My First Million - Billy of the Week: Alex Hormozi

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

Sam Parr (@theSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) talk about (non) Billy of the Week Alex Hormozi, how he has made $72M over the last 5 years based mostly around gym businesses, and discuss whether he is legit. ----- * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

All right. I have to tell you about something interesting. Ben, cue the music. A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars. All right. Billy of the week. This person is not a billy, but they're incredibly fascinating to me. So I've been getting just targeted on YouTube like crazy, not from ads, but for like things you also should watch. Because my first million, there's this guy named Alex Hermazzi. Have you seen this person? Yes, dude. This guy's all over my ticket. TikTok feed. I see this buff motherfucker in every TikTok, every other swipe is this guy. So who is this guy? What's his story? I will tell you. He looks like an 80s cop had a baby with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Long hair, mustache. Great mustache and just huge jacked. Like he looks like a good

looking dude. And very fascinating look. He like right when you see him, he stands out. Ben's pulling up a picture of him. Yeah. I mean, he's yo. and I've been getting these YouTube videos from him everywhere. Like, learn from me a guy who has a business that's doing nearly $100 million a year in revenue. And I'm like, what? This guy looks like he's 30 years old and I think he's 31. So let me tell you about this guy. And let me preface this by saying, I think this guy is legit.

But it's almost too good to be true. And so I'm like, I wonder what the truth is. Right. So, all right. So his name's Alex. So basically he started out. out when he was like 22, 23. He opened up a gym.

He scaled that gym to three gyms. Still wasn't that good of a business. Met some folks at ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels is a little bit multi-level marketing-y, incredibly. It's an incredibly dirt. Just internet marketing. I wouldn't say multi-level. It probably a trap, but it's the cousin of it.

You know, they all go to the same family reunion. They're Thanksgiving together. Yeah, they're all, they all go to the same Mormon church up in Utah. call. I would guarantee you that. Let's just say they all know how to run a call center. And so anyway, he like learns about that guy, learns about copywriting. And then he meets one of the guys at the company and he says, wait a minute, you're opening gyms? That's a horrible idea. Don't open gyms. He goes, are your gym's good? He goes, yeah, they're really successful. But like the best gym isn't that successful. And they said to him to teach people how to open up a gym.

So he creates this thing called a gym launch. And gym launch is basically, like a course that costs around 20K. I saw somewhere that it was 16K. Then I heard somewhere else that it was 20K. So let's just say $16,000 to $20,000. And it's like a course, but they like hold your hand and you meet with them like a mastermind. It's a course that teaches gym owners how to improve their gym.

And on top of that, according to the website, it's financial freedom. Okay. Sorry, it's financial freedom. And he's running these great ads and he's got, really good copywriting and he's getting these people to, he's getting his people to,

uh, uh, improve their gym, whatever. Hold on Ben, can you go up to that founder's section on the website? What does that say? We slept on the floor.

What does that say? I want to read this. That's what he says this story is he was like, I was living in the gym because I didn't have any money. Gotcha. Okay. Gotcha. So,

you know, I was a former gym owner who slept on the floor of his gym when it, uh, when it was full. I couldn't acquire serve and retain enough customers. Over the next three years, I became a sponge, or he became a sponge. He experimented, blah, blah, blah, became great.

Now he goes gym launch. Okay, go ahead. Okay. And then from gym launch, he launched another company called Prestige Lab. So once he gets these gym owners coming to him, he says, hey, like, buy these supplements, too. Like, you should sell supplements at your gym. Why not? We did all the work and we know which ones sell best, and we're making them.

You just go ahead and buy it from us. Then he starts this third company that says, all right. So far, two smart moves. Yeah. Then he starts a third company. It says, okay, you've got a gym. One of the things that I told you was that you need more leads. I'm going to create a lead company, which I don't entirely understand what that means,

but it's kind of like a marketing company. And somehow maybe they set up your Yelp and set up your Google AdSense, things like that. They just, what they do is you search, you know, gym, like Jim near me, San Jose. And then they're going to, they know that the gym owner is not buying that top click on Google. And they're going to buy that. They're going to create a search engine. They're going to let you say, put it in your zip. We'll find a gym near you.

What's your email? And then they'll pass the gym owner your email or your phone number and say, you know, pay us per person who's interested in a gym near you. And so collectively, these businesses, these three things that I said are doing in the world of, according to his videos and my research, $70 to $80 million a year. In fact, he just sold one of the businesses, the gym launch and supplement business combined. he sold 66% of it for $46 million. And in one of his talks, he says over the last five years, both through the sale of the company as well as dividends, I've paid myself $72 million. And I thought that is nuts. That is crazy.

That is crazy volume. And this like kind of blew my mind. But there's another business. So his wife has a business, right? Or him and his wife, they have another business? I don't know, man. This is one of those guys that's just like prolific. He's got a book on Amazon.

He's done all this. He's like Steve Bartlett, who were you're talking about. He just, like, has his hands in so much shit. I don't know how it works. They have something called Acquisition.com. I was looking at this the other day because I saw a video on TikTok and I was like,

what's up with this? Is this real? I was literally like, it's so funny. You did the research on this because I had jotted this down as like, dig in, find out. And so what Acquisition.com is basically like, it says, do you want to scale your business? You know, I will three X the business.

I'll three X the profits of a, of 100, businesses that are doing between 1 and 10 million EBIT up per year, that are service-based businesses over the next five years. If you want help scaling your company without giving up a majority interest, click the purple button below. And then, yeah, it basically says the same kind of story that you were saying before. And it's like, how do you want to, you want to learn from us? Here's my course.

Here's my book. Here's my podcast. Here's my, like, you know, my link to join my accelerator or whatever. But this, I don't know if he's selling a course on Acquisition.com. or if he's just trying to get leads on small businesses, he could buy. Because he bought one business, and that's a photography business. And I listed the name of it. It's called like something fair.

I'll find it. But oh, here it is. Scroll down to the bottom. Enchanted fairies. Yeah, enchanted fairs. F-A-I and fairies. Sorry, enchanted fairies. That's like a photography business he bought.

Is that crazy, though? I mean, this is like a pretty wild enterprise. Yeah. And he actually has some pretty good stuff. stuff. Like I sent, because I sent to my team, like, I sent like, I don't know, 20 TikToks out a day, but to three people, it's like, this is the, okay, so like I have my friend who I'm like, I can send offensive, funny things. And actually, you're in this bucket too where you're one of the few people that, like, I can send something that's like cancel worthy if you think this is

funny. I can send it to you and I can send it to my brother-in-law. And that's what I do. I send it to both of those people. Like, I'll tell you one. This is, bad, but it was like, there's this Twitter account I follow that's like a, like a meme accounts. He got like 200,000 followers. And he tweeted out, he goes, men's mental health is not important. He follow up tweet. He goes, he goes, just get more b***es. That was his tweet.

And I'm like, I know. It's like a fart joke. It's like, I shouldn't think this is funny. But it cracked me up because it's so anti my Silicon Valley timeline, which is just like so super progressive. Everything matters. Everything is justice for everybody. Like it's nice to just hear like where I'm from in Houston.

Like I went to like a pretty like ghetto school growing up. And like the sense of humor that is like from that is just like hits home for me. Just potty jokes. Yeah. Just like, you know, it's just like you don't bring you don't bring your pronouns to the hood type of thing. And so there's this like hood humor that I just find really funny. Anyway. So you and this guy that's like my inappropriate jokes.

And there's like, you know, I'll send my wife for my sister just like kind of like, oh, that's funny kid stuff. mom stuff, whatever. And then there's like little business or marketing hack tactics that like I think are actually pretty interesting. So this guy, Alex, to me, one of the reasons I suspected he's legit is because his advice is actually pretty legit. And he's not just saying general like motivational quotes.

So for example, you say it's something like he's like a little sales thing that helps. And these are TikToks, right? There's like 10 seconds. You don't have to like invest much in it. It's like he's like little sales trick that kind of helps me. getting somebody to say yes is hard. It's like a commitment. So if I'm like, so would you like to sign up?

It's like, oh, let me think about it. Let me get back to you. That's like what you'll get frequently. He's like, I'll ask a no commitment. So I'll say, you know, if we're able to work out the detail, would you be opposed to actually sign it up with us? And they're like, no, I'm not opposed to that. Like, no, I'm not against it.

And actually, this is something that when I heard it, I was like, oh, actually, I've kind of like accidentally done this a couple times. And you know, that's a good point. There's something there in the psychology. Cool, noted. And like, I'll pick up these little things from him and like five other people that are like, you know, in this copywriting, sales, persuasion world. Then I just think those are interesting to me. So I actually think this guy is legit for that reason, even though like people look down on like lead gen.

They look down on course businesses. Like there's a stigma around course businesses, which is like, oh, you probably couldn't do it. That's why you're selling courses. Let me change. Let me clarify how I feel. I think he's legit. And he seems like a decent guy. and he for sure seemed like a smart guy.

I don't know him. I don't know him well, but he seems like a really nice guy. But he's in a shady industry. Not a shady industry. He's in an industry with a lot of shady people. Not that he's shady, but supplements and like selling this type of stuff. Supplements, courses. Yeah.

Yeah. Of course, I don't know if he's shady. I'm just saying there are shady people. And also it's a $20,000 course. And I frankly don't think I've got the Hutzpa to sell that to someone on the phone. Yeah. Like that's really bold. and frankly, I find it to be challenging.

So I wouldn't say that I think he's shady. I'm just saying that like that world has a lot of players who are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm with you. Yeah, I don't think you said anything naked. I think we were actually quite complimentary towards him. But, okay, I like that.