The Game with Alex Hormozi - The Biggest Mistake I’ve Made in Business | Ep 177

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

"The number one reason that people fail is because they are successful, then they change something." Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) discusses the biggest mistake that successful entrepreneurs make: not being able to repeat successful actions. He explains that it is important to focus on quality assurance and consistently do the same actions to sustain success, even if it is boring.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:(1:10) - Not repeating successful actions leads to common mistakes.(3:22) - Learn to say no, as the temptress of skill increases.(4:10) - Bergman trap: fail and know why you failed correctly.(6:51) - Profit comes from repeating the same actions, entrepreneurs get bored.(8:41) - Quality assurance and consistent actions for continuous successful profit.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

The number one reason that people fail is because they are successful, then they change something. 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. Talk to you about something today that is probably the biggest mistake that I've ever made and that I've repeatedly made. And hopefully kind of a heat of warning and kind of an explanation of how to avoid that same mistake. honestly it's probably the number one biggest mistake that successful entrepreneurs make and I say successful with a grain of salt you know I mean because success is defined however you want it but basically once you've accomplished something that

you set out to accomplish I would say like in doesn't matter what level it could be making your first sale that this is the number one issue that people make and so this is where the whole concept of self-sabotage comes from not being able to sustain levels of success right like you can get there but you can't stay there and it comes from this one kind of central concept and it's honestly one of these single hardest things to master as an entrepreneur and it's still something that I work on every day. And this is kind of what it is. It's not being able to repeat successful actions. And what I mean by that is every time you do something and you actually works, right, you try a bunch of things and then finally it works,

what you then think is, oh, I should continue to try more things. But the reality is that you you already bore the cost of learning how to do that thing to get there. And what you need to do at that point is just continue to do that successful action over and over and over and over again. The problem is the personality traits that you and I have that got us there are not the things that keep us there. And so we have to go against our own nature in order to sustain success. And so, and the thing is, is that it's incredibly boring.

It's really difficult because you have to learn different, you have to emphasize different aspects of your character and you have to learn different skill sets. So for me, part of that skill set that you have to learn is kind of being able to focus at each level. And I'm defining focus as the ability to say no, right? And the ability to not change things. Because it's in our nature to always want to tweak, always want to tinker. But the number one reason that people fail is because they are successful, then they change something, and then it no longer works, right? And they're like, yeah, I change this.

And then all of a sudden my numbers, you know, crushed. But the thing is, is they change multiple things at the same time, and then they don't know which one. is the one that is the problem. Now, in theory, you're like, oh, I only change one thing at a time. No, you don't lie to yourself. You change multiple things. And so in order to focus at each level,

the thing is that the level of opportunity continues to go up as you, oopsies, the level of opportunity continues to rise as you go up. So it's like in the beginning you have to say no to, let's say, you know, a $50,000 opportunity. And then once you level up, then it's like you're saying no to a, you know, $250,000 opportunity. And then you're saying no to a million dollar opportunity. And then you're saying no to a $10 million opportunity.

And the thing is that every single time it looks beautiful. And because it's always, because as you level up and your skill set levels up, the attractiveness of this new opportunity will raise with you. So it's like the temptress becomes more and more beautiful to you as your skill set increases. And so don't think that you're like, well, I learned how to say no at this level, right? I don't even have to try it and say no to that stuff anymore because I don't even think about it, right? But when one of these comes along, right, or one of these comes along, it's really hard. It's really, really hard to stay the path and be able to stay focused and continue to do this stuff

and repeat the successful actions and do them over and over again. And so the reason that business owners, entrepreneurs, et cetera, are not successful when they don't repeat successful actions is something called the Bergerman's Trap. And so Dr. Bergerman was a PhD at Stanford MBA for Business School. And essentially what the Bergerman trap is, is it's better to know why you failed and be correct in knowing exactly why you did not succeed versus being successful and not knowing why you. you won. And the reality is that I think the vast majority of us, myself included, we think we're smarter than we are and we don't actually know why we succeed it. And so that's why it gets really, really tricky when you go back to here where you're like, well, this thing worked, I'm smart, I know exactly what made it work so I know how I can improve it when in reality you have no

clue why it worked because you tried 20 other things and they didn't work and you thought all of them are going to work. Think about that for a second. You try 20 other things that you thought were going to work and none of them worked. So I would say that your predictive ability is probably pretty poor. Hey guys, real quick, if you're new to the podcast, I have a book on Amazon called $100 million offers that over 8,000 five-star reviews and 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 potentially partner with you. So that's my give. Go check it out. Amazon and back to the show. Right. And the reality is that rational design really doesn't work. Trevor could talk about this forever. But a lot of times it's people stumble into things. They try, they try, they try, and then finally something works. And so if you think about that from a rational like concept, you actually have no clue why it worked. So why would you think that you would have the ability to start tweaking and tinkering with it, right? And so you have to fight that aspect of your nature that likes to tweak and likes to tinker because that is that what got you there is not going to continue to allow you to see the success.

And what's interesting is that if you look at growth, if you look at growth overall, the fun part is here in the beginning, right? This is where entrepreneurs are having fun, right? But here is where entrepreneurs are sad. But here is where you make profit. And here is where you make happiness. Is where you're basically breaking even. And the reason that is so interesting is that in the beginning you're breaking even because you're continuing to reinvest in the growth.

If more people come in, you have to hire more staff so you can fulfill more people. You spend more on ad spend, all those things. it's exciting because new things are happening and we love new shit, right? But the problem is that where you actually make your profit is where you actually continue to repeat the same actions over and over again and don't mess with it. And this is where entrepreneurs get bored. And this is where I see, you know, in our community, people just lose focus. They just can't stay focused.

They have a successful gym and they self-sabotage by just trying something else that's new because they're bored of making the money that they are. dead serious. They get bored of making the money they do and they actually just introduce chaos into their own business because they want to do this again. But the reality is that once you fix the business, once you fix the operating model of a business, you provided more value to the end user, this is where you make a profit. This is where you have to learn to make a profit. Some of the most bored times I've had at gym launch, like me personally, has been like, we don't do anything new and we just make a ton of profit, right? all of this profit between, you know, our cost, et cetera, because we're not spending all this money reinvesting

and trying to tweak things, right? Now, obviously, we innovate a shitload. But that's a defined process in and of itself because that's a successful action that we continue to repeat. We have our whole betas. We test two, three, four things, and some of them don't work, and every once in a while we crush one out of the park,

like the diagnostic selling process. But the point is that you have to... And it's like, well, then how do you innovate? You have to innovate in small, controlled settings. So if you're looking at your attention span for like how you innovate, you know what, I'll just stay here. If you're looking at your attention span for how you innovate, it's got to be like 90-10, right? Like 10% of your time. And the thing is that you're like, yeah, I'm only doing 10% of my time now.

No, you're not. You're not doing 10% of your time. All right, you're doing like 40% of your time is on your new project and 60% is on your existing business. Or maybe it's even flip-flop. All right, 10% means you're putting like, you know, two to three hours a week into this thing that you are finding interesting. You know, that's it. That's all you're doing. And the rest of your time is doing what I would consider QA, which is quality assurance,

which is making sure that the things that are supposed to happen are successfully happening continually, right? Are the same people calling the leads, are the same people following the script when they walk in the door? Is every client being reached out to for their one-on-one? How is the 14-day nutrition going? What percentage of people are getting upsold into supplements and food, et cetera, right? And you have to just make sure that those things are happening.

And so that's the boring part. That's the part no one wants to do. That's the part that no one likes. But that's where all the profit is. All the profit is being able to consistently do the same action over and over again. And it's boring as hell. And that's why most people cannot sustain success is because they fail, fail, fail, achieve, and then fail, fail, because they continue to change,

because they what got them there of continuing to tweak and tinker, they continue to tweak and tinker, and then they tank it again. Because they actually don't know why they achieve the success that they did. All right. So my advice that I'm also half telling myself is just keep doing the boring work, keep doing the stuff that got you there. And be okay, not optimizing in your own minds because in reality, when you try and optimize, you end up tanking it. So just be okay with making money and consistently doing that over and over and over again because that's the point. All right. So anyways, have an amazing day. Hope you has found that valuable. I hope that convinced somebody who's about to

try and do something new in their business to not do that and just keep doing the boring work continuing to reach out to new prospects, continuing to nurture their leads, continuing to sell using the right process, continue to service them so that you can get them great results and make them happy.