The Game with Alex Hormozi - The Data-Driven Entrepreneur: Mastering Customer Success (with Dan Henry) Pt.2 - June ‘22 | Ep 518

Episode Date: April 1, 2023

It’s about finding your leverage. Today, join Alex (@AlexHormozi) as he guests on Dan Henry’s show to discuss various topics related to entrepreneurship, including user research methods, evaluating user feedback, and the importance of understanding customer needs. He also shares tactical advice on increasing word of mouth and transitioning from a personal brand-based business to a brand-focused business with database marketing. This is part 2 of the interview.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.Check out the episode on Dan Henry’s YouTube Channel!Timestamps:(3:58) - Word of mouth & Linear tactics: referrals, shilling.(7:15) - Drive results, emotional wins for quadratic returns.(12:45) - Market customer results, not face.(16:58) - Database marketing builds equity and substantiates claims.(19:06) - Qualities of an entrepreneur Alex looks for & avoids(28:19) - The parallel between branding & finding a mateFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

Layla and I spent a really long time trying to narrow it down because we believe in three values rather than five or ten or whatever because you can triangulate thinking. It's very difficult to map five values or ten values against like a decision. 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. I don't know if I ever told you this. I might have told you this. But a conversation me and you had, I believe it was the first time we met. backstage at FHL, right? And I had this course that at the time was like the hot Facebook ads course, right? And we're standing back there. And, um, I'm, you know, back then I was this

little pudgy, skinny fat dude sitting there all with those stupid bunny hair hat on my head and stuff. And, uh, I could just, I could sense your disapproval like through your, through your pores. Um, and I said to you, I was like, hey man, like, how's it going with Facebook ads or whatever? You're like, oh, like, yeah, at the time, you were like, yeah, I don't know how to do Facebook ads. I suck at them. You just were like, just, I don't even know. And I'm like, well, what is your ROI? And you're like, I don't know.

It's like 20x. I'm like, what do you mean 20x? I'm like, I'm at like, like, 5x at, you know, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. How are you doing this, you know? And you're like, oh, like our cheapest product is 16 grand. So I don't give a shit what our Facebook ads cost. And when you said that, my entire world. change because at the time, we were pushing anywhere from six to a million, six hundred to a million

a month on a thousand dollar product. And when you said that, immediately, I realized that, and this is something that I see other entrepreneurs just don't get. They believe everything revolves around what button you push in the dashboard. And this is life, right? This is reality in an entrepreneur world is you got to push this button. You got to know how to do this thing with this look. None of that shit matters if you have, if you don't have good creative and you don't have a good product that you're going to, and the margins don't make sense. So when you said that, I was like, wait a minute, there are far more important things in this world than these little tech things.

And so I fundamentally changed my business model, and I went all in on high ticket. And since then, we were just able to, we went from spending like, you know, 700,000 to make a million to spending like 80,000 to make like 600. It was just nuts. and just revolving around that. And so I don't know if I ever told you that, but that one conversation, because I'm the type of person

when I hear something that makes sense to me, I'm like all in. Like I'll burn the walls around me and build something new, you know, just to make sure that I understand at a higher level. And so I read your book last week, Jim Lant's secrets,

and what I thought was... Yeah, of course I did, yeah. Well, what I thought was interesting about it, if you do control H on like a digital copy and you replace gym with just product? I thought about it. I like really considered just literally relaunching it and just call it like coaching secrets because gyms are coaching businesses. They're brick and more.

I think that's why we were able to actually build our licensing business with gym launch so quickly was because like I had already spent five years. I didn't know as a coaching business. But like when people coming to a gym to work out and lose weight, like you're coaching them. Like it's what it is. And I had a staff of, like, already knew all this stuff, but I didn't know I knew it. So anyway, so yes, that book is a hundred

percent a playbook on how to build a coaching business. I know. I was reading it. And I'm like, I'm like, nobody's reading this fucking book. I'm like, I mean, for coaching there, the gym people are, but the coaches are like, oh, it's gym. It's gym stuff. I don't need that. And I'm reading it. And I'm like, you know, it was just crazy to me. So, so let me do this. Let me ask you a couple of rapid fire tactical questions. Because I always like to get some super, I mean, I love the high-level stuff. It's the most important stuff, but from a tactical perspective, right? You mentioned word of mouth.

Tactically, just to kind of like set the stage, I'll give you one tactic that I've used for word of mouth. I'd love to know how you engineer word of mouth because I'll give you an example. We used to do webinars when I would do, I would have like a free Facebook group or some sort of free community. I would do a live webinar. And then what I would do is I remember hearing about this thing called, shrilling or shilling. It's where you hire people to come into a room and you pay them to buy the product

and say, hey, I'm buying the product. It creates crowd psychology or mob mentality and everybody buys. Well, I don't like, and it's illegal. It works so good. It's illegal. Well, I don't like to do anything illegal, go to jail or get any trouble.

So I thought, how can I get that same effect but do it ethically? So I made this little technique called the ethical shrill. And what I would do is at the webinar and say, hey, listen, you're in the free group right now. That's how you got on this webinar. once you buy, I want you to go into the free group and post, hey Dan, I just bought the program.

Please add me to the student group. And we'd sell 50 people on the webinar. 50 people in the group would go and post that. And then people who weren't even on the webinar, they would just freak out and start buying the product. They'd be like, what are you buying? Where is it? And they'd send them the order page.

And we'd do a hundred. We'd double the conversion on the webinar. And there was a huge chunk of people that weren't even, on the webinar. And I know that that's a very like specific sort of short-term word of mouth sort of hack, but tactically, since you believe that word of mouth is like one of the best things, like if you were to go to a company and say, hey, listen, here's how you're specifically how you're going to increase your word of mouth, what would you tell them? This is a good question. So there's two, there's two kind of components to this. So the first one is like there is what I would

consider a linear way of doing word of mouth, which is kind of what you outlined. And there's a lot of different tactics around that. And when I say linear, it's kind of what I was saying earlier, where you get a one-to-one relationship where you say, every time we do this, we get an additional 20% or whatever it is, right? And so those ones are, you know, like when the sales guy closes, somebody who's like, hey, do you have any other, you know, gym owner friends or do any other people who might benefit from the same thing?

Like just asking that question, we just get referrals and we can bring it in. Right. And so like little things like that, people are like, well, obviously, but then no one does it, right? Like, that's the thing is that like, no one does it. Right? And so in terms of like engineering, the customer experience, like for us, the thing that gives you the quadratic returns.

And like I was saying earlier, there's a million ways you can do like, we call it the hinge method where it's like you, the person that is your customer and then their friend and you a three-way message, we call it the hinge. And then that's how you bring them in. If you're in an in-person business, you're like, hey, Sandy, do you have any friends who would like this kind of thing? And if they say yes, then you're like, awesome. So how about this?

You take their phone from them and then you take a picture of you and her and then you text it to a thread with the three of you. and then that way it comes initiated from the friend with you already being, the rapport kind of being shown as you in person with this other person. So then they can't ghost you. They can't be rude to you. And then you already have so much more like, you know, no like and trust just from that little exchange.

Right. So like that's like there's tons of little tactical weed stuff that's like that. And, you know, we could spend probably the next hour just going over little things like that. But the big ones are the metrics that I was saying earlier, right? It's how can we drive time to value? How can we increase the emotional win, the speed with which someone experienced an emotional win in the product, right? So like one of the companies we have, the way that their business model works is that it takes like 90 days for someone from the day they start to the day they basically make their first dollar doing this thing. Right. And a lot of times it's like real estate deals, like something like it might just take a long time for someone, you know, can make money.

And so rather than just say like, up, life sucks. I guess that's just what it is. We think, okay, well, how can we, how can we give someone a win in seven days, right? How can we get as material of win as humanly possible? And then how can we string them along with emotional victories in shorter time periods? And then of these emotional victories, which of these are activation points? And so the way that we find out activation points is we look at what are the customers, and this works better when you already have some business that's been going on for a meaningful amount of time. And you say, what are my favorite customers, right?

And so then we say, okay, well, these are the people that I love working with. These are the ones that crushed it for me, et cetera. And we say, okay, what experience did they have and what's, steps did they go through that other people didn't go through? And so usually we can find a few key points along their life cycle that if we can just then reorient everyone towards those activation points, it's like, hey, like ClickFunnels figured out that if someone makes their URL with the landing page, they're like, they stick five times longer, right? So then all of a sudden they had to, they created that as part of the onboarding. And then they started paying for the domains because they just

wanted everyone to do it because they knew they got five times a stick, right? And so it's, what are these non-traditional KPIs, we call metrics that matter, right, M-TMs, that we can drive that are activity-based, which is like, okay, if someone, and like for Jim Launch, for example, it was like, I don't talk about the portfolio companies because it's their companies and I don't want to share their stuff. But like for Jim Lunch, for example, we knew that if we could get someone to close a $2,000 sale in their first seven days, and this is people who are used to sell on $99 things, it's like we can get them to close a $2,000 high-ticket sale in the first seven days. We massively extend the lifetime value of the customer.

And then secondarily, if we can get them to collect $20,000 in their first month with us, that like, they're in. You know what I mean? Like, they're in for a year. You know what I mean? No questions asked. We already ROIed the entire program in the first month in cash collected. So it's how can we engineer these handful of events and in a B to C business,

it might be like weight loss driven. So it doesn't have to be money, right? It's just like what is what is the closest or a chunk down outcome that we can express to them, promise them, it would be meaningful them, that they would then, and for like click funnels, if you have your own site and you see your domain, there's like this feeling of ownership, feeling of accomplishment, that's not about making money, but it says, what are these micro events? And so you do is you take the best guys, you map their customer journey. And a lot of times you can do that qualitatively, too. You interview all your best guys. And you say, hey,

what was like really meaningful? What were some of the big magical moments you've had when you're working with us? And you get this big list of them and you're like, all right, well, these ones we can't engineer. This one, we can totally engineer. And then you start building that into the customer journey to increase the lifetime value. And then that's what ultimately drives the word of mouth. So all of that to go back to like, what is what drives word of mouth? Exceptional product. And if you get exceptional product, how do you build exceptional product? You build experiences that drive the results that people want in a choreographed way. So to sort of put a different perspective on that for these online coaches, you almost, it's almost like you funnel hack yourself.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. So I've always, I've always. I've always. said, you know, the only person you should funnel hack is yourself. Because, you know, if, if you got some 80-year-old dude with white hair selling the same product that you sell, they're going to have a different audience, they're going to have different objections, they're going to have a completely different experience, you know, than you. And I remember you saying it, I was a YouTube video or something, you were like, hey, the easiest way to increase the amount of customers you get is just hire a spokesman, have them say the same stuff you're saying, and you'll attract new people. like you, you're like this big Hulkomania dude, right?

And maybe some like, you know, timid soccer dad is just going to automatically not like you because you have muscles and he doesn't and he just gets it in his head, right? Or maybe somebody who, it could be anything. Or just an old Asian lady. You know what I mean? Like even just going, you know what I mean, like more the other direction. Yeah. Or maybe somebody dated a bodybuilder and he was an asshole and they've developed this idea.

It could be dumb stuff. But you put somebody else on there. They say the same exact thing, boom, you got to cut it. customer. And that leads me to my, to my next question. You see this? So this is one of the things that we, this is presentation I'm building right now. But you can see each of these people are people that are now like faces of the company, which is what allowed us to sell it and also attract different demographics. It's like, all right, we've got a girl. I see the diversity. Yeah. Exactly. 100%. And so it's like we have to attract different people. You can just email me that,

that slide deck to Dan. But let me ask you this. A lot of people that listen to my stuff and, you know, my, just anything, my YouTube, whatever, they're either online coaches, course creators, or they have some sort of business that revolves almost entirely around their personal brand, meaning it's them, right? So when people buy from them, especially if they buy high ticket, they want them, they want to interact with them, they want to talk to them. If they say something, it's, you know, they need to hear it from them, et cetera, et cetera, etc, their staff, or this is not good enough. And so for somebody who is inherently the bottleneck of their business, because it's pretty

much based on their brand. Like I noticed that when you run ads, it says, Jim Lodge doesn't say Alex Harmosey, but most of these personal brand-based businesses, they run it with their name. What is the biggest piece of advice or the thing that they could do now to start thinking about how they can remove them, still make the same amount of money, still grow their business, but remove themselves as that bottleneck. Like if they got hit by a bus, would the company still run type of thing?

Yeah. So, I mean, it's easier to transition to customer facing first. Like, it's a good intermediary is that instead of marketing your face, you market all your customer's results, right? And you can do that from a brand. And so that slow leap starts to build the brand. And then people are like, and they associate these successes with the brand,

and you start building brand equity, right? and then I have a big slant or penchant for database marketing. And so it's something that I never hear anybody else talk about. I still haven't made a training on it because it's like so secret sauce and so fucking good. But I'll share it with the audience. The reason most people don't market with data is because, A, they don't collect it. And they usually don't collect it because it's probably not that good. And so it's usually like fix the, like start collecting it, realize how bad it is.

And then now you can start driving to fix it. And then once you get good data back from like, I can tell you all the metric. And it's in every video, it's in every piece of copy. It's on every landing page. It's like, we on average triple the profit of a brick and mortar, a brick and mortar gym in 12 months. I have seen that in your ads.

You always go back to that. That's true. Right. Because that's the logic. And I actually tend to have probably, I would say a relatively contrarian view on persuasion. And I think that it's the higher up the ticket amount, the more logic is employed in the purchase. because like if you're, you know, like if you're closing a $10 million deal, it's not like, let me tell you this Epiphany Bridge story when I was like you and I didn't have a $10 million.

You know what I mean? It's just like it's a different buyer. And so the higher the ticket price, the more I think logical reasoning you have to employ to get the yes. Because this is my belief. They're there because they want it already emotional. They want the promise, right? And what we're doing is giving them the logical reasons to justify the decision. And so most of the, people, if you make the promise, they just immediately don't believe you. And so then it's how can I, they want the thing, they just don't believe it. And so it's like, how can I help you believe? And a lot of that, for me, is giving them logical reasoning around that. And if you've noticed any, in any of the ads at Jim Montrons in general, a lot of it is data driven. It's just like,

guys, like, this is the average, you know, amount of leads that our guys get. This is the amount of sales that they're able to generate. This is the amount of extra cash they're able to add. This is how much we cut their turn. This is how much we, like, this is the data. And I'm like, and if you're below these benchmarks, we can help you get to these benchmarks. And if you're above it, awesome, then you don't need us. You know what I mean? Like, cool. And if you expect that you're going to learn the same amount, just iterating on your one gym,

spending your whole life trying to fix it where we can iterate across 1,000 gyms and learn every month so much faster to create the best model, then power to you. You know what I mean? But I don't think that's reasonable. But if you want to believe that, awesome, right? It just makes these very, very logical conclusions. And the thing is that the point I'm making here is that when you have database, or logical arguments, anyone can say them, right? Some of the more charismatic, emotional-driven,

maybe story-driven, like if you have an origin story that a lot of people resonate with, et cetera, those will be things that will build the founders business and the face-based business earlier, right? But if we can transition to customer stories, we can transition to more database marketing, then you level up. And the problem that most people experience is that they create unsubstantiated claims, right? And so the first reason that we collect the data is so that we can substantiate our claims and so we can be compliant marketers, right? The thing is, is a lot of people don't like the data that they collect, right? Because it turns out only 20% of their people even log in. You know what I mean? Like stuff like that. But you can still

always figure out a way to show, hey, of people who a logged in showed up to four, four coaching calls or whatever it is, right, and sent the emails that we told them to send, this is the, this is the average return. So then all of a sudden it's like, I didn't say everybody, but I'm saying of the people who did these five things. And here's where it gets cool. When you have the data that you can you can substantiate the marketing you also use the activities that generate that outcome that you slice the data with as the guarantee points right and that's where your customer experience starts driving towards it then all of a sudden you have this harmony between high marketing that gets the best outcomes the client experience that someone go through because they're like well shit

i mean if i have to attend four coaching calls send this email on xyz to get that guarantee and that outcome then i'll do it and then all of a sudden the client outcomes and improve even more. And so it becomes this virtuous cycle of, like you said, funnel hacking yourself and saying, like, what are the best guys doing? What are the key activities? Great. I can slice the data and show that because I just looked at it. That becomes my front end that's data driven rather than face driven. And then the client experience is identical to what I told them it was going to be. So you have this parallelism, which is one of the biggest issues that happens in a lot of businesses is they promise this thing. And then they're onboarding their product was totally different because they've been

changing their hooks, changing their offers, changing their funnel, but then they sell the same product. And so there's this disconnect between what I bought and what I got, right? And so it's really, you can improve a business just by like being consistent. This is what you said. This is what you saw. This is what you get. Right. A lot of times it's one of the easiest ways to increase the value of business, right? And so it's doing that across the board over and over and over again and it creates a virtuous cycle that improves the company. Awesome. Awesome. There's a lot that you can unpack from there. And I think that if anybody listening is really listening, they can implement things. You know, like as you were saying it, I was thinking, okay, Google form. And then I had this insane thing. I was like,

one of the questions would be like, if there was a magical telepathic fairy that asked you if you did everything we told you to do, and if you lied, you would lose an appendage, would you say that you followed our advice? Yes or no? And then of the people that said, yes, how much money do they make? How much do they increase their business, et cetera, et cetera. You know, one final question. in your dealings, right, whether it be a dinner, meeting somebody at an event, doing business with someone, portfolio company, whatever, right? What is the one characteristic quality or, dare I say, red flag that you see in an entrepreneur where you're just like, nope, I'm not going to even associate with this person. And then on the flip side, what is the one that you go, man,

this is somebody I should know? Part of his two sides of the same coin, but the second one probably has a little bit more explanation. So, I mean, the red flag is always ego. Okay. Always. Like, it's, it's always ego. That's ego. Like, that's for personal life. That's for business, especially, expect more than anything for portfolio companies. It's the number one thing that we look for is humility. And there's a variety of reasons, but like ego flows to everything. It flows to coachability. It flows to their ability to be, to learn and change their character traits, to become what is required. Like, a flows from ego. And like a lot of the ability to lead, like being a servant leader comes from humility. And to build a $30 million, $50 million, $100 million company, like you need to have that,

in my opinion. So I think a lot of like there's, you know, there's these charismatic leaders that exist, but the, you know, Jim Collins has written a lot about this and like good to grade and built a last and a lot of these things. He talks about like that level five leader who puts the customer first, who puts the company first, who doesn't try to take credit. And to, you know, always takes blame and gives away credit to everybody else. And it's honestly very rare. And that's why the vast majority, you know, right now we accept 0.2% of the companies that apply, you know, to become a portfolio company.

So it's not, I mean, it's an investment model. It's different. You know what I mean? And for us, it's like, I only need one Facebook. Like I don't need to have 100. You know what I mean? Like the biggest company we have does 250 a day. So, you know what I mean?

Like, I don't need a lot of. I just ask you what industry, but I know you're not going to say. Right. So, like, there's, you know, I mean, like, we have some, some companies and they've grown a lot, right? And even that one, we grew by just simplifying everything and just saying, what are the points of leverage? And I'm going to wrap this with something that you said earlier, which is like, you realized the high ticket thing. And then that was a huge, like, breakthrough, you know, in your career. And I remember the conversation really specifically.

So I remember you were saying that you were, you're selling, you know, all these courses. And at the time, if I recall correctly, I was getting 100 to 1. That's right. It was some disgusting, you know. Because I remember because I gave a presentation at that one. And I remember the presentation. And the thing is, I was like, yeah, man, I was like, that feels like a lot of work. I was like, you got to sell like.

I was like, like 500 customers, make 500 grand. I was like, I need to sell like not that. I need to sell a 10th of that. I need to sell like a 20th of that. I was like, yeah, if I just sold like 40 people, I would make that money. and you're like 40 people. And I was like, yeah. And I just remember that because like,

I think that was where it's like a perfect example of the audience of like finding points of leverage. It's like, is the leverage in my ability to buy an arbitrage media and do all the tech little optimizations? Or is there one domino to the Tim Ferriss illusion, right? Or is there one big leverage point that if I just crank that one, everything else falls into place? Right.

Like if you can figure out in the reverse. isn't, the answer is not raise your prices. I mean, sometimes it is, but that is the outcome of the deeper thing, which is figure out a way to provide more value. And so, like, if you can find a way to make someone a million dollars, you can charge 250 grand, right? Right. Like, the reason we come with the portfolio companies, and I have this visual that I just made yesterday about it, but like, we come in and we have, you know, we get a minority stake for all the, the interests that we do. But it's also because, like, if I create 50 million dollars in net worth for an entrepreneur, is it unreasonable for me to ask. You know, for 10. Most people would say no, right? It's like, well, how do you sell stuff for $10 million? It's like, well, you make someone 50. That's how you sell stuff for 10 million. So you acquire the skills to do the thing. And most people want to sell stuff for 10 million, but they have a $100,000 skill set. And then what happens is they destroy their reputation and then the word of mouth monster comes and eat them, eats them alive, right? And so you asked about what is the thing that's the big red flag, which is ego? What is the thing that, you know, we look for? It's three things. And they're the values

the company. So it's the same thing that I look for in our personal life, same thing that I look for in employees and same thing we look for in portfolio company. So Layla and I spent a really long time trying to narrow it down because we believe in three values rather than five or 10 or whatever because you can triangulate thinking. It's very difficult to map five values or 10 values against like a decision. And so the first one is do we believe this person is unimpeachable character? Would we be proud to associate with this person on and off the field? Right. And like being proud, not just like being associated, but would I be proud when I brag about my association with this person, right? That's unimpeachable character, right, in all ways. And it's on and off the field,

which is hard because some people are like, wait, you don't hire someone because some of their personal decisions? I'm like, yeah, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Because humans can't differentiate. It's hard to give advice, you know what I mean? In general, if people think that you, you know, cheated on your wife. Like, people, it's harder for people to do that because even if it's good business advice, psychologically, it's difficult, right? And I'm a realist. If I think that people are not going to be persuaded by this person or they're going to have all these chip chips stacked against them. I'm just, I can just choose to make a different bet. You know what I mean? Like, I can just choose to vote on a different jockey, bet on a different jockey, right? It's all it is. So one is unimpeasful

character. The second is sincere candor. It's not like, can they not bullshit me? That's not what sincere candor is. Sincere candor is can they have the hard conversations, both taking the hard feedback and incorporating it, and that is an element of humility, and then also have the empathy to care about the people on their team and give them feedback when it is required. And a lot of people avoid those conversations, the real conversations. It's easy to just like, you know, just give the, you know, no BS, whatever, like direct stuff, but like being like, hey, surely, you seem like your, your head's not in it lately and the team thinks that you're slipping and I want to figure out what's going on, right? Or, you know, we gave you that piece of

feedback the other day and I felt resistance and it felt like your ego flared up, right? Like, you can even see my tone changes because like to have these conversations, it's not easy, right? And if you're going to build a 30 or 50 or $100 million, which is the only thing that we're interested in investing in is entrepreneurs who we think can get there, right? And so that's number two. Number three is competitive greatness because sometimes you've got an amazing human but they're just like really content. And I want to be honest, there's nothing wrong with that. But maketh a good company does not. You know what I mean? So like sometimes it takes a little bit of teeth. You know what I mean? It takes a little bit of competitive drive and desire. And sometimes that

comes from fear of failure. Sometimes it comes from insecurities. Sometimes, sometimes. And the ideal way is that it's a pool, not a push. That's the perfect rule. But I accept somebody who is competitively great. Michael Jordan was 100% push, not pull, right? But he was still the greatest, right? And so, like, I accept that there are different forms of fuel. And I just want to make sure that whoever we are doing business with has one. 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.

We can out more entrepreneurs, make more money, feed their 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 with someone else. I was going to try to sneak in one more really lame interview question, like what's your number one interview hack? But I already know your answer. It's find out if Lela Harmosey has the sister. You told me this recently. You said, you know, basically like find a wife or husband that can be your greatest partner.

and can really help you grow. And I, you know, it's such, it is kind of unorthodox advice, or at least uncommon advice, you know. But I thought that was, because who's the person you spend the most time with, right? It's your significant other. And if that person is not supportive and maybe even pushing you to go further, then, you know, my grandfather on my father's side, he was a German physicist. And he always used to say constant exposure always leads to some form of contamination.

And so if you are around someone all the time that is not supportive, that's not supportive, that is, you know, against the grain, it is going to affect you no matter how much you try to separate it, no matter how much you try to be independent. And so I really did love that advice because it made so much sense, you know. I'll answer a question you didn't ask. That's always my big question. What's the question I should be asking? So to find this, and I'm actually thinking.

thinking about this overall, too, because I was having a branding conversation yesterday with our creative director. And I realized that I think there's a parallel between branding and finding a mate. So hear me out. I'm still working on this. I'm open to this. But I feel very confident in saying that there are three components that make a good marriage. And obviously, you know, we're five years in and people are like, ah, you're young. I'm like, all right, cool. I'll just wait 20 years. And then people listen, whatever, it doesn't really matter. And like my only, my only dispelling of that is just that like the average marriage, married person spends two hours a day together. 45 minutes of that is watching television.

35 minutes of that is eating and 24 minutes of that is doing house tours. And so the remainder of that time from that is like 20 or 30 minutes. And that is it per day. Right. And so compared to the amount of time that Layla and I spend together, I was like, we've already been married 45 years based on the amount of time that we spend together. Oh, dude, that's a great point. This is a different, you know, different view, different lens.

So, I mean, I know some people who literally only see each other. on the weekends because they both work full time. It's like, well, you spend one day a week together. You know what I mean? Like, that's nothing. Anyway, that's not my point. But there are three things that I think create great relationships in general. The first is aligned mission, which is do we want to go to the same place? Right. And a lot of people don't even talk about this. And it's like, this is the life I want to live. And for me, it was like, I want to do big shit. And where I want to go will be hard and treacherous to get to, right? Are you down for that journey? A lot of people are not, comma, and that's okay. It's just that they just might not be your person. And these requirements

that I put here, most people will fail as they should, because you only need one. Like, I remember when I was, I was in college and I was like, this is all the things I'm looking for. And someone's like, and I was talking to a girl who was pursuing me and they were like, geez, like, good luck finding that. And I was like, I only need to find one. Oh, man, that's such an amazing perspective on that. Because that, oh, dude, that hits home because it makes sense. Like you, there's, they say, oh, there's all these fish in the sea, but you have all these standards.

Yeah, but you only need to find it once. That's, that's a great perspective. Yeah, like being hot is a price of admission. That is not the, you know what I mean, like the end all be all. That means like you have a ticket to play in the show. You know what I mean? So one is aligned mission, right? The second is similar values, right?

Or ideally, you know, same values, which is we know where we want to go, but how do we want to get there? It's a big part. Some people want to get to the same place and they want to go about it very differently. They have different values, right? And the reason that's important is because you're going to get stimuli that come in your life, you're going to have things, obstacles. And if you're presented with the same data, I do.

you want to make this come to the same conclusion. You want to make the same decision. And so the variables that you weigh and how you assign weight to those things are going to be your values. And so whenever Layla and I, because we've now been doing this a lot, we've made a lot of decisions together, a lot of big decisions. If we ever have a time where we're not like on the same page about something, we don't immediately like fight. It's just like, what data do you have that I'm not working with? Because I'm making this conclusion because we have the same values and we wouldn't get to the same place. I'm making this conclusion based on these things. What are you making your conclusion off of?

And then she'll share her. I'm like, ah, I didn't think about that. That's a good one. Or I'll share something and she'll be like, oh, totally didn't think about that. That makes complete sense. Right. And then we're like, cool. And then we are able, like, we haven't had, we've only had one decision in our

entire marriage that we disagreed on. And I bulldozed Layla and it was the wrong decision. And I was like, I'm doing it. You know what I mean? And I shouldn't know that. And that's the thing. And so like, we have always come to the point where if we don't agree, we don't do. We don't do whatever.

is. Like, if we don't agree. Was that a business decision or a personal one? It was business. It was business. Okay. And the third piece, so align mission, where we want to go, line values, how we want to get there, right?

And then the third is, I like to say similar interest or you can say lifestyle. It doesn't really matter what word you use, right? But it's like, what are the interests that we have? Because like, you want to go to the same place. You want to get through the same way. But it's like if the day to day, we don't share interests, it becomes more difficult. Like if I was, if I had somebody who was super driven, had. the same values, but then, like, wasn't into, like, fitness at all. Like, didn't like exercise,

didn't like eating, you know, eating in a way that made sense. Like, didn't like, you know, walking. You know, just like, just like, what are my day-to-day things that I like? Or maybe they just love television. I don't know. Like, it's just, are there things that they have that are interests that I'm like, I have no, or maybe they're really big artists. I'm not an artist. I'm not into art. Maybe they love museums. And I'm like, fuck, that sounds horrible, right? Because I don't want to spend any time doing that. Right. But, like, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just like not my vibe, right? And so it's like, because if we can have aligned interest, so like the mission and values is baseline, right? And if we can have the similar interests,

then we're going to spend more time together. And then when we get both exposed to stimuli, we will both adapt the same way. Whereas when people have different interests, they spend time being exposed to different things. And then they end up adapting to the things that they're exposed to, which sometimes can be in the same direction, but sometimes it can not be in the same direction. And so you grow apart, right? And so the similarity that I'm seeing this with from a branding perspective is like, what, like, what is a brand? Right? I've been trying to break this down. I'm like, what is a brand? Because we're like, dude, I love your brand. I'm like, what does it even mean? Right? So I'm like, I think on some level, it's like, there are some people who are aligned with me on the

mission of what I'm trying to do. And they're like, I think this is dope. I'm down to like, go along with you, right? Go along for the ride. And then they also align with the values of like how I want to get there. Like Gary Vee and I probably have similar missions, but different values. Not in a bad way, we're just different. We're just different people. You know what I mean? Like, we just do, you know, we just do different things. We're different people. You know what I mean? There's nothing wrong with that. Right. Same thing is like, there's another girl who might not be your wife, but she might be someone's wife. Right. It's just different. Right. And then different interests. Right. And so if I think the brand, it's like this is where I want to go, this is how I want to get there.

And then this is like my day to day. My cat's, my work, my dessert stuff. My, you know what I I mean, like, these are the day-to-day interests that I have, and I am a minimalist slash a functionalist, right? And so if you think through those lenses, I think, anyway, that's what I think it helps build relationships. And I also think it might be able to build a brand because I think brands are really just relationships with a mass audience. So same mission, same values, same day-to-day desired ideal environment. Oh, and hot. You mentioned that. Well, and I'll say this, they should be hot for you rather than hot for everyone else.

Because sometimes there's a keyholder if you're on the bikes. 100%. Awesome, man. I'm going to tell you, you know, I think that if we just clip out the last 10 minutes of this interview, no one would ever need to buy a relationship course again. You could just watch what you just said. That was like the best relationship advice. Because it was just so brutally, tactically honest, you know.

It just stripped away all the bullshit, you know. So that, I appreciate that. I definitely learned a lot from that. Alex, man, thank you for coming on and sharing all this. And, you know, I try to ask some more tactical questions and pull out some real nitty-gritty stuff. So I appreciate you sharing all that and getting into the weeds and not doing what most people do and go on these long story tangents that are irrelevant. You know, I love your directness.

So thank you so much for coming on. and I think people are really, really, really going to enjoy this interview. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thank you to the audience. Thanks, man.