The Game with Alex Hormozi - ❌Why "SHOULD DO" is Dangerous ❌and How To Make Unhealthy Amounts of Money Doing Very Few Things... | Ep 108

Episode Date: February 26, 2019

It’s not about doing more, but rather about examining all of the decisions and tasks that will make the most money. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) discusses the challenges entrepreneurs face when deciding which tasks to prioritize to grow the business. He suggests that entrepreneurs identify and focus on weak links in their business and allocate resources to tasks that will make the most money.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:(0:53) - Exploring the challenges of innumerable and impossible to-dos(2:22) - Differentiating between should dos and contributed value(5:38) - Identifying business bottlenecks and strengths(10:14) - Doubling down on strengths for business growth(11:47) - Investing human capital for business growthFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

You guys are having an amazing week so far. This is something that this concept, why should do is dangerous and how to make unhealthy amounts of money doing very few things. And so I wanted to take a quick moment to talk about this concept. Okay, so here's, let's dig in. So one of the number one things that happens with entrepreneurs as they get going is that you have so many should do, you have so many things that you have to do or that you should do that it gets suffocating. It gets overwhelming because you're like, oh my God, there's so many

holes in my business. There's so many things that I need to do that I should do that I'm not doing. Good morning, Craig. Good morning, Jordan. And so how do you tackle that, right? And what's interesting is that the bigger you get, the more horsepower you have on your team and the more you feel like you can take on these should do's, right? And so let me give an example of how should do is become innumerable and impossible. So if you were to look at the business with the five core functions, right, You got lead gen, lead nurture, sales, fulfillment, resell and ascension, right? I could look at any business, ours included, and look at lead generation, be like, you know what we should be doing? We should be doing six other platforms and we should be making ads every single day and we should be making professional videos and all this stuff, right?

That's all these things that we should do for lead gen. I need them to get them to show up for lead nurture. Okay, I should have an entire 150 day email sequence that should go out to them with content and emails and text messages and direct mail and all. of these things that would help improve my lead nurture process, which it absolutely would, right? I should be training my sales guys to sell better. I should be listening to all of their calls and all of their recordings so that I can improve their selling ability and I should be coaching them more one-on-one. Fulfillment.

I should be doing more things to wow and shock in all my customers. I should have a shock in all package. I should be mailing this out. I should be, right? And so I can keep going. And all of those things that I just named will make you more money, right? But the question is, and the thing that plagues entrepreneurs, is which should I do? And so one of the things that happens is, like, we think of all these things, and that's because

we're entrepreneurs, we think of all these things that we should do, that we should improve because we are by our nature, problem solvers. We seek out problems to go try and solve them, to try and fix them. And the first place we always look is our own business is because we want to improve those first because that's how we make money, right? The thing, though, and that's why I call this and how to make. So, like, why should do is dangerous. That is why I should do is dangerous, right?

and how to make unhealthy amounts of money doing very few things. And so the one real role, right, of the CEO, of the entrepreneur, of the man in charge of you guys, right, is not to always think of the should do's, because actually, I don't think thinking of the should do's is very difficult. You can go to an event and come away with a hundred should do's, right? There's a million, right? The question is, is your ability to differentiate between the actual contributed value of those should do's to your bottom line? that your skill in navigating that decision-making process will determine how much money you make and how successful your business is. Because no matter the size of the business, whether you have four people at your gym or you've got

85,000 employees, you always have a limit on your human capital. So we always have this thought, I just need more people. I just need my team to be bigger. I just need X, right? I just need more money. I just need more, right, human capital. I need more resources, whatever, right? The thing is that there will always be a deficit of what you need to accomplish

because the actual list of things that you should do will always surpass your resources, right? Which is why, as long as things are working well, there's always more opportunity to be seized to improve the business, right? The thing, though, is that how does one business move faster than another, right? How does it actually happen? Like, how did we come into pretty much an established market? and then go faster than everyone else, right, in 24 months. Actually, it's not even 24 months. How do we do that?

If you deconstruct it, it's not by doing more. For sure. Like, we try and manage our time and we try and be effective, we try to be disciplined. For sure. Like, that goes without saying. But I would reason that a lot of people try to do that, right? The thing that we've done very well and that I think should be modeled is looking at all of the decisions. All of the should do, all of the tasks that you could potentially do and allocate human resources,

allocate financial resources toward. And then in the beginning, your mental resources toward, because if it's just you want a team of three, you're going to be half the horsepower of your team, right? And looking at which one of these things is going to make me the most money? And what happens, if you actually look at your day in terms of activities and the things that you're doing, you probably have this huge list. if you look at what your time is being actually spent on, most of the times we have these projects that we start doing. Sometimes we start doing things to procrastinate because we don't want to do the things that we know we should do, right?

That's one. That's a big one. Because the thing that we should do, the one thing that might be the most effective that might move the ball forward, might take discomfort, might take learning a new skill that we don't know yet. And we don't want to go through that discomfort period. So we start doing less important things. There's things that we should do. And we could definitely make the rational argument that me making 150 email sequence would improve the amount of people who over time would come back into gym launch. I could make that argument all day long. I actually got a request for that from my sales director.

And this was a few months ago. I have not done it. And I told him I wasn't going to do it. It was a request. He literally was like, do this. And I was like, no. And there is an argument for why it would make us more money. I just don't think it would make us more money than the other things that I am working on.

And so that's where my attention should go. And so your ability to navigate all of this huge and endless to do list and be able to actively cross things out that you know you should do in favor of doing the things that you need to do because it's the one thing that's going to move your business forward in a massive way. And that's why when I get on the phone with guys who are stuck at five million, stuck at 10 million, and they're like, how did you do it so quickly? and I asked them what they're doing. I asked them what they're focused on. And like nine times out of ten, it's, for lack of better term, bullshit.

You know what I mean? I look at them like, they're working on things that are not the bottleneck. Hey, if you're a return listener and you have not rated or reviewed the show, I want you to know that you should feel absolutely terrible about yourself and everything else in the world. I'm kidding. But it would mean the absolute word to me if you guys would go ahead and do that. You don't even have to pause the show. You can keep listening and you can just do it with your thumb right now.

It'll take you less than 60 seconds. And like I said, the only way that podcast grows through word of mouth and this is you joining hands with me and helping as many entrepreneurs as we possibly can because no one is coming to save us. It's just us. All right. So please go do that now. And let's get back to the show. They are not the weak link in the chain. And so what's interesting is that there's these like two totally different schools of thought, right? You have your like double down on your strengths, like only be good at these things and then outsource the rest. You have that sort of, you know, uh, uh, uh, uh, narrative that gets pushed on us. And then you have the other side, which is like work on your weak points, right? So you can become more balanced, blah, blah, blah, blah. The difference between working on yourself, right,

versus working on your business is that you yourself, like I shouldn't learn accounting. That's probably not a good use of my time. But if my business has a point in time where accounting becomes the bottleneck, that I need to solve that problem. And so that's where the balance between, what are my strengths versus what is the weakness of the business in the beginning your strength is

what is propelling the business because in the beginning anything you do if you're like good at sales and you start selling stuff right but then other parts and then because that's the strength that starts moving things forward but then another thing is going to hold the business back and until you can identify which of these things is the real bottleneck and that's why it takes wisdom it takes discernment to look at the business and be able to see it and that's why something Sometimes having consultants, having people from the outside be able to look in without a motion, without investment, because you might have had a sunk cost of time. Like, I've been working on this email sequence for, you know, I get this one all the time. Like, well, you know what, Alex, I'm going to do exactly what you said, but I'm going to finish this thing first because I've already put in five weeks.

I'm like, cool. You putting in another three weeks on that project to finish it still will make you less money than solving the one problem that if you're, you're going to be able to make you less money than solving the one problem that if you're, took the next three weeks that it would take you to finish that thing, if you took those three weeks to solve this problem, you'll still make more money. And so when I get on these calls and I talk to these entrepreneurs, like the only thing I'm listening for, literally. And like, you'd be amazed to what a coaching session with Alex is. Like, it's literally just what's the thing that's holding you back? What's the weak link? What's the bottleneck? Right. And as soon as you identify that, it gives you focus and then you can ignore everything else because when you take off the weakling

everything blows up until the next bottleneck right that's the thing and so if you were to make a fitness comparison if you're really really strong off the floor and you can't finish your deadlift right you just can't lock it out you getting stronger and stronger off the floor isn't going to do anything because you're like I have to double down on my strengths I have to get better at sale I'm already good at sales but I'm going to get even better. I'm going to get even better. If your problem is that you can't retain for shit, that's not going to grow the business. It doesn't matter, right? Because that's the weakling. And so you might not be naturally an empathetic and caring person, but you can find someone who is, empower them with the decisions, and then coach them with culture to take ownership over that aspect

of the business. And then the business itself grows because a business needs to be balanced. The people in it are not. And so you need to double down on your strengths. Your employees need to double down on their strengths. You need to coach them to double down on their strengths so that as a whole, we create a balanced business, even though individually we're all weird, you know, but when we put it together, it works and it is balanced. That is how the business can grow and expand because it has great lead generation, greatly nurture, great sales, great fulfillment, Great ascension, great retention. It has all of these things in place.

But it's through an unbalanced team of weirdos that it's accomplished. And so when you look at this huge list of should do's, the number one thing you need to do is not get stressed, is not feel anxiety, is give yourself permission to not do three quarters of them and never look at them again. Because the reality is that you probably have one thing or two things that are the real things that are going to drive the business forward

are going to break through the bottleneck so that you can grow your business. The business can actually continue to grow and can leverage the strengths that you have. So I hope that makes sense. I know everyone's got new year resolutions. I know that everyone wants to do more. Everyone wants to do whatever, right?

And a lot of times, conventional wisdom is wrong. A lot of times you just need to do less, but do the right things. And those are the things that are going to grow your business, right? Do less. Pick the things strategically. I don't have more hours. than the people who used to beat my competition

who are now do less than a year than we do it a week. It's not like I have more time. It's not like I'm smarter. It's not. You know what I mean? We have equal access to information. I believe, and this is my belief, and I could be wrong, I'd be corrected by someone else later.

Who knows? I don't know. But I believe the reason that we've been able to grow quickly is because in the limited amount of human resources that we have and had in the beginning, it's not like we had more people than our competitors did when we had three, four employees, right? We had a limited amount of people. on a capital and we simply invested it, we allocated it to projects that were more valuable,

that made their time more effective. We got a higher return on our human capital, on the attention that we invest. We got a higher return on that because we didn't have a bottleneck. And every time we had a bottleneck, we were able to invest and identify what that Beroneck was, despite having maybe other issues in the business, but they weren't the one that's holding us back. So I hope that makes sense to everybody. I hope you guys have an amazing new year so far and loving life and crushing your goals. And so sometimes I think it's good to remember.

Look at your big list of should do's. Don't feel guilty about it. If you feel anxiety, it means you need to prioritize them and get rid of most of it. And be okay with the fact that your business will literally never be perfect, ever. And you will literally never have enough people. You will literally never have enough money. And so the skill of the entrepreneur is in picking. which one thing or two things am I going to take my time and attention of my team and focus

them. That's all I got. If you can drop a comment or like, I would give you a like and a comment back to your comment. All right. Here we guys. Have an amazing week and I'll get you guys on the flip side.