The Game with Alex Hormozi - Purchasing Proximity: The Two most Live-Changing Experiences of My Life | Ep 233

Episode Date: September 1, 2020

Advice? Just shut up and listen. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about the two pivotal moments in his life when he truly felt like he received a high ROI on his decisions and shares the importance of educating yourself and continuing to improve your skills.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:(3:14) - Pivotal moment: told to teach, not run gyms.(4:23) - 3C's: Clarity, Conviction, Community.(7:32) - Potential shock: scale up fast or lose everything.(11:15) - Investing in learning builds future success.(13:48) - Learn from those doing better, invest in proximity.(15:26) - Be in awe, listen in rooms where you feel undeserving.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

He pulled me aside after my presentation. It was like if what you're saying is true, he said you've got a $100 million company. 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.

Good morning, everyone. Happy Sunday. I hope you guys are rocking and rolling as we start the beginning of next week. I've been cranking on some work and I felt like I got a nice place to rest. And I wanted to share two stories with you because they've just been on my mind a lot lately. And they are the two most impactful experiences of my life, which is pretty bold playing because I feel like I've had a lot of pretty impactful experiences. But there are two decisions that I made in my life that were by far the highest R.O.I.

Decisions in terms of how much I was able to grow as a result of them. And both of them were in-person mastermind experiences. The first one was when I decided to join Russell's inner circle. And so the backstory behind this was I was a gym owner, right? I had six gyms at the time. I was young. I understood a tiny bit about marketing just enough to kind of get my gyms to work. And I was actually in a pretty bad spot in my life.

I was just really, I don't know, incredibly bored. and I didn't really know anyone. And so the gyms were working and I had looked up after, you know, three years of not doing anything but working and realized like I had nothing, like lifewise. And so I just knew I wanted something different. I didn't know what it was. And so I had seen Russell speak at Traffic and Conversion Summit like a year earlier. And I just remember watching him present and I was like, this guy's really good. I need to work with this guy.

And but he wasn't allowed to pitch so he never sold anything at the event. He just literally did an entire webinar and then stopped at the stack and was like, ah, you know, just check us out if you think this is interesting. And so anyways, I, I Googled his name and the first thing that he made him up was his mastermind, which was the most expensive thing he has on his value ladder, which is kind of hilarious. And so I applied and I got a call. And honestly, I had no business being invited to join his mastermind from the application. So this shows you like way back when before Russell was Russell Brunson, you know what I mean? when he was, I think they were doing maybe $10 million a year. At the time and, you know, probably a third of that was his mastermind and not the software.

But anyways, the sales guy was like, oh my God, you know, you'll love it here. Like there's so many players and all this stuff. And so he sold it to me. And at the time, it was a tremendous amount of money for me. I mean, it was pretty much all the money I had to join. And so I wired all of it over because they didn't do payment plan. or anything like that. And the first call that I got with him, he got on the phone with me. I told him everything that we were doing. And he kind of paused for a second was like,

you're really, really good at this. And I was like, thanks, man. And he said, first off, you need to speak at my event. And I was like, this guy was like God to me. You know what I mean? And I was like, holy shit. Okay. And so I think the first thing that happened in my life, like in terms of like the reason this one experience was so pivotal to me is that, um, He said, the next thing he said to me was, I think you have a level 10 skill set in a level two opportunity. I don't think you should be running gyms. I think you're teaching people how to run gyms.

And so that entirely shifted how I move forward in terms of my business. The next thing is after I had my first 30 minute onboarding call with him, I got put into the first event, which is like the next month for his inner circle. And when I went there, I remember there was this guy who stood up and he just didn't seem that like motivated. or ambitious or anything. And he was just like, yeah, you know, we're doing like 300,000 a month and really need to, you know, improve our stuff.

And I was like blown away. It's like 300,000 a month. Like, are you kidding me? And I just, I was dumbfounded. But the thing is that I hung out with this guy and I hung out with these other guys during the breaks. And I was like, these guys are just normal dudes. And so when I, when I rub shoulders with these guys, I was like, I can do this.

You know what I mean? And so there's three Cs that I think came from this event for me, which was clarity, conviction, and community. And so I got clarity on what I needed to do. I had conviction that I could do it because I saw other people there that I didn't think were better or smarter than I was. And then I had a community of people around me. And that kind of feeds into the conviction that I felt like I could have support or take phone calls with or whatever. And I talked to everyone in the group. I had a one-to-one call with almost every person in his inner circle when I joined.

I just reached out and was like, hey, here's all the shit I'm good at. And I just gave them everything I knew. And they were like, oh, is there anything I can do to help you? And I was like, not really, but I just wanted to meet you. And so I got all this goodwill from everyone else in the group. And then later, as I would get stuck at different points, I knew what they were good at. And then I'd reach out. And they were like, yeah, dude, for sure.

And they'd hop on and they'd help me get unstuck. And so that first experience that I had in his group was, one of the like kind of defining moments for me as an entrepreneur. The next one is after we kind of executed some of the first things after being in that group, I think it was probably nine months later we were doing probably 400,000 monthish. And this is now not from the gyms, but from me, you know, doing gym launch, actually had done for you kind of service. And we just pivoted to done with you and it kind of blew up. We were literally like the second month in it had done with you.

And we did like 380. And so he said, hey, you need to come to this pirate service. Cove Mastermind. And he's talked about this at some of his, on some of his content, but the Pirates Cove Mastermind was, I mean, probably the single big, I mean, the first one and this one were the two biggest, most impactful experiences in my life. And when I went there was invite only, it was $10,000. And the only people were invited were doing eight figures or more. And so there's 10 people there, and I was one of them, and I was not doing any figures. And I was like, why am I here? And he was like, I just think that you're good enough to be here. And I think you're

going to be there really soon. And so it was again, you just kind of believed in me. And I was like, this is awesome. And when I got there, definitely the room, the elevation of the room was definitely higher. And every one of these people were people I'd heard of. You know what I mean? Like I knew all of them. It wasn't like up and coming. They were all established. And when I got up and I presented what we were doing and our numbers and all that stuff and I was like, this is what I think about doing and I want a certain something company and all the stuff. There's this guy named Jason Flatland who had done like $28 million in a single day. And it was just wicked smart.

And he pulled me aside after my presentation. It was like if what you're saying is true, you've got a hundred million dollar company. And I just like, I just remember like feeling like the air got sucked out of the room. I actually felt a lot of pressure. I didn't feel really good about it. I just felt like tons of pressure because at that moment, Layla and I were just like really enjoying life. Like we just, she and I think we had like one other employee and we were making so much money. You know what I mean?

It was just an uncomprehensible amount of money for us. You know, I mean, we had like no overhead and we're doing $300,000 plus take home every month. And we had not made that kind of money ever. And he's like, you need to scale up extremely fast or someone is going to take everything you have and claim it for themselves. And so I felt this huge insecurity and fear that I was like, oh my gosh, I have to scale really fast. And so we went all in. And so we both put our heads down and signed up for like three or four more masterminds for different things, some for traffic, some for scaling, you know, your teams called, like

everything we possibly could. And from the little pieces we were able to put together, we were able to rapidly grow from, I think we did 380, then we did 480, then 780, then we did a million, then we did 1.2, then we did 1.5. I mean, like literally that was the growth curve. I mean, that was all in a six month. It was nuts. It was insane.

And the reason I'm bringing this up is that both times, like they were, the second time wasn't a financial stretch, but I'd never paid $10,000 from an event. That I'd never done. You know what I paid for masterminds, but not an event. And even though everyone there was, you know, way above me, I was still like, damn, $10,000. I was like, that's kind of, kind of steep. But since having those experiences, one, when we have our events, I try and try and think about those three Cs is how can I recreate? And if you're doing stuff for your clients,

how can I recreate those three Cs? How can I recreate conviction, clarity, and community? Because I think in live events, unless it's a workshop, like a three-day workshop, which really tactical, most times, those are the biggest things that you can get from an event. But I also think they're the most valuable, right? You can Google how to, you know, how to do stuff. That's not difficult, but it's just getting someone to believe that they can do it, knowing what they need to do from the clarity, and then having the community there to kind of deb bottleneck and also kind of reinforce the conviction I think is one of the most valuable things. And after going through those two experiences in my life, they are definitely, and probably

to the stories that I refer to the most, those are things where I kind of transformed. And I think that a lot of entrepreneurs miss out on the highest ROI I have ever gotten has been from spending money to buy information by a mile. Like not, I mean, not even close the highest ROI has been buying information. And so we consistently, and I still do try and buy courses that I see anything that's up and coming or interesting, because I almost always get stuff from them. And the amount that I get from them is always less than what I pay. And I think part of that it means you have to do stuff.

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 family, 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 asked you do is you can just leave a review. It'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 for someone else. But beyond that, I had a woman who reached out to me recently and she said, I've wasted, you know, $100,000 on masterminds and courses. and I can't get past $500,000 a month online. And I was like taking aback because I knew this person before she had invested in all of these courses and programs and all that stuff. And she definitely wasn't making 500 grand a month, sorry, a year.

And I was like, how can you say you wasted money? Like you invested in a lot of times you don't get the whole picture. Now we try and do the full stack as much as, you know, like as much as humanly possible, like the full stack end-to-end of lead generation, nurturer, sales, fulfillment, scaling, delivery, everything, right? But sometimes you don't get all the pieces from the same person, right? I mean, I can't tell you the amount of different things that we purchased. And just because you don't immediately see an ROI doesn't mean that you didn't build another link in the chain.

And so a lot of times I think that success is, you know, where you're at to where you want to go and there's this bridge. And the bridge is made of these bricks. And each of those bricks is necessary, but you don't always get the bricks from the same people and so you learn how to write headlines and copy and then you learn how to you know make creative and then you learn how to place ads and buy traffic and then you learn how to you know build funnels and then you learn how to improve your product and delivery and each of those things could be from different people different courses that you consume um but i can just like my biggest

ask for anybody who's listening is just that like invest in proximity i think it is the single the most powerful thing you can do is always try and buy your way into the next level. Because when you do that, you will rub shoulders with people. You will get clarity on what you need to do. You will get the conviction that you can do it and you have the community to support you to make sure that you don't get stuck. And I'm just telling you like, it is the high, like if you, like there's no point unless you're, unless you have a million plus in your bank account that you shouldn't be spending all of your money, in my opinion, on education. right on I'm not I'm very against formal education I'm very pro self-education but education is the way right and so I get messages and people are like what are what investments are you in right now I'm like I still look

at trying buy stuff we're going to another mastermind this week and now it's everybody there is at a hundred million and a billion and there's two guys that are at 50 and so we're going to be like the smallest cats in the room and so I'm super excited for this but I'm saying this because when you have those opportunities do not pass them up because I shudder to think what my life would be if I hadn't gone to these, if I hadn't made these kind of leap of faith decisions to join these higher level groups and to pay for them almost before I could afford them. And in paying for them before I could afford them, I think it enabled me to later afford the things that I couldn't normally. And so I know it takes guts. I know it takes a leap of faith. It does take some discernment to make sure that you're

investing with the right people, but almost always, there's always something big that you can get from someone and it doesn't always need to be tactical. Sometimes it's a belief set. Sometimes it's a, it's a way that they treat things. It's a way that they have a perspective, but like there's always something really valuable, especially from people who are doing more than you. Like almost everybody who makes more money than you is doing something very well. And if you just look at what it is, now they're not doing everything really well, but they might do something very well. And they have to be doing something because they're doing better than you are. And so I think if you can go into that perspective and always continue to invest, especially

in proximity, I think that you will, you will not thank me, but you'll thank yourself for making the call because for me, it's been, it's been the single most, the biggest contribution to where we're at right now has been the people that we've been able to find and surround ourselves with. And people talk about it, but I don't see nearly as many people taking advantage of information because it's the only thing that can buy you time, right? Like you can't buy time back, but you can get the thing that gets things to go faster, right? You can take the amount of time it takes you to achieve your success from 20 years to two years. If you leverage five other people's

20 years of experience and then just apply their learnings, right? Like at the end of the day, you can either earn the learnings or you can pay for the learnings, right? But you just have, you have to have the principle or the belief set one way or another. It's either by ramming your head through the wall or looking at somebody else who did and saying, cool, I'll not do that. I'll do this instead. And I think that's how you can jump because you don't have the huge losses of time that come from failures. Right. You're going to fail no matter what, but you might as well minimize the amount of failures you have. And I think proximity and learning from people who are better than you is by far, bar none, the best thing I've ever done. So anyways, I thought

I'd make that for you because a lot of people don't know, you know, the things that we've invested in. And those two things were the most impactful. and I think it's really getting almost like you should be in rooms where you feel like you don't deserve to be there that's kind of my point like you should you should walk into rooms and be almost in all of all the other people there and keep your mouth shut and just listen you know what I mean and the the only other thing that I can say that has been really valuable for me that I don't see people doing is I was voted the most valuable inner circle member the first year they had the award and they didn't say they were going to have an award so it wasn't like I was doing it

for it. It's just like they just decided to have an award and anonymous, everyone wrote to me as the most valuable person. And at the time, I wasn't making the most money in the group, not even close. And so, but I think what I was able to do was I literally gave everything I knew. And at the time, I knew way more about sales than I did about marketing. And so I just was like, hey, here's how we do our sales process. Here's how we, here's how we close. Here's how we drill our teams. Because that was something that I had scaled. I had scale the sales team. I had, you know, six, eight guys who were selling for me at the time. And so, I just, I didn't know shit about marketing, but by showing, you know, all of these internet marketers

who were really good at marketing and the tech stuff, which I wasn't good at, how we sold, they all got a lot of value and they'd applied our sales processes and our tactics and how we scripted things out. And they started making money. And I was just offering to help. So I literally reached out to every person that I thought was cool, which was most of them, because I just wanted to learn more about what they were doing because I almost inevitably got something back without even asking. And then later, I had an IOU in my pocket, not

not doing it for that reason, but I did have goodwill. And so when I was like, dude, I'm super stuck on this. And when I started our supplement company, there's all these dudes that I'd helped in e-commerce that were like, dude, I'll help you get all that stuff set up. I'm like, oh, thanks. And sometimes it's not even them setting it up, but they know a guy. And so those things like not just the people, but their networks, I get, I got so much leverage so quickly that I think that was how we went from zero I mean like you know figuratively zero dollars online to doing 10 million in collected cash in our first 10 months and to date from what I understand I think that's the fastest growth that they've had in that whole community and I think it was

because it was like a double leveraged effective goodwill so I found the the best group that was above me I tried to provide as much as I could I did one-on-one calls with virtually everyone in the group lately it was like half my day I was on call people that weren't related to my business. And I just tried to give as much as I could. And then they would always inevitably give back because givers always give back. And that's what you'll see. The higher up you go, the more people are givers than takers.

And so they would always give back. And they poured into me. And then by doing that, I was able to just leapfrog two, three, four, five, you know, different levels of growth in a very short period of time, you know, learning from their beliefs, learning from their tactics, learning from their setups, learning from how they set up their teams, like all of those things. And so I just want to say if you have the opportunity to rub shoulders with giants and rub shoulders with people who are way above you, I truly do not think that there is a better

investment you can make. Like, don't try and buy some $50,000 house in Ohio to try and get $500 a month passive cash flow. When you could take $50,000, invest in two high-level groups, and I guarantee you you will make more than $500 a month. So anyways, I hope this makes sense for you. I hope this was valuable for you. Those two experiences were the biggest life-changing experiences for me.

And so hopefully one person listens to this and says, you know what, I'm going to pull the trigger on something that I wasn't otherwise going to, even though it's a stretch because at the end of the day, if I execute everything in this group, then I'll get what these guys have. So keeping awesome, happy Sunday. Got some cool stuff coming and I'll get you guys soon. Bye.