The Game with Alex Hormozi - My Journey from a DUI to $3M | Ep 496

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Within 12 months, life went from 0 to 100 real quick. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about one of the most pivotal moments in his life that took him from a head-on collision with a DUI & no money to his name to having $3 Million in profit and not knowing what to do with it.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:(0:53) - What my life looked like prior leading to my DUI(6:52) - It's about not being afraid to take certain decisions(8:56) - 2 takeaways: Most people don’t regret doing things & you have to be confident with the decisions you make(10:26) - Going all-in with Gym Launch and the decisions that were left to move forwardFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition(This episode is a re-run. Original airdate was March 21, 2022)

Getting into a head-on collision and a DUI and having basically no money to my name to, you know, 12 months later, having $3 million in profits, not knowing what to do with it. 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. Hi, my name is Alex Ramosi and I ownacquisition.com and our portfolio companies will do $85 million this year and I have absolutely nothing to sell you. What I want to talk about today is one of the pivotal moments of my life that took me from really just getting into a head-on collision in a DUI and having basically no money to my name to, you know, 12 months later having $3 million in profits not knowing what to do with it. There was a series of decisions that happened in that period of time that radically transformed my life. And so I want to talk to you about one of the more significant ones today. And so, kind of like I just alluded to, leading into my DUI head-on collision, I had six gyms, two with one partner, I had three with another partner, and then I had one on my own.

So I had all these kind of weird arrangements that were going on in my life at that time. I also had a partner that I was doing a 50-50 split for dental agency work, and another, and the same partner, we also had an agency together for chiropractic agency work. I'm also doing in-person gym launches. So that means that I was flying out in person and doing gym turnarounds and trying to launch gyms. And at the time, I was so stressed that I was drinking, I mean, probably half a bottle every night just to honestly not to get drug, but just to not be stressed. It took me a really long time to just even like function. You know what I in the morning because I was so spread thin mentally. And what I want to kind of talk to you through is some of the decisions and how I thought through them because I don't know where you're out right now

and it doesn't really matter what the scale is of what the decisions are because I've made decisions like this at multiple times my life. I ended up going to an attention coach. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I went to a coach to help me manage my attention. And so one of the things that I think us as entrepreneurs we think about all the time is like, you know, we're managing our time. We're trying to be productive. And I worked every hour of the day that I was awake. And yet I still didn't have that much money at the time. Everything was tied up in, you know, the gyms and all that kind of stuff and cash flow for employees and all that kind of jazz. And this coach had kept telling me, he's like, you need to, you know, you need to aggregate your attention. You need to focus. He's like,

you're spread all over the place. I pretty much just like would nod along and listen and I tried to do some of the stuff they told me to do. But I wasn't making, I mean, I was making some progress. but it wasn't until I drank so much that I ended up getting into a head-on collision at 60 miles an hour on the highway and I actually walked away from that and it wasn't I didn't hit anyone I was actually getting pulled over and there was a car that was in the side, the shoulder that was turned off. It was dark and so I was looking over my shoulder and just kind of going from lane to lane as I was getting into the shoulder as I was getting pulled over as I was getting pulled over cop in the shoulder there's a black car and I just I nailed it and so anyways they say that because

I was drunk I was really relaxed and that's why I didn't get any injuries who knows but anyways I stepped out of the car you know I'm getting whatever they do you know signed you know signed paperwork whatever and the next day after Layla picked me up from jail as my girlfriend not not my wife at the time she was like this guy's a real winner anyways and so she picks me up and the next day I have a conversation with him obviously and he's like he's like your lack of making decisions is going to kill you and I remember him saying that to me and he was like the reason you're stressed is because you have all these decisions that you know you should make and you're not making them I wanted to make this because I wanted to talk about probably the the

the second hardest decision I made in my life the hardest decision was quitting my job probably the second hardest decision was was the decisions that I had it was a multitude of decisions that I had to make that I knew I was supposed to make and I just didn't know how to confront them. And it seems like it's a common theme in my life that when I only make decisions when I'm literally confronted with my own mortality. And so if you notice that as a common theme among my stuff, it's because for some reason I can't get myself to decide to do things unless I literally think I'm going to die. And so I saw this and it became the catalyst for me making a number of changes in my life. And so what I did over the next, you know, really the next 48 hours was

a rapid series of decisions that consolidated all my attention into one thing. And so that's what I want to talk to you about. So the first thing I did, I called up the partner that I had the two agencies with and I said, hey, I can't do this. I'm doing gym agency work where I'm flying out and doing turnarounds. I'm doing dental agency work. We're doing chiropractor agency where I was like, I can't do any of it. So I'm just, I'm out. I just was like, I'm out. You can have everything. I'm done. It was like, okay. And that was a horrible conversation to have because I felt like I was letting a partner down. And then I called up the partner that I had in the multitude of gyms, more of the gyms. And I said, hey, you know, how can we figure out a way for us to, you know,

walk away. I want to do this gym launch stuff. And so, you know, we ended up working it out. And I basically gave away the gyms at fire sale numbers, more or less. I was able to sell two of them successfully for a better number, but the rest of them I pretty much just gave away. And then the partner that I had that I was in the new gym with, I said, you know, hey, I'm, I don't, I don't want to do this anymore. I need to focus on gym launch. Obviously, all those conversations did not go, you know, super well. They weren't super well received. But I think I just was only able to have the courage to do it because I had almost died the night before. And so it just gave me this massive perspective where I was like, am I, I'm so afraid of letting these people down that I,

that I might die. And so I ended up making that all those decisions just in a matter of like a day or two. Hey, guys, real quick, if you're new to the podcast, I have a book on Amazon. It's called 100 million dollar offers at over 8,000 five-star reviews. 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 a thousand 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 coach a partner with you so that's my give go check it out amazon and back to the show and having those conversations and so I think the the the lesson for

me that I've taken with me that's been the most valuable thing of this is one you won't die when you make those those calls but second a lot of times I feel like when I was a newer entrepreneur and even as I feel that as I accumulate unmade decisions, right? I think we accumulate these unmade decisions or unconfronted conversations. And what happens is there's like a portion of my brain and my decision making, my thinking power that just gets allocated to this chunk, this decision, right, that needs to be made that is unmade, that I know I should make and I probably know what the right call is, but it's just sitting there unmade.

And so it's like as we start accumulating these things, it's like my actual amount of thinking power continues to decrease until it gets to the point where you're so reactive because you have no brain power and as a small like correlator to that i don't know if you've ever like if you remember when you're a kid and you had like homework or something like that and you were like staring at a math problem you can figure it out and um and you know you're staying up late into the night and you're like whatever i'm going to go to sleep and see if i can think about the morning um and then you wake up the next day and you feel refreshed and you look at the problem and it seems obvious you're like oh duh here it is and then it's done right? I feel like that is the, that is an expression of having far more attention, far more

decision-making power, far more thinking power, because you can concentrate on this one thing and all a sudden it seems easy. And I think that business and life are a lot like that, at least they have been for me, where it's like if I feel like I, like simple decisions are, are taking an inordinate amount of efforts, because I am too distracted, I have too many things, too many unmade decisions, too many unconfronted conversations that I need to have. And those can be. life conversations with a spouse, they can be conversations with parents, they can be conversations with siblings, they can be conversations with business partners, they can be conversations with employees, they can be decisions that must be made. And I think one of the most powerful things

that I've tried to remember is like I'm only one decision away from changing my life. Just one decision. I'm one decision away from changing my life. I can quit my job. That is one decision, right? I can start a business. That is one decision. These are decisions that we have to make at some point in our life and these are like the crossroads. There's two kind of major, major themes that I have. One is that most people don't regret doing things, they regret not doing things. And so I know that when I die, I don't want to regret not having done things. I'd rather do things than fail so that I do not have the regret. And I'll have the experience.

And having that kind of thought process has been extremely helpful for me. To draw back to the point of this whole thing, when I made these decisions and Layla was with me because she basically said as well, after I got off the phone call with the coach, she was like, if you don't change things, she's like, I'm not like, this has got to change. like I'm not going to be around. She kind of indicated that. She didn't say it directly, but I think I understood. I could read between the lines. And I valued my relationship with her more than a lot of the other things that were going on in my life. And I could tell that she was a little bit outside of the storm that was Alex Hermosie at the time, the storm of chaos.

And so she was like, you have to make these calls. And so I made these calls physically, like phone calls and also these decisions. And what resulted next was really the, you know, I had to suffer the pain of the consequence of those decisions, which was very hard for me. But I felt determined that I had made those decisions. I felt confident and I felt like I had more attention and more bandwidth in my disposal because I'd made the tough calls. And I started believing in myself more because I was like, man, if I can make these calls, then I can do this next thing.

And so that was kind of, I would say, the explosion that created the beginning momentum of like, I can do this. After I basically shut down as many different side projects as I could, that's when I went all in on gym launch. And so Jim Launch actually was started in 2016, which was probably 2016 into the first half of 2017 was like the worst 18 months of my entire life. And that was also when I coincidentally met Layla, my wife. So she saw me at the absolute worst and for some reason decided to stay with me because she believed, which is why I shall always have my eternal gratitude. We made this call.

I ended three partnerships. I sold or let go of fire sold. you know at the time i guess if you if you were just trying to number those i had like 11 nine businesses or something that was going on and so this is one of those things where people were like man i have i have i have so many businesses uh you know et cetera and it's like you have to do them in the right sequence like i didn't even i wasn't barely making any money and i had all these businesses so i could feel good about my status when in reality i knew that i wasn't that successful and so um it was only one label was like this gym launch thing is working like all we have to

is just give it our full attention and it will work. At that point, I felt so, I want to say defeated, but I also felt like my, my slate was clean, right? I had cleaned the slate and like I pushed everything off the side in the face of my, of my mortality, that the stress of not making these decisions was going to kill me. And so that's when I just focused fool in on on gym launch and things kind of took off. And I think in another video, I'll tell you that story of how how things actually started there, because I think it's valuable for a lot of people who are going through it right now. But I guess I wanted to make this video because the takeaway that I had from that is that I'm always one decision away from changing my life. And I'm often one conversation

away from getting my attention back. I'm one decision away from getting all my attention back from where I'm feeling distracted. So I don't know where you're at right now, but the most valuable thing that we have as entrepreneurs is not our time, but our attention. If we have all of the time, but we have a million things going on, we are useless because we have no decision-making power. We have no thinking power because little pieces of our brain are being allocated these unformed, unfinalized decisions that maybe can cost you your life. And I don't know. I mean, it did almost for me, which is why I've been so ruthless with my attention since then.

And so it had to, by consequence, so disciplined with my focus, it's not because I'm naturally that way. So hopefully this story will illustrate that to you, that this was not something that naturally came to me, but was a decision that I had to make to save myself. And so don't know where you're at right now. My name's Alex from Rosie. We own Acquisition.com. Our portfolio companies now do about $85 million a year.

I have nothing to sell you. I made this channel because a lot of people are broke and I don't want you to be one of them. And I think that everyone has 100% within their control to become the top 1% of the United States, which is already the top whatever percent in the world. So anyways, lots of everyone. If you did like this, hit the subscribe button.

If you didn't, love you either way. And I'll see you in the next video. Bye.