The Game with Alex Hormozi - Doing the Boring Work vs. Chasing Shiny Objects | Ep 455

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Stay focused on the goal. Leave no room for distractions. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about why you should avoid opportunities that are potential distractions to your growth, not needing a fancy play to be successful, and stop thinking you are going to outcompete other people.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(1:02) - The importance of saying no to distractions and new opportunities as you progress in your career.(3:27) - Success is about doing the obvious things consistently for an extended period without overestimating your intelligence.(7:08) - Transitioning from seeking new opportunities to optimizing existing strategies.(10:18) - Focusing on the obvious truths rather than constantly chasing new ideas.(14:03) - The key to success is consistent effort in the right direction, not necessarily fancy plays.(15:58) - The arrogance of thinking you can outcompete others when you're split among multiple things.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

Business is not hard in that it is not complicated. It is hard because people cannot stay focused on the same thing for a long period of time. It's also because once people make a certain amount of money, if they only did it for the income, they're trying to find the next thing that's going to make more income rather than the mission of the business. The wealthiest people in the world see business as a game. This podcast, the game, is my attempt at documenting the lessons I've learned on my way to building Acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. My hope is that you use the lessons to grow your business and maybe someday soon, partner with us to get to $100 million and beyond. I hope you share and enjoy. Growing businesses is hard because it's different than people expect it to be. And I continue to get more nuanced and more detailed in my understanding of growing businesses, the more businesses I've grown. And the more I'm doing this, the singularity of focus is so important. My team knows that we get presented opportunities every single day that could distract us.

And the thing is, the bigger you get, the bigger the opportunities they get presented to you. So the harder it is to say no. And so I want to tell a quick story about the woman in the red, dress and I'm going to relate it to business. So in the Matrix, one of my favorite movies, there's the woman in the red dress. And so it's one of the training programs that Morpheus takes Neo on, the main character, to teach him one simple lesson. And so they're walking through a crowd. It's normal, New York, lots of people, everyone looks different. And then there's this woman in this red dress walking towards it. She's like stands out from the crowd. And Neo's head

turns and Morphus is still talking to him trying to teach him a lesson. Right. And then he looks back and Morphus, he's like, were you listening? He was like, what? He's like, or were you looking at in the red dress and he says look again he looks back at the woman and it's agent smith pointing a gun to his head and the thing is is i see distractions and new opportunities shiny object as the woman in the red dress and at every level of business the woman in the red dress becomes more and more attractive right because at first you have to say no at a thousand opportunities then 10 000 then 100 000 and you have to learn how to say no again at every level because i thought the once i learned how to say no to the woman in the red dress i'd be done forever but that's not true she comes back hotter you know whatever whatever whatever

whatever ways you want to like with makeup and who knows, you know, plastic surgery, who knows. And every level, she just gets hotter and hotter and hotter because you get better and better and better. And so the quality of the woman in the red dress that you can attract is higher, the higher up in the game you go. And so when I look at the businesses that we have, I used to think that like innovation was everything. And I think innovation is important to very, very small degree. But the vast majority of the business success is actually doing all the stuff that you know you should be doing, but you aren't. So a friend of mine has a wife who's really popular. He runs all of all their businesses, and they have literally 60 businesses. He has an Excel sheet to keep track of all the

businesses he has. And I think they make about total between everything, maybe eight figures a year. Maybe. And that might, and to some of you be like, oh, that's amazing, but hear me out. So we're having this long conversation. And I just said, you know, if there were a magic wand and you could snap your fingers and eliminate all businesses but one, how easy do you think it would be to grow that business? He was like, oh, my God. God, it would be so easy to grow that to like 30 or 50 million. I was like, then why don't you do that? And he said that that question has messed with him for an entire year. And he has since that conversation shut down business after business after business, so that he could focus on the one

that he thought was the biggest opportunity. Because Mark Zuckerberg didn't have side hustles, right? If you do one thing and you do it right and do it all the way, you can get as big as you want. You can have a long-million business that cover the entire United States. You could do that. you could have a cosmetics business that covers the entire United States. You could have whatever type of business you want that covers everyone. You could do it if you waited for a long enough period time and didn't get distracted. It's one of my favorite quotes is by Neil Strauss. He said, success comes down to doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time

without convincing yourself you're smarter than you are. It's one of my favorite quotes about business because it's the details that pay the dividends. It's the depth and the nuance of understanding how to do something. And so, for example, right now, like, there's obviously lots of opportunities that we have. But the thing is, is that I still don't feel like we're doing the basics, right? Like, if we're not on every platform, why are we thinking about starting a new business? If we're not hardcore email marketing regularly and providing value, why are we going to start another business?

If we're not even building the SEO out on our site, why are we doing something else? If we haven't completely built out the sales training for our sales team to keep their execution high, why are we thinking about doing other things? And so many entrepreneurs that I see who are talking about how they want to grow their business and do this next new thing or this exciting add-on aren't even doing the basics. And the thing, and I've said this before, but being advanced means that you never don't do the basics. And if you're like, well, Alex, that's going to take so much time for me to do each of those things. Welcome to building a big business. Because big businesses do the same things little businesses do, but they do them better and they fill the holes in the bucket. And so,

if you were to think about a business as a bucket and you've got water pouring in the top, which is the traffic or the eyeballs or whatever, and then the bucket is what you're keeping, right? So the first thing that you're going to do, right, if you want to grow, the amount of water you have in the bucket is you don't have multiple buckets, right? What you're going to do is probably fix the holes in the bucket you got, right? Number one, fix the bucket. Number two, once you fix the bucket, increase the flow to the bucket. Once you've done that and you've completely maximized that, then you add,

new flows. But most people have never done that. And so the moniker that I remember about this is better, more, new. And so whenever I'm thinking about our business or our businesses in the portfolio, I think, have we maxed out better yet? If we have not maxed better yet, there's no point in incurring the risk of more or new, because more is riskier than better. Better is the lowest risk opportunity that everyone has. Do what you're currently doing, do it better. Right? Follow up faster, follow up more, make better copy, make better creative, optimize your site, hire better people, train them better, have better management systems, better incentive systems, but you're like, but Alex, that sounds so boring. Welcome to growing big shit. It's how you do it. You literally fill all the holes in the

bucket that you know you should be doing but aren't. And so right now, hear me out, if you were to make a list of the top 25 things that you could do in your business that you are not doing, right, The obvious things that you know would make you more money. If I emailed more, I'd make more money. If I did more reachouts, I'd make more money. If I made more content, I'd make more money. If I trained my sales team more, if I did more call reviews, I'd make more money. If I reorganized our customer onboarding process, if I created a better cadence or training

for our customer support team or customer success team, we'd make more money. Put out every single one of the obvious bullets that you had that you know would grow your business. Instead of doing the new thing, do those first. And once you finish that list, what you will see happen. And this is why it's spiritually difficult as an entrepreneur because we like to do new shit. It's why we started the business to begin with. We stopped doing the old thing. We started the new thing and we got reinforced that behavior.

And so we learned the wrong lesson. We learned that when we start new things, good things happen. And so we think we should start new things. But this is where it's difficult and we have to learn at each level is that you started the new thing and you got rewarded. But now if you start another thing, you will get punished. And some people never unlearn that first lesson. And so you have to switch from new to better because the innovation already happened when you got the product market fit.

As soon as people start buying the thing you're selling, that's when the new needs to end for a while. Because now you just need to do better and more. So you fill the holes in the bucket with all the better and then you do more. Then you go from one piece of content today to five pieces of content today. From one sales guy to five sales guys, right? From one video editor to five video editors. From one, I mean, I can keep going with this, right? You get the idea.

It's about doing more once you fix the first one and make it better. Hey guys, real quick, if you're new to the podcast, I have a book on Amazon called $100 million offers that over $8,000 five-star reviews and it has almost a perfect score. You can get it for 99 cents on Kindle. The reason I bring it up is that I put over 1,000 hours into writing that book. And it's my biggest gift to our community. So it's my very shameless way of trying to get you to like me more and ultimately make more dollars to that later on in your business career. I can potentially partner with you. So that's my give. Go check it out, Amazon, and back to the show.

Businesses will grow by default, and they will beat their competition if they do everything their competition does, but better. Because what happens is most entrepreneurs will divert resources from their core thing. So think about the two paths. You've got boring entrepreneur number one who finally finds product market fit. People like the stuff that they're selling. And then they say, I'm not going to do anything new for the next five years. All I'm going to do is do this better and do more of it. It's all I'm going to do. And then you think about the other guy who says, oh, we got some product market fit. Fantastic. Now I'm going to sell something else.

And I get to get my rocks off, get my jollies off over here, thinking about all this new stuff, all this new marketing, all this new product, while the other business starts to wither away a little bit because atrophy starts happening because the things that were there when you're overseeing it aren't happening anymore anyways. And not only that, it's never improving. And cost of media goes up. Cost of talent goes up. And the business is literally getting worse relative to the market over time if you're not

improving it. And so you got these two entrepreneurs. and this guy is diverting resources that would have been allocated back to the same bucket to fill the holes, as instead taking some of that and trying to build another bucket over here, trying to build another bucket over here. And meanwhile, the holes are getting bigger in the first bucket because it's getting worse and worse and worse. And so then they find themselves with five buckets that are all tons of holes in them. They don't have the bandwidth to actually go to the one bucket and fix it.

And that's when I asked the magic wand question. So right now, if you have multiple things going on, how easy would it be to grow your business if I could wave a mask, I'd snap my fingers and everything ended except for one. Pretty easy, right? So why not stack the chips in your favor? The thing that makes it hard is the discipline you have to have, not the concept, right? And so one of the things I like saying is that strategy is easy, execution is hard. It's the execution risk that is the much bigger risk for most businesses. Like conceptually, if you deliver dry cleaning that is always clean, always, right? And always on time. you'll have an exceptional business. Think about that from like the strategy isn't complicated.

It's the execution is where everyone fails. But this is the thing is that the strategy is the new and exciting thing. And so people allocate tons of attention, tons of time to new strategies, new ideas, new everything, rather than making the obvious truth of if I deliver everyone in their clothes on time and they are always perfectly clean, this business will work. And so one of the things that we do when we're growing the business, after understanding better, more new, when we think about anything that we're growing, is what are the need to believe? What do we need to believe for this to grow?

We need to believe that people will always want things fast. Do is that something I want to bet on? Yes. People always want a good product so that we clean their clothes perfectly every time. Well, do I believe that that's something that people will want in the future as much they want to date or more? Yes. People will always want good service. Do I believe that that's something people are in the future or in the day? Yes. It's one of the beautiful things is that when you enter a marketplace, something is boring, is dry cleaner, boring is lawn care, boring is whatever, is that oftentimes you're actually not competing as the smartest people in the world. The smartest people in the world are on Silicon Valley all trying to make the next platform. But there's tons of other businesses that you can absolutely

demolish who are making lots of money just by doing the basics well. And what makes them basics is how hard they are to understand. But what makes you advance is how well you execute them. That's the thing. Like it's not hard to conceptualize that you take 10 guys and each guy makes 200 calls a day. It's 2,000 calls a day. It's not hard to conceptualize that. But it's how well did you train them? How well did you recruit them? What is their incentive structure? Do you listen to calls on a regular basis? Is there a leaderboard? Because you're thinking yourself when you have that big list, it's like, oh, we need to do competition for the sales thing. Oh, yeah, I need to get that leaderboard set up. Oh, yeah, I need to be doing more call reviews. That is the stuff that grows the

business. It's not the big idea. As long as the need to believe makes sense, then the foundational tenets of the business. And unless you're in high tech and you're trying to create something that the market doesn't know it wants yet, which is basically what big tech bets are, is that you're creating something that the market doesn't even know it wants, right? But I'm telling you, I've never made money in that. I've made money going to things that I know the market wants and doing it better. People always want leads. Promise you. You know how to get leads? You know how to get them better? You will make tons of money. People always need a place to live. You have better buildings that are cleaner and things run right and you treat your residents well, you will have successful

buildings. If you have lawn care where everyone communicates well and is, you have. is cost effective and the grass always looks great and the hedges are clean lines and you do it at the cadence that's perfect for most people, you will have a good business. And the thing is, you might be competing against people who don't even think that way. And so you can absolutely take their lunch money. But you have to not get fancy. Right. And so I'll end with a little story that was a huge, meaningful story to me. So when I was going through the sale process for two of our companies, the bankers introduced me to a couple of other CEOs that they had done deals with. because I was like, I wanted to know what it was like afterwards.

Things like that are like, oh, we can just connect with these guys. So I talked to one of them and the conversation changed my life. I was telling about the dreams I wanted to do and all the stuff, et cetera. And he was a mercenary CEO. So he was a third time CEO that private equity buy a company, place him in, he'd grow it, and then they'd sell it. And he had done that three times already. He's a super seasoned guy.

He was a long island guy, really thick accent. And he's like, you know, backyard football? I was like, yeah. It's like, everybody wants the super fancy trick plays. It's like, okay, hike, and then I, you know, fake to the left, and then we go right, and then it's actually going to be a reverse, you know, whatever. And then we toss it, and then what do you know what happens? He catches it and then fumbles it, and the other team takes it down for a touchdown. He's like, no, we're doing simple backyard football.

He's like, two fat guys in the middle, run to the right, consistent in the oddage. He's like, don't be cute. And he said that, and it really changed the way I saw a business. He's like, you don't need to have any fancy. play to be successful. You just have to be willing to get the consistent yardage. And when you do consistent yardage on a thesis that makes sense, people want clean clothes, people want them fast, people want good service. And if you execute on that for 10 years and you fill every hole in the bucket, your business grows by default because your competitors won't do that. Business is not hard in

that it is not complicated. It is hard because people cannot stay focused on the same thing for a long period of time. It's also because once people make a certain amount of money, if they only did it for the income, they're trying to find the next thing that's going to make a more income rather than the mission of the business. Because if you believe in the mission of the business, you will be willing to do it for an extraordinary long period of time. And I can tell you right now, from all the friends that I have that make shitloads of money, they've all been doing the same thing for a long period of time. So as much as the world wants to tell you, you should have 17 majors in college and you should taste everything. And I think there's value to that. It will not fight against the reality

that Ben Francis started Jimshar when he was, whatever, 17, and now he's 28 or 29. He's got a billion-dollar thing. So could he have tasted more stuff? Sure, he tasted from like 14 to 17, right? But then when he started that, he's been doing it for 10 or 11 years now. And now he's a billion-dollar thing. And so the work needs doing, and you just need to decide when you want to start the compounding clock in your favor, which means how long can I commit to this thing?

And so I would say, once you've had a little bit of your entrepreneurial licks as fast as you can to learn those lessons, you have to think, what need to believe is there that I do not think will change over an extended time horizon and then serve that. And then every day, all you do is you look at how to do better and how to do more of it. How to do it better, how to do more of it. And it's going to kill you inside because you like doing new shit. And that's what was positively reinforced your entire life as an entrepreneur in the beginning. And then you have to unlearn that lesson because that's what it takes to get big is you do the same thing and you just do it that much better than everyone else. And that takes time. And that's why big businesses

take time. It is arrogant to believe that you are going to out-compete other people who are fully focused on one thing when you are split on five. And the thing is, plenty of people are arrogant. So many of you will still do this. But you'll also still be poor. So whatever. Some dude is he's got a lawn care business. And all he does is longer. All day, every day, that's all he does is molons and builds this business because he believes that everybody deserves an amazing long because he's got a story of when he's a kid. And that was the only thing that his parents could do was cut the lawn to even though they were poor. It was like, something that gave them status of neighborhood. And he can remember his dad crying because somebody

gave him a compliment on and he hadn't gotten a compliment forever. Whatever that reason is, he's driven to make that company. Right. And he got the other guy who's like, oh, yeah, I'm doing drop shipping and I'm doing some long care stuff and I'm doing some consulting gigs on the side for marketing. And I'm, you know, I'm doing, you know, NFTs, whatever, right? He's got all these things going on. Who is going to win at longcare? It's obvious. And yet we still live like this other guy. And so my hope is that you recognize that if that's you, stop. And I'm only saying this from place of love because I had nine businesses before gym launch took off. And before you think, oh, well, what I'm going to do?

Because I hear this all the time. I'm going to do them all. I'm going to see which one takes off. None of them will take off because any of them could take off if you just focus on one of them. It's conflating sequence. It's saying, I think that because what it is is it's thinking that the outside market is somehow going to make you successful, like you're going to pick the right bet, right? When you can force any of them to be successful, right, provided you're not selling newspapers, right? Like, as long as you have something

that's not obviously a stupid idea, right, and you have normal businesses that you're trying to build, an acquaintance of mine from high school, I haven't like stayed in touch, but he saw the stuff that we, you know, the success we had. He said, hey, can we talk sometimes? So I got on the phone of them. And he said, hey, I've got a roofing business. You know, it's awesome. I said, oh, that's great. And he said, oh, yeah, we also do real estate flipping. I was like, all right. He's like, Oh, and we also do general contracting. I was like, okay. He said, oh, we do Windows stuff too.

That's actually glass in windows. We do that stuff too because it's like, you want to be vertically integrated for real estate. I was like, dude, you're doing like four million bucks a year. Like, you're not vertically integrated. You're just distracted. It's like, if you look at the biggest roofing companies in the world, they're billion-dollar companies. Billion, multi-billion dollar companies. The richest woman in the U.S. is built off a roofing business.

So, like, you can do one thing to scale. and make all the money you want, and you will only get there with the scale from the details, from the depth, right? That's how you get these compounding returns from doing the same thing over and over again because you get better, better, better, better at it, right? Whereas the other guy who's got four things, he's never going to get good at any of them. He's just going to be barely good enough, and he's going to make barely good enough money, right? And so if you're not making money in any of the things, it's because you don't understand any of them well enough, because if you can see anybody in your industry who's doing the thing that you're doing and making a hundred times more money than you,

it's because they know it better than you. So how quickly you're going to pay down that ignorance. You're going to try and divide it by four. You're going to try and pay down the ignorance that of one of them as fast as you can so you can start the compounding. Because that's one of the mistakes.