The Game with Alex Hormozi - Reset The Bar | Ep 550

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

Advanced people never don't do the basics. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about how two life experiences changed his view on business. Listen in to find out what they are and the mindset that you need for your business.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:(2:30) - Realizing the importance of soft skills(5:33) - The difference between winning and losing teams(8:10) - Focus on the basics for success(9:05) - Intolerance of mediocrity for excellence(9:49) - Looking for soft skills and character traitsFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition(This episode is a re-run. Original airdate was October 21, 2021)

And it was like, everyone tried up to practice. Everyone, you know, tried their hardest. It was the effort and the consistency and the alignment of the team that accomplished the goal. The rules are the same. Everyone was trying to do the exact same thing. The wealthiest people in the world see business as a game. This podcast, The Game, is my attempt at documenting the lessons I've learned on my way to building acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. My hope is that you use the lessons to grow your business and maybe someday soon, partner with us to get to $100 million and beyond.

I hope you share and enjoy. So when I was just starting out in my gym lunch business, I had a gym owner who said, hey, let's partner on this. Like, you keep filling these gyms up at full capacity. Why don't you just fill them and I'll come behind you and operate them? And I had a gym that was doing $4.2 million a year. This is what he was telling me. And I really know how to operate the business.

You know all the acquisition stuff. So let's just partner up on this. And I said, sure, sounds fair enough. It ended up being a horrible partnership, but that's not the point of the video. The point is what I learned. All right. And so we had two locations. And the newest location had a whole new staff and they were just lack of days ago.

right they weren't they weren't they weren't they weren't caring they weren't really doing a good job and he said you know we need to we need to you know have a meeting and i was like okay and so he said we'll have a meeting at the first location call everyone there tell them to show up at four o'clock and the first location was probably like 45 minutes away from the second location right and uh so at four o'clock so everyone's everyone's everyone's coming in everyone's sitting down it's kind of awkward it's silent there's clearly like some tension right and so at four o'clock he looks at his assistant, he says, hey, go down to the front, lock the door, right, of the gym. And she was like, okay, so she goes and locks the door. Mind you, some people hadn't shown up to the meeting yet, right? There were a couple minutes late, whatever. And so all of a sudden, as they lock the door,

like, 30 seconds later, someone's like banging on the door and it's like, hey, open the door. And he's like, ignore them. And they were like, why aren't you letting me in? Because obviously there's a meeting going on, right? And then another person comes, knocks on the door. Another person comes, knocks on the door. And now there's like three or four people and they're like, what the hell? Why aren't you opening the door or whatever? Right. And so he tells his assistant, he says, go outside and tell him they're all fired. And he says this before he starts the meeting. And so I'm sitting there, right? And everyone in the room is like, oh shit, right? He just set the tone, all right? And he reset the bar. And I remember witnessing this and being like, wow. So what he did was he

reset the bar of this is how we perform. When we say we're going to be somewhere, we're going to be somewhere at that time. If we say we're going to clean up after the session, we're going to clean up after the session. If we say we're going to fall up with leads, we fall up with leads. And what I have figured, and I'm going to tell you one more story, and then I'm going to tell you the moral of both of them, all right? So pause on that for a second. Now, when I had my first job, I was a, actually, I think it was my first job. I was a blender tender at Smoothie King, all right?

And so I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do when I was in this business. I think he was a small business owner. I think he had two locations, three locations at the time. His name was Dave. Really nice guy. What up, Dave? And I went, and I was trained personally by Dave. So Dave trained me.

And I was, you know, enterprising young man. I wanted to do a good job. And so I showed up my first day at work at one of his newer locations. And, you know, after, you know, between people walking in, you were supposed to like mop the floor, clean the counters, like, just clean it, just make it look good, restock the shelves. And so I started doing that when someone walked out the door. It's my first shift, right? And the manager was like, what are you doing? And I was like, I thought, like, I was worried I was in trouble.

So I was like, I thought I was supposed to, I might not supposed to restock the shelves. Like I thought I was supposed to do that right now because like there's no one here. And he was like, oh, yeah, you don't even worry about that. He's like, we don't do any of that stuff. And I was like, oh, okay. Boom. New cultural norm. All right.

So what I was supposed to do and what the owner had trained me to do and then was always complaining about how no one ever did what was supposed to do, the manager was telling me that I didn't need to do that stuff. All right. And what I learned from this, right? And I'll just call that manager John, right? Actually, I'll call the manager Vince. This is the name I'll use.

So I said, so do you in your business have events? Are you the Vince in your business? Do you have someone in your business that's the Vince that's secretly destroying your business? All right. So let's rewind to the original story about the first genome that I was talking about. So think about the difference between both of those styles of management. I'm not saying the first is right or the second is wrong, whatever. The second one is definitely wrong, right?

But when you look at that, what it was setting the tone. And the reason that my views on business have dramatically shifted is that I have always had a tendency to lean towards strategy, acquisition, monetization, pricing structures, and all of that stuff is important. But I think within a business, there are two components to it. You've got the smarts and you've got the hearts. And you have to have both. Real quick, guys, if you can think about how you found this podcast, somebody probably tweeted it, told you about it, shared it on Instagram or something like that. The only way this grows is through word of mouth. And so I don't run ads. I don't do sponsorships. I don't sell anything. My only ask is that you

continue to pay it forward to whoever showed you or however you found out about this podcast that you do the exact same thing. So if it was a review, if it was a post, if you do that, it would mean the world to me and you'll throw some good karma out there for another entrepreneur. And I think that most people overestimate the importance of smarts, myself included. And I think that there's a lot to do with the hearts because business strategy overarchingly is not that complex, but like you really think about it. Right. It's like you got to find something that's good that people want and you sell it for a lot more than it costs you to do it. And you do as much of that as you possibly can't. Like, that's kind of the idea, right? And the thing is,

it gets lost in the execution. It get lost in the doing, right? As soon as you hire your first employees, you're like, no, employees can't. Boys can't do what I can do. It's like, well, that's a horrible belief. She should probably change that before we try and move forward. That's a limiting belief, right? Do you want to have a big business? And so when I think about this from a cultural standpoint, and this is what has shifted for me is that it's become so much more about the soft skills. it's so much more about coaching and developing the leaders of the company. It's so much more about addressing behavioral dynamics of someone that are limiting them more so than it is about tinkering. And I can't help but think that so many entrepreneurs, myself included, I spent so much time tinkering and tweaking things.

What if we change this in our sales process? What if we change this on this page? What if we change the offer like this? What if we change the payment return? Blah, blah, blah, blah, all these different things, right? And think about this for a second for yourself. How many things have you tinkered with in your business over the last? how many years, how many months, and your business hasn't changed at all, right?

Because the real problem is not the strategy. The problem is not the smarts, right? The problem is the heart, right? The people are not doing what you want them to do because they don't understand why they need to do it and why it's important, right? And that's the soft stuff. And you've got, you know, people who don't want to talk to each other because they don't like each other because one guy's really annoying.

And so it's like, it would better serve you to fix that problem than to try and come up with some new strategy, right? And so realizing that has been one of the biggest. breakthroughs that I've had in my career. And those two stories should illustrate the difference between having a championship mentality and having a loser mentality and what might be going on in your business. And I'll leave you with one more story really quickly. So if any of you has ever been on a championship team, right, if you've ever played in a sports arena or whatever, and you've been on a winning team and you've been on a losing team, right? And you've probably

been on a losing team, a lot of good players, but you guys were not connected. You weren't concerted. You weren't aligned, right? And on the flip side, you had a winning team. And it was like, everyone tried up to practice. Everyone, you know, tried their hardest. It was the effort and the consistency and the alignment of the team that accomplished the goal. The rules are the same. Everyone was trying to do the exact same thing. And so when you think about the entire business landscape, right, your competitors have

access, more or less to the same talent pool that you do. They can see what your strategy is overall. And most people are not that dumb, right? And so as long as you have a relatively sound strategy, like you're not selling things that are lost, right? Then the difference between the team. is going to be your ability to execute and have people execute on your behalf. And so that's going to become like for us as CEOs, we do shift towards becoming championship team coaches, which is why

John Wooden, if he had run a business, would have had a championship business because he focused on the fundamentals. And one of my favorite things of all time is, advanced people never don't do the basics. Advanced people never don't do the basics. I would go to, I would go to these stages and I watch guys get on stage and they'd say, we follow up with all of our leads, you know, within five minutes. You know, when we get on sales calls, we always ask them why they're there. we label them a problem. You know, we overview some of the pastings they've done. And then they follow a clear framework. Then as soon as someone buys, we, you know, we have a good onboarding process. And nothing they say is revolutionary. It's just that they actually do it. And the people are actually

on their behalf. They're not the Vince, or don't have a manager like Vince, who's telling them they don't, that they shouldn't have to do that work, right? Who's sabotaging the business. What they did is they set the tone and then they carry the bar. And so their job is to be intolerant of anything but excellence and to reinforce that in the culture so that it's consistently executed across the company because that between two companies with the same strategy will make the difference between somebody who yields disproportionate returns on advertising crazy profits good growth great retention on employees low turnover from a company that doesn't have that right even though they both have the same strategy even if the smaller company has the better strategy this guy will win and this has been

one of the most profound shifts that i've had um as a CEO now owner of companies is one of looking for is I'm looking for just as much soft, if not more, soft skills, interpersonal dynamics, self-awareness, then I look for skill in particular, you know, like this guy's really good at finance, which is a really good product. This person's really good at marketing sales. Like, I'm looking way more for character traits now. And now that I think about it, when you, if you're thinking about yourself, right, then I would look in the mirror and say like, am I really, are we always doing the basics? Because if we always do the basics, we will be advanced. Because that is what advanced people do is they never don't do them and they have a culture that reinforced that standard.

So hope you enjoy the first story. Hope you enjoyed the Vince story. Make sure you don't have any vinses in your business.