The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 120: The ONE Skill, We Can All Learn, That 95% of Millionaires Have!: Alex Hormozi

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

In this moment the entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist Alex Hormozi gives his best advice for becoming a millionaire. According to Alex there are many ways to reach this level of success, but it is dependent upon the person on which path they want to take to become a millionaire. This can either come from creating a business around a core skill or working with other people to combine their skills into a unified organisation. Alex believes that one of the keys to personal development and success is the idea of skill stacking. This is the adding of different skills on top of an original skill, until you reach a level of having a completely unique and valuable skillset. Listen to the full episode here -  https://g2ul0.app.link/TIVYc9ZjNu Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Alex: https://www.instagram.com/hormozi/ https://www.youtube.com/@AlexHormozi

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. Caleb in the corner who works for you,'s your creative director if Caleb said to me you know Caleb said to you he said Alex I want to be a millionaire yeah what would you say to him what advice would you give to him he says listen I've heard you doing all these podcasts you're running around I've been filming the camera but I've been filming

I've been listening yeah and this millionaire stuff this sounds amazing yeah so what advice how old are you caleb 29 what advice would you give to 29 year old caleb if he said to you alex how do how do you knowing me how do you think i become a millionaire so there's a lot of ways to do it just depends on which way you want to go so say first off you can stay at acquisition.com that'll probably happen on a long enough time horizon just because we're going to get really big. We're already pretty big and we're just getting started. So like, I genuinely believe that

and that's 100% my goals that every single person that we have becomes very, very wealthy because I'm going to die and it's not going to matter anyways and if everybody else can make some too, great. So that is a path. Another path is he peels off and goes on his own and starts a business of some sort. And so it depends on whether he wants to make the business itself,

what his core skill is, which would be like media and maybe services around media, or using the skill that he has of media in an opportunity and he gets two or three other people to maybe co-found it with who have other complimentary skills. And then he just runs that division or portion of the business within the larger context. And that's like a classic question of like, I'm really good at making wallets. Like, what do I do? It's like, well, you can continue to make them. And then when you can't make as many as you have demand because you're so good at it, you can either raise the

price and just continue to keep raising the prices until eventually you become Versace of wallets and you make tons of profit, but you don't have tons of units and that's okay and you're a luxury brand. Or you put on the business owner hat and you say, okay, how do I mechanize the wallet building process and I become more businessy? And so I think it's like, do I want to be the artist or do I want to be the entrepreneur? Both of them are fine. It depends which one you feel like you're more naturally inclined to or have a higher likelihood of success doing.

I like the game of business. I've played lots of different games in terms of industries. Like I like the game overall. I don't feel like I have a particular art. Like I don't think I'm really good at any aspect of business. I feel like I've been decent enough to not make one of them the constraint. Like I'm not

a great copywriter, but I'm good enough that that's not going to be the limiter. Like I'm good enough, like I'm good enough at hiring that I can make sure that that's not the limiting factor. Right. And so that's kind of how I think about it in terms of business growth overall. And so it'd be the same thing with Caleb is like, we have to identify what the constraint of the system is and then deconstrain it. When you say talent stacking, I've heard you say that a few times. What do you mean by that? So this is one of my favorite topics. Many skills like one plus one equals five when you put them together. So let's say you have somebody who's really good at math in the beginning. That as a skill, not super monetizable, right? Okay. Well, then you learn bookkeeping. Okay, well, now you had a proclivity for math, but you learned something

that has value in the business world. Okay, then you learn to get your CPA and now you become an accountant. Okay, more valuable. Then you start studying around tax law and insurance and you're like, oh, significantly more valuable. And then you learn how capital markets work and how debt markets work, right? And you understand how mergers and acquisitions work. And all of a sudden, you're a CFO. And then you learn how to sell and promote a little bit. And all of a sudden, now you're a rainmaker. And so you still needed to be good at math.

But when you stack these other skills on top of it, the original math skill becomes significantly more valuable when you have these skills on top. But each one kind of requires the original math skill becomes significantly more valuable when you have these skills on top but each one kind of requires the one before which is why one of the things i hate about kind of the entrepreneur world a little bit is like they'll learn something new and then poo-poo the thing before it's like i'm not upset the teacher who taught me arithmetic because i learned algebra one was necessary for the next and so um as, a lot of times it takes, I think, the self-awareness to say like, where am I at on my skill stacking adventure, right? And each skill, every skill you

add to your skill tool belt makes the rest of your skills more valuable, which is why I think it's so cool, which is why I'm such a big advocate for education overall. And that's, I mean, mission of acquisition.com going to make business accessible to everyone. That's why he put all this free stuff out there. It's like, if we can give people enough skills, they'll be able to stack them on their own and then just achieve whatever they want

in a totally different way if you'll allow me to go there. It's like, you look at Jay-Z, right? Maybe he was somebody who naturally had rhythm, right? And so then all of a sudden he learned how to rap. Okay, took his rhythm, put in a rap. Okay, and then he made his first CD. Okay, and then he learned how to rap. Okay. Took his rhythm, put in a rap. Okay. And then he made his first CD. Okay. And then he learned how to promote.

Ooh, significantly more valuable. And then he learned how to make a label and then he learned how to recruit other artists. And so he still needed to learn how to know how to promote the other artists. If he didn't know how to promote at all, he wouldn't have been able to do it. But once he had the label, he got significantly more leverage on the skill of promotion and he could recognize people because of his skill in rapping and rhythm. And so like each of these skills stacks on top. And then eventually he, he pinnacled into Beyonce as his, as his top skill. I'm just kidding. Um, but no, but like, that's the idea. So like, and that's why I'm just like, learn the skill, find the next skill. And the nice thing is that

it doesn't even matter how disparate the skills are. Like if Jay-Z is really good at math and understands capital markets and understands the label, those combine to do another cool melange, right, a little French word, like mix of skills that's like unique to Jay-Z. And the longer you play the game,

the more skills you get and the more unique your mix of skills is. and that to me is like the coolest part about business and just like education in general i i stumbled across a bit of a similar but maybe adjacent idea um in my career where when i learned when my company went public on a stock exchange in europe I then learned from an investment bank when we were having the meetings with the banks, we went on this roadshow, met 20 different investment banks, we were considering an IPO in another country. They told me that our business would be worth four times more if it was just on a different stock market. If you move it to the Nasdaq, the exact same business would be worth

four times more, which meant that my net worth would be 4x'd just by taking the exact same business and moving it to a different stock exchange. And I thought about that a couple of years later when I was thinking about the skill set that I had acquired over my career, which was this skill set of marketing and social media and entrepreneurship. And I was thinking, you have to not just have the skill, but know what market to apply it to. And what ended up happening, I've never told this story before, but I looked for an industry where my skill set was in least supply but highest demand and return the greatest. And it turned out that industry in terms of social media marketing

and storytelling i felt was most in demand and would return the greatest value for companies that were about to ipo because essentially when you're going to ipo if you have a good story it can swing your valuation by hundreds of millions or in the case of the first company I worked with, when their IPO listed at 3 billion, billions. And so my skillset of social media and marketing, I could do what with it? I could go help a local gym and get paid a thousand bucks, or I could go help a company that was in the lead up to an IPO

that was where I can potentially add hundreds of millions in value and take 7 million as part of an equity deal. So upon leaving my first company the equity arrangement that i had was valued somewhere between four uh i'm gonna say between it depends because the share price fluctuated but i think on the day of the ipo the equity that i got for for the nine to twelve months work that i'd done was worth in the region of seven to eight million dollars right nine months work yeah basically

freelance yeah you know same skill stack but applied to an industry that would would pay me more for the same skills um and so i thought a lot about that and that's ultimately why we started our company which is now called flight story we have a um probably the time of the airing this about a hundred people we started the company about about a year and a half ago oh crazy that's basically that's applying the skill set we have to industries where that need it and we started out in the ipo market did a little bit of work in this um biotech market um and now we've kind of broadened out but people don't think about that a lot you're like my skill set where is it in highest demand and can pay the most