In this interview from the Leveling Up Founders event, Alex Hormozi, co‑CEO of Acquisition.com, shares his operating playbooks for scaling businesses. He argues that buying talent—through fractional hires or M&A—is faster than building it, and outlines a systematic interview process to acquire and then internalize expertise. Hormozi describes a growth‑thesis framework that minimizes "need‑to‑believe" assumptions, focusing on high‑probability, low‑risk opportunities that could become $100 million deals. He explains acquisition.com’s four core customer‑acquisition methods (one‑to‑one and one‑to‑many, both owned and affiliate) and how a strong personal brand drives both deal flow and talent acquisition. He attributes the scarcity of successful acquisition‑focused entrepreneurs to a lack of earned credibility, which can be built via elite pedigree or proven track‑record. Hormozi also discusses his capital‑allocation philosophy: early in a founder’s career, extract as much cash as possible to develop financial discipline, then later reinvest once personal wealth allows for smarter capital allocation. He argues that investing in one’s own earning capacity—through education, mentorship, and high‑ticket access—yields far higher returns than traditional market investments like the S‑P 500. The session closes with a promotion for the Leveling Up Founders private event.
Chapters
This next session is with Alex Hormozi, who is the co-CEO of Acquisition.com. Alex is talking more around the product and the marketing side. Hope you enjoy it. It's a really insightful session. And that being said, hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you think. How is that setup looking now? Because I don't— I'm more interested in kind of the intermediate to advanced setup.
The ops of it.
Yeah.
So I think you, Neil, and I share an ideology, which is it's a lot faster to buy than build. And so you can also think about that on, like, a microscopic level of within a company. You can either build the talent, train someone, et cetera, or you can buy the talent versus you can also buy conglomerations of talent in the form of, like, M&A and whatnot. But I think about it on the micro level, like, you can buy talent. Basically, the whole playbook is go find somebody who's really good, interview lots of them. If you don't learn from them on the interview, don't hire them because then they don't know more than you do. So you should be learning from them during the interview process, which then gives you even more juiced when you're, you know, like after you do 3 interviews, you can talk to the 4th guy with more knowledge than you did beforehand. It honestly becomes pretty clear if you talk to like 10 LinkedIn vendors who actually knows what they're talking about. And so once we get the person, we make it clear to them that, you know, we're only gonna be doing this for 3 to 6 months with you because our goal is to absolutely copy everything you're doing and bring it in-house. And so we're very upfront about that. Honestly, everyone's been cool with that. They're like, that's fine. And so it's actually worked out okay. And so that's pretty much been the playbook. And so one by one, the ones that we feel like we have the playbook down the most, Suck in-house, hire somebody, train them with the playbook, and then we are just kind of knocking out outhouse to in-house. But it's more expensive to start that way because you're paying a premium for fractional attention. You get all the learnings that they've already learned across all their companies, and that's, for me, that's shortcut a lot of the figuring it out. It's actually easier to take something from like $15 million to $40 million than it is to take something from like $3 to $6. Like if you look at it from like absolute like money-making standpoint, I'd rather have one company that I do that with than 5 companies that I'm taking from 3 to 10.
Yeah.
It has to be a really compelling company that we think, this is a grand slam, and we think that this thing could really be a $100 million deal, and that we're just, we see all the pieces that need to be there. There can't be a lot of need-to-believes. When we're thinking about a growth thesis, we like to have as few need-to-believes as possible, which is, okay, for this outcome to happen, what must also be true? And so we have assumptions that we're basing this growth on, and so we wanna have as few of those assumptions as possible, number one, and number two, we want to have as high a potential likelihood of achieving that as possible. It's basically the lowest risk, lowest number of need to believes for this to happen. So if like on the one extreme, it'd be like, I only need to believe one thing and it's that inflation's gonna happen, right? Or it's happening right now, right? Like if I believe those 2 things, then this business model will work and will 10x, then it's like, great. And that's something I wanna do. If it's like, we need to believe that like, you know, X person has to be in the presidency, interest rates have to be rock bottom. Like, you know, if I have like 5 things that have to happen in order for this company to be like a lollapalooza, like knock it outta the park, then we're just less likely to want to take it on. So big picture, if we zoom out, when I started acquisition.com, so whenever I'm starting any business, it's always like, okay, you know, gotta get customers, gotta sell 'em shit, right? That's fundamentally what it is. We need the thing to sell and we gotta have the people to sell it to, right? And so I look at, okay, what are the acquisition strategies am I gonna use? So I can talk to people I know one-on-one, I can talk to people I know one-to-many, I can talk to people I don't know one-on-one, I can talk to people I don't know one-to-many, right? Those are the 4 core things you can do to advertise anything. And then below that, I can get customers to do those 4 things, or I can get affiliates to do those 4 things. So there's 6 methods you can do to get customers. Most private equity or VC, they're getting commoditized. If you think about them as an offer, their offer is money, and then they have their bonuses, which is their unique expertise. It's like, how can I sell in a vacuum? How can I sell in a market of one, which is people coming to you rather than you going to them? And so I wanted the deal structure, I wanted that to be the way that we acquired companies. And so that's why we started organic as the primary method.
Got it. And your pops people, these are like ex-PE people, Harvard people. How are you finding these people?
Brand. It's like the biggest benefit of having the brand, honestly, the deal flow's cool, but I think the talent flow is better. And so like the level of talent that we're able to attract with acquisition.com compared to companies in the past and like how much cajoling I had to do to get people to leave their thing to come do our thing, significantly higher. And so you get better talent at better rates. By having kind of the personal brand. So that's been a huge, unbeknownst to me, benefit that I have now experienced that is awesome. Many of the problems that entrepreneurs suffer from in general just need an objective pair of eyes to look at and be like, all right, well, what problem are we solving? What's the hypothesis you have about how you're going to solve it? How are you going to measure your input? How are you going to measure your output? And then just like following through that process for many of them helps them come to the conclusion on their own with somebody who's just very intelligent and hardworking, who will do research on their own to also answer the question, being like, okay, well, I just read 3 case studies of people who were trying to increase their activation on XYZ. So give me your ideas. Here are the ones that we're going to bring. I think we should do this. And the person's like, great.
Charlie Munger said this before about, like, it's a wonder why no more people are doing what Berkshire is doing, right? But then you have Berkshire, you have Tiny, obviously, up in Victoria. And so more and more people are starting to do this, but still, Not many people are doing this. Why do you, why do you think that is?
I would guess the reason people don't do it is because they haven't earned the right to do it. You know, like a lot of people, it's, it's the same thing you guys probably see everywhere where it's like, hey, this is how you should grow your social media. And the person has like 100,000 followers on TikTok. And it's like, I mean, that's cool, but like most people would be like, why should I listen to you? And they don't have an answer to that question. And so I think most people, because they're impatient, want to jump the gun and go to the highest leverage thing as soon as possible. And they haven't really like earned that credibility in the marketplace. And so they can't get deals because anybody who's worth doing a deal with is already ahead of them, right? And so it's like, why would I listen to you? So I think that's probably why many of them do it. And so it's like either you have to go like the corporate pedigree path and knowing that like you've been, you know, you went to HBS, and not to say that like people who don't go to that are in any way less, obviously I haven't, but like if you do that, that's like one path of getting the credibility because then that person has worked with like 20 companies that are significantly larger than yours. And so they have experience they can draw from, or you have to have done it yourself. And so I think most people don't fall in either of those buckets, and that's why they haven't like earned the right to, You've talked about this a couple times on taking distributions versus just reinvesting back into the business.
And so what's your philosophy on that?
Yeah, it's— I've given a lot of thought to this. I think it's like entrepreneurial phase and risk tolerance. I think that earlier on, I advise most business owners/entrepreneurs to take as much money out of the company as they can. And I think it just teaches good discipline. financial hygiene, and like, 'cause a lot of people are like, oh, I'm reinvesting in the business right now. I'm like, are you reinvesting, or do you just make no profit? Big difference, right?
Mm-hmm.
And a lot of times, they're not actually reinvesting in the business. They just don't make any money, and it just sounds more socially acceptable to say you're reinvesting. I'm a big believer in like, take as, you know, set the number that needs to be in the bank account every month, drain it to that, and then do that as many times as you can, right? I think once you get to, and this is, again, this is just how Alex ran his life, which there's way better ways to do it. But for me, once I had a certain amount of material wealth that I didn't have to worry about any personal needs for good, which that number is different for everyone, at that point, I think it makes more sense to then truly reinvest, 'cause now you've learned all the habits that actually make money, and take that capital, because now you've gotten better at allocating capital because you actually had some, right?
Mm-hmm.
And then you can think in terms of return on that allocation. And then, sure, like, you can compound the wealth faster then. Whatever, you know, than the S&P, you know, can.
S&P? SME, right?
SME 500.
Do you wanna explain what that is for those that don't know?
Yeah, sure. Like you guys, I get a little pissed off when I see like the TikTok influencer who's like 7 years old giving financial advice. And so they're like, if you dollar cost average, you know, blah, blah, blah into the S&P 500 for, you know, 1,000 years, you could be a millionaire, which by the time you're a millionaire 80 years from now, it'll be like having, you know, 50 grand. But whatever. Point being, if you took the same money for most people and reinvested in your ability to earn money, would be a far better return on capital in a real sense. So it's like, if you have a— a friend of mine has a daughter who's 16 or 17, and so she got a job at a bowling alley. And for $500, she could get certified as a phlebotomist, which starts at $25 an hour. And so that's just drawing blood, right? And it takes 2 days, and it's $500. And so with $500, she could invest $500 in the S&P 500 and do her Excel chart about, like, how much money she'll make in 100 years, Or she can triple her earning capacity in 2 days. And so, I'm of the belief that most people don't— are not wealthy because they do not know how to make money. And so, I would invest as much money as I can into increasing that flow of cash, because you can do the math on the guy who saves for 10 years, and at least in my opinion, the moment you start really doing formal investing as your primary thing is kind of the moment that you have— You're in trouble. I don't wanna say given up, but you have decided to slow down your rate of increasing your earning capacity. And so it's like, if I have $10,000 a month that I have that's left over after my expenses and whatnot, I could put it somewhere, or I can buy access to rooms like this, talk to other people, whatever that is. And I just, and this has just been my experience. I've gotten, I've made a lot more money not saving for the first 5 years of my career and just putting, plowing all that cash into Coaching, masterminds, courses, seminars, et cetera, to the degree that now I will put money wherever I possibly can to buy access. So like right now, the majority of my investment has been, you know, I spend probably like $30,000 to $50,000 an hour to just try and get access to people. They're like, we don't do that. And I'm like, just tell me a number, whatever. Hang out with me for a second and tell me your secrets.
All right, so that's it for this session. Hope you enjoyed it. If you are interested in learning more about the Leveling Up Founders Private Event, it's basically an annual thing where we gather the top founders and also the top speakers and ultimately just help each other grow our businesses faster. Last event was rated a 9.8 out of 10, and everyone said it was more so about the people. The speakers were amazing, but the people are even more amazing. So you can go to live.levelingup.com to learn more if you are interested. And we will, we'll catch you later. Bye.
