikTok, find me at Rob Biltow.
Starting point is 01:21:25 Alex, last, I lied. I have one more question for you. How long do you anticipate we have to endure before we stop having to look at the little like TikTok pointing at bubbles thing? I'm losing my mind every time I see these now. Yeah, it's really interesting because like I, you know, we've grown a decent amount. I think we started September of last year, so we're almost coming in on a year. I think we've grown 400,000 or something like that as of today. in that period of time from zero. And I didn't do any dances ever. And so I think people look at, you know, because it was musically before this.
Starting point is 01:21:56 So it made sense that there was a little bit more dancing kind of in the like embedded in the culture of it. But fundamentally, it's not a dancing app. It's a short form video app. And so I think it's just about whether you can deliver value in an entertaining way in 60 seconds or less. And so, you know, the dancing is just like a non. Like when I see business people or like lawyers doing dances of like five things you need before you do a deal. It's like, due diligence. And like, I just, you know what I mean?
Starting point is 01:22:21 Like, you know, you don't need to dance in point. Just talk to like about the five things and how you do it and keep it under 60 seconds and you've got a TikTok. You know what I mean? And so I think it's people misunderstanding the platform. And this is by and it not means me being some social media expert, but just at least my understanding of as it currently is, as it's just short for a video. And then you just know that there's a slightly different demo there and trying to cater it a little bit more. Like my general things about marriage and food and fitness tend to do better than my business stuff. it's also probably because the audience in general is a little bit younger probably.
Starting point is 01:22:51 But it'll age up. You know, in five years, they'll all be starting their businesses and hopefully, you know, they'll be able to get some value from it. Did you hear that people? You don't have to dance and point at bubbles that have a little piece of, please share this video, make it go viral, get them out. Collectively, we can end this horrible trend that makes me want to poke my own eye out every single time I see these things.
Starting point is 01:23:10 I think it might be a realtor thing. I follow a lot of realtors in there. A lot of realtor. Oh, that's what I'm supposed to do. I'm going to start. are making exclusively that content and then tagging both of you in it. You will too. All right, Alex, thank you very much, man.
Starting point is 01:23:25 We really appreciate you. We're going to let you get out of here. Rob, I know you love when I do this. Any last words before we go? No, man. No, no final words other than things. Thanks for coming on. And I watch all your TikToks.
Starting point is 01:23:37 There you go. Appreciate you guys. Thank you so much for having me to the audience. I hope you were able to get some return on your attention. I know that's all of our hopes. So thank you so much. Thank you, Alex. This is David for Rob.
Starting point is 01:23:47 the dancing TikTok machine Abas Solo, signing up. Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I'm the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer. The show is produced by Ian K. Copywriting is by Calico content. And editing is by Exodus Media.
Starting point is 01:24:31 If you'd like to learn more about real estate investing or to sign up for our free newsletter, please visit www.biggerpockets.com. The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only. All host and participant opinions are their own. Investment in any asset, real estate included, involves risk. So use your best judgment and consult with qualified advisors before investing. You should only risk capital you can afford to lose. And remember, past performance is not indicative of future results.
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