The Game with Alex Hormozi - Imperfect Action and Certainty | Ep 192

Episode Date: March 27, 2020

"Courage isn't acting in the absence of fear, but acting despite fear or taking action despite of how you feel." Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) discusses the importance of taking imperfect action and adapting to new circumstances in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. He emphasizes the need for businesses to recalibrate and utilize existing resources to meet new market demands.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:(0:51) - Emergence of new challenges in business due to pandemic(1:37) - Choice between imperfect action or no action(3:18) - Utilize existing resources to recalibrate for new market(5:06) - Courage is acting despite fear, take imperfect action(6:24) - Adapt to new circumstances, learn from others' mistakes(9:42) - Provide value in new vehicle, government programs to helpFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

It's going to be ugly. There's going to be shit you're going to fuck up. Your team is going to be operating on incomplete info because the thing is, it's like, what other option do you have? Welcome to the Jim Secrets podcast where you 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 that we have learned along the way. I hope you enjoy and subscribe.

What's going on, everyone? Happy Monday. I hope you guys are rocking and rolling. doing and taking massive action. I wanted to make a quick vid slash podcast for those who's tuning in on the podcast, thank you, about imperfect action and certainty. And so a lot of you have either recently started, you know, had to make a massive pivot in your business or you've been paralyzed by fear.

And so I wanted to hopefully address some of those concerns because I think they're incredibly common and they're definitely worth addressing. And so I just got off the phone with somebody that owns a company that's very affected. They work with chiropractors. Really no more affected than we are in the gym industry. But doctors in general tend to be a little bit more hesitant, a little bit more analytical, and honestly just a little slower to react to things. And so I kind of wanted to share with you guys what I shared with him.

And so hopefully it will be valuable for you. And the thing is that all of us right now have a choice. to either take imperfect action or no action at all. But the reality is that you can either take the choice or let your circumstances make the choice for you because the choice is going to be made. And so right now this is especially speaking or I'm especially speaking to everyone who likes to be perfect, wants to know exactly it's going to happen at every step, wants it to be perfect. Let me tell you, it's not. It's going to be ugly.

there's going to be shit you're going to fuck up. Your team is going to be operating on incomplete info because the thing is, is like, what other options do you have? Right? Like you can't wait a week. You can't wait two weeks once you've pressure tested everything and gotten the process flows down.

And it's not like the thing is, a lot of you guys had everything's cool. And then the next day you were announced you're not allowed to do business. Right. So if that's the kind of pressure and environment we are currently in, you have to let your actions reflect that, right?

Like taking time should reflect an environment where you might have time. You don't have that right now. And so what you have to paint for your team is basically giving them emotional permission to feel not okay and still act despite that. So when you're talking to your team, like, you're like, listen, I like right after you explain everything you're doing to do it, like, listen, guys, I know this is not perfect. I know this is not even pretty.

But what else we got, right? What other choice do we have right now? And all you hear is crickets because no one else has another solution. And you're like, all right. So this is the best bad idea I've got. And so when you're looking at a changing environment, what you're trying to do is look at what existing resources and skills do I have as a business at my disposal that I can recalibrate and reset to meet a new market demand, right?

This is what businesses do over longer cycles. They call these S curves where an old product dies over time and then you begin R&D on a new product. In the beginning, it's not making money and all of a sudden it starts taking off and then becomes a mature product. This is a normal cycle that happens in business except we are being forced to do it in a week. Right. And do everything change every system we have because being real. Like, yes, most gym owners have to go from being an in person business to an online business in seven days. right never having done it your team doesn't know how to do remote you don't know how to get zoom to

work you don't know what the communication cadency is to look like your clients don't know how to make that stuff work what is it going to look like from a scheduling standpoint how we're going to onboard new people there's a ton of things that you already unknowingly did or were able to do without as much process in an in-person setting that you're now having to learn the thing is is what's your choice right what other chance you got and so one of the things that I wanted to convey to you in terms of how you talk about these changes is certainty. Now, I can't remember the first time I heard this.

It's not mine. But it was confidence is for boys and certainty is for men. And mind you, I understand that we have women on the call. Just reflect everything I say in a female setting. Same thing. We need to reflect certainty in times where you're not certain because that is what everyone is looking for from you as the leader. right and you might not be right a lot of you guys have probably heard the saying um

courage isn't acting uh without fear or acting in the absence of fear but acting despite fear or taking action despite of how you feel and this is pretty much what we have to do right now right and so if anything all i want to do with this with this one podcast is leave you with one single thing which is it's okay for you to fuck up right now right but what's not okay is for you to do nothing. It's okay to take imperfect action. You'll get better. You've never sold over the phone before. Guess what? You're going to learn real fast. Right. And guess what? You're going to suck. Why? Because you've never done it before. Right. Is your remote fulfillment going to be amazing? No, of course not. Why would it be? You haven't done it before. Right. But that's okay because what other

choice do you have? All right? So I just like, if I can just reflect this to you to give yourself a break about not being perfect, but not give yourself a break about not doing anything. All right? Like, everyone needs to act. This is affecting all of us immediately right now. And if you're in an area that isn't quarantined, do not be the guy with the dunce hat on who says, well, I'm going to wait. Sure.

You don't like getting a head start. You don't like being prepared. You don't like learning from other people's mistakes. You want to wait for things to happen to you. Awesome. Good for you. I think that humans have this unique advantage. We get to look at other human beings.

to say, I'm going to learn from his mistake. I'm going to learn from his circumstance. And we're a unique situation where history is literally playing out just a couple days, just a couple weeks ahead of time in other areas. So learn from it because don't think it's not going to happen in your area. It will, right? None of us are going to get out of this anytime soon. Right.

So you've got to adapt. You've got to take imperfirmative action. It has to be massive because you're not going to take a small incremental shift from a massive external change. Hey, if you're a return listener and you have not rated or reviewed the show, I want you to know that you should feel absolutely terrible about yourself and everything else in the world. I'm kidding.

But it would mean the absolute word to me if you guys would go ahead and do that. You don't even have to pause to show you. You can keep listening and you can just do it with your thumb right now. It'll take you less than 60 seconds. And like I said, the only way that podcast grows through word of mouth and this is you joining hands with me and helping as many entrepreneurs as we possibly can because no one is coming to save us. It's just us.

All right. So please go do that now. Then let's get back to the show. All right. So all I want to say is it's okay if you suck. It's okay if the things that you do don't work as nearly as well as you wanted them to. Give yourself a break. All right. Big picture. If you can eliminate your rent, which you should be able to do. Now mind you, I'm not a lawyer. Talk to your legal counsel, blah, blah, blah, blah, do all that. But I think if I were a betting person, I would bet that there is going to be a lot of credit forgiveness that's going to happen, especially for businesses that were purposely shut down.

by the government, right? Or massively affected due to coronavirus. And so most banks have already come out and said that they're forgiving or at least offering forbearance to landlords for mortgages. If your landlord doesn't have to pay his mortgage, you in all likely will not get penalized for not paying your rent. I'm saying that you're a grown-ass person. You should make your own decisions. But if it were me, I would be conserving cash flow and only focused on one thing, which is acquisition. Okay. The one thing you cannot stop is marketing and says, why? Because the moment you stop it is a moment that you have cut off the lifeline of your business. It's a moment that no new customers are going to enter.

You're basically begun the ticking clock, which is why you need to get uncomfortable, learn a new acquisition process, learn a new fulfillment process of selling over the phone, selling over Zoom, fulfilling over Zoom, having Zoom workouts, having remote check-ins. You got to learn how to do it or it's not going to happen, right? It's like, what other choice do you have? And so I'd be conserving my cash flow. All right, for that. So first thing is I'm going to remove the expenses that are not providing value.

If your gym is not providing your physical location is no longer providing value, that would not be my prioritizing of where I would spend my cash flow. Number one. Number two, it takes in every state, most states especially, it takes 90 days for someone to evict you. Okay. Now, if you're a landlord, what do you think the likelihood is that you're going to get a new tenant after that 90 days is over in the economic situation we're in? probably low.

Got to think from their perspective. All right. Would they rather give some months of free rent or give some forbearance so that they could potentially keep you on the longer side? Probably. So that's the first thing you're going to do. All right. The next one.

And I'm just being real. You have to keep the business alive. All right. So that means that you have to let go of non-essential employees who are not going to provide value in the new setting. And this is what's key. It's not saying you are not valuable as a person that I don't love you. I love you.

I absolutely do. You're like, I love all humans. But in this business, these are the new requirements for how we provide value. If you can no longer provide value in this new vehicle, then there's really no place for you here. Now, that being said, there's economic programs from the government. There's unemployment. There's all these things that these people can apply for so that you can keep the business alive.

So that hopefully come 90 days or four months or five months or whatever it is, you will have a business for them to come back to. All right. Now, if you've eliminated your fixed overhead with rent, right? And you've cut a lot of the over that was associated with the payroll, then what do you have left? You should still have a decent amount of recurring revenue that you've built up over this time. Now, even if you lost 30% or 40% from freezes and cancels, that's okay. Quick side note, don't let anyone cancel. They can only freeze. Okay. So if someone's like, hey, I want to cancel, be like, no, no, so we're actually not accepting any cancels. We're just pausing into where we're open. Is that fair? Cool. So at least this way, when you do reopen back up, you don't have to go find them and resell them.

All right. So just giving you that right now. But if they do pause and they don't want to do it, there's nothing you can do about it. All right. So say you lose 40% and your EFT, your recurring revenue is at 15,000, right? And you lose 40%. So you're down six. All right.

That means you have 9,000 recurring left. If you have no rent, you only have one person who's assisting you, you may actually be able to make more money. Crazy. Like eight or nine months ago, I pushed. I was like, hey guys, I think you. you guys should prepare with a remote, I called it hybrid, but a remote thumb system, right? Because you're going to be able to prepare and have another way of providing high value,

high margin services. There's this beautiful instance right now we're being encouraged to switch towards a higher profit model. Okay. And so you should all take a moment and think about what this means. I know it's change, but just because it's changed doesn't mean it's bad. So like, you just like internalize that. Just because it's change doesn't mean it's bad. Remote is a better business model.

It's a higher profit model. It has more scale to it. There's a number of benefits to it. Okay? So at least we didn't get like shafted into a worse business model. We actually like we're being gifted a true reason why, a true carte blanche, a permission slip from the world to actually switch to a more profitable model. And it is all we have to do right now is just learn it and be okay and give ourselves

permission to suck a little bit in the beginning. You're not going to be perfect. It's going to be as clean as your gym. No. clean being fulfillment germ joke not included um no it's not of course it's not but that's okay just give yourself a break but you just can't do nothing all right you just got to take action and you got to get right back on the phone when you have somebody hang up on you because this is first time you sold over the phone and you got to get right back on the next phone call with a smile with good

energy look at yourself in the mirror fun trick if you've never sold over the phone find something that's reflective if you can't just turn on your zoom on your computer and just look at your while you're talking. Your tone will change. You will speak better. It's an old school sales trip. Use that if you don't know how to fix your tone. So I know it's a little bit, give you like 16 tiny different nuggets in different directions. And it's because times are chaotic right now. And I know hopefully for somebody you needed to hear that. But what you cannot do is do nothing because it's not going to fix itself. Superman ain't coming. All right. It's just us. So anyways, lots of love. Hope you guys who are hanging in there, are hanging in there.

We'll get through this together. Thankfully, we're in an industry that we could actually very easily pivot to remote. There already existed in industry for remote fitness. So, like, thankfully, be grateful that we have something that we can do that. Switching to remote restaurant, much more difficult. Switching to remote events, doing Zoom events, not necessarily as valuable as an in-person, you know, three-day event. If you're a wedding planner, kind of hard to do Zoom weddings. So be grateful for what we got.

All right. So anyways, love you all. Hope you guys. Stay positive because if you don't know, this well. All right. Catch you too. Bye.