The Game with Alex Hormozi - Don't Be Cute | Ep 254

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

Just do it exactly as it is outlined. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about the one piece of advice every entrepreneur needs to hear. Listen in as Alex reflects on a pivotal concept that was given to him by a mentor.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:(2:05) - Alex dives into the question "What breeds success?"(3:50) - The reason why "What breeds success" needs to be talked about(5:30) - The bedrock of successful entrepreneurship(7:24) - If you're in the process of optimizing something(9:49) - The shortcut to where you want to goFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

A lot of times I feel like we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. And this is one of those instances. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer, and how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons we have learned along the way. I hope you enjoy and subscribe. What's going on, everyone? I wanted to bring this video to you downtown coming in hot from Austin. What I want to talk to about today is a saying that we have said over and over and over again in our community

and some real world applications to it. And that saying is, don't be cute. And so the first time I heard this saying was from a serial CEO. He was a mercenary CEO. So basically what that is as a CEO who wants a company, like a private equity firm purchases a new company. They go have this kind of blackbook of their all-star players, their SWAT team that they drop in so that they can grow the company.

That's kind of how it works. And so he's one of these CEOs. He's one of these guys that's brought into a deal. They get the company, and then he grows it again for the private. equity, usually in a three to five year span, and then they exit. He's done this exit process four times. And he was the one who told me this story. And so he was like, hey, don't be cute. He has this long island accent. And I was like, I don't really know what that means. He's like, all right,

so you know when you play in backyard football? I'm not even going to try to the accent. And I was like, yeah, and he's like, so you've got two, you know, you try and make these super fancy plays, you're like, all right, we're going to go fake left and then double fake right, and then we're going to swing around and then you're going to pretend to be the quarterback and then I'm going to throw it that way, right? He's like, and what happens? He's like, you try it and then, you know, Tommy fumbles the ball and you lose 10 yards and you lose the ball, right? He's like, instead, he's like, put the two fat guys in the middle, run to the right, right? And what is that? He's like, consistent yachtage. And he's like, don't be cute. And so that story has always stuck with me because it's so true in

business and that's what he was applying it to. But I feel like so many of the entrepreneurs that I talk to and the ones that we work with, a lot of times, you know, myself included, like we try and be cute and we try and get fancy when it's usually the fundamentals that breed success. And one of the biggest telltale signs I think of somebody who's newer is that they do not repeat successful actions. And there's two types of successful actions. There's successful actions that you do that yield a good result and you think, oh, I did that, that worked.

Let me go try and do something else rather than doing more of that thing, right? That's the first way. The second way is where you are paying for a system or you're paying for advice or whatever. And the person says, do it this way. And then you do not repeat their successful action. And so this is one where a lot of times I feel like we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. And this is one of those instances because over the last probably week, I've had three separate conversations. Two with entrepreneurs who are doing about three million a year.

And one with a brand new entrepreneur, my neighbor. I think I've referenced them before. And when I was talking to my neighbor, he just bought this system so he can start flipping real estate and he's doing well. And he was like, I think I might do it this way. And I was like, listen, until you make more than the guy who taught you that system, you do the system exactly the way that it was outlined. All right? You don't get cute. Don't think you're special.

Don't think you're a snowflake. Just do it exactly as it's outlined because there's a reason it's outlined that way. And the two entrepreneurs that I talked to who are on our agency side who are doing about three million a year, we just did a call. And I was like, hey, what are your wins from this last month? And both of them were like, you know, we've been trying a lot of stuff. And finally we decided to just do it the way that you had outlined it. And we're actually seeing a lot better results.

And they said it kind of, the tone was like, I don't have reluctance the right word, but like feeling silly, right, about themselves that they had taken this. long to do that, right? And the reason I'm bringing this up is that if you purchase a system, if you take advice, if you watch a YouTube video of somebody who's doing better than you at something, which is why you're trying to learn, right? And they're doing it a specific way. There's a reason that they're doing it that way. It's probably because they have the same goal that you do and probably suffer from the same cons that you suffer from. And they've already balanced those for the best outcome, right? And so recently this morning, I was on a call

with our marketing team, our traffic guys. And I was looking at our funnel that we're in the process of optimizing. And my traffic guy's like, man, if people knew how much we work on optimizing our conversion process, he's like, I feel like they wouldn't want to change anything because they'd know that we've probably already tried it. And I wanted to at least pay homage to that because right now, we're maybe, I'd say three weeks into optimizing this conversion process of series of pages and copy and messaging and whatnot. And even in those three weeks, we've already tested over 100 different pieces of this conversion

process, this funnel, this series of landing pages, messaging, et cetera. And so that means we've changed the headlines a handful of times. We've changed the buttons. We've changed the flow of the pages. We've changed where each one leads multiple times. And so these iterations stack and stack and stack. And so if I'm going to eventually show someone, hey, this is how it works, what do you think the chances are that if they change something, it's going to be better? Probably low, right? And so the thing is that we somehow, you know, I think it's an ego thing as entrepreneurs, like we always think we're special, we think we're different, we think we're smarter or whatever. But my rule of thumb for me is, until I'm doing as well or better than

the person who taught me this thing, do not change it. Replicate before you get fancy. Right. And so that's where, you know, doing the boring work, don't be cute. Those kind of say, we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. Like those sayings are pervasive in our community because I think they are the things that are the bedrock of successful entrepreneurship. And it's repeating successful actions. And there are certain points where once we get this conversion process optimized where I think it should be, I probably won't change, I won't be pushing as much attention to that. I'll be pushing more of my attention towards filling the top side, right? So right now, we just, I'm putting enough attention on bringing in traffic so that I can

find the optimal way of converting that traffic. But once I feel like the numbers are optimized, I probably won't tweak that very much because now it's a successful action and I want to repeat it as many times I possibly can. And then I'm going to be focused all in my attention on bringing traffic into the top of that conversion process. Real quick, guys, you guys already know that I don't run any ads on this and I don't sell anything. And so the only ask that I can ever have of you guys is that you help me spread the words, so we can out more entrepreneurs, make more money, feed their families, make better products, and have better experiences for their employees and customers.

And the only way we do that is if you can rate and review and share this podcast. So the single thing that I ask you do is you can just leave a review. They'll take you 10 seconds or one type of the thumb. It would mean the absolute world to me. And more importantly, it may change the world with someone else. And so as a total side note, because that's what these are for, I guess, if you are in the process of optimizing something, which if you're using someone else's templates or anything like that, then use them the way they are. There's a reason they are that way. But if you're coming up

from these things from scratch, what I can tell you is that after having now done this, I've done this optimization process a zillion times in my life now, the headlines and the messages, the top, literally the first one to two things that someone reads are going to have the biggest swing on the needle. And so many times I've spent hours and days and weeks optimizing the the bottom part, the images and the pages and the, sorry, not the pages, the, like the copy bullets and things like that that are below the fold, right, on the newspaper, if you flipped it open, there's a fold and then you can flip the second half. Landing pages work the same way above the fold as what someone sees when they land on their desktop or on their mobile phone.

That's above the fold. Below the fold is everything else. I routinely have seen changes of doubling to quadrupling the throughput of a page, meaning the percentage of people who click to do the optimal action you want them to do, simply by changing the sentence at the top or the sentences at the top and the one image that someone sees. And so if you are trying to optimize something, if you're way below where you need to be, don't even worry about anything below the fold.

And in fact, you could probably spend 90% of your attention above the fold and get way higher returns on your time than everything below the fold. And I can't say the amount of times we're literally just deleting everything below the fold, got us better, better throughput on those types of pages and actions than even putting anything there to begin with, right? And so just recently, I changed the headline of our landing page for agencies who are going to be partnering with us for our Allen software, and we three-xed

the throughput of that one page, simply by changing the headline, right? And on our scheduling page, which is the third step in this process, we five-xed the throughput by removing a headline that was there. We didn't even add anything. We literally removed something that was there. And so, which was, hey, you know, you finish this process. The next step is this. We just took out, you finish this process, basically. And so people were like, oh, I'm not done. I need to take this next step. And so it's just this huge, massive jump by removing something that was there. And so all of this, at least for me, is this continuous reinforcement that, that we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught,

we need to repeat successful actions when they're there. If someone gives this advice or we're taking advice from someone, especially if we're paying for that advice, to not take advice as akin to literally burning your money, right? Because this person or this YouTuber, or this thing that you're trying to learn from, this person you're trying to learn from, has already suffered the consequences of trial and error.

And so why would you not at least just duplicate, replicate their process and what they're doing first, and then when you surpass or at least match them, then and only then you will have the understanding of the process to improve it. And the thing is, is a lot of times people become experts because of how many failures they have. If the first time you set the plate, you hit a home run, you may not know why you did that, is it because of your hip stances?

Because when you dropped your elbow, was it because you kept your eye on the ball? Like there's so many other factors. But if you want the shortcut to getting to where you want to go, replicating other people's success, repeating successful actions, both on yourself and what other people have done is one of the shortest paths to getting there. And so, anyhow, don't be cute. Don't try and get fancy.

Don't run the super crazy whatever play. Just look at the fundamentals, follow the steps, only iterate after you've duplicated the results of the person you're trying to learn from. And so that was my message for you today. That was top of mind. The same advice I gave the 18-year-old, my neighbor who's flipping real estate net right now. Really proud of them. And the same advice I gave people who are doing $3 million plus a year is don't be cute.

Repeat successful actions. We need to be reminded more than we be taught. And then just keep doing the same things over and over and over again. And you will get outsized returns. So anyways, have a happy day. Hope your marketing is converting like crazy. money and leading you to financial wealth and freedom only to realize that it is empty and that in the process you will turn most of the people who know you secretly against you.

They won't purposely tell you that, but they secretly envy you. And that's okay because I'd rather be envied than pitied. So with that, have an amazing day. And I'll keep you guys on the flip side. Bye.