The Game with Alex Hormozi - The Reason You're Not Successful | Ep 655

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

“A lot of times you got to do a lot more in the beginning to get the ball rolling.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) explores the interplay of volume, skill, and time in business, highlighting how they mutually reinforce each other to yield greater outcomes. Emphasizing the significance of hard work and persistence, he shares personal anecdotes to underscore the importance of investing more effort and time in business activities, which not only boosts immediate output but also enhances skill development for long-term compounded success.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(0:51) - The importance of doing the boring work(2:13) - The four key activities for business growth(8:49) - The impact of quality and quantity(10:59) - The effort-outcome relationship(12:22) - The true meaning of workFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition(This episode is a re-run. Original airdate was on July 19, 2022)

Most things that most people make suck. Most products suck. Most marketing sucks. Most businesses suck. And most people suck at the things that they think they're good at. And it's because they don't even know how to work. They don't even know how to do it. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to sell more stuff to more people in more ways and build businesses worth owning.

I'm trying to build a billion dollar thing with Acquisition.com. I always wished Bezos, Musk, and Buffett had documented their journey. So I'm doing it for the rest of us. Please share and enjoy. I'm going to break down how I learned how to consistently generate leads independent of platforms. And the key piece that I was missing in multiple different platforms, I'm going to tell you five key stories that my life that massively impacted how affected my marketing was as a result of the exchange. So a few high-level observations before I dive into this.

The first thing is there's a sitting in our community called do the boring work. And a lot of times we don't confront the work that must be done because it's not exciting or sexy. and it feels somehow like it's beneath us. You know, prospecting and doing $100 a day can feel tedious. You know, posting and repurposing the same content across lots of different media sources can feel tedious. You know, reaching out to people you know and asking them if they know someone who might be interested in your, you know, products or services might feel tedious. Or creating, you know, 100 different ad variations with different hooks and headlines can seem tedious. It's very easy to understand, very hard to do, mostly because people don't have the discipline

and the work ethic to go through the boring work, which kind of leads to the second one here, which is that there's a saying between my closest friend and I, Dr. Cashi, violence is the answer. Sometimes when you have this outcome that you must achieve in your life because of the goals and insecurities that we have set upon ourselves, that just being violent with the level of activity that we are doing will ultimately get us much closer than the nuances and the skill that sometimes we like to project and pretend matter more than just physically doing a sheer higher volume of work. Number three is that if you do more than you are doing right now,

we'll get more than you currently have. And that is a promise and you can take that to the bank. And number four is do what matters most first. So right now you probably have lots of things that, you know, fill up your day in the morning, all that kind of stuff. But the things, there are only four activities that will actually generate more business for you, period, that is new. Number one is reaching out to people you know. Number two is posting to an audience that you know. Number three is reaching out to people who you don't know one-on-one.

And number four is advertising. There's the only four ways that you can get new clients, right? And so if you're not doing one of those four things and you're struggling to get customers, you're not doing lots of those four things as your primary activities, then that is probably one of the reasons that you don't have the amount of customers that you wish you have. All right. And so what I want to do is take this. quick moment to introduce an equation that I've thought a lot about, but it's V times S times D.

So volume, time, scale, times time. And this is kind of a flywheel that feeds itself. And I'll get to the actual wording behind this. But essentially, the more volume to do, the better you are at it and longer you do it, the more throughput you will ultimately have. The more outcome, the more clients, the more sales, the more leads you will ultimately have from doing it. All right. So let's dive into the this and a little bit more. So in other words, and this is based in just like pure foundational principles of logic, right? The more we do, the better we get. The better we debt, the more we do, because we like it, because we're better at it. And the longer we do something, the better we get.

The better we get, the longer we do it, the more of what we did compounds on itself. And this is the same reason why if you start doing cold outbound, or start building up pipeline, it starts to compound on itself. And if you start doing business over a long enough period of time, they're just becomes this larger and larger audience of people who know you for doing this thing, right? And I'll show you a couple examples in some of the stories and examples I have today that will show you how compounding massively affected my life. And so in this way, each of these three variables, volume, skill, and time feed each other, but it all starts with doing. And so these are the three. We're going to focus just on volume today because I want to be mindful of your time. And so I'll tell you a

quick example of this. So this is probably a decade ago. I'm starting my gym, first business I owned or a real business I own. And someone was like, oh, you should run flyers. And I was like, okay, cool. So I went out, I did a bunch of flyers. And it, you know, it didn't really work for me. And so, you know, a few months later, I was talking to a friend of mine who had, you know, multiple successful locations, he was doing well. And I was like, hey, you know, I did, he's like, you should do flyers. So I was like, nah, I did that. It didn't work for me. He's like, well, you know, what was your, what was your test size? And I was like, test size.

What do you mean? He was like, well, how many did you test before you, you know, scale it up? And I was like, well, I mean, I put 300 out. And he was like, 300, like total? And I was like, well, yeah. He's like, I don't even test for less than 5,000 flyers. And all of a sudden I was like, whoa. And he's like, yeah, he's like, I'll put out 100,000 flyers a month.

He's like, and I'll get a half a percent or a percent back. He's like, who walked through the door. And he's like, yeah, but 100,000 flyers are percent back. I get 30 people a day walking in my store. And I was like, holy cow, my understanding of the sheer volume for the activity that I thought wasn't working was just dramatically under what it really was supposed to be. And in that moment, I had a belief broken about what volume really means. This happens all the time.

But I'll tell you a couple other examples in a second. But like, this happens all the time even in like fitness stuff. People are like, man, why can't I get jacked? And I'm like, you know, why can't I grow my arms? It's like, all right, well, how many sets of arms are you doing every week? And they're like, well, I train arms twice a week. I'm like, what do you do? And they're like, well, you know, like three sets 10.

And I'm like, that's it? Like per week? Like, so six total sets. They're like, yeah. I'm like, well, try 12 sets six days a week and I guarantee your arms will drop. And they're like, seriously? I'm like, yeah. Imagine that.

The more you do, the more you look like you can do. Mosy Nation, real quick, if you are a business owner that has a big old business and wants to get to a much bigger business, going to $50 million plus, we would love to talk to you. And if you like that, we'd like to hear more about it, go to acquisition.com. You can apply anywhere on the page and talk to one of our team and see if we can help you get there. So I'll give you a different one that I had. This is in a paid ad's example, which is similar to flyers, just a different platform. I had an agency owner who was walking, who was talking to us within our software company. and he was like, hey, you know, my lead flow

stalling out, I can't seem to scale above a certain map. And I was like, okay, well, you know, how many pieces of creative are you putting out, you know, per week? And he was like, he confidently answered, right? So he was like, he's like, oh, he's like, that we have on point. He's like, we're putting out like five to ten pieces of content a week. And I was like, per week? He's like, yeah. And I was like,

dude. And I scrolled over, I shared my screen of my creative department. And I was like, we're testing 30 pieces every three days. He was like, what? I was like, yeah. It's level of output, quantity of output.

Most people dramatically underestimate how much work it takes to make money. The thing is, once you understand, and for most people, and this is the point that I'm hoping, somebody who's like, hasn't gotten on their first customer

or wants to start on a new channel, if you already have one working, is you usually need to do a lot more because you're S in that equation, your skill level is low, and you have no time that has compounded for you. So you must compensate with extraordinary volume so that you can learn the skill and then begin the compounding process that will give you the throughput or outcome that you desire.

And so a lot of times you've got to do a lot more in the beginning to get the ball rolling. I switch from one time a week to one times a day and here's what's crazy. My growth organically 40xed from a 7x increase in effort. So there is a multiplicative effect here because, sure, we did more, but we got better at the doing. And then the more we did, the more each of those other pieces fed one another. Right. And so again, all of this starts with the doing and taking a lot more than most people anticipate to get the result and get going. And so this is a different nuance on volume.

This is more level of effort. But I think it bears mentioning because for this concept to kind of sink in on ahead of a couple different angles. So this is the number one video or at this time is one of the number one videos on the channel. And the thing is, is like, and I realize that quality most times trumps quantity, right? And the thing is, but quality and quantity trumps just quantity, right? Or just quality. And so this particular piece of content took me 20 hours to actually put the slide deck together and then two days of travel to go film. And then go on, lo and behold, it ends up being, the number one thing on there.

And to me, I was like, well, that's not really surprising. I spent a ton of time on this. And so it was just, I'm just saying, I get reminded to this at all levels of the game. You know what I mean? And so I'm making these because, like, as I'm learning and I'm sharing it, so that hopefully it provides some value to you. Like, it just takes a lot more work than most people think.

Like, Leila, this is four or five years ago when we were refilming an entire content portal. So she had probably recorded, God, I don't know, 70 or so videos. with trainings and everything. And she got done and she was like, I don't think these are that good. And I was like, I was like, she's like, I just, I don't know.

I don't know if they're like hitting the way I want them to be. They're like just not as crisp. And we sat there and I was like, we'll do them again. She looked at me and she was like, yeah, you're right. Because the thing is, and I've said this before and I'll keep saying. Like your work works on you more than you work on it.

The thing we're developing is our character, because that's the ultimate. prize that we get at the end of the race, right? We can't keep the stuff that we have with us. And so we're doing this work to become better people, right? And so if you do it again, it's nothing bad about it. You're just like, cool, I get more practice at doing the thing. And my S is going to get better in the throughput equation. So even if you did the same in terms of volume of output, the skill on the equation, the S, is going to be higher. So you're still going to actually still get more throughput, even if you do the same effort again. Right. And so that's

why the level of effort and giving a shit for lack of the returnment really working like violence is the answer doing the boring work and putting the the time under the bar in to use a fitness analogy is what is required and most people dramatically underestimate the volume all right and so i'm going to tell you this last one to wrap this wrap this little piece up which is i wrote this book right it it took me basically like a year to write it um it took me two weeks to write it took me a year to edit it. And right now, I get DMs every day. But the thing is, is the difference between that level of effort is why many times I think things don't work out, is that most people put like a seven out of 10 effort or an 8 out of 10 effort and then look at somebody who put a 10 out of 10

in and think, well, I didn't put that much less effort in, but you don't realize the difference between an 8 and a 10 might be five times the work. But also, the difference between an 8 and a 10 might be 100 times the outcome. And so the actual net outcome, on the incremental increase in work is still worth it. That's what's crazy, is that if it takes five times the effort to go from an eight to a ten, you might get a hundred times, even though you only did five times more work. And so this is one of these beliefs that I've ingrained in myself within how we do business, but I'm sharing it with you because most things that most people make suck.

Most products suck, most marketing sucks, most businesses suck, and most people suck at the things that they think they're good at. right and it's because they don't even know how to work they don't even know how to do it and i'll tell you this final story to wrap this up when i was a legal intern in a in a past lifetime um at a chemical company called arkema in france believe it or not i worked there in the legal department and this older more experienced you know senior lawyer at the in the department kind of like tap i was like oh i'm going to go back to work and she like tapped my shoulder and she was like you don't even know how to work and i was like what do you mean and she was like you're so young she's like you're

don't even know what work really is. And it just hit me and it struck me like to my core because I was like, how can you tell me that I don't know how to work? But here I am 10 years, 15 years later. And I think to myself like, man, I had no idea what work even look like because I don't even know how to focus the way I do know. I didn't know how to eliminate distractions. I didn't know what it looked like to just put rep after rep, after rep, after rep, after rep in to just get that thing just right. And the beautiful thing, especially when it comes to marketing stuff is that when you make those each of those posts, each of those outreaches, each of those calls, each of those ads that you run make you better. They increase the S. And so in that way, the V, the S and the T, the volume, the skill, and the time work on each other

and then yield you a higher throughput because they are multiplicative, not additive. And that's like the one thing that if I can drive this home is that most people just do so much less volume than they think. And then they look at the vehicle that they're using and think, why is this not working when the reality was that you were not working? Because you did not know how much work really was required to get to where you wanted to go. And so with that, in other words, most times you just need to do more than what you're currently doing and a lot more of it.