The MULTI-MILLIONAIRE SECRETS Nobody Shares That You CAN COPY! | Alex Hormozi

I think the single greatest differentiator between the poor and the middle class, middle class and rich, rich and the truly wealthy is, I think you got to have a dream. The School of Greatness.

Really?

Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes.

Now what's the difference between someone who's selling all the time and someone who's never selling and doing a disservice because they don't offer someone to buy something? When they know like, okay, I have this coaching program or this course or this thing where I know you could get value if you took action. but maybe they shy away from it because they want to focus on brand so much and not be the salesperson. But then it's actually doing a disservice because they're not in your program.

So I think it actually has less to do with the ratio of how much they're selling versus serving in their content, but more so the ratio of selling and serving overall. Because most times, because of this, like we were talking before, this about the internet marketing space in general, is that most people's products are not serving.

They're not good.

They're terrible. Right, they're terrible. And so what happens is like, it is the most right hook of right hooks possible. Like you just lose a ton of goodwill with the thing. Apple doesn't lose goodwill when they come out with an iPhone. Everyone's just excited about it and they use the iPhone, they tell their friends. So the difference is in the goodwill that comes with the quality of the product. And so I think that's where the issue is. It's not like, do I sell or do I not sell? It's just, is the thing that I'm selling? And the vast majority of people who are pitching all the time are natural promoters, not product people. And so most times the greatest product people, like Naval had this quote that I really like. He said, you,'re only selling because you don't know how to market. And you only market because you don't know how to build a product. Because the best products market and sell themselves. Now obviously if you're Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, it's like you build amazing products and then you back them with unbelievable marketing and then you have an army of salespeople that are selling for you. So it's like then you have them all and then you have a trillion dollar company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just being exceptional at any of those will make you money, but you get the multiplicative compounding effect if you're good at two or three of them. Were you always good at making money.

Or was there a time where you were like, man, I'm just broke, struggling, and trying to figure this thing out? Depends on how much we're defining.

You know what I mean? Right out of college, I finished college in three years and then did the management consulting path. And so out of college, I was making like $50,000.

Right.

And I lived in Baltimore, so my cost of living was like $5. And so I was able to save a bunch of money. So I saved $50,000 in two years living there. And that's what I was able to start my gym with.

Did you understand money when you were in your teens or growing up? Or did you feel like you were scared of it or it was scarce? Or were you thinking, oh, I'm not really worried about money. It'll come when I'm ready.

I've always been a saver. I've always been a saver, not a huge spender. I think part of that is because I don't get a lot of like, when I pay a dollar, I feel something different. And most times if I buy something, I don't feel any different. So I don't get a lot of utility on spending. Yeah, right. I just don't get a lot from it. I think I've been aware of that for a long time. And so like, if you don't spend a lot and you make even a normal amount of money for a decent amount of time, you end up having a lot. And my income went up. I would say that there's definitely elements of scarcity that I, that I believed in for a long time. Yeah, I mean around competition was one.

Tell me about it. What was that about?

So when I had my gyms, for example, this is almost a decade ago, I was so concerned with the guy down the street was, what he does marketing, is he copying my ads? I used to get so obsessed with this stuff and it just so doesn't matter at all. He could copy and we could both have really big successful gyms. It's not like there's a lack of people who need to get a change. And then even then it's like we're only talking about a five mile radius, not like the rest of the world. There's just orders of magnitude of thinking in terms of scale that I was just completely aloof to.

What happens when we focus on competition so much? What happens to our ability to scale, grow, our creativity, our money-making abilities?

I think you become emotionally reactive to the activities of the other person. And so you're truly focused on nothing that adds value. And so it's because it's not the competition, like competitors don't put you out of business, but you obsessing over competitors does.

Right.

What should people be doing instead of obsessing over competition?

It's all customers. It's all just to being. Because if you can get, there's a billionaire in my building who he was asked on every interview, he's like, if you had one thing that you could tell someone if they wanted to build a company like yours, he said, your customer must absolutely love your product. A lot of people just underestimate the amount of effort it takes to go from good to great in a product or a service. If you've ever been to, like, the difference between a five-star restaurant and a four-star restaurant, you know, looks like 20%, but it's 10 times the effort. You know what I mean? The difference between like a one Michelin star and a two Michelin star restaurant is an ocean.

Right.

Right.

And so I think, like, I use the book as an example because it's an easy one to reference. Most people try and just write a book. And then once the final word is done, they're like, Send it to the editor. Edit it. Cool. And let's ship it out. But like that book, I rewrote five times, end to end, the whole thing. And each time, the goal was to make it shorter. It's like, how can I say this in fewer words? How can I say this in less words? And in doing that, and the same thing happened with Jim Loach with that product, is that every time we created a 2.0 or 3.0 or 4.0, we made it shorter. How can we make it easier to consume? And then that was the reason we wrote the book about the value equation. It's like, what is value? Right. How do we define that? And so if we're customer focused, we can obsess on value and then have a very iterative approach and I think that you came from the internet marketing world, and I've given this in a couple of closed door masterminds where I'm like, guys, you all say that your product's amazing. And I'm like, what's your CRC? What's your CHS? What's your NPS scores? What are your TTVs? And they're like, huh? I'm like, well, if I ask you your CPM, your CPL, your cost per book, your cost of acquisition, all of these things, you could rather lose off in two seconds. I'm like, so you guys say that your product's amazing, and yet you don't.

Measure a single metric around product.

Wow.

And so focusing on that more.

Right, so they just, so the thing is like, if we can get that part right, then you get so much, because if we can just get each customer to get one more customer, then we get our return on ad spend doubles. But then if you think about what your contribution margin is on that extra customer, if you don't have to spend the cost of acquisition, so much of that drops to the bottom line, and then the company just becomes so much more profitable. Just by like tiny levers that we do here, like how can we take, I think we were talking earlier about our publishing business. We're like, okay, publishing is something that takes a long time to do. How can we figure out TTV is time to value? So how can we figure out some sort of experience or some sort of win someone can have in the first seven days? How can we get them a dollar? Is there anything that we can do to promote launching their book? Yeah, exactly. Like something, some proof of concept, and we were able to figure out how to, we're talking about mini book, get that going in a very short period of time so that people could just, and we're like, hey guys, this is an MVP, this isn't your perfect product, we just want to prove to you that it works. And so then they get $1 in their account, and we're like, you are now an owner. You get some momentum. And now you have that identity shift that happens. It's like, I just made money on the internet. Yeah, you did. Now, let's do a real book that's really good. This is not the product, but this is proof of concept. That was a more creative one we had to do. In other businesses, it's like, how can we always drag forward at least some sort of big win so we get the emotional buy-in to then fall through, like when we had the gyms way back in the day. I would run people through a six-week really aggressive diet in the beginning. And that was because even though the sustainable weight loss is it takes a much longer period of time, et cetera, the slower you lose it, the longer it sticks off, but the faster you lose in the beginning, the more likely are to stick with it.

Interesting.

So you get this emotional buy-in and you're like, cool, okay, we just did a lot of weight loss in six weeks, I need you to chill for six.

Right.

But now they believed us because we had just delivered a big win kind of results. Exactly. Quickly. And so it's like we know how to do it, but now, you can trust that we do know how, but now let's just maintain for six weeks, get your hormones back, make sure everything's good, hunky dory, but a little bit more muscle because you lost some during this kind of aggressive cut. And then we'll get into a more sustainable phase. So it's just how can we drag that forward? And I think that level of obsession, the way people obsess about promotion, if they obsess the same way about product, the amount of profit they would make as a result of that is just like, it's huge.

And those are sellable businesses. The marketing driven businesses do not have nearly the enterprise value that the product driven businesses do. So would you say the key to going from good to great is obsessing on product, product greatness?

100%.

What if someone, they have any product, a physical product, digital product, coaching, a software, and they're watching or listening, what should they be thinking about to making the product that much better? They've put a lot of time and energy launching it, building it, they've got sales, maybe they've had it for a year or two. How do they break it all down? And it says, is it 20 different factors? Is it like just do these three things and it's gonna improve the quality of product? What should they think about?

About?

It's a really good question. So there's like three different angles I want to take this. So one is like what I talked about in the book, which is like the value equation. So-- what is that? So there's four variables in the value equation. The first one is the dream outcome, which is, is the thing that I'm delivering fundamentally valuable? And this is especially for people probably more so who are trying like starting.

Out in their entrepreneurial career. You want to map, draw it out for me too if you want to.

Sure. Well, I'll hold it up for people.

Yeah.

So you've got your dream outcome. so I'll just put dream here, right? You've got dream outcome, which is the first variable. Second variable is the perceived likelihood of achievement. And so the idea is, and I'll give you an example of this, if you have, let's say you wanted to get plastic surgery, whatever, and is that.

What you did with your calves?

That's exactly right. If you wanted to get plastic surgery and you had the option of two guys who are gonna do the surgery, one guy has done 10,000, surgery and one guy is fresh out of medical school, this is his first surgery, which guy would you go with? Probably 10,000.

It might even take this guy half.

The time to do the surgery as this guy. And double the price.

Right.

So we might. And it's double the price, why? Because of the perceived likelihood of achievement. We believe that when we pay this man, we are more likely to achieve what we want. Even though the work is the same, probably longer on this side, but our perception of what we are going to get in a real way increases prior to purchase, which is the same reason that if you have like 20 people who told you that this restaurant is amazing, you're willing to pay way more even though you haven't experienced it yet. It's the perceived likelihood of getting the outcome. To rewind on the dream outcome, this is more a commentary that how is it that you have a 50,000, you can solve the same problem, let's say weight loss, because everybody understands that one. If I'm trying to help somebody lose weight, there's $50,000 solutions and there's $5 solutions. There's free solutions, right? $50,000 solutions, you can get liposuction, right, and get a full body lift or whatever. You're getting it in a day. Right. or you can get an e-book for five bucks. So the question is, why are these two things more valuable? And that, again, goes to perceived achievement. But if I went from the weight loss to, let's say, making money, if I had two things, in general, all the things in the making money category will be priced higher because there's a more direct ROI.

Yeah.

So that's why between categories, dream outcome as a category can be higher or lower, but then once you're within a category, it's the other three variables. So perceived likelihood of achievement is number one. of the other three variables. The next variable is underneath, which is the time delay. So between when I pay and when I get, what's my delay there? So if I were to say, using the weight loss example, if you swipe your credit card and you look down at your stomach and you just have abs, how valuable-- We'll pay a lot for that. Exactly. All we did was just decrease the time delay. And so if let's say in a B2B example, if you had a marketing agency, for example, and normally it's like, okay, you guys need to send me all this creative and we got to get everything spun up and it's going to take us 45 days to really get everything We got to build a funnel and have a lot, blah, blah, blah. And then let's do a different example. We're on the same call. The guy says, Cool, we're going to get you going. And you hang up the phone and your phone rings with a prospect. That's pretty big. Even if it's the exact same thing, 45 days from now your phone rings with a prospect, today your phone rings with a prospect, how different is the perception of value? Phenomenally different. Which is why the time delay is such a huge piece, which is why time to value referencing earlier is such a huge part of increasing the perceived value of the product. And so that's the time delay.

That's the third.

And then the fourth one is effort and sacrifice. And so effort and sacrifice are two sides of the same coin. So effort, as I define it, are things that you must begin doing that you do not want to do, that you did not have to do prior to the purchase.

Give me an example.

If I have to wake up early to go to the gym, that would be effort. That is something that I now have to do. And so sacrifice I use as the equal opposite, which is what do I have to stop doing that I want to do that I would continue to doing if I didn't have to stop.

Eating milkshakes at midnight.

You have to stop eating milkshakes at midnight. Yes. And even in the B2B example with the marketing agency, well now what do I have to do? I have to start making this content. I have to start hopping on meetings every week. We have to start looking over these metrics. The hire new people. I gotta what, yeah. Right. And so oftentimes, especially like businesses, they think that their price is the most expensive thing that they have in the cost and it's not. So think about this. If you've ever asked someone, Hey, I'll give you my service for free and they said, no, it's because there are other costs that you're not taking into consideration, which also means a lot of times your price has far more wiggle room in it than you think it does. And if you can decrease a much bigger hidden cost by asking for more money and you can solve a hidden cost, you can make more money and improve their experience at the same time. Right. And that's when you just make oodles and oodles of money.

When does someone know, so this is a good to great concept, right? What we should be focusing on is kind of this main analogy and factor. When does someone understand, a lot of people talk about their worth, like I'm worth this, I deserve this, whether they're an employee or they're an entrepreneur and they want to price something. When should they be thinking about their worth and increasing their rates, whether as an employee or as an entrepreneur, how do they know? Because you're only worth what people are willing to pay. So how do you get people to pay what you believe you're worth?

So I think there's three variables that come into like how much you can charge.

Right.

The first one is value or perceived value. From the prospect.

Perceived value.

Yeah. So perceived value. The second one is how good you are negotiating, which would become which I put that or persuading. You could probably put that as just persuasion in general.

That's a good.

If it's a job, you might be negotiating if it's a customer you might be negotiating to, but it's persuasion in general.

And that's a whole skill to develop on its own.

100% and the third one is how unique it is. So that there's no easy alternative. And so if, for example, let's say I provide something that's really valuable, unbelievable at selling, and then another guy is willing to just do all the same stuff for just less.

Right.

Right, and so it's being de-commoditized, which we talk about in the book too, is that people have to be able to, they cannot, and the goal should be with our services that we have that no one can hold up our service and somebody else's and say, these two are similar enough, I'll pick the cheaper one. And so the goal is how can we differentiate ourselves in enough ways by looking at the value equation and thinking, what are all the things that are making this take longer and how can I remove them? What are all the efforts and sacrifices, even these micro things, these nuances that make things more difficult? And so like the kings of this, if you look at Amazon, Right? Like the biggest companies in the world, I'll reverse. The small companies that are out there, they always focus on the first two things. Let me promise something really big. Let me show you all these testimonials and that's all they do. Just promote these things. It's amazing. Listen to Sammy. It's amazing. Listen to Tommy.

Right?

That's all they do. But the biggest companies in the world focus on the bottom side of the equation, which is how can we make things faster and how can we make things more effortless? Like Netflix destroyed Blockbuster. not because they fundamentally changed the product at all. All they did was they made it happen immediately and from the comfort of your home. And so they just dramatically decreased the cost and effort that was associated with watching movies and boom, they blew up. And so, Jason Fladlien, who's a friend, he said, one of the easiest business models in the world is just look.

At what everyone else is doing and.

Do it in half the time. Right, like, it's the same, like, people are like, what do I do for business? Just look what, if someone can cut your lawn in whatever months hours, you clean houses, so you can clean houses in less time because it's just less inconvenience when you're there in their house.

Less time and less money or same money?

Same money. Or more money. You know, it depends on what are the hidden costs. So like probably with cleaning, what are the hidden, what are all the things that people hate? Scheduling is probably a pain. Hearing the noise is probably a pain. Like silent cleaners. You list this out in the book of the process of thinking through this. But what are all the pains and problems that your customers complain to you about. And so like the goal is always in the support tickets. So when you talk about like obsessing about a customer, right, it's let's go through all the comments on the videos, right? Let's go through all of the support tickets that are coming in and those complaints inside of the complaints, sure, like what you don't want to do is say like, well these guys are all victims because then you lose all the power as a business owner by just blaming them. So if you just accept all of it, it's like, These are all, as long as the thing that they're saying is not false, if it's unreasonable, then let's see if we can figure it out. Maybe no one else has figured out how to do this, but we might as well try. And so I think if you can approach it with very open hands of when you accept the feedback, it gives you the goal to really create huge breakthroughs in products and services.

Were you always open to the feedback from customers?

No.

Or when did you learn to be like, okay, this sounds like a victim conversation, but There's something here where this person's struggling and if I can make it more effortless, it's gonna be a better product for that person.

I think it's just taken time and I think it's, because I think a lot of it I think is really beating down your ego. And I think in a lot of ways with business, in my opinion, ego is the enemy because it gives us too much confidence when we don't deserve it.

When did you start beating down your ego?

I mean, I've been trying to do it since I was 19. It's just been a very slow process. I just realized that it was the root of all the unhappiness that I had. and everything that I have was in comparison to other people with for no reason. And I've obviously adopted some perspectives we'll probably get into later, but that are contrary in nature in terms of how we live, but not just, there's no benefit to ego. There's just none. And then I have a different thing that I've been thinking about recently. I'm excited to share with you. Sure. So you've probably heard this, but there's a lot of evidence that points to, with mitochondrial DNA, that we go back to one woman birthed Like the mitochondrial DNA of all humans just comes, like tracks back to one woman, right? And so I think that that's interesting within the context of legacy, 'cause people talk about legacy and they wanna like leave something for their progeny. And we love our sideways family members, right?

What do you mean?

Like our- oh yeah, like your- yeah, exactly. But like, if we all came from the same mitochondrial DNA, Right? Then, not to be weird and huggy love you, but we're family members. 100%. Yeah, of course. I find that really fascinating. It's like a super distant cousin. And this is why when I met you for the first time, what did I do when I met you?

Deep long hug. Deep long hug. Oh yeah.

And I do this with you.

It was a triple hug.

It was a triple hug.

'Cause you broke in your bro. I was like, no, bring it in, bro.

And then at the end of the.

Hugging, and then you had to surrender.

There's a reason I do that is.

Because, oh, that's the thing.

I didn't know that was the reason.

Well, I mean, unless it's someone where it's like maybe someone who's older that doesn't want to be hugged or, you know, your wife, I'm gonna give a quicker hug. I'm not gonna be grabbing so, yeah. But it's a respectful, you know, understanding the human being in front of you doing your best to respect it, but with you, I knew I could just hug you and it's gonna make you uncomfortable. And it's gonna make you uncomfortable, but For me, I don't know if I'm ever gonna see you again. I don't know if I'm gonna see you tomorrow or anyone tomorrow. And so why not embrace people with a three to five, ten second awkward hug and let people know that you really appreciate the moment.

And you're present.

That's what I try to do. That's what I try to focus on. And if we're all distant cousins, then why not treat each other that way, the best way possible.

And I didn't mean to launch all the way there because I'll go right back to ego. So I can screw this back otherwise we'll go in that direction. But yeah, so I think, because all this comparison, I was like, well, if I were comparing myself to a family member, would I feel the same way? And if all these people were on the same side as me because we're all family, would I still feel like I would, because I've just tried to attack it from a logical perspective of like, how many different ways can I try and diffuse this bomb? And I think there's a lot of keys and you just unlock tiny piece of it and you can just try piece by piece. And I don't think anyone ever conquers.

It, but just hopefully I can over time. Get better. I used to be very competitive as well as an athlete. That's all I thought about was winning. It's like I had to win to feel like I was or I was good enough or I was talented enough or and if I didn't win that I wasn't reaching my goal of winning the championship or the prize or whatever it was and I took that into business for many years and I felt like I needed to compete with other people and then it's funny when I started this show Almost 10 years ago, I was like it can't be about me. It needs to be about collaboration. Yeah, in order for this to really grow and scale and change lives and impact people it can't just be the Lewis How Show all day long. One, I'm not smart enough. I don't have all the answers. I'm not as talented as you. Shorter guys are way smarter. That's why you're so much more brilliant. You know, and I was like, I.

Gotta bring on the smart people and create a safe space. I can bring all the tall guys on, right?

I'll just catch it, right? Like, all my audience will get taller as a result. That's what we're doing. But it's funny because when I started to shift that, the ego goes back into still comparing and ranking some of these things, and I was like, okay, when I started to shift that, It's when the platform and the community started to expand because I made it about shining the light on others and doing my best to shine the light on others. And when you do that, when you shine the light on an idea or a mentor that taught you something, usually good things come back. That's interesting. So when did you start to shed this ego mentality?

I mean, I started attacking when I was 19.

19? And how are you now?

32.

32, yeah.

And I think I have like 40% less ego than I did that.

Yeah.

So and how do you have, how do you diminish the ego as you continue to scale and exit these big companies and build your brand and get more and more attention and known? How do you bring it back down to the humility?

I think it's linking the two. So it's trying to link these good things are happening because I'm decreasing this thing.

That's smart.

And so that way I can have a positive reinforcing association with the success that actually that would normally amplify the wrong character traits.

What do you think would happen if your ego was at the highest level right now?

I think a lot of people would, I mean, a lot more people would not like it. I mean, I don't think the message would get across. To be fair, I think the message would stop, the spread would happen much slower or not at all because the message would change. Because the message wouldn't be about the message, it would be about me. And I think that's, I think that probably the reason that this has grown so much is because you've tried to quiet yourself so that the message and the idea can spread to as many people as possible. And you put the message on the pedestal rather than Lewis on the pedestal. Yeah, of course. And I think your audience realizes that.

Yeah, that's interesting. So what do you think, you were making 50K the first couple of years out of college. You saved 50K within two years, which is amazing. So you were disciplined. What was the habit or the switch from one year to the next that started to bring in more abundance financially, not in an incremental 20%, but it was like, boom, this was 5x, 10x. What was that habit or mindset shift for you that started to develop more income?

So there's like the science and the art kind of both sides. So like the science side is just the leverage. So the amount of money you make is proportional to the amount of leverage you employ in your life. And so, you know, four types of leverage, this is not mine, this is Naval's, but I'll just say them. So you've got labor, I use four C's because it's easier for me to remember. He says labor, I say collaboration. So funny that you said that earlier. But it's just getting other people to basically use their time, right, for your cause. The second level of leverage is other people's money, is getting people to invest in your thing. And then the next two are, so these two are permissionless, the first ones. Like you need to get someone's permission to work for you and you get someone's permission to give you their money. The other two are permissionless, so you can do them on your own. One is media, which is what you have here, because the cost of making one video and having one person see it versus a million people see it is the same cost. And then the other is code. So I say content and code. So those are my four C's. So collaboration, capital, content, code. And those are not binaries. It's not, am I using other people? Am I not using other people? It's to what extent am I using other people? Do I use other people's money? Yes or no? No. It's how much of other people's money am I using? And so each of these are continuums, not binaries. So somebody could just use other people's money and be a billionaire because of the extent they use it, but those are the types of leverage that exist. And so as my income went up, it was by proportion of the amount.

Of leverage I was employing. Really?

What are you, what are these four were you leveraging the most? So in the beginning, I had no leverage because I was an employee. I was using my own time. The next thing that I started doing was I became self-employed. So I had a little online training business that I started in between quitting my job and starting the gym. And so when I started the gym, I started getting labor was the first thing.

Other people, yeah.

Not a lot of it, but I got some of it. And so that gave me that first next tier. I went from-- Part-time interns. Yeah, yeah. I went from $5,000 a month to I think about $30,000 a month. So that was the big jump. It was just, I had a team.

I mean, a small team, but I had a team, right? Now that's overall in revenue. That's not your take on that's in sales.

You might have been losing money or-- Exactly. We made-- I was probably making $20,000 a month. at that point?

For yourself, after expenses and team and everything.

Yeah, that was then.

What did that feel like going from five to 20? Did that make you feel something different? Was there a shift inside of you when you took that action?

Because for me, when I started this, it was all about vanquishing my father. So it was all about, I was Middle Eastern father, only child. So like I was raised by a single dad, it was just me and him. That was it for the vast majority of my life. And so he's Middle Eastern, came here with $1,000. became a doctor, or he was a doctor, came here, learned English from watching television. You know what I mean? Has the American success story. Absolutely.

That's amazing.

And so, I was born here though. Speak another language too?

French was my first actually.

There's a whole story around it, but anyways. French is your... How many other languages do you speak? That's the best one. I'll just leave it at that.

But all of it was about making him proud. Right.

That's what you did. You set out to do that. That's what I was trying to do. And then I think that Throughout my like adolescence, I realized that it was something that was always going to be withheld from me. So it didn't matter what it was, the goalpost would always move so that-- It would never be proud enough.

Right.

And it was just-- and it was because he wanted the most out of me. And so like if I got, let's say, you know, a 99 on a test, it wasn't congratulations, it's what'd you get wrong. Oh man. Right. And that was always what it was. That's okay. Like I'm very happy with my life. And I realized that and so this.

Desire to gain approval turned into a very deep anger. And so towards the world, him, yourself, other people.

Mostly him. Mostly him. And most like him and myself probably split. Probably 50-50, you know what I mean? And so it was like my earlier, I'll say, quote, success was purely fueled by rage. Like it wasn't fine. It was rage. You know what I mean?

I was in the same boat, yeah.

Yeah, and it was like, and I, But there was probably some element of me that just like almost enjoyed the suffering because then like I just would get in the space when you ask like how did I feel by getting the extra 20,000 a month? First my goal was to make as much as my dad and then it was to make more than my dad and then it was to make more than my dad had ever made his whole life. Wow. And so once I had done that.

The.

I wanted the success to be unquestionable. There couldn't be a but, there couldn't be an asterisk. It had to be so undeniable that vanquishing was the word. And so for a five-year period after I quit my job, my dad did not support, he didn't support me quitting my job. Why not?

Even though you were off making money and building a business?

Because he didn't, he's like, what are you a gym owner? Like he's like you went to Vanderbilt, you were on a management consulting career. You got above Harvard's mid-score for your incredible career. Of course.

Right.

Gym owner doesn't sell well in cocktail parties.

Right.

What are you, you know, he's figuring himself out.

Yeah, he's doing this little gym as a side thing. How well is that going?

Right.

And so, I mean, I made plenty of mistakes too when I had the gym. So it wasn't like all, you know, sunshine and rainbows for me. Like I had a lot of mess-ups that I did. I got in bad partnerships. I mean, like, all the things that you could possibly do. And over that five year period of me scaling to six locations with my facilities, at the end of that whole thing, I ended up losing it all. Really?

Yeah.

Lost everything.

Six locations, lost the whole business.

Yeah.

Well, I sold five of them. I shut one of them down. So I wanted to start doing this gym launch thing, which would be like flying around doing turnarounds, because I started.

Doing that's when I met Layla. You find a gym that's kind of like not succeeding and turn it around.

That's why it. Yeah, we- you- do a makeover.

Yeah, exactly.

Bar rescue, same exact thing.

Same exact thing.

I should have done a TV show with it. Believe me. The many regrets I have, right? That would have been an awesome one. We did 32 turnarounds.

Wow.

It was almost two years, yeah. And so we started doing that. And anyways, I lost everything because I took all the sale money and I put it into my last location and then the partner that I had there siphoned the money out. Because I was like, yeah, I'll put all the money from the sale of these gyms into this thing. Like, it doesn't matter. It was my own mistake. It was on me. But it was even then it was you know, we'll see you know, we'll see how like this isn't real like we'll see and then once I started once gym watch really started taking off it wasn't until I think we did like 17 million in EBITDA like profit take home in one year in one year that my dad I was 27. That's crazy yeah My dad called me and he's like are you sitting down? I remember like at this point like we were like not talking too much you know, I mean maybe every few months, it'd be like a five minute phone call. And so I was like, Sure, yeah, I got time. What's up? And he's like, you,'re gonna want to hear this. And I was like, okay, what? And he was like, I'm sorry. And it was the first time he'd ever apologized to me in my life. And what's interesting to me though is that it didn't feel like anything.

I didn't care.

Why not? Because I had stopped caring about what he thought about me a long time ago. And it was like when I quit my job was the day that like I I accepted dying to my father. Wow. Because very much to me at that point was I was really, really sad at that point in my life when I had the job, because I had really done everything that he had wanted me to do. I finished Vanderbilt in three years as president of fraternity. I had won writing awards. I'd done like a bunch, like I'd done everything, you know what I mean? I was vice president of the powerlifting team. Every club. All the stuff I could possibly do. Yeah, finish it. Yeah, while still being president and did it in three years, right? and got a management consulting job that was like a good job, had all the credibility. And it just, I knew it wasn't enough and I knew that. And so I knew that the choice for me was that I either had to die to him or I had to die to myself. And that was ultimately like the choice that I put in front of myself. And that was whenever I was like, maybe I should just get, I was like, die to him or die to you. And so that was what gave me the confidence to break that. And then I physically moved because I couldn't be in the same area.

Wow.

So I actually- you- were 23 at this point or 20?

Yeah.

So I called my dad when I was like in Ohio and I'm from Baltimore. So I'm like, how- that was for you. I called him when I was there and I was like, Hey, by the way, I'm doing the gym thing. He was like, okay. He's like, why don't you come over? We'll talk about it. 'Cause he knew that if he came over with enough battering, I would be like, fine, I know this is a smart thing. I'll take the gym, you know, I'll apply to Booth and Harvard or whatever and I'll do that whole thing. and that, because that was a cycle. I just kept doing that. And I was just like, no, I'm not gonna do it. So I, I was like, well, I can't. I'm in Ohio. He was like, what do you mean? And then the tone totally shifted. And he was like, you always do these crazy things. And you're always like, he's like, you're never balanced. It's always extreme with you. There's no middle path, blah, blah, blah. And so anyways, I, you know, I did that five years. Gyms lost it all anyways. And then started gym launch. And then that's when, and then that really took off. Sure.

And then, but when he called me.

And he apologized, And this is where I'm ashamed of myself, but I could have just let it lie and been like, Thanks, appreciate it. What'd you do instead? Instead I said, I was like, you know, when people get up on stage and they're like, hey, they get awards and they're like, hey, mom and dad, I just want to say thanks so much for always believing me. I was like, I won't say that. Oh my gosh. I was like, because you never did. I was like, the only time you accepted me was once every other person on this planet had accepted it too.

Oh my gosh man.

And so, that's so I said that.

It's intense. On the phone, you said that?

Yeah.

What do you say to that? He said, well, we'll see how long it lasts.

Oh my gosh. So that was-- so he was still.

Kind of in competition with you.

Yeah.

And to be fair, when he apologized, he said, you know, I'm sorry. He said, but in my defense, if it had been in my time, I would have been right. And so, you know, but all that to say, like I should have just said, like, appreciate the apology, you know, thank you. you know, Tony Robbins said something that I thought was really impactful was like, for the vast majority of my life, it's been like how my father shaped me or whatever. But rather than thinking like, what can I use from this dynamic? Like what gift do I have?

Yeah, like from his mother kind of like beating him or whatever.

Yeah, exactly. Like what do I, like what do I, you know, they're blaming for the good, right? And so like I have so many things to blame for good. from that and I'm very, very happy with my life. That is why $20,000 a month didn't feel significant to me because the goal that I had, my expectations weren't to make money. My expectation was that I had to make more than he had ever made. And so I had a very big vacuum to drive towards, which I think in a lot of ways was a gift because like I blew past 100,000 a month, 500,000 a month, million a month. Like I blew past those things because like it was never about having enough money for me. It was about feeding this monster. But once I got there, I realized that what I had done was set up a game to win by my father's rules. Ooh. And so then I-- and you could never win. Right.

And to be fair, would I want.

To win a game that I was, wasn't for me? It was making you suffer.

Sure.

You're playing the wrong game. I'm playing his game.

And so I did win, but I won at his game, not mine. Right, right. And so that was kind of what I think making that realization was, it was kind of the the slow shift that happened from there.

So when you won the financial game or the game of like, I've made more than you in a month or a year than you've made your whole lifetime, how did that make you feel? And when did you realize you needed to start playing a different game and what would that game become?

Okay, there was three questions there. What was the first one?

How did it make you feel the moment you crossed the finish line of the game of making so much more than he'd ever made in a short amount of time?

Relief, because we actually got our relationship back. Not like, you know, I wouldn't say we have like sunshine and rain, but like we have a functioning relationship. I would say it's role-based. Like I'm a father, you know.

Yes.

But what happened was we are both very like strong personalities and it wasn't until I think that he accepted me as often our relationship that we were able to kind of like move forward again. Because before that, my dad's, he's a doctor, so he's always had, you know, like decent money. and I wanted to be beholden to no one, you know what I mean? Including him, like I didn't want his money. I didn't want anything, you know? And so I think I had to establish my own, I had to really plant my own flag to be seen as a man in his eyes. And so I think once that happened, I think I felt there was some level of like, there's no conflict here anymore. Like, this is undeniable. This is beyond reproach. I have an attractive wife who's really nice and awesome. I have a business, so I'm in good shape. And if you think about it, like the way, I mean, I'm just being really real with you, I blame my father for the many things that I have become in a lot of ways, right? Because everything that was not perfect was criticized, right? And so like, I've had six packs since I was 15. And it was because he used to always criticize everyone who was overweight and being that they're undisciplined and they don't try hard, right? And then I've, you know, like, and then it was like about having pretty good, nice, everything, perfect women, right? Not just pretty, but like everything has to be perfect, right? And then making lots and lots of money. And so it's like all of these elements I had to max out to again win at that game. But my whole life was designed to be bulletproof, was that so that I just wouldn't be criticized. And so that was, 'cause that was what I just, I knew that if I could criticize myself harder than anyone could, then if they did say anything, it was never as mean as what I would say to me.

What's the meanest thing you say to yourself?

Oh, like, it's all around just not being good enough right now. I mean, oh, not now. Not now.

But I was.

That's what it was. Yeah. 100. And it was. It was about being. To be fair, the actual thing would just be being weak. And so it's all about strength mentally.

Emotionally, physically, financially, everything.

Just weak.

That's how you felt.

Yes.

You felt powerless for most of your 20s and 20s for sure.

And so everything that I did was to counteract that, right? Like, what can I do?

She's big and strong as I can get, yeah. I'm gonna make as much money as possible, have all the women I can get, yeah.

Exactly, 100%. And so I pushed against that to try and to quell that, that need or that desire, that feeling.

Did it satiate that need when you had all those things?

Yes and no. Yes, because when I got there, it forced me to change my perspective. perspective is what changed the way I felt. Basically realizing that those things were never going to solve anything is what allowed me to. Les Brown, I think, says this where he says, Everyone knows that money doesn't make happiness, but everyone's like, I'll see for myself.

You know what I mean?

And so I think it was one of those, I had to cross all the, and I'd say this not as a slight to anyone else, but I had to check off the easy ones from the list, which is getting in shape, getting the good wife, getting the money in the business, all that stuff. Those are circumstantial. That means I can push with enough effort, I can change my conditions, I can change my surroundings and my environment. And if I can change those things, will they make me feel better? And so I think once I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that that didn't work, maybe they helped me.

Maybe they helped in some ways, but not the internal ways. So what did you have to shift your perspective or what was that shift where you could still have it all and then have it all internally as well?

I think that the whole ego death concept that we were talking about at the very beginning, I try not to talk about this too much because I think a lot of people take offense to it and I don't mean it that way. I share this is just what worked for me and not as a criticism of anyone else's beliefs. For me, the idea that there was no such thing as legacy, that when I died eventually everything that I had would become dust, and that anything expanded over a long enough time horizon disappears, right? Which if you are like Christian, for example, it's the whole book of Ecclesiastes, if you. And I think the realization of that allowed me to quiet my ego a lot so that I could be more present in the idea that, like, this moment will only be here in my mind, and anything that I do here will not last. And so it shifted how I worked. It shifted how I saw relationships. And a lot of my thinking is around, like, my 85 year old self. I feel like my number one Mentor is like, my fictitious 85 year old self because it's the only person that I really believe has my best interest at heart and has no ulterior motive. And so there's this tweet that I had that went pretty viral, but it was like listening to a billionaire or a millionaire, I'll just use that. Like when I was in my 20s, I wanted to be a millionaire. And when I was a millionaire, I wanted to be in my 20s. And so the idea that my future self would trade all the money he had to be poor in 20 again made me really reanalyze how I saw living life in the moment. If I literally in the future will value my present moment more than the achievement of the thing that I'm seeking right now in the present, then something's off. Because even my future self knows that. Because right now I would pay all the money I have to get 10 years back. Is that even thinking about it? And so then all of what I'm going to achieve in the next 10 years, I would happily give up to be right where I am right now. And so I think thinking about that really shifted a lot for me because it helped me quiet, I'm not saying eliminate, but quiet some of the thoughts that are more ego driven because the ego always wants to like separate and isolate from others and prove that it's better. And if I know that it will all be dust, there is no better because we're all going to be dust. And so in that same way, if like if we're all going to be dust then we're all siblings. like two very strong frames for me at least. It helped me quiet that aspect and I think in that way I was able, I think, ask my people, but like I think I was able to show up better as a leader. I think I was able to show up better as a husband. Show up better like to make content, things like that. Like I don't think I could have made the stuff we make now five years ago because I still think it would have been more, it would have been too proving something. Yes, too hard. Perfect.

Numbers proving.

100% of them proving someone, proving a fictitious foe wrong.

Right. Right.

They're all talking about.

Right.

No one cares about you.

Exactly. And so that was really, and it's like I had to shift from like, no one cares about you, to like, I really want to have a shirt that says no Lives Matter, but I feel like it would be way too.

No one cares about you.

But I think there's like a lot of, like, meet to that where it's like if we can, because in that way we are all equal. And so I think it's almost the most egalitarian perspective is that like in the end we will all be dust. And so I think in that way that's like we have these exchanges that we have and in some ways it makes it more beautiful.

Why do you think so many people care about power and respect so much?

It usually was withheld from them, I think. I think the things that were withheld from us are the things that usually we seek the most, I think. How many really successful guys have daddy issues? You know what I mean? So many. And so it's like, okay, well, I didn't get his respect, so I'm gonna have to compensate with my circumstances, with my environment, so that everyone respects me. And some people do that through fear, some people do that for violence, some people do that through success. It really just depends what vehicle you choose. But like, I feel like the deep need is the same.

Yeah, there's something like, I can't remember the statistic, but a number of US presidents, a big number of them like grew up without a father or their father died early in their life. And there was, I can't remember the stats, it's like 30 or 40% or something of like the US presidents lost their father or didn't have a father or something like that early on. And it's like, well, you know, now they're going to go prove something or go to be something, you know, to what about the the habits that you learned of the wealthy people once you started to really earn and scale your wealth. Were you studying wealth or were you just fixated on like, how do I get one more customer and increase my prices, make better product? What did you learn about the habits of the rich? I haven't learned much about the habits.

Of the rich at all, to be very candid with you. I think that maybe there are some beliefs that, because, like, my dad was a doctor. I wouldn't say he was, like, you know, Ultra wealthy, but, like, we lived an upper middle class, you know, lifestyle. But in terms of like wealth as I think you and I would probably understand it, I didn't know anything about that and I don't think I've ever really studied it very much. I would say that my heroes now, like I started studying wealth after I became wealthy.

So like- what did you learn about it afterwards? And what do wealthy people do that you think poor people don't do?

They pick higher leverage opportunities in a sentence. So like rich dad, poor dad, like poor dad says get a job. Poor dad says get a higher paying job. like Rich Dad says, and the thing is there's so many innate beliefs that seem commonplace. Like, well, of course, you know what I mean? Like, well, of course, you know, and you know, you buy some real estate and it'll appreciate over time. Of course, you invest in some stocks, like, yeah, of course. But like, poor dads just don't say that. And so you have to like learn that, I think. And I didn't, so I'm grateful in that I didn't have to learn that because I heard that just was, of course, yeah, once you have some money, like, of course you don't spend your whole income. Of course you don't. And so there's a lot of of course you don't that I think I inherited just by being like a saving father. But there's also some upper middle class people who don't save anything. But I think my dad did a lot of, I think he helped a lot with like money hygiene. I think I've had a lot of really good money hygiene from my dad. The big breakthrough that I had for me was when I stopped focusing on, and this is gonna sound backwards, but when I started my gyms, I was all about building the business. Right? And when I built the biggest companies that I've had and now recently sold and now we have our portfolio, it was about how do we make the most money? And I know that sounds completely backwards, but the only way that you can make the most money is to provide an exceptional valued service and charge a ton of money for it. And because I optimized around making money, I started going for low capital expense businesses because I had lost everything after that. five year stint. And so I was like, never again am I going to reinvest every dollar from the business back into the business because I've lost it before. So when I started the next business and every business I've had thereafter, like we take dividends every month and we do that because you don't wait till there's an exit 10 years later.

I mean, put all your money in.

I'd love to do both. Yeah, yeah.

Why not both?

Sure.

Right? And so that was-- Take a dividend and get a bigger return.

Yeah.

But not just put money in and wait. and get no money back?

100%.

And the thing is, and this was a fallacy I had, because people always talk about reinvesting in their business, but I realized that that just meant that they weren't making profit. And so the vast majority of businesses, even the software world, is somewhat shifting in this, but they want to see profit. And then even better is if you have net free cash flow, which is just a fancy word for the amount of money that you can take out every month after making necessary investments in the business. And so I wanted to have businesses that pumped cash flow because I had lost it all before. And so I think there's a lot of, like every one of my business seasons, I would say I've had three business seasons. I had my gym ownership period, I had my turnaround and early gym launch day period, and then I had Prestigious Labs, the licensing business in Allen. That was like my last season.

Where you exited the whole thing.

Yeah.

And then I'd say now we're in our third season, I guess. So brick and mortar gyms, licensing, supplements, and software. And then, you know, third season is what we have now. And each of those has a huge, huge magnitude of leverage that was added to it. And so, you know, this was like, gym launch was started on accident in that I was like, this might be a way that I could make money.

Because people were like, hey, you're doing this pretty well for your own gyms. Can you help me turn?

Exactly what it was. Yeah.

Like, can you teach me what you've done? Exactly. All right, let me go in here and. I just helped them double their revenue in 60 days. Maybe I'm good at this.

People pay me more for that than they'll pay me to help them lose 20 pounds.

Right.

And so that was when I went from B to C to B to B.

Yes.

And then from there, to be honest, it was just going up another order of magnitude because now, instead of just building the one business, now we're building lots of businesses at the same time. And so that's why acquisition.com, I think, has a much higher-- has bigger feet for lack of better.

Right.

So what do you look for when you're acquiring a business or investing in a business that has cash flow and what businesses have the best cash flow?

So this will be relevant for everybody in the audience and also hits on what we were talking about with the wealth thing. Wealthy people choose higher leverage opportunities and we went over what leverage was earlier. The best businesses, especially in an inflationary period, are businesses that have low capital expenses.

Okay.

And that's because it's-- Can you have some examples? Yeah, yeah. I'll give you opposite examples to make and then I'll drive it. So something that does have high capital expense, which is what you would not want to get into, would be stuff that has lots of inventory, stuff that has lots of supply chain, lots of manufacturing, heavy equipment, things where you have to constantly buy more stuff in order to increase capacity. A low capital expense business are things like services, services, digital businesses, Software is mixed because sometimes the development team can be considered capital expense. It really depends on how you build the dev team. But the idea is that if you can produce 10 times more units without phenomenally changing the cost basis, then you will have a business that has lower capital expenses. Yes. And so that's what you like. And most of those types of businesses produce more cash flow, have more pricing power. And so, I mean, that's what Warren Buffett invests in. Right, it's high cap, you know, like insurance, Geico. There's no capital, it's risk. They're literally assessing risk. It's math. Like the business is math. Like if you really think it's just math, it's the entire business of insurance. And what's crazy, just as a side note, is that a great way of figuring out the highest leveraged businesses that exist is looking at the businesses that have been here the longest. Insurance has been here since before the World Wars. Banks have been around forever. JP Morgan was in the 1800s. The biggest insurance companies, they're all 100 plus years old. They're found in the 1800s. And so when you have a business that's lasted that long, to me that's a great breadcrumb of like, this thing has to print money. Because it means that they were able to still keep making money through wars, through famines, depressions, all of it, and they were still able to keep going. And so I think that when people are like, when you look at all the, like many of the biggest businesses that exist, they have phenomenal gross margins. I don't want to get too business term-y here, but the gross margin is how much incremental cost it is to make an extra widget. A pill, for example, costs $100 million to make the first pill. Then every pill after that costs a penny.

Sure.

The gross margin on the pill is very high because if they sell each pill for $10, they cost them a penny, those are great margins. Most people who are small business owners or people who are trying to get into small business price like small business owners. They say, well, it costs me a dollar, I'll sell it for three, or I'll sell it for two. But if you're already starting on like a 50% gross margin, it's very, very hard to make money. Because think about it, like that's at 100, you're already at half, and then you have the rest of everyone else you have to pay off that extra 50% very hard to do. And so like, I'll give a couple rules of thumb if anyone wants this. But like, if you're, if you're building a service-based business for us, I would, I, by all means, I have to get gross margin is above 80%, which means five times the cost of goods. So if it costs me $100 a month, the minimum I'll charge is 500. And so that also gets you to think about business differently, which is not necessarily even how much can I charge, but how can I provide value and make it cost as little to me? How can I be as efficient as possible? And if you think about what technology does over time, is technology takes something that's valuable and makes the cost of delivering it less. And so that's what happens is a lot of people are able to have access to things that were once only for the wealthy, but now become for the common men because the cost basis decreases as a result of technology. And so technology as we see it, we can create technology, but you can also have technological breakthroughs just through process.

In your own business.

And that's where niching down and being very specific about the avatar becomes important, especially when you're starting, because then you can productize the service. Because if you're doing everything custom, which most people when they're starting out do, it becomes really difficult to become efficient. And it's really difficult to become efficient at a very low margin.

Right?

Or you have to charge huge fees, which most people are too afraid to do. And so the flip side is if I do the same thing over and over and over again, I will get better and more efficient at it and I will know how to do it faster and quicker and cheaper. And I specifically choose this type of customer so that I can have more margin because there are millions of even this one specific type of avatar. And then from there, I can take the gross margin, the extra cash that I have, and I can hire the best people. I can invest in marketing. But when you have such little margin to work off of, it's very difficult to make money.

Yeah, it's so hard to grow. That's interesting. Do you think it's going to be harder or easier to become wealthy and start businesses over the next few years with everything that's happened in the last couple of years and where this whole great 2030 agenda is coming and all these different things are happening? The war and all the, there might be another pandemic, whatever it might be. Do you think it's going to be easier or harder to make money?

I think technology in general makes things easier. for most people, I mean, because at the end of the day, it's increased access for more people. And so I think-- To reach more.

People at any moment.

Yeah.

If I were just to use history as a guide, business has only gotten easier to get into. It's gotten more competitive and easier to get into. And so I think that what happens is just the arena gets bigger. So you got more gladiators, so it's more competitive, but more people can walk in. And so I think-- but for the world in general, the more people you have fighting to make amazing products and services, the better it is for society. But the downstream effect of that is that in a capitalist system, it is a winner-take-all for many, not all, but for many businesses. And just by the nature of it, that does create social disarray. But the thing is, it's still the best system that we have. We don't have a perfect system. Because the other systems remove incentive, and humans are driven by incentive. Even the survivorship bias, like every MLM in the world exists off the fact that there's that one guy who makes $500,000 a month selling Shake Mix, and the other 5 million Shake Mix producers are like someday.

One day I get there, yeah.

And it's just survivorship bias, right? But that's why the whole capitalist machine works. So I think they're like figuring out some sort of a creative way, like my, I put this in my YouTube channel, but the idea of having 100% death tax, I thought was like, take down the income taxes and all this stuff, but the thing that creates the conglomerate at the top is that if let's say I have $100 billion, right?

That's interesting.

And if I have $100 billion, I'm probably pretty good at managing it because that's why I have $100 billion. So let's say I gain 15%.

You're holding it. You're not using it yet.

Yeah, let's say I gain 15% on my assets. So I make $15 billion on my assets. It is so hard for anyone to make that up. in a lifetime. With just the one, and like that might be my kid who gains 15 and the next year he gains 20. And so the compounding effect of the wealth is across generational is where I think it gets crazy. But if there were 100% death tax, because obviously this is aligned with my belief that all of it disappears anyways. So this is obviously Alex's-- there's two cents in the world. But it's just basically dramatically lower the income taxes. I think income taxes should be as close to zero as possible. And then make the capital gains taxes higher because that's only going to really affect the wealthy if you really want.

To think about it.

Because people who, if you make with your hands, awesome. If you make on your assets, that's the stuff that has infinite leverage with time. So if you trade the most expensive thing for your money, then I feel like you should get taxed less than.

If you trade no time for your money. Sure.

This is like a weird thought experiment. What do you think would happen if it was 100% death tax? I think that billionaires would become far more giving. And as they approach the end, they know they can't keep it. And I also think it would change the way the game is played. Because if you know, because this is the analogy that I like, I haven't heard it anywhere else, so I think it's mine. But if you were to imagine life as a poker game, right? And everybody grows up, they become 18 years old, they can go into the casino, they get a chip, or 21, whatever age you can be. And then you get a chip, and then you sit down at the table, and you're dealt cards, right? And there's all the other players around the table. and depending on the cards you're dealt and the skill you have, you begin to amass chips, right? And the difference between this fictitious, you know, casino and the casino of life is that in the real world, you can amass chips, you cash out, you have a big wad of money, and you walk out the door. But in the casino of life, when the Grim Reaper taps you and tells you it's time, you have to get out from the table, but your chips stay on the table, and they push them to the middle to be distributed by everybody else and continue to get played for. that's when you realize that it was a fake game with rules that never mattered to begin with. And so I bought this piece of land in Austin. It was this huge, it was like a big, really, really nice lot. And I remember thinking to myself, like.

Got me some land.

Yeah, got me some land, right?

I own this.

Yeah, I have that trade to that thing on the rise. My yeah, right. And then I thought to myself, I was like, well, the guy before me thought the same thing, and the guy before him thought the same thing, and the guy before him thought the same thing. and I was like, and we've literally still been looking at the exact same piece of dirt and it's just been cycled. Even if it was father to son, even if it was family to whatever, like the like death taxes everyone 100%. Like, even if the government doesn't death taxes everybody 100% and then time taxes your money to infinity because, like, people are like, I want to build a legacy. It's like, that's even just with, like, within Americana, you know, I mean, within the times of America. But, like, you go a thousand years and there's never been the same superpower over a thousand year period. and so we're like, I'm gonna leave a legacy. It's like, but that would be like, you know, let's say an ancient Greek saying, I'm gonna leave a legacy for my kids when, like, they might change their currency by, you know, XYZ or. And there's so many things. And I've had a real experience with this because my great, great grandfather was a ruler in Iran, which is where we're from. We got kicked out because we were loyal to the Shah back in the day, which is why my dad came to the US, and so. Despite that, my great great grandfather had like 400 wives, ruler. Very, very wealthy.

Really?

Yeah, very, very wealthy. Different time, different culture. Very, very well. He's a ruler, right? All the money, all the women, all the everything. Literally a ruler, right? And here I am, I'm not even that many generations separated from him, right? Even that.

You don't have all that wealth. I don't have that land, yeah.

Right.

And so like the idea that we're gonna somehow, because the desire for legacy is the desire to cheat death. Like, that's what it stems from. It's like, we don't want to die. We want to last forever. It's we want to make something that is impermanent. And so we fool ourselves into thinking that the accolades and the material success and the books we write, whatever, are going to last forever. And they're probably not.

Right?

And so, like, I mean, the sun's going to disappear at some point.

Right?

So, like, if we don't do anything before then, like, at the very least, that's going to happen. And so if that is the inevitable outcome, I think it shifts the way people think. And I think that's when you start changing, I mean, Tony Robbins talks about global belief systems, and that's why if someone adopts a new religious belief, everything changes because the reasons they do and the way they believe the world works changes. And so, I think that if they did do 100% death tax, it would be a really interesting way to see the downstream effects of how it would.

Change the way the players played the game. What do you think would happen if all the billionaires started distributing their wealth sooner? I think what would happen is-- Or would they be as hungry to be and driven to push and build and innovate?

Yes.

To generate the wealth if they knew, I gotta give this away anyways quickly.

I think they would. I think it's because it's, I think it's, I'm gonna say something that may sound bad, but I think winners win because of who they are. And so I think it's like sales guys, like you can have an incentive or a comp plan.

They just wanna win.

But they are salespeople. And if I get on the phone, I want to sell because of who I am, not because of the comp. The comp is the ticket to get me to say yes to the deal. but it will not change my activity. I will do it because I love to sell. I think billionaires get there because they love the game. You don't get to a billion without just-- because you obviously don't need it for you. You stopped needing it for you millions and millions ago. You do it just because you love the game. What I do think, and the reason that I like that solution is because-- Elon Musk said this-- but private enterprise is 10 times as efficient at capital allocation compared to the government. Every dollar that private enterprise spends, it's 10 times more efficient. And so it is like if we were to death tax 100%, so whatever you accumulate while you're alive, it just goes back. And the thing is, it's not that it would go back into the system through the government. It would if you were lazy. But most people, knowing the government was going to take it, the less efficient vehicle at the end of your life, you would then start thinking about how can I allocate this money efficiently? And so I think what would happen is you'd create far more ingenuity and innovation around social enterprise. Before they died. Solving problems. Knowing that the wealth would eventually disappear. So like it's more there's this backstop that no one wants to hit. And so I think what happened is they would change their behavior before hitting the backstop. I don't think a lot of people would just be dumping their billion to the government. I think just knowing that they had to would then trigger them to yeah, yeah. That would be, you know, hey, that's.

Alex's two cents of the world, which is obviously different.

What's, you just had a big exit, right?

Last year, what was that for? How much? It was 46. 46.6 million. So when that enters your account.

What.

Did you expect would happen? What did happen? And what can you teach other people about what they should expect to happen when they have a big exit?

So I will say that I, I did not feel the money. I did feel the loss of cash flow because I had this, you know, I measured myself off cash flow for since.

Now you don't have any.

Right.

You got a big chunk.

Yeah.

But then no money coming in every month.

So I actually felt-- Interesting. And I probably still feel poorer now than I did before the exit.

That's interesting.

Because the cash flow is going down. Now, I know that acquisition.com is going to be, I think, significantly bigger than Jim.

Sure.

Than those companies were. But in the interim, I definitely did not feel any better after that. I am happy that I did it because I do think I'm in the right vehicle doing what we're doing now, making the books, making the YouTube channels, the Twitters, the social medias, all of them. But the cash flow is what I felt. And because I'd taken dividends my whole life, the amount of money that we got out was pretty much about what we already had anyways. So it was not life-changing in any way. It didn't change how I lived at all. Like, not at all. We didn't. We didn't have any big, like, what are you gonna buy? I was like, well, I could, you know, I'm happy already. Yeah, I could buy 100 Lambos before the sale. You know what I mean? Like, that wasn't. And I never bought them in, and I never did. It's like, you know, because I don't get a lot out of that. What else was different? Losing the team is hard. Because when you sell a company, you sell the people. Like that's something that people don't like.

The connection, the loss.

It sounds bad. Yeah, but you sell the organism.

You sell the system, the people, the process, and everything.

100%. And so that was hard because there's definitely times now that we're building acquisition.com where I'm like, man, I wish I had so and so. I already taught this person everything I'd have to do it again. But there's also some level of beauty to it because now that I'm doing acquisition.com, I have a different appreciation for what I'm doing because every other time that I've started something, it has been from a place of lack. It has been from a like, well, this is what's going to not make me poor. You know what I mean? The gyms was all about that and then I lost it all. So the second time was all about that again. So this time I'm starting not like that.

That.

And I know what it got like before we sold the companies last year. I spent basically 12 months not doing anything because I wasn't required in the business. Like it truly, it ran. And so I had a lot, like it was very depressing. Exactly. It was very depressing for me.

What happens if we don't have a purpose?

I mean, you find one. You know what I mean? And so for me- But you're in a depressed state even though you have.

I mean, I'm sure you were fine, but you were emotionally mentally like, what am I doing every day?

Exactly.

I have no idea.

Can I go to the gym for so long?

Right. Can I go out to dinner?

Yeah.

What else are you gonna do? I can eat every meal I want. I can travel. Okay, now what? After three months of that, you got some mission. You have some purpose, right? Even though you have the money, your safety, you have everything.

Security, but it wasn't fulfilling. 100%. And so that was 12 straight months. And it was because we were going through a sales process. you can't start new initiatives because I'm in the middle of a sale. And you don't want to make any massive new hires. And so you just basically have to just maintain. And the whole time you're wondering, I hope this deal goes through. Because if it doesn't, then you just wasted a year just doing nothing. And then you might have to do it again. So it was a super, super, it was one of the most emotionally tiring years of my life because it's always like, this is about to happen, it's not going to happen. The deal's on the table, the deal's off the table. There's all of this drama that's happening constantly. And I also, one of the things that sucked that I didn't like was as soon as I had made the decision to sell or that I was going to entertain the idea of selling, and this is a mistake I made, everything became about satisfying a fictitious overlord of like, what will they think about this move? Well, how will they value this? And I started thinking, whatever acquirer, whatever private equity was going to buy the company, like, how are they going to see this? Are they going to value this? Or is this a waste? And so what happened was I started making the private equity buyer my customer. And that was a mistake. And so I think that like at the end of the day, and now that, and what happened was interestingly, we started the sales process because my wife and I were beat down. We were just very tired. We've been in gyms for almost 10 years at that point. Not to say that that's not a good thing, but like whatever. We were ready. We were ready. But in order for us to sell it and make it a sellable business, we had to fix all the things that were wrong with it, right? And so we took a year before the year. So it was 2020 or something. Exactly.

Yeah.

So it took two years basically, one year to like fix everything and then one year to sell it. But the thing is, it's just like when you have a house that you like fix up before you get ready to sell it. By the time you're about to sell.

You'Re like, I love this house.

This is amazing.

I just fixed all these, all the problems I fixed.

Now I've got more cash flow. It's more efficient. You know, I got rid of the toxic people. Yeah, exactly. And so it was again, a very like mind trip experience where I'm like, well, maybe I should just hold it as an asset that just produces cash flow. Uncle Warren never sells anything. Selling is what makes you rich. Keeping is what makes you wealthy. I've got all these things in the back of my mind, but I think ultimately, no matter what we had done, we would have been fine. But I think for me right now, I think the likelihood that the choice, if I had two alternate realities, which I don't have to plan, I think that the choice will ultimately yield more impact for more people. I would not have the attention to do acquisition.com and the media stuff that we're doing right now. I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be focused on your gyms. Yeah, exactly. On those companies that were in that portfolio. And acquisition.com would still be a side thing, but it probably wouldn't be the main thing. Whereas now it is 100% of my attention and the companies are killing it. And I feel renewed.

You mentioned you'd always created something from a lack.

Yeah.

But now it sounds like there's a different intention for why you're building something. What happens when people shift their intention from scarcity lack mindset to growth, impact, service, whatever it might be that you're coming from.

I'm so excited for this question. So I think the biggest thing that changes is time horizon.

Time horizon, what is time horizon?

And I think the single greatest differentiator between the poor and the middle class, middle class and rich, rich and the truly wealthy, is how they see time. And if you think about money as simply a condensed unit of time, right, that's all money is. Like you trade it for time, I mean, you can trade time for money, so like it is, they're almost equivalent units. and the people who know how to master their time the most mean that they know how to master their money the most. And so really, if you want to master to the original question of like, how do wealthy people become wealthy? It's because they master their time. And so Time Horizon is just like the perspective from which we see what we want to achieve. And so if I am doing, if I'm building a company from the place of like, I believe that this company should exist, I believe this problem is worth solving, and that is where you start it from, then you build it differently. Versus, I need to make money. I need to make money this week. I need to make money tomorrow.

Because, what can I go make money with?

Exactly. And so I think, I mean, you've built this amazing brand here. If people were able to not ask for 12 months and just serve.

Dude, this is what I did when I launched this. 'Cause I literally sold another company. I didn't make that much, but I had enough for two years to live.

Yeah.

And I was living pretty frugal. I wasn't like, I never bought anything fancy. It was like, you know, whatever. Food and travel, maybe.

Right? Yeah.

But I was still sleeping on couches back then, you know, just because I wanted to save. I want to spend it on hotels. I didn't start spending hotel rooms until about four or five years ago. All right. I would always find a way. Who do I know in that town? I can crash on. Anyway, side note. But when I launched School of Greatness 10 years ago, I remember saying, I'm gonna do this for one year because I I wish I had access to this. I wish this was a thing that I could go listen to in the world to teach me. And I'm not going to try to make money. I'm going to do it for a year all in, but I'm not going to try to make money. I don't want to make money. I mean, if the money came, great. But it wasn't my intention. It was just how can I create the best content to serve people on the things that I wish I would have learned in school growing up. The School of Greatness. And After one year, I was like, man, this thing is really starting to take off.

Yeah.

You know, but it wasn't based on how do I make as much money?

Totally.

It was, how do I create something that could really make a lasting change?

Yeah.

And that intention is what's made me sustainable for 10 years, loving the process.

Totally.

So when people come from a place, when I'm hearing you say, when they come from a place of that intention of service or because this needs to be in the world, it's art.

Art exists not to do something. It exists to exist.

Right.

That's like no one says, why did you paint that?

It's like, it needed to come out. It needed to express it.

Exactly. And so I think that if people chose their businesses that way, I think, and don't be wrong, I'm all about making money. By all means, go get your back.

Earn as much as you can.

Yeah, by all means. But I think that what it does is it ends up freeing you to then make your real impact, because then you can start whatever the next thing, and hopefully your first thing is that thing, but realistically it probably isn't. And all you have to do is look at every entrepreneur that's really wealthy, the amount of graveyard businesses they have in their back.

Right.

Right.

And so right now, if you're listening and you're like, I'm not sure if this is the perfect business idea. Let me just save you the time. It's not because look at every other person who has been ultra successful. They have 10 failed business ideas. So just start. So you can just start notching off the bad businesses. But extending the time horizon, I think only happens if you do shift the intention through which you're building it or you're just unbelievably self-discipline. But I think it's easier to just start at it with the right heart. Small tangent, but I think it'll be worth it, is that the reason that most people aren't successful, in my opinion, is that they sacrifice global benefit for local benefit. And that happens in all areas of life. You eat the piece of cake because you have an acute local benefit versus the global benefit of a six-pack that lasts for a very long time or better health, et cetera.

You mean the instant gratification as opposed to delayed gratification?

Exactly. And I just like saying global, I just like saying local versus global because it happens in an organization. For example, sales guys don't want to put the notes in the thing because it's a pain in the butt to put the notes in the CRM. But finance needs the notes, customer service needs the boat, success needs the boat, like all of these other departments need those notes for all the other things that we're going to do. And so it's a local cost but for a global benefit. And so I think if people were able to delay that immediate gratification, which is like, this is the nature of success.

I think it's funny, man.

There was the study that was done, I can't remember it.

It's the marshmallow test or the other.

Okay, I can talk about the marshmallow test. Okay, so fun one with that, with the marshmallow test is measuring how long they delay for the marshmallow. So at what point does it not make sense? If they say you can get one, because everyone simplifies the experiment, which is like, if I give you a marshmallow one now or you can get two later, right? But what if two is in a year?

Yeah, you're like, I don't care. I'll take the one now.

Right. So then the next question I would have is like, if you were to test kids and then say at what point the global versus local crosses would be, and then track the kids who had the longest marshmallow waiting period. Because then you could measure how long.

The most successful probably in life.

Really interesting. Just total side note. But the three things that I think were in common of the ultra successful were inflated sense of self, as in they thought that they deserve big things, they wanted to go after big things.

They believed in themselves, right?

Inferiority, never being good enough, and impulse control.

Those are the three factors of the most successful.

They're like when they did a common factors analysis, these people think they believe that they can achieve all this amazing stuff and then it's just an amazing paradox because at the same time they think they're not good enough and they are insecure about whether they can achieve it. and they have impulse control. And so it's like if you have.

Discipline, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

And they stay focused on the thing. And what I like, I'd say the biggest breakthroughs that I've had, I think that will create a lot of the wealth that we will have in the future is really a deep understanding of how long long is and shooting with the intention of, I'm only bringing this up because my YouTube guy said it, but he's like, I've never had somebody who actually started that. I was like, we'll see what we.

Do in five years.

I was like, we'll measure that. And he was like, no one has literally ever said that to me. I was like, as long as I.

See progress, I'm good.

Because everyone wants results in like two months. Yeah, yeah. Like if we're going this way, I'm cool. I don't need to say, that's good enough for most people. If they could extend the time rise, it's like, I'll give you another hack. You can know how wealthy someone is based on the time horizons they speak in.

Give me an example.

So if someone's talking about how they're trying to make money today, hey, let me hold 20 for today. You know how poor they are. I have to say poor. You know how poor they are, right? If someone's talking about what they're going to make this week or this month or this quarter or this year or this decade, think about how different the people are who are talking in those time horizons. And so I think that if we can shift the time horizon that we think in, then we gain more leverage over our time, which we then know we will compound into money. Because I think if you can master the time, you master the money.

You've been married for how long? Five years. Five years in a relationship or six years or something.

Six years in a relationship, five years married.

This is something that I've been on curious about a different decades of my life, right? I'm 39 now, I just turned 39 in March. and in my 20s, I didn't think it was. I was like, how is it possible to be with one human being for the rest of your life?

Right? Yeah.

Like, there's so much adrenaline and testosterone and just, you know, desire.

Yeah.

I was thinking from a place of desire, not from a place of, I don't know, from a spiritual foundation, let's say.

Right.

More of a sexual desire. And I would study these different men over the years. and the ones that I really respected were the ones who had amazing long-term relationships and who had healthy businesses that impacted people in positive ways and had, you know, semi-healthy families in general.

Right.

I'm curious. Why did you decide to get married, I guess, at 25, six?

I was. Yeah, 20. She was 23 or 24, and I was 26 or 27. Okay.

It was.

Why decide to get married in your 20s?

Yeah.

And how has that been beneficial towards your inner peace, your health and your wealth?

Yeah. So I think getting married is a great hack for making money. I have a lot of thoughts on this. First one is because at least if you're anything like me, probably 80% of my attention went to Chasing Tail. And so getting all of that attention back automatically just makes you more money.

Right.

All your energy is spread out. Oh yeah.

100% if you're doing that. It's spread all over the place. And so that was, that's just like, honestly, just getting into a relationship accomplishes that. Going from a relationship to marriage though was really surprising to me because I was, I would say fairly against marriage for most of everything. And it's by happenstance, Laila and I got married almost like as a dare and then we're still married and it's been awesome. Total, we'll get it another time. But when we did get married, it was actually really interesting and maybe this is just my own personal experience, but I felt this very sincere shift of knowing it felt secure. Even the long term, I'm like, why do we need a government body? Why do we need someone? Why do we need an external party to validate our relationships?

Find a document from the government.

Yeah. But there is some level of commitment that comes with it that makes it more stable. Knowing that it was like, oh, she's in it with me. Just knowing the barrier to exit was significantly higher for both of us, I think increased our commitment to the relationship. But it gave me so much more stability for risk taking in a lot of ways, knowing that she was there and knowing she had my back. And, you know, I was texting a buddy of mine who was living the fast life.

Yes. Girls every other night.

Yeah.

And it was like, how do you think through this? and I thought about it and I think that when you get into the committed relationship or marriage, you trade novelty for loyalty. And for me, to me, loyalty, I was trying to define this for myself, but for me, loyalty matters more than love or is a form of love or the one that I value the most. And then as a secondary, because I was trying to define, like, whenever someone says, what is love?

Right?

Like if you actually like start trying to peel the word back, most people would just describe activities that people who are in love do. Well, it means, and then they use a laundry list of activities. And so the best definition I have, I know this is me out there, is of how much, like measuring love, is how much are you willing to endure to keep it? And so if you have a relationship with someone, and like, and I would say love and liking to me is the same thing 'cause it's really difficult to differentiate between the two, if you have a relationship with someone and you're not really willing to, let's say, wait 30 minutes later to go to dinner with them, probably have very little liking in there. If you have kids, you're probably willing to do a lot for them. And so, I'll give you an example that a friend of mine said. He was like, Man, he's like, if you have a car that you've been working on all the time, like a lot of guys tinker with.

Must love that car, right?

That thing's a piece of crap. He must love that thing. It barely runs. because of what he's willing to put up with. And so it's kind of interesting when you think, like you can measure love by your willingness to sacrifice or endure in order to keep it.

Do you think we should endure a toxic relationship though, or something that's not adding value equally or putting forth a level of effort?

To be fair, the toxic relationship, I'll use the quotes here because defining toxic would be another call. Another video, right? I think that there are moments in relationships that are negative, but if you love someone a lot, because you had a lot of benefit. So going the other direction, right?

But if it's more toxic than it.

Is-- Then you wouldn't put up with it. So then is it worth putting up with anyone having a negative experience? It depends on what you have to gain. And the more you love someone, the longer you're willing to wait for another positive reinforcement. so if I meet somebody and I have a negative experience immediately, I'm probably done.

Right.

Right. If I meet someone and I have positive the next day, positive two days later, positive a week later, the next one I might be willing to wait two weeks and then four weeks. And this is really just becomes a question of human conditioning rather than love. Not to get like, I love this stuff, but anyway, I can get us back to marriage. But marrying Laila gave me a lot of the security that I needed to make, take the big risks and knowing that she had my back. And Layla and I have very uncommon views on marriage.

What's the, I guess, unique views on marriage you guys have?

So most people get married because they feel a chemical attraction.

Yes.

And then they just wait, right? Until eventually it's been long enough.

And it goes away.

Yeah.

And they're like, I guess we should get married. We had the first date, we talked for four hours about business. All business. And at the end of the day, I said, you should quit your job and work for me.

I was like, Was this a date or was this a-- It was a date.

Okay, it wasn't just like a casual encounter. No, it was 100% going on a date. It was Bumble, but it was a date. Bumble, date.

Yeah.

All business, all night. The whole thing. We walked for four hours just talking.

About business, and the very end I said, you,'ve got to quit your job.

And work for me. And she said, no, I just met you. Not quit your job and date me, but I quit your job and work for me. And I said, Listen, even if I don't come with the deal, this needs to make sense for you. Like, this is how much I'd pay. I was just like, this is how much I pay you. This is how much you'd make. Like, you should totally work for me. And she said, no. But I kept working on her. And eventually, three weeks later, she quit her job and she joined me. And we hung out every day after that one, and we did not have a super chemically sexual relationship. Not at all. We just liked doing the same stuff, and we both wanted the same outcome. And so at least as I see it, it's like, You have to have an aligned mission of what you want to accomplish in life. Values of how you want to get there. And then ideally, this like bonus, bonus points for similar interests. Dude, that's so funny you say that.

Because I say that, you know, from all the mistakes I've made in the previous relationships that are all my mistakes, it all comes to values, vision and lifestyle. And having shared alignment, doesn't have to be 100%, but it's like an alignment and values, vision and lifestyle. not in, you know, if you have the sexual chemistry, which we do, which is great, but not using that as the main value. The sexual chemicals. Because in two, five, ten years, they may not be there. But if you don't have the values of Vision and Lifestyle, which you call values, because it's all business.

Like, mission is the. What we're trying to accomplish. Values, how we're gonna get there. And then interests is like, what do we want to spend?

Exactly.

Yeah.

That's so funny.

Yeah, so that's what I think. And if you have those things, you create a relationship, in my opinion, at least this has been my human experience, that becomes very difficult to get out of. And I say that intentionally in that, like, the best way to stay married is to figure out how to stay married. And so, like, well, let's stack all the chips in our favors. Like, we like doing the same stuff, we like talking about the same things. And then I think in a very important way, if those three things are aligned, you will get exposed to the same stimuli. And if you get exposed to the same stimuli, you'll have the same adaptations, provided you have the same values. So if we get this exposure and we both have the same values, we'll both grow in the same way. Or I think what happens for many people is they're opposite sides and they attract, right? And what happens is you get on this, you probably Esther Perel.

I just had her on a week ago.

Yeah.

And then I'll just stop.

I'll just go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Well, now I feel so like, quote her. But my understanding of mating activity is you've got familiarity, right? And you've got, I say variety and then familiarity, 'cause this is how I do it. And so in the beginning, everything's so new and exciting, there's all this variety, right? And then you get to know each other and it gets better and better 'cause you're like, oh my God, this is amazing, this is amazing, this is amazing. But then all of a sudden you keep going and then you're siblings and you're roommates, right? And so it's not, like she says, you know, a problem to be solved, but a dichotomy to be managed between familiarity and variety. And one of the interesting things with our relationship is that we have so many ways to be familiar. So for us, based on that, so.

You need to create more variety.

Yes.

How do you guys do that? Because you talk about all the same things, you do the same thing all day long, how do you create variety?

It's a great question.

Besides the multiple business boards, you're not doing the multiple People.

Oh no, we're not doing that. No, no, I think Layla would stab them. No, but I think the variety piece comes in through deliberate creation of room to be missed.

Space, intensity.

If you think I'm going away for.

A week, and you're gonna go with your friends or family, and I'm not gonna be there.

You know how much you like someone more when you see them after not seeing them for a week?

So good.

Isn't that weird?

Best feeling.

Right?

Isn't that weird? So it's like we can create that deliberately. The mystery. The longing. Exactly. And so it's like if we can physically separate ourselves in terms of when we work, so we work on separate sides of the house, we only come together for food, so we eat and then we go back. And ideally we're not on any of the same meetings, 'cause the last thing I wanna do at the end of the day is sit down and say, how's your day?

Just kidding, I was there the whole time.

Right?

Right, yeah. So it's ideally, so you work together, but you don't.

Yes. We work in the same company.

But you're not on calls all day long together hand in hand.

Right, and we can accomplish, and so that way when we talk, it's like two business colleagues that are both after the same thing, that both believe in getting there the same way, and we're talking about our unique things that are interesting for me that you might want my perspective on, and I'm like, Hey, I'm thinking about this hook or this message, or what do you think about this? And we can bounce on it, but because we didn't share every moment of the day, it gives us that ability to have variety. But I think Esther said this, so. But the couples that have, that do start businesses together, maybe I'm misquoting to research things anyways, couples that start businesses together have a 10% divorce rate if you start and make a dollar in a business together. And I think it's like birthing a child, except in order to do a business, I think it's harder than having kids and people will be like, you don't know that because you don't have kids. It's true, but I do know that there's a lot of people who have both, there's more people who have kids and businesses who started together. And I think that there's some magic in that, because it's like birthing an idea, but you both got to agree on what you're gonna create. So you're not leaving up to biology, you're leaving up to choice.

Do you guys ever fight or argue?

Sure. Like, I would say we don't have what I would consider real fights.

Low observatory, yeah, yeah.

I mean, minor arguments, but- I'm sure that, The many common miscommunications that can happen as humans. Sure, sure, sure. Hey, you said this, that? Did, is this what you meant? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, there's, I was like, if there's two ways to take it and one way makes you really angry and.

The other one doesn't, I meant the other way.

Whatever you're angry about, just round up.

Round up, that's like, just round up for me.

What's the thing you love about her the most? She's made a steal. She's, play is just unbreakable. So, like, I'll tell you the two moments in, in our marriage that, like, or we weren't married yet, but the two moments that, like, defined her to me. So one was in, we were probably nine months into dating, or maybe, no, maybe, like, six months into. We're six months into dating. And I had lost everything again. Standard. Standard Alex move. Right. Just loses everything. And she had to go launch a gym, and she had to absolutely crush it. And I was so stressed out because at this moment in time, I had the six gyms, I had a chiropractor agency, a dentist agency, and I had the launch business where we're actually flying out and doing launches. I think I had one more thing, I can't remember what it was, but those are eight different businesses that I was owning. I made no money, obviously, because I had eight businesses, right? And I was too stressed to function. That was the only way I could describe it. It's like I was not present. at all ever. I was just thin. I was so spread thin. She walked in the office one day, I didn't look up, and she was like, Do you want me to be here? And I was like, you, can do whatever you want. And she was like, well, do you want to break up? And I was like, yeah, that's fine. Really? And so she said, okay, that's fine. And she had quit her job to do this with me. So it had been five months. Like, you know, she'd quit everything. She'd built up a personal training business that was doing really well. And she got rid of all her clients so she could come do these launches with us. Five months in, I was like, you know, I can't, whatever. And so she went to Hawaii to do this launch, which was gonna be a really big launch.

And I was betting big on this thing 'cause... So she was still working with you.

But not in a relationship with you.

Yeah.

So we've actually, like, work is the thing that was our first language. It came naturally to us. And so she went there and I had, I think I lost all the money for the seventh reason in a row, right? And I had like 10 grand left and we needed to make like $100,000 in that month or I was gonna get behind. And so it was 10 grand to get her there for 30 days in Hawaii because hotels are insane. And I was like, you need to crush this. Even though we just broke up.

Oh my gosh.

You need to crush this. Like you need to crush this. That's like all I can say. and she flew there and she set every sales record that we had when she got there and did 100 and something thousand in cash collected and she killed it. And when she came back, I had a coach that I was like meeting with during the time she was gone. He was like, look at the stats of your life. He's like, are you in better shape now that she's here? He's like, are you making more money now that she's here? Are you like, and to be fair, like in general, I was still doing better because I had started the launch business. Like I was, I was, you know, I was like, yeah. And he's like, I think she's a very good thing in your life. And I was like, okay. And so anyway, she came back and she crushed it when virtually every other person that I know would have either not gone, like, screw you, I'm out of this. Or just wilted under the pressure. 'Cause I put a lot, I was like, you need, I was like, this.

Is the last money I have. Like, you have to crush this.

And I don't care about you intimately anymore. And I don't care. And so she killed it, and then she came back, and then two or three months later, of course, I lost all that money again. Class. And so then at this point, now we're sleeping at her parents house.

And you're not in a relationship.

No, so we got back together. When she came back. Sorry, when she came back. Yeah, that was like, you're awesome. You stood tall when everything else was crumbling.

Let's keep doing this.

And so this leads me probably to the core point of Layla is that, and I don't know if it's all relationships, but at least the way this one is, compared to every other relationship I've had is that I respected her first. And I don't think I had... God, that's so key. Like, I don't... And I say this not as any... I've loved a lot of people in the past, but I don't think I respected them to the same degree. And I think part of that is because it was harder for me to respect them because I didn't have a shared arena to witness it in. It would be like, maybe for me, I might not have been able to respect an athlete, maybe. Maybe, because it's just not a game I understand as well as a business game. Sure. I'm maybe just saying that I can appreciate excellence, who knows? But I respected her and her opinion mattered to me. A lot of times I would feel like someone's opinion, like, yeah, it matters, but I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do. You know what I mean? My opinion matters more. Her opinion I valued equally or even higher than mine in many occasions, because I trust her gut. She has an amazing instinct with people especially. And so I respected her first and the second time that happened was I'm sleeping in her parents house, winner that I am.

24, 25, 26?

No, I'm 27. 26 or 27. Sleeping in her brown, she's 23-24.

And.

They gave me the spare kids bedroom. So I'm like in this little desk, you know what I mean, like the little chair, like cramped up. And I'm like, this is make believe to except it's a real business. And we had this horrible day where we lost like $150,000 and it was, and I just saved, like everything was turning around. Everything was turning around for us. We lived there just to like kind of save some money. Yeah, yeah. But we, the first month of getting rid of all those businesses that I had and just focusing just on gym launch, we did 100,000, we did 200,000, 300,000. So like things were turning around and I was like, okay, this is happening. And then we got 150,000 refunds, which is pretty much all the profit I had made. And it was because A couple of the gyms that we had launched basically told all the customers to refund and then sign back up through them for half the price. Oh my God. So it's like I go to a gym. That's what we did. We pay for everything, the hotels, the flights, the marketing, the sales guy. And let's say we sell 100 people at 500 bucks, we make $50,000, right? Just for example. They would say, hey, 100 people, now that they're gone. That's annoying. That's messed up. It was a flawed model. You know what I mean? And I could lament it, but I was not operating within the context of human incentives. There was a huge incentive to not be ethical. And so we lost $150,000, which was all my savings again. And at that moment, I had already lost everything like three times since I'd been with her. It had been like 11 months at this point. I think at that point, 10 months, because we got married in May and it was 13 months since we had met. And so I just looked at her and I'm like in her parents room or whatever and I said, listen, I'm a sinking ship. And if you want to get out, I was like, I will have absolute respect for you. We will be like, we're cool. Like, I will hold nothing against you because I, like, I clearly am not good at this. And that's where she was like, I would sleep with you under a bridge if it came to that. And so that was when that was before you're married. Yeah, it was before we were married. And so that was when. And that, like, you know, I think the, the dedication in that book says, or actually, well, I might be spoiling it, but then I think the next book says, you, saw the light in me.

It's a strong-- It's my ride or die. I couldn't do this without you. Yeah, that's great.

It's a very meaningful thing, but I don't know if I would have done it without her. You know what I mean? And so anyways, all that to say, she stood tall when everything else was crumbling around me, and for that she has my eternal respect. And so as a result of that, that security, knowing that she like, even when she didn't have to, she was there and she chose to be there alongside me because she believed that we could do this, even when I ran out of belief. I think for that, that's, and that's, and to be fair, that was the first 11 months of our relationship. And so like, since we got married, it's been super easy.

Yeah, really easy.

It has been. Like literally nothing was hard. harder than the first year of our relationship.

I mean, sorry. No, it's great. I'm assuming you wouldn't call yourself a marriage expert by any means, but you've been married five years. You've also know, you have a lot of respect for older men who've been married for a long time. You've, I'm sure, interviewed them and have mentors in that space. What do you think makes a strong marriage last more? Respect or love?

I mean, you know where I'm going with this one. Respect, because I think that respect is based in logic. Love less so. And so, I'll say it differently. I think that love has a strong emotional component. Some days you feel like you love someone more than other days. But respect doesn't change as much.

Consistency.

It's based on facts. It's based on evidence. It's based on I, the story I just told you will not change. That happens. right? And so when emotions fade, logic remains, which is why I'm a big fan of logical selling, which is when someone is trying to make a decision, I do want to give them the logical reasons for why they should do that because when the emotions do fade, which they inevitably do about the decision that they made, what will remain is the logic and the logic will carry you through the dips. But if you don't have a logical reason to be together, then when the emotions fade, that's when you have no reason to be together because the emotions are on and there's no logic. And so I think that for the long-term relationship, that's why the mission, the values and the interests, there's a lot of logical reasons for us to stay together. We have a million logical reasons together. We're partners in business. We love the same lifestyle. We're both into fitness. And so we have all these huge stack of reasons for why we should stay together. And I think that if we can stack the reasons and as a funny, side note with the length of marriage, the average married person spends two hours a day together. 45 of that is watching television, average marriage, 24 minutes of that is housework, and then 35 minutes, sorry, 35 minutes is eating. And so 45 plus 25 plus 4, so there's like 20 minutes, that's not that of the two hours, that is just being with someone. And so we have spent every hour of every day together for six years. And so I feel like in that way, we've had a 50-year marriage. Right. Exactly. From a time perspective.

But anyways, just-- and where do you think you'd be without her or a marriage like hers that has supported you and thrived? Do you think it'd be as financially successful? Do you think it'd be-- you'd have more time to build your businesses, or you feel like you'd have scattered energy with lifestyle choices.

I don't know. I don't know if I would have learned the lessons that she's taught me that, like, if I had. So if I had a similar marriage to the one that I have, I think it would be the same. If I didn't have a similar marriage to this one, I think. I think I would have figured out. The money thing was too important to me for me not to figure it out. I think it was too. It's too important to me.

Because you had the discipline.

Yeah. And the fitness thing, that was always on lock. And so, the missing piece, I still probably would have had that longing to figure it out. 'Cause to your point, all the people that I respect have been in 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 year marriages. And I think there's something about character, it speaks to someone's character when they've done something like that. And I think that was something that I wanted to have. Yeah.

What do you think? You're 32 now?

Yeah.

What do you think? When you hit 40, the three biggest lessons will be that you will have learned or that you, if you could go into the future, because you're really good at thinking, your 85-year-old self, and your 40-year-old self was looking at you right now or in a room with you talking to you, and he said, Here are the three things you really gonna need to learn.

Yeah.

And try not to make these mistakes. What would those three lessons be, do you think, if you could go in the future?

Well, the first one that jumped out at me was patience works. So that would be the first, I think I would have continuous reinforcement on the fact that the longer I wait for things, the better they are. The second one would be define your terms. Socrates says wisdom begins with the definition of terms. And so a lot of people make these goals, but they don't know what the goal means. And so they're like, I want to be healthy. What does that mean? I want to be happy. What does that mean? We have to define our terms before we start trying to attack them or breaking them down, which is why, if you've ever heard any of my stuff, I tend to define terms a lot. So I think a definition of terms is, have to define your terms. And then third one of lessons that I think would probably still be, because whenever I talk to my 85 year old self in my therapy sessions with myself, it's always just remembering to smell the flowers more. Because if I'm 20 years old and, or 30 years old and I would trade all the millions I have to be 20 again, then that is the lesson. So I would trade everything that I have when I'm 40 to be 32. And so it's just like reminding myself.

Enjoy this now, this moment.

Yeah.

Because I would trade everything to be here when I'm 40. Right. So, like, if I can just. If I can just even get a 10th of that awareness in the present moment, if I can bring 10 of that future awareness to the present moment, that would be a success for.

Can you break down really how to sell someone or how to enroll someone in your product or service who has a reason why they don't want to sign up?

Yes. So the baseline assumption is this person wants what you have. And so that's why like at the beginning of every sale, you're always asking what problem are we solving?

Right?

Like, why are you here? What do you want? And sometimes you have to like ask that question a lot of different ways to get someone to actually answer it. Cause like if someone says, well, I just want to find out more. they're not actually here to find out more, they're here because they want to solve a problem. And so some just saying, well, what problem are you solving? It's an easier way to get to the core of the matter.

And so once they admit they have.

A problem, then we can, so how do you approach it? I'll give you the back of Napkin before I give you the one that we were talking about earlier. So the back of Napkin sales scripting process that I have is called Closer. And so it's an acronym, it's easy to remember. So the first thing C is clarify why they're there.

Right?

Got a, why are you here? Right? What brought you in today? Why'd you respond to the ad? Why'd you take time to take this call? Whatever it is. Clarify where they're there. Keep asking until you get the right answer. If it's just information, it's like you're not hopping on 20 calls a day taking information, are you? No, of course not. Okay, what problem are we solving? Cool, got that. Then L is label them with a problem. That's where you're really repeating back to them. Let me just get this straight. You're here because you're trying to lose weight and you are struggling to do so at current. Is that correct? Awesome. Great. Then I think you're going to like what we have. So then we go to O. CLO, closer. O is overview their past experiences or past pains. so it's like, well, tell me what you've done so far to try and accomplish this. I'm assuming that's not the first person you've talked to. I'm assuming this isn't the first moment you realized you wanted to lose weight.

Or you wanted to X, Y, Z.

Right? And so then we go through what I call the pain cycle, which is like, okay, what did you do? Try this and this. How did that work for you? What was good about it? What was bad about it? Great. What else have you done? And you go back through. And each time it's like, and each time you affirm the person, you're like, that must have been hard. Appreciate you sharing that. Just affirming and giving them positive reinforcement throughout the conversation. and that's just building rapport one on one, right? I understand how you feel. I felt the same way. My sister was like that too. I totally get where you're coming from. I know how that's difficult, blah, blah, blah, right? S is then we sell the vacation. So now that we've exhausted all the pain, they're in the thick of the pain of remembering all the times they failed. You're like, you know what? Given everything you just said, I think you're going to be perfect for what we have. Can I tell you about it? So then you get permission to sell, right? And then we sell. I like to have three main points that I hit. And I think it's because people remember threes very well. I know you've seen Russell stuff with webinar, Threes are remembered well, same thing with values in a company. I think three people remember, it's easy to triangulate ideas. And so when we sell the points, a big part of this is not actually explaining the features, this is obvious, but I like giving short anecdotes that are easy to remember. So if I would say a word like, we offer accountability for whatever program you sell, and that doesn't mean anything to anyone. So I want to give a quick story or anecdote to explain the concept. It's like, all right, well we have three types of accountability. We've got peer-to-peer accountability, which is people who are gonna be walking with you shoulder to shoulder. You're gonna have alumni accountability, which people have already finished, but they're just 12 weeks or 12 months ahead of you and they're cheering you on from the finish line. And then you have expert accountability. You have people who've helped a thousand people just like you get to where you wanna go. All right, so those are the three levels of accountability. If that doesn't make any sense, do you have a kid or were you ever a child? That always gets a laugh. They're like, oh, I was a kid. You're like, well, do you remember when your parents used to tell you to brush your teeth and you didn't wanna brush your teeth? I don't want to brush my teeth, right? Like of course, but then every night you'd still go brush your teeth even though you moaned about it. Do you brush your teeth now? They're like, yeah. Well, that's an example of external accountability turning into internal habit. And so what we're going to do is we're going to be the initial parent that's going to tell you brush your teeth, but we're going to be able to transition to getting that internal combustion engine going by the end of this so that you're brushing your own teeth.

Right.

Right. You can use the same thing with the seat belt. There's a million examples you can use. And so that would be a quick, whatever that was, 90 second anecdote to explain point one. And you same thing for point two, point three that you have of like it's kind of like and then you explain a little epiphany bridge or the story of how you realize that's important. And then they would say like that makes sense? Yes, boom, you move to the second point. Make sense? Yes, move to the third point. And then it's then you go for the close. Like well, given X, Y, and Z, I will tell you this is extremely expensive. And the reason we say that is because it's even better than a price anchor. Because extremely expensive, for everyone is expensive. If I said, Hey, Louis, it's $500. Just kidding, it's $100. You might have thought 500 and 100 were both cheap. But if I said it's really expensive, whatever I say next is going to either be actually expensive for you, in which case I braced you, which is actually more likely to close the sale, or it will be less than what you perceive as expensive. And you're like, oh, great. Because the problem that most people try and do when they sell is they try and minimize the thing they say next, but it actually has a counter active effect. You say it's actually not that much, it's only, right? But when you say that, when you say only, then all of a sudden people expect low and then you rip their expectations. And so it's much better to set expectations here, but people are afraid of doing that. That's not how psychology works. So you set expectations sky high, you anchor, and then when you say reality, it either matches the braced person or it's much lower, which most cases it is. Interesting. Because that's really expensive.

Does that work? for webinar sales to mass, or is that only better with one-to-one sales calls?

Have an expectation.

I'm curious if that also converts. Well, I do know that from the.

Infomercial world, you'd price anchor high. So it would make sense to me that, I mean, I would imagine it would still work the same way. It's like, guys, this is super expensive for guys. It's not $5,000, and you work your way down. And then when we do end up saying, hey, it's expensive, we want to make sure that we're selling to goal. and the point there is that some people sell a program but people don't buy programs to buy results. And so the idea is we want to as closely as possible sell the outcome that someone desires. And it sounds obvious but people don't do it. You know what I mean? Like a lot of these, well duh, but no one does it, right? And so in the weight loss example, I realized that people didn't want to buy memberships. No one's like, I want to buy a membership. Of course not. They want to lose weight. And so what we did was we shifted our selling style in the gyms and the fitness programs to how many pounds they needed to lose. So we'd say, okay, cool. You need to lose 36 pounds. Based on our calculations, it's going to take 36 weeks for us to get there and it'll take another 50% of that time to basically restabilize you, get your metabolism back up, and now you're eating the same amount at a lower weight. That sound cool? Great. And so now it's going to be a 52-week program. I will tell you it's very expensive, but it's normally, you know, whatever, $500 a week, but instead it's only $150 a week. Interesting. Fair enough. And then when we get into the closing questions, I always prefer neutral or negative questions. because if I said, Sounds amazing, a lot of people would be like, what does sound amazing? But if I said, Fair enough, then it's much easier to get someone to say, well, yeah, it's fair. So it's like, how low can I make the thing that they're agreeing to? And then the negative version of that, which Chris Voss talks about in the.

Negotiation, what's the difference?

Is no-based questions. It's just like-- that's not so bad, is it? Or-- Right, or yeah, you wouldn't be opposed to moving forward. Would it be totally crazy if we moved forward today? Would it be totally crazy if we started you on Monday? Like all those, well, it's not crazy. Okay, cool, let's do it. And then at that point, let's say Lucy says no to whatever the thing we're selling. Now we begin the E of Closer, which is explain away their concerns. So C, clarify L label, O, overview their past experiences, S, sell, which is the three anecdotes that you're going to tell, and then you present the price. And then at that point, hopefully they say yes. But in the world of sales, No is the job. No is the job. They say yes, then you wouldn't be necessary, right? And so no, like selling is everything that you do before you present price. Closing is what you do after. And obstacles are what come up before you present price. That's when you disagree with the prospect. Objections are what happen after you present price, when they disagree with you.

Right. Well, I don't have the money, I don't have the time. I don't have, let me check with my spouse, etc.

And so obstacles, you want to resolve as many of those as you can before, because they become bigger, scarier monsters of objections after you present the price. And so, like that example I gave earlier with the information, when someone says, well, I just want to find out a little bit more information, that's an obstacle. Like someone's presenting in the first five seconds, they're already telling you an obstacle, like you have to confront it. And so a lot of people are like, well, I think it's myotism's law. You're like, is it though? Because like, you know, there's a lot of people in Africa and none of them have stubborn body fat. Right, right. Because they're actually starving.

Right.

But so you would think that they have true starvation mode, but they look like they're starving. So what do you think it is? You know, like, and then you can get into it. Most people are really offended by that though. But you get, it's an extreme example. So once we get to that point, they say no or I have to think about it. So there's three circles and this took me actually a really long time to think through. because I've gone through a zillion different books and things on sales, ironically, after I already knew how to sell, not before, which is just kind of funny. But different people had different, like Grant had, I think, decision maker, stall, money. Those are the things like, those are the three that you always have to overcome, which is like, I need to think about it, I need to talk to my spouse, or it's money, right? Those are his three. Barry from Sage, she has five. She has time, money, time, money, spouse, fear, shame.

Interesting.

I was like, that's cool.

Noted.

And then Belford has his, the 310s, and there's a number of different ones. And I was like, there has to be, and they may all disagree with me on this, so who knows, but there has to be a unifying truth here, right? Because everybody has their own buckets, and there's obviously some elements of each of these. And so I pulled back from Albert Ellis, who is one of the fathers of CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy. He said, and originally he had, 17 and they had 11 and they had 9 and they had 7 and they had three reasons that people upset themselves. He just kept boiling it down. And the three that he came up with are that people blame their circumstances, they blame other people for their unhappiness, and then they blame themselves. And so when we are confronted with an objection underneath the pretense that the person has already admitted that they want the thing that you have and the thing you have would solve their problem. So that has to be there. If we have that, then we have to walk through three concentric rings of power. And so the first thing that people do is they blame their circumstance. So they're casting their power to something else. They're saying it's because of time. Or the money. Or the money, right? And then, you know, with the money, if you were selling a B2B thing, I would say, well, what's the difference between a self-made billionaire that starts at zero and you? It's not resources. It's resourcefulness, right? Then you can tell a story if you want to reinforce the point, but at the end of the day, if you were resourceful, you can make it. So the question is, if you were.

To die tomorrow and you needed to.

Come up with the amount of money for this thing, how are you going to do it? You figure it out. Exactly.

So what we need to do is figure out how to tap into those resources. So the bubble, you go into that thing.

Right.

And so each of these have come in your insecurities, your fears, your people saying no, judging you, and you just taking action and risking. And so underneath of circumstances, I have three big buckets. So you've got time, you've got money and you've got what I call fit, which is actually an association with identity. So usually it might be like, well, I want to lose. I use weight loss because everybody understands it. I want to lose. I don't. I want to lose weight, but I don't want to eat broccoli. Your print has broccoli on it. Like, you know what? I don't like cardio, though. And so that is, that's where you just go through, like, you got to change the change. Right. And there's a whole script around.

Yeah.

It's like, you can't. You cannot change any of the variables because at the end of the day, like, you know, I used to have weight loss clients who would say, like, Well, can we make this the breakfast? Because this is what I already eat. I'm like, well, that breakfast got you that body, so we gotta change something, right? Right, right. Right, gotta change the change, right? And so we'd walk through it and.

I'm like, maybe you're not heavy enough.

Maybe this isn't enough pain for you. And then they're like, why don't you put on 50 more pounds? Right, right. And then you'll finally make it. Yeah, exactly. And then all of a sudden they're like, no, no, no. I'm like, all right, well then maybe today is the day.

Yeah.

Right, so time, money, and each of.

Those has three, so like time is.

Three, which I go macro, micro, when then. which is, right, right, yeah. And then, you know, money, I could go through. When they do take it, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I would go through too many of them.

Sure, sure. But that's circumstances, right? The next level, and this is peeling back an onion. So if you're a salesperson or you're selling someone and they blame money or they blame time or they blame the fit of your specific program, understand that you're actually talking to someone two steps away from being in power.

And so making the decision.

Yes. And so if we believe ourselves as salespeople to be coaches first, because that's what we're really in serving the customer. The goal of the sale is not to get the person to buy. And this is a huge thing for most salespeople that everyone has to understand. The goal is not to get the person to buy. The goal is to get them to decide. If you get someone to decide, then you have already given them power, more power than they've ever had in a very long time, probably. And I guarantee you that you will make more money and you will also disassociate success in selling from purchases. You will also get more purchases. But if you do it this way, then you won't have an ego that's invested in being right because it's not about you, it's about them. We get them to admit that it's never been about having enough time because it's about priorities. We all have the same 24 hours. And you know what? If you're really busy now, do you think you're ever gonna be busy in the future? Well, yes, I do. Well, do you want it to be permanent? Well, I do want it to be permanent. Well, if you're gonna be busy in the future and you're busy today, then you might as well start now when you get the most support because you're already busy. If you learn how to do it when you're busy, you'll know how to do it again when you're busy in the future. that way you'll stick with it. Makes sense? Great. Time's overdone. And so each of that's one of the three for time, right?

Sure.

We've drilled a lot of these. And so the next one is other people. With other people, a lot of times it's spouse often, right? And so I kind of walk through a process, which is, are they aware of the fact that you're struggling with this? Yes. Do they approve of the struggle? Well, they don't, I mean, they're like, well, I mean, no, they're not approving of the struggle. So, well, then why would they be against something they already don't approve of?

Right?

Well, and if the roles were reversed, would you be in support of them? And usually they'll say yes to that most of the times. It's like, well, then why would they be against? And if they're anything like my wife, I would do everything I possibly could to support her and I think she would do the same. Is that the same that you have there with your relationship? Yes or no?

Cool.

Finally, I'll walk through, it's like, honestly just listen to you, you know, Tom, I think you're asking for permission when you should be asking for support. And the reality is, let's play this out. Let's play this out. Let's say that you don't do this program, whatever it is. Let's play it out. And 12 months from now, you're in a more negative situation currently. You're in more overweight, more poor, whatever. And if you keep doing that, who are you gonna blame for your cir- Is it gonna be you or is it gonna be her? It's gonna be her. So is that fair to her? Is that fair to your marriage?

No.

So I think what we need to be looking for is support, not permission. And so what we're gonna do Then we tone comes up and we're like, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna take control, we're gonna take the power. You have to make decision for you and then she will support you. And what you have to do is when you show up with her, you're like, listen, I've wanted to be an entrepreneur all my life. Who knew that there wasn't an entrepreneur school and you go through the, you know, like just like doctors go to school, but no one did for me. And instead of being $100,000, it's only $10,000 and other people and I'm not gonna moan about how I'm not making money because I'm actually supporting with other people and I'm committing to be more present here to be a better wife or be a better husband. be better, you know, spouse to be better mother to our kids and you give them the script to tell the other person. And at the very end, you say, at the end of the day, sometimes, like I said, we have our three-day no sweat guarantee. So for some reason you go home and your husband says, listen, sweetie, I want you to, I don't want you to be healthy. I want you to keep the extra weight on. I want you to live 10 years shorter. I want you to pull up those sweatpants and reach your bag into those Cheetos and get them all orange and finger-y and spread it over there and teach our kids not generational and have early diabetes, if your husband says that to me by all means. Well, we're going to refinance. And usually at this point, they're cracking up. You know what I mean? And that's why rapport matters a lot with selling on the upfront. Which the whole goal is there is to find some similar ground because if you're in Paris and you find out somebody else is from the same city as you, you think they're amazing. If you're in the same city, you don't care that all they're from. So it's just like how can we find some similarities because people really are persuaded more by people that they find similarities.

With.

Wow. And so the idea is how can we find those. But anyways, all that to say, when you are selling, first people will confront you with time, money or fit. And you have to be prepared to know that you might have two more layers you have to go through. So you might have to peel back that first layer and then they hit you with the spouse, which is do they approve if the roles are reversed and then you're asking for support, not permission.

Right.

And then you go three-day no sweat guarantee.

Right.

And then the last level here is self, right? And what people do here is they avoid. So what we're trying to conquer is avoidance. So now, and here's the good news, is that when someone says, I need to think about it, I'm not sure, we're talking to the decision maker. That's amazing. Yes. That's, we've already, you,'re the decision maker. Yeah, this is amazing. This is great news for salespeople because they should be like, oh my God, they're not giving me a money, they're not giving me time, they're not giving me spouse. They're just saying they don't need to, they need to think about it. Well, what's your main concern?

Right?

Tell me what you're thinking about. What are the variables that you're gonna use to make the decision? Let's walk out together because at the end of the day, you don't need time to make decisions. You need information. I'm the only source of information you got. So what are your questions about?

Right?

And you keep going. And then from here, all we're trying to do is understanding the variables that they use to make the decision. And if they don't know them, which they usually don't, we say, do you know what it takes to make the decision about this? And then you actually physically walk them through confronting the decision. If they're not sure about it, you're like, listen, I use this all the time. It's called the rock in your clothes. Let's be real. You're not gonna go and actually sit on your rocking chair on the balcony and be like, am I gonna do this program? Of course not. You're gonna get in your car and your mom's gonna call you and you got a kid and you got the laundry and you got dinner and you got all these other things you gotta do. And then five days from now, you're gonna have some moment where you either put your pants on or you check your bank account, whatever the thing is that we're selling. And you'll be like, shoot, I really should have done that thing. And in that moment, you will have made the decision. So, you might as well do it today. When you have all the information, you've got all the momentum because you're six inches from gold. You don't want to be the guy who, because let's think about what we've already done. I know you want to do it because you're already here. You saw the ad, you put in your number, you set a time, you scheduled it, you drove in your car if it was here, or you showed up on Zoom even when you're in the middle of a work week. You did all this stuff and you spent an hour on the phone with me up to this point. You're this far. Do you think that maybe the reason that you're on this call today is because you haven't been able to pull the trigger in the past?

Mm.

And then usually they'll come up with something like, well, you know what? I tried a program like this before and I failed and I don't want to fail again, which then you go into like burn you twice, which is, well, totally makes sense. I understand that. I'm really sorry they had to go through that. Well, did you ever date anybody in middle school or high school? Well, yeah. Are you married to that person? If they are, then you can still, but it never happens. They're like, no. I'm like, imagine if you had gone your first sixth grade boyfriend or girlfriend. And after that, you swore off men or women after that one breakup. that'd be ridiculous, right? Well, it's the same thing here because the thing is, is if you had a bad experience, you're gonna let that person burn you twice. First time when they were with you and now when they're preventing you from doing the thing you really do need to do or for preventing you from meeting the person you need to meet.

Right.

Right. And so don't give that situation more power than it already has. Only let it burn you once, not twice. Right, right. And so then we walk through, we just have to confront the decision. And so at the end of the day, do you believe that the product is going to get you to where you want to go the way you want to get there. That's the second part that I learned later in sales, is that some people want to lose weight, but they want to lose weight their way. And I'll tell you, we learned it another time, but we found that out because we would get people who didn't want to sign up for memberships. We'd invite them to a free nutrition consultation, and they would spend four times as much money on supplements as they.

Would on the membership because they still.

Wanted to eat or they didn't want to lose weight. They just want to lose weight their way. So the first thing that we need to learn is these are the yeses that we need from them. So it's like, listen, if you don't make the decision, I'll tell you what the variables are right now. Number one, do you believe the product or service that we have is gonna get you to where you wanna go.

The way you wanna get there? Yes.

Okay. Do you wanna work with me or us?

Yes or no?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like yes. Okay. Do you know someone who has or do you have access to the amount of money to start the program? Yes or no? If it's yes, then let's go. We just made the decision together. How much better do you feel? You're just like, wow, okay, I feel much better. Awesome. What card do you want to use them in?

Boom. So a lot of it is just.

The ability to get them to decide. Confront. Yes. Exactly. Confronting the decision. And then if someone's still wishy-washy on it, the easiest and best questions in.

Sales, in my opinion, are what are you afraid of?

If you sign up, what are you afraid of having happen? I lose my money or I don't.

Lose the area, yeah. Right, exactly.

Well then what do you think would have to happen in order for that to happen?

Right.

I don't show up, I don't do the work.

Well then, what would you need to see in order to feel like that wasn't gonna happen? Because at the end of the day, you do know you need to work out and do all this stuff to lose weight, right? Right, okay, so that's fixed. So then what would you need to see from us to make sure that you feel good about taking the decision? Because you can just always just take it apart and get to the point.

Where like, you know what, if someone just texted me, it's like, well that's.

Part of the program. Right, right. This is the weekly check-in, yeah. Totally, and we do have that. What do you know? Oh, I didn't know that. Okay, fantastic, let's get you, because sometimes you can't mention every single feature future you possibly have on every sale, which is one of the benefits of 101 and one of the drawbacks. It's like you can cater it, but at the same time you don't want to take the whole time. And I'll give everybody in the audience two really easy ones if you're starting your business. Number one is the reason close, which I use all the time, which is whatever reason they tell you that they don't want to do it is the very reason they should do it. Like I don't want to do it because I think my spouse is really controlling. I think the reason that you should do it is because your spouse is really controlling because you need to control your life. I think that I don't have time to do it. I think that that's the very reason that you should be doing that, is you need to get your time back, right? Because you're trying to do this business program, right? And currently, are you working all day? They're gonna say yes, 'cause everyone thinks they're working all day. They're like, you,'re working all day? Okay, well then obviously what you're doing now isn't working. So the first thing we're gonna do is cut out all the stuff that's not working, and then you're gonna have all this time to do the program. That's micro. So the macro is the one I said earlier. Micro is that's the second one for time. There you go. for everyone in the audience. And so with the reason close, it's just whatever reason they present with, just say totally understand you don't have money. That's the how long you want that to be an excuse of why you can't do things in your life. That's the very reason you should be doing this more than anyone, right? It's like when someone says, this is a lot of money to me. Right. This is really expensive. And then you would normally say, like, this is a lot to you, right? And they say, yeah. And you're like, well, you know what? That's the perfect reason to do it. Because there's people every single day who come in here and they buy this thing and the money means nothing to them. But the thing that makes you successful is that this is a lot of money to you. And the only reason that this won't work is if you don't do the work. And if this means a lot to you, then you're more likely to be successful than anyone else here. And so when you say that, it's true. And it helps overcome the people. Because a lot of times, like, I spent a lot of money early on by percentage of my net worth on skills and acquisition education, and it is scary. but it's 100% what you need to do when you're starting out. It's the fastest route to getting to where you want to go is buying the lessons from people ahead of you. And so that's the reason clothes that you can use in all those different situations. And the other one is one that I'm working on. I'm trying to figure out like a skeleton key for closing because it's something that like I just love this stuff. But it's like a hypothetical close. So whatever they present with, you get a hypothetical yes and then you walk backwards. So if someone's like, I'm just not sure, You just say, well, if the program were perfect, would you do it? They're like, well, yeah, I would do it if it were perfect. They're like, Cool, then what's the difference between what we've got in perfect?

Right.

And usually they can't generate many ideas anyways. And they're like, I don't, a lot of times they're like, I don't know. And you're like, Right, so then it's not that.

So let's talk about what's really like worrying you.

What are you afraid of? Right, and then we can confront the real stuff. The fears, the insecurities, the doubt. Same thing with, but like you can use that for any of them. It's like, I don't have time. Well, if you did have time, would you do it? Okay, well how much time would, so if you did have, so they get the yes, it's like, well how much time do you think you need? And then they're gonna say something, you're like, did you know that it's actually one-tenth of that? Is what you're actually gonna need? Oh, I didn't know that. And we already got the yes. So they're already committed with commitment and consistency, they're already committed to the yes that they just said. And so it's really hard that if they, it's like, cool, if you have the time would you do it? Yes, cool. Now they gave us one problem to solve and all we have to do, especially if you sell services, it's like, Cool, then all, so all I have to do is solve this one problem for you because I just got you to say yes. Because that also ties them down to not any other objections. They still might, but it's much harder for them to go back on that.

To a no, yeah. Now, one of the things that I've heard you talk about a lot and also you just shared right here is developing skills and acquiring skills over the last decade. That's something that I've been obsessed with since I was a teenager is acquiring skills. Because I didn't feel like I was enough. I wasn't smart enough, talented enough, all those things. So I wanted to become those things by acquiring those skills and investing in them. What would you say are the three main skills? If you could only learn three to reach your first million, what would those be?

Well, to reach, I mean, the reach of the first million is you just have to sell something to someone.

So it's just sales.

Sales. It's just sales. You can just make a million just doing sales. Like, you don't even have to sell your own products. You can just do a million dollars. just selling.

Right.

And in order to make more in sales, you sell stuff that's more expensive. That's it. Like, learn how to sell and then find the most expensive thing you possibly can to sell.

And then sell that.

That's it. And I will tell this to everybody who's, like, not sure. The more expensive it is, the easier it is to sell. Really? Why is that? Because you're dealing with better people. Like, you probably had a Consulting client that pays you 50 Grand is like, oh, yeah, by the way, I sent the wire yesterday. Yeah. Whereas the $50. A lot of people are like, well, what exactly am I going to be getting with this program? You know what I mean? It's a different person. You know what I mean? You're dealing with a different avatar. And from an actual selling perspective, almost every sale is the same regardless. So you might as well just do the sales that you're getting paid $5,000 for rather than sales you're getting $20 for. Like I learned, and the one thing that I will say is that if you're starting out with the intention to develop the skill of sales, sell in the highest volume environment possible. that's why a lot of, I think some of the best sales people are fitness people because so many people, you know, you work at LA Fitness, you get 25 memberships a day that you're, I mean, you're sitting down 25 consults a day and I did that for five years, you know, four years, every day, 20 plus consults every, I was in LA Fitness at my own gym, but like, so like, you get, there's just so much unconscious competence that you develop at that point, like, and those, those, the time and the money, like, those things become so ingrained in your second nature. Yeah, in your language patterns that, and it gives you power in all different areas of your life. So sales is number one. You might want to develop the skill in a high volume environment, but understand that that's not, you might make some money doing that, but the goal will then be to sell massive buildings, sell super expensive cars, sell yachts, sell jets, sell, you know what I mean? Like, sell huge software packages to enterprise software. Like all of these are roles that you can make 400, a million dollars a year doing. So that's where you, you know, you want, and that's a million income, not even gross. That's a million income. But if you just want to like make a million dollars, just reverse out a million dollars and just do it looking at daily. So it's, you know, 3,300 a day, whatever, roughly. And so at that point, it's like, okay, well, I can sell three $1,500 things, you know, and I'll be over it. I can sell one $5,000 thing. I can sell, you know, I mean, and, or you could sell, $3,300 things. And it's just which of those sounds easier? They're different, you know? And I will say that I have this desire maybe in the future to look at some sort of entrepreneurial personality type where I do believe that businesses are an extension of the entrepreneur in terms of their personality, their thumbprint is on it based on just how it works. And so I've met guys who do super high volume, really low ticket transaction. And they're a little different than the guys who sell ultra high ticket, like service based. this stuff.

And so.

I've seen people really successful on both sides, but I do think that the more expensive the ticket in general, the less operational complexity there is, you still have to take, if you're going to take 10 sales calls, you might as well make a morthall. Exactly.

Exactly.

Right.

I have two final questions for you, but before I ask them, I want people to get your book. It's really inspiring. $100 million offers, how to make offers so good, people feel stupid saying no, which is a great tagline as well. So make sure you guys get a few copies of this and also go to acquisition.com, right, which is the main business that you're running right now, acquisition.com. so when's the right time to acquire a business if you're a small...

It depends on whether you're going for majority or minority. That's the huge lever here. So there's the what you're trying to buy and then there's the life cycle of the business. So it's like if you were trying to buy a majority, then you want to get it before it's peak. And you want to have it when it's already established with a good leadership team and you want to make sure that you can pull the entrepreneur out and still functions. That's how we were able to sell the companies that we had. And that's what we do with acquisition.com.

Companies that we actually, so we buy minority.

Minority. Yeah, exactly. So we buy minority. What's minority? 10%, 20%, 30%? 20-30% is usually the stakes that we need to be invested enough to care. And usually the companies are between 3 and I think 36 million is the biggest one. Three-- we don't really have any threes. I think the smallest one we have right now is six. But 6 million to 35-ish million is the range, and we have seven companies in the portfolio. And so for those companies, we buy them because we think they can get better. We think we can grow them. And we think that we can put a team in place and we can transition from face-based branding to a brand-based business so that it is sellable. And then what happens is interesting there is that we might triple the revenue of the business, but we might 30x the enterprise value because it's not valuable if you're just, you know, Johnny teacher or whatever, which we do mostly internet businesses because we know how to transition from being the personality brand who teaches some sort of niche skill like we talked about earlier into teaching the same thing but being like Salon University or being Plumber you or Gym Launch. You know, like those are all like very specific niche skills that provide real value to people. So we're almost-- the entire portfolio, except for one, is e-learning. And that's because we're huge education people. I like the business. I also like the impact. The margins.

Yeah, yeah.

I love the cash flow. It's a low CapEx business. It's very inflation responsive in that we can always adjust prices very easily. There's real impact on people's lives compared to a four-year degree. You've got a great price anchor and alternative. And I think the education-- my thesis is that education is becoming increasingly we fragment it just like media has and it's just catching up. The fact that all of these quote gurus exist is a telltale sign that more and more people are not going to college because they don't see the value and I think they're right in that assessment. And so rather than spend $100,000, $200,000 over four years or $50,000 over four years, you could spend a quarter of that and get a way more tactical training that can replace your entire income. And so in terms of for us, we look for companies that are growing, that are cash flow positive, that are typically e-learning or internet business that have really good products. So ideally somebody who really knows, who is good at the thing that they teach, which sounds silly, but you also know that there's lots of people who don't have that. And if we have those things, we on average triple the profit of the business within a year anyways. So we're very like, when we have our very narrowly defined avatar, which is doing $3 million or more, so $250,000 a month or higher, that's just to be considered. Usually they're at like the, usually like $5 to $1 million a month, $500,000 a month is usually when we take them on. That's our sweet spot. We can ramp them. And then with regards to majority, it kind of goes back to like, I personally, I think long term we're gonna try and figure out a way to maybe raise a fund so I can help all of the founders take some cash on the table and maybe do some sort of conglomeration thing because it's all you're learning, which would be cool. Or we might have them sell off individually. It's really up to the founder. because we're, and this is kind of cool for me because like I'm really just there to support them and we recruit the key players for them and because we have the reputation we have, we have so much more reach and leverage, we can find the people that will help them so much easier than they can. And so that's how we can build these things into enterprises so quickly and we can get outsized returns. And so that's what we do.

That's cool. And do you guys teach also how people can acquire a company on your site as well?

We don't.

No.

The courses on the site correspond with the books. So the book has a free course that comes with it. It's on the site. You can go through it. It has all the downloads, everything. The e-book is 99 cents on Kindle. I think it has 5,000, I think, five-star reviews on Amazon. Who's counting? Yeah. Who's counting? But it's 99 cents. I wanted to make it affordable for anyone. I think that the hard copy is a little more. But I've got people from Nigeria and India. being like, I could afford this thing so much. And I know they're probably never going to be on acquisition.com. Right, right, right. But yeah, if you're a US-based company.

And you're e-learning, we're always happy to see how we can help. We'll have to have you come on another time. If you guys wanted to come back on to talk about how to acquire a smaller company and teach that process, then let me know in the comments below on YouTube if you're interested in learning that. But acquisition.com, alexhermosillo.com, On Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Your YouTube's blown up. Your Facebook as well. But you're doing what, daily, almost daily YouTube now? New shorts.

Shorts. Yeah, we do the shorts daily on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. We're on Twitter. We have a podcast that's actually grown a lot.

Oh wow. Yeah, it's, it's, what's the podcast called?

I don't even know. The game. The game, okay. I see more of your YouTube stuff. Yeah, it's the game. Yeah, the game is the podcast. It's just me, just me.

Just talk about whatever.

Check that out. They're same style as YouTube in terms of short, 15 minute stuff. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, then we also have a LinkedIn. We're everywhere now.

Trying to be Louis H. Twitter, the Twitters, everything. Yeah, the Twitters, yeah, the Twitverse and the metaverse.

I love it.

Yes, make sure you follow you everywhere. We'll have it all linked up. This is a question I asked everyone at the end called the Three Truths. So imagine it is your last day and maybe you've surpassed 80 Maybe you're 120 or something, extended the life as long as you can. And you've lived your life. You've accomplished the things you want to even though they don't matter anymore. You've made all the money, but you've given it all away because it doesn't matter anymore. And no one has access to your content or information. For whatever reason, it goes with you.

Everything.

The books, the videos, all this stuff goes with you. This interview is gone. And you can only share three things with the world. three lessons that you've learned from your entire life. What would be those three lessons or three truths that you would share?

Give first and without expectation, and you'll get more than you can imagine in all aspects of life. One, if you can't do it forever, don't do it for a day. And probably something to the extent of, if nothing matters, then you get to decide what matters. so use the power wisely.

That's good, man. I want to acknowledge you, Alex, for your growth and your ego death and the constant journey of that death. I think I'm on the same journey. But your acknowledgement of it, your ability to look yourself in the mirror and see, okay, here's what's working, what's not working, and how do I continue to develop that. And now you're this stage where it really feels like you're trying to create to add as much value as possible to as many people as possible through your books, your content and your information. So I really acknowledge you for the example you're creating for your really uniqueness, your being 100% who you are. I mean, you're in like the basement with your wife beater with like just like you don't care necessarily about what you look or whatever, you know, you just want to add the value and not think about what are people saying about me, but how can I make it about other others, which I think is really inspiring example that you're leaning from. So I want to acknowledge you for that, man. And hopefully we'll have you back on for more times. But final question. What's your definition of greatness when reality exceeds expectations? Oh, man. Alex, thanks. Good stuff. Good stuff.

You end up broke, you end up.

Struggling financially, and you. You can never figure out why.

So the first thing is. What is it that you want to.

Achieve in your life financially? And then you have to go out and figure it out yourself because unfortunately school will never teach you this stuff. So you didn't learn this in high school or University of Michigan or?

No.