The Game with Alex Hormozi - Don’t Be Cute | Ep 593

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

“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:(1:11) - Simplicity outperforms complexity.(3:23) - Rule: Duplicate success, then innovate.(7:08) - Prioritize above-the-fold content optimization.(8:30) - Reminder: Repeat what works consistently.(10:36) - Simplicity often leads to substantial success.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition(This episode is a re-run. Original airdate was December 1, 2020)

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. 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. 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 that is 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, right? 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. 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, oh, 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 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 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 works. 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 you can

start flipping real estate and he's doing well. And she 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. 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, we've been trying a lot of stuff. And finally, we decided to just, you know, 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 know, reluctance the right word, but like feeling, 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, is that we somehow, 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 word of 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 saying, we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. 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. Hey, guys, real quick, if you're new to the podcast, I have a book on Amazon called $100 million offers at over $8,000 five-star reviews and has a lot.

almost a perfect score. You can get it for 99 cents on Kindle. The reason I bring it up is that I put over a thousand hours into writing that book. And it's my biggest give to our community. So it's my very shameless way of trying to get you to like me more and ultimately make more dollars so 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. 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, that 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 bottom part, the images and the pages and the copy bullets and things. 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 is 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 tell you 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 X'd the throughput of that one page, simply by changing the headline. And on our scheduling page, which is the third step in this process, we five X'd 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 finished this process, the next step is this, we just took out you finish this process, basically. And so people are 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 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 for paying for that advice, to not take advice as akin to literally burning your money. Right? Because this person or this YouTube 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, it was 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 fundamental. 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 him. 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. you guys, 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. They secretly envy you and that's okay.