The Game with Alex Hormozi - From Vision to Reality: Building a Successful Business (with Ryan Pineda) Pt.2 - June ‘22 | Ep 530

Episode Date: April 29, 2023

"I think the relationships and the feeling you give those people is longer lasting than the education." Today, join Alex (@AlexHormozi) and his wife Leila (@LeilaHormozi) as they guest on Ryan Pineda���s Show to discuss the success of their e-learning business and the importance of providing a great user experience. They also touch on their personal relationship and share insights on navigating the current economy. This is part 2 of the interview.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.Check out the episode on Ryan Pineda’s YouTube Channel!Timestamps:(2:08) - Personalized experience enhances the value of the program(5:31) - Writing process for $100M Offers(9:11) - Building communities & working together with Leila(14:30) - Navigating economy, looking at leads traffic(21:30) - Being the face of business, recruiting top talentFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

most people in an economic downturn, like the demand, again, for income-producing skills does not go away. When there is no money, the demand for money is just as high if not higher. 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. That's exactly what I figured out what Future Flipper was, you know, at first, people would do it for a year. And they'd be like, okay, I learned what I wanted to learn. And, like, that was good.

But then we realized like, man, people stay for the community, like you said, the network, the accountability, you know, the camaraderie of just coming to an event every quarter. And they love it. And, you know, to make it even sweeter, I did exactly what you said was I cut the second year price in half. And I just said, hey, you know, it's half the price. And, you know, it'll be that price as long as you want to stay. And like our retention skyrocketed just from doing all of those things. Yeah. Yeah. If you think about it really like, like, When people are, if you look at like anything customer success, they always put like basically results and experience. And so it's just like understanding that most, I think in this space, typically like e-learning masterminds, they have the results there, which is like you're getting the network, you're getting the information,

you're getting all of this. But they actually forget about the experience, which is like, did you set expectations properly with the person of what they're going to get even? Because some people join for network versus some join for the education. And then did you onboard them well? And then what's you, how often are you talking to them?

Are you proactive with your communication? And so a lot of people actually look at gym launch and they say, oh, it's a digital, you know, information business. I'm like, dude, we had a 40-person support team, you know, because we were so focused on the experience, like every time someone had a baby, a wedding, a birthday, a holiday, like their first trip, they made a certain amount of money. It's like we're constantly pouring into them.

And I think that's the intangible stuff that people don't want to leave because they have the relationships. And so I think the relationships and the feeling that you give those people is longer lasting than the education all in all because people are loyal to a person, not necessarily to a thing. Right. And one of the points that Layla made there, I'll just zoom in on real quick, which is asking people why they're joining. It sounds really simple and obvious, but people are solving different problems when they're buying the same thing.

And so having a personalized experience for how they're going to consume the product and the service at the onset, giving kind of like a unique roadmap is one of those things that will dramatically enhance the value that they're receiving from the program because usually most people deliver way more stuff than someone can consume. And so it's like, okay, how can I give you the shortest path to getting the value that you want the way you want to receive it? And so, like, that's a huge part. And then, you know, some of the other cool things is using that network effect that you have, A, for the network, but also for group purchasing power. So if you, let's say, let's say just for math sake, let's say your first year was $12,000 and your second year was $6,000. If you have a group of 200 entrepreneurs or 500 entrepreneurs who are in this network, we have a huge amount of buying power. And so there's normally services and products and things like that that everybody probably frequents that may or may not be yours, you know, that you own. And so you can bundle in the savings from the group purchasing power to be in excess of the absolute cost of the mastermind.

And then it becomes a savings to be a part of the association or whatever. And so there's like ways that you can stack the value that makes it just so irresistible and such a no brainer for people to stay that they're like, well, shit. I mean, it makes the, I'd feel stupid to say no, right? And then that's the idea. Yeah, so speaking of, you know, you referenced your book, subtitle there, you know, offers. What's the subtitle offers? How to make it. Yeah, how to make all over so good.

People feel stupid saying, no. Yeah. So, you know, we talked about the book earlier and just, like, all the different ways to market. And I know you're coming out with a whole series of books and everything else. And the next one's about generating, is the leads. Leeds. And, you know, you've talked about how it's taking a while with all the revisions and everything else.

It's been a beast. It's been a headache. And I remember, I actually asked you, man, this was maybe like four or five. I go, hey, you know, how are you publishing them? And you're like, just on Amazon, Kindle. And I was like, really? I was like, who's writing him?

He's like, I am. I was like, what about everything? You're like, I'm just doing it. I'm like, holy crap, dude, to do all of that. I wrote my one book right over there. And that was like four years ago. I was like, I don't think I could ever do that again. That was so difficult to like write it on my own.

Yeah. Yeah. It's tough. Alex didn't write his first book even thinking he was going to publish it. Like, I don't think people realized that. Like, he was literally writing it. And he's like, I don't know if I'm going to do anything with this. Like, I just don't.

I think I'm just writing it for myself. He's like, we could actually use it with the companies. It'll be like a manual. That's exactly what it was intended to do. And so then, it was like one day he woke up in the morning. And, you know, if I'm going to publish it, maybe I'd do it in like a few months. You should be a big launch. I would do this whole thing.

And then I kept telling me, I was like, well, if the thing is good enough, which I'd read it like probably six times by this point, I'm like, it is fantastic. Like, it's going to blow up. Like, you don't need to do anything. And he was like, hi. And then one day you woke up and you were like, I put it on Instagram. And it's on Amazon. I was like, it's on Amazon Instagram.

He was like, yeah, and I was like, I don't even know where to log in and like, you know, make sure the shit's going well and stuff. And so there's a little bit of shit show. But it, you know, he made one post and no marketing, no other posts about it. Nothing. It just literally went viral off word of mouth. I mean, it was insane. People don't believe us.

They're like, you had to pump something. I'm like, he didn't pump shit. But people just aren't used to actually, like the how much time he puts in the writing, like I am not somebody that gets bothered by how much somebody works. But like when he gets into writing mode where it's like, we can't. on weeks of like, I'm like, hello, are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Like, are you shriveling raisin in there?

You know, is in this closet. Yeah, you go in your closet and just turn off the light. He's so dedicated to it. And it's because he genuinely loves writing. Yeah. Books are very special to me because, like, I've learned a lot from, you know, reading. And like, if you think about, like, when people die, the only thing that's left is, like, books.

Like, the only thing that has, like, stayed for 2,000, 5,000 years is, like, written word. And so I think there's something magical about that. And so that's what I, you know, I spend a lot of time trying to make it really, really good. I think there's a big difference between like publishing a book and publishing a great book. And there's just a mountain more of work with like, you know what I mean? Like there's probably 20% of the work is publishing a book compared to, you know, publishing a book that the product, the value that people will get is so far in access of what they pay that they tell their friends about

it. And so like if you can achieve that ratio, then the product takes off and then it can like, like it becomes its own marketing. Yeah. And so that was that was the goal for the book. And you know, when I told Layla that, I was like, I don't know if I want to promote it because either it's good enough that it will promote itself, right? Why would I promote it? Because if people aren't telling their friends that it's good, then why would I want anyone else to read it? Right. 100%. And I think the thing you did that was genius was you made it a dollar. Like, you know, like the virality of that, you haven't seen many people do that, right? Because like they spent so much time and money to get a book out there and to do the launch and, you know, if they paid

a ghost writer and all this stuff and it's like to sell it for that, you know, it's like, well, what do I have to lose? Like, it might as well read it. And then like it just, it's kind of like, it made me realize, too, that a book is pretty much just like content. And, you know, we make content for free. We don't charge people to watch our YouTube videos and stuff. And it was like, yeah, that makes it like, why not try it as a book? And so watching what you did with that. And obviously, even if it was a dollar and it sucked, nobody would watch it or nobody would share it.

Right. So it was just like, you got nothing to lose by buying this and just reading it other than your time. and, dude, it's just, it's crazy, like, how viral it's gone. Because I read it when it maybe had a couple hundred reviews. And then I was looking at it before, I was like, this thing's got like 5,000 reviews now. What's going on here? Yeah. It's crazy.

Yeah, it's been pretty cool. I'm very excited about it. Yeah, it comes up on one year in July. Yeah. So, you know, hopefully we can get $5,000, maybe $6,000 the first year. That's crazy. Because then I think about, like, you know, what does it look like, you know, 20 years from now? Are there going to be, like, 120,000 reviews?

Right. Which would be pretty cool. So, but like, you know, to your point about the pricing thing, it's, like, I priced it there because, like, what was the objective of the book? The objective of the book is that it gets shared and that many people can say it. The objective is not like for me to make an extra, you know, $20,000 a month on a buck. Yeah, like, I just, you know, like, Amazon takes 66 of the, of the 99. Like, it really, like, I did not make on money in the book. Yeah, we said we want to be able to basically, you know, anything we put out there that's education or information, we just, like, decided, like, our brand, like, it's just want, we want all of it to be for free. So we don't want to make people pay for anything. We don't want to ever sell anything. That's not how we want to make our money. Yeah, I mean, we just make our money doing the stuff. You know what I mean?

And so we wanted to just teach as many. Like, the business model was simple. It's just, okay, we really do do this stuff. And why don't we just help as many people as humanly possible, knowing that 99.9% will never work with us and never give us a dollar. And that's fine. And then of the people who are super executors, because they can take the stuff without handling and get themselves to $3 million,

$5 million, $8 million, $10 million a year. And then they're like, dude, I used all the stuff. I got past this level. Now, like, I trust you because I used your stuff and it worked. So now I know the next thing's going to work. And then it just makes it for such a better process of finding alignment, getting the right partners. And so it's just big picture. I don't want to sell more like $10,000 things. You know, I want to just find partners that were in it for 10 years and build something really cool. Do you ever see yourself starting? I know you're not going to charge for education, but do you ever see yourself starting like a mastermind for high level entrepreneurs? No. No. No. That was actually, sorry. No, I feel strongly against that.

Yeah. But even if you didn't charge, like just, I don't know, as a networking type deal. I think we thought about doing like an event. Yeah. You know, like a Mosey Nation event or doing a community on like Discord or something like that. So like, we're trying to think of different ways. Hey. Did he tell you to do Discord?

Yeah. Yeah. I have two discords right now. Okay. Oh, yeah. So they have 15,000 in them. All right. And Discord is interesting because it's,

It's like 24-7. And it's just like non-stop. People are just always talking, always coming. It's different than a Facebook group where it's like you got to make a post. And somebody might comment. Somebody might, it's like a 24-7 chat room. Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy.

I mean, yeah, I could see us doing something like that. It's just what's the objective. You know what I mean? Like for us, the objective is to, I mean, the mission of the company is to document and share the best practices of building world-class companies. And so we do that by building world-class companies and documenting it. then we share it. And the key point of sharing is like, we share it so that everybody can have it. And I just, in my bones, believe that the only thing that makes the world better is entrepreneurial businesses. And so the more business owners we can equip with, the skills and lessons that, you know,

we're very difficult and painful for us to learn, then the more good businesses will be out there. And even if none of them ever work with us, like, we'll die and it won't matter. And it's okay. And we're happy to just help people out. And we're good with that. 100%. So how is it, you know, working together? I mean, You guys seem like you're just yin and yang, like, you know, it just works so well, just watching it from here. It does work well. It does work pretty well. Honestly, yeah, I mean, it's a tough one because we met and we started working together so quickly.

And it's not for, I would say, like, 99.9% of couples. And I think also a lot of couples aren't going to work as well together as we do. Because I think that we just naturally, you know, like I've always been kind of in this position with anyone that I've worked with. like the integrator to a visionary. And Alex is naturally a visionary. And so I think we met and we had complementary skill sets and it was the right timing and we started doing it from day one. And we're both really coachable and we both take ownership over our shit and don't blame each other. And so I think just who we were, we're lucky that we found each other and it worked so well. But I'm working together's great. We love it.

Do you guys ever like, how do you split like between business and your relationship? Or is it all just flowing together all the time? It flows together. I mean, there are moments where you're like, hey, husband hat or, hey, wife hat, you know, like, and you need to, like, clearly delineate. But most of the times, like, the things that we enjoy talking about are the things that we're building together. You know what I mean? And so in a lot of ways, we're talking earlier, like, the businesses that we build are a lot like our kids. They're the things that we're bringing into this world and we're raising them and, you know, fostering them and whatnot.

So, like, that's what we enjoy. And we've always kind of decried the black and white, you know, you have to have one date, you cannot talk about business, you have to, you should, you must, blah, blah, blah. I think you can do whatever you want. And this is like, this is the life that we like and this is the marriage. We do marriage the way we envision marriage and it works within our dynamic. And that's all we know. And so, you know, for people who have similar mission values and, you know, lifestyles,

then I think those are the three things that for us have to be in alignment for any kind of long-term partnership. It's like you got to want to do the same epics thing. You have to want to get there the same way. And then the lifestyle is like, how you do it in the meantime? Yeah, and I think what people, I'll say this, which is what people see in terms of us in the business setting and working together and doing all that. Like we actually do, I have always intentionally like tried not to because I actually is a pattern when we had gym launch, which is I don't want to show like husband and wife Alex and Layla in front of our team because I don't want them to that to detract or distract from business. And so like how we are in private when we're not in front of other people is very different than how we are in front of people too. And that, like, we're super playful.

Like, super funny, playful, tons of humor. We drove around a lot. Lighthearted, you know, very touchy, you know. That's one thing that, like, I actually, when we had the company, I was like, oh, like, I just, because you go, just touch your spouse, but in front of the team to, like, be hugging and doing all that while you're leading it quarterly. Yeah. That's a little weird.

So I try to kind of train ourselves not to do that stuff for other people. And if anything, like, no, like, unified front. It's just like, I mean, it's just like, I would imagine it's just like parenting, right? I would imagine it's just like parenting. Unified front, like we don't disagree publicly if there's ever anything. Like if there is anything, we're like, hey, after the meeting. Talk about it in private. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like, I thought we were not doing that. Yeah. Where did that come from? Yeah, it's like, oh, I thought you were talking about this. Like, ooh, my bad. I'll let them know

in Slack, no big deal. You know what I mean? Yeah, just being sensitive to other people in the room, you know, I think especially like so many people are hesitant to work for a husband-wife duo because they're worried, like, about the stability of the relationship and how you disagree and how you solve arguments, all and stuff. And the last thing we ever want to do, bring any sort of personal element in, like, in front of our team, besides, I would say our intermediate team, which is like, you know, Caleb, who does video, he's going to see us together, like, in our own element. And same with our EAs. But besides that, nobody really sees. Got it, got it. So with all these businesses you're buying, how do you factor in, like,

the economy? Because I've heard you talk about this on, on your videos, talking about, like, the vehicle at which, you know, you're in, right? Like, if you're, you got a ship that's got a a lot of wind behind it, it's way easier to go with that, right? And so we see the economy doing whatever it's going to do. How do you guys navigate this? So I will take this. So one is, what's the marketplace we're going after? So the marketplace that we're going after is e-learning, which as a category is set to two and a half extra over the next five years. Now, compared to, like, anything else, that's great growth. So from like the wind behind the sales perspective, we've got that. And I think a big part of that is because formal education is being disrupted, I think,

because a lot of people are looking or seeking out alternative education sources to make money, right? Because, and this is not me decrying or saying college is bad. It's just that a lot of people can't afford to spend four years and $100,000 and not make money for that period of time to then make the same amount of money that they could just not doing that experience. And so, like the opportunity cost is massive. And so if I say it differently, is that the demand for income producing skills has not gone away. The supply of formal, the formal supply of it, has, and so they are seeking out alternatives. And so that is why that market is growing. So number one is that. Number two is that in a bad economy future, especially in inflationary environment,

businesses that have low capital expenses and high cash flow tend to be businesses that fare better because there's easier pricing power and because you don't have to put capital back into the business to expand it, it's easier to those businesses are more flexible. And so the types of businesses that we work with are by nature, low capital expense businesses, high cash. flow. And so for those reasons, we feel really well equipped for, you know, an inflationary period that might come in the future. You know, everybody has a plan until you get hit in the face. But as far as we can see, we feel pretty good because things have to go on. And so it's like, okay, well, if we can mitigate these risks, at least then we can trudge forward and deal with things

as they come. Hey, guys, love that you're listening to the podcast. If you ever want to have the video version of this, which usually has more effects, more visuals, more graphs, you know, drawn out stuff. Sometimes it can help hit the brain centers in different ways. You can check on my YouTube channel. It's absolutely free. Go check that out if that's what you are into. And if not, keep enjoying the show. Yeah, I mean, it comes down to their very flexible businesses.

And so if you have a flexible infrastructure and you have a flexible model and these aren't businesses with huge capital expenditures and giant buildings and real estate all over the freaking world, it's not going to be that hard to pivot. And honestly, like during COVID, we had to pivot all three of our businesses. Was it easy? No, it was a pain in the ass. but did we do it? Yes. And it was something that made the companies better off. And so we factor that in when we're looking at the entrepreneur and are they the kind of person that could, you know, do well in

economic downturn and then the company as well. And most people in an economic downturn, like the demand, again, for income reducing skills does not go away. Right. The demand for, you know, other things that are like nice things might decrease. But like when there is no money, the demand for money is just as high if not higher. And many of the businesses that we have teach kind of niched income producing skills. So it might be how to fix a hair salon, how to be a plumber, whatever. Those are, I think, always going to be in demand.

Yeah. Second to that is we do try to pick people that we believe are market leaders or could be market leaders. Yeah, that's a big one. So we're not looking at people that are distressed or that we don't think have the potential to take over their specific niche.

And so typically in an economic downturn, the market leader survives. And so we felt confidence that those people could do that. Right. When you guys look at these different businesses, You know, you're talking about market leaders and, you know, as far as in the space and generating revenue and everything. But, you know, like a lot of businesses, probably like Jim

launch early on, are very dependent on, you know, the founder, right? They're the face. They're driving all the traffic. Even today. And many of my businesses, like, do if Ryan stops making content, you know, where the leads coming from, right? Yeah. What do you guys do to address that, if any? You mean so that we could like potentially exit them in the future kind of thing? it's always, honestly, with all of them, that is part of the plan. So that's something that takes, I want to say if you're starting and you're like, I want to sell my business and I want it to be like rock solid. Maybe it's 18 to 24 months.

I would say if you want to do it right and like really rock solid three years. So most of these companies are three year to five year plan involves that. So it's how are we going to basically like, you know, diversify our risk of the founder, you know, because at some point, if they want to exit, I think most of them want the freedom to choose, right? They don't necessarily want to exit, but they would like the freedom or the opportunity to decide at that point in time. And so we are always setting them up for that. And so I think that it's more complicated when you're the founder than when you're somebody like myself looking at it. Because I look at it, I'm like, you just have to put other people.

For every Alex, I need like 10 people. Right. And that's all it is. It's just the 10 people that fill the skills gap. And then the 10 people that can, you know, essentially act as characters to fill in for one face. Right. So can 10 people fill the gap of one Alex? Yes, is there more operational complexity?

Yes, but it's a more sturdy business. So oftentimes, like a personality brand, it's basically diversifying and adding, going from like one personality to like, you know, you go to Disneyland. It's not just Mickey Mouse. It's all the characters. You've got Alice in Wonderland and Snow White and like all these people. It's like how do we create that within each of the businesses? And so a lot of those businesses, they have people that, you know, are niche experts

teaching their, you know, customers because they're coaching businesses. And those people typically, you know, you kind of make subject matter experts that can take over a different subject matter. And then the other one is taking, you know, their leadership team and kind of like raising them up to be more forward facing, kind of taking the internal and making it external. So there's a few different ways you can do it. But it's just a process. And if you, if you do it over time, it's honestly not that hard. Yeah. You pretty much described what I've been thinking because like, I don't want to sell, but, you know, I'd like to have the option one day, right? And so we started thinking about this at like the one I'm most prevalent at, which is the

real estate education business, right? And so I said, you know what? We're really good at making content. Why don't we just produce it for other people in the community, right? And so we took like our best students who I thought were great on camera. We took our coaches, everyone else. And so we created a whole separate YouTube channel, Instagram, everything else. And they're growing really quick just because our post-production team makes them the exact same.

Like it's just send us the videos and we'll make the thumbnails and everything else that we know works. And so that's actually helped. out a lot. And like, we're launching a new podcast. I am not the host, you know, and just trying to diversify. I think the more that you edify those people. Yeah. So it's like the more that one, you associate with them, like you're seen with them before they're on their own. And then you edify them when they are on their own. And you consistently do that over and over and over again. And just like as an added point, because this is the subject of the next book. Lots to say on this. But like, typically if it's a founder face, you know, face forward thing, then it's going to be

through paid ads are organic for the most part, right? And there are so many other ways to get customers. And so it's like, okay, well, how do we get an affiliate channel set up? How do we get a referral, you know, a really strong referral program in place? How do we get a big manual outbound team set up? How do we do? How do we do? It's a different list that we can hit. And so there's these different things that we can set up and we can do that. And by building an employee team, we can build customer teams, we can build affiliate networks. All of those things we can do that are not founder facing at all. And I can tell you that when Jim launch, the sales past 50% of total sales came from the outbound team. I can't explain the amount of

peace of mind to just know that every day we're doing $5,000 and that's going to turn into $100,000 or whatever. You know what I mean? And so we just know that if I die tomorrow, all these people have jobs, all these families are secure, mortgages are paid, like everything's going to be okay. And that's why, you know, a private equity or whatever feels comfortable coming in to purchase a business like that because they're like, oh, they're not only diversified across channels, but they're diversified across methods of acquisition. Right. It's not just social media. Right.

That's just like one, right? Like, we could cold call, we could call email, we could call DM. Like, there's so many different ways that we could do this. We could build, we could do paid ads to get affiliates and then build a thousand person affiliate. Like so, Prestige Labs was 100% affiliates. It was all affiliates. Yeah. 3,000 affiliates. We actually had super affiliates. We had a two-level affiliate set up in Allen because for the same reason. I was like, I didn't want to be the face of this.

And so there's so many ways you can do it. And even like even in the paid ads, you can put the mascots, but you can also put your customers more, right? Have the customers and the results and the experiences and the workshops and things like that be far more prevalent. Because at the end of the day, like, they don't really care about us. They care about what they see in us. They care about what they relate to. And so if we can if we can draw that line or just kind of like lean into that more, we can kind of like step off camera. And it's like, oh, wow, this person is just like me. And this business helped that person succeed, whatever. Yeah. No, I love that. So you mentioned that if you're going to replace the founder, it might take 10. people to replace Alex, right? What are you guys doing to recruit top-tier talent? For ourselves?

In general, for you and helping the founders, you know, hire better. I think that, you know, we're at a point now where it's actually, we're attracting a lot of top talent, which is something that I haven't had for the last six years. It's unfair. It's honestly, it's really like an unfair advantage. And that's what I've experienced too. It's just been accumulated. Yeah. I tell people, I'm just like, I make a post and we get so many, like, hot applicants and it's great. but like that's not the reality for most people. Yeah. So for most people,

I mean, like when we had gym launch, like to get top level, top tier talent is an investment. You know, I think that there's two ways that you can get it, which is one, you can go through your network

and you can try and literally like pull whatever favor you can to get your first top level person. And if you can get one, that edifies you to every other person that you're ever going to talk to, that it's not a crazy idea to join your company. Right? So like for gym launch,

like we got our CFO. and I'll go with the second way, which is using a recruiter or paying somebody to go recruit if you don't have that in-house because the thing is a lot of people don't have recruiters in-house. They also don't have the time to dedicate to really finding the right kind of person. So, I mean, we've forked out a lot of money on a couple of positions, and I'm glad because once you have one or two people that are top-to-your talent that you did pay a lot of money for, then those people have networks,

and then those people also edify you. So you start to look more legit, so it starts to legitimizes your company. And so then you do attract town. more naturally, whereas in the beginning, you just don't have that advantage. So you don't have anything to leverage besides your money. And so it's, you know, either your time, you can try and DM and, you know, on LinkedIn and craft yourself, I guess, as a founder, which, I mean, I've done it, or you could pay a recruiter to do it for you to find that talent. I really just think, like, we basically gotten in, I'll tell you how we found our CFO. We got an in with one of our friends who said,

I can get you with this recruiting company, but they typically only take companies above 100 million. And at that point, we weren't there. And he was like, but I'll tell them, like, how faster growing and all this stuff. And so because of that, we got to use them and because their name, their brand of recruiting, right? So when they reached out to somebody, they're like, oh, shit, they're like, they were literally number one in the nation. So they're like, I'm going to answer to them because they're the number one firm. And so I think you have to associate with somebody else's brand if you don't have a strong enough one. And so for our companies, like an acquisition, when we're trying to fill roles for them, you know, like we do leverage ours to find people for

them because we have so much inbound like, hey, do you need an operator for a company? Do you need a sales manager for company? So we can just throw that back into the companies. That's a big competitive, you know, that's a big thing that we can help with the portfolio companies. Because also, like, to her point about like the legitimacy, if they're like, oh, your portfolio is doing, you know, 150 million a year, they're like, okay. Like, I feel much better that you guys are all on board on this and you guys are an investment firm that's really like, see something here, too. So then they feel way more at ease. And so we will, you know, we'll screen and vet some of the final candidates, especially like leadership and up. And so like we can attract them, we can vet them,

and then we can place them. And then it also gives us from an operating perspective, we get multiple lines inside of the business so we know what's going on because it's, you know, sometimes the founder doesn't communicate all the time because they're busy, whatever. And so we have other people who are in the company that know and like and trust us too. And so it gives us so much more intel to how the business is doing so we can keep a much better pulse on what we can do to help them. So, so you're telling me, Acquisition.com is a recruiting company now. That's, I mean, that's actually, Yeah, because when we were deciding what we wanted to build, you know, Alex was saying this is what I want, and I was saying this what I want. And then we kind of put something together. It's always like a mesh of the two. And so like what I really love doing is finding talent for people. Like I love doing it for my own teams. And so I was like, I think I'm good at it. And I think I'm really good at helping people. And I think I'm really good helping people. And that's why we decide like the most hands-on piece that we are with the businesses is recruiting. So it's recruiting their leadership. And that was the number one thing you said from the beginning. You were like, people. That's what they all need. And it makes sense. Like that's the thing you're helping.

probably the most with. It's the phase of growth that they're in. So part of it might just be that tends to be the problem that most of them we're at. And so we have morphed ourselves into becoming like the best solution for that thing. I don't know if it's the chicken of the egg, but just the more high quality people we place into enterprises where there's a deficit, the faster the growth is. And so we just like everyone's one higher away from the business of their dreams. Yeah. No, I 100% agree. And I mean, for acquisition.com, it gives you guys so much of a competitive advantage. Not only just like, yeah, we're going to, potentially give you money.

You're obviously going to get our expertise. But by the way, you're getting our network too. Yeah. It's like Shark Tank. Yeah. That's super cool. Well, I really do. I could talk all day to you guys because there's just so much, you know,

you guys have going on and knowledge and everything. But, you know, I appreciate you guys coming on the show. It's been a lot of fun. And I know the audience got a lot of value out of it. So, yeah. I mean, we appreciate you having a song. Yeah, it's only 15 minute drive. That's true.

No, and I appreciate the question because it was, we don't get to talk about like as much higher level business stuff or what we do every day that often. Yeah, never. So this was actually really fun for us because we almost exclusively talk about this stuff every day. This is all we talk about. But nobody asks us about it.