From Broke At 26 To $100 Million Net Worth By 31 (Alex Hormozi Interview)

i have come to accept that i love working and i don't need to judge myself for that or or take in other people's judgment on how much i should quote do like this is my life and this is what i like doing [Music] because i never heard of you before and i was like hey this guy is popping up all over my youtube all of a sudden what the hell is going on and b he's saying that this gym i don't know i call that a course which actually is incorrect if there's like one thing that i could make just for the almost for the

audience's sake because like we were we were much closer to what a franchise would be um and overall in the very beginning that was what the big decision was like am i going to go the franchise route because i had six working locations i was 26 years old and they you know they worked and that's when a mentor was like you should stop owning all these gyms you need to license the model out and so that was when i kind of transitioned from b to c to b to b um what you might not know is that for two

years i actually because i wasn't confident i was like i know it works in my six markets i was like but does it work in all of these markets so my wife and i actually did 32 gym turnarounds in the next two years so we'd fly out in person fix their pricing change how they did their layout change their sales just like a consultant like like a management consultant for a job it's exactly that and then um from there we you know we figured out we cleaned it up to just like completely dial it in um and then it i would love to say with some stroke of brilliance of like and then in my master plan i decided to start licensing

um that was not what happened uh we ended up doing these launches and the flaw of the business model was that i didn't control the fulfillment so we would go in we would charge nothing it was pure performance we'd fly in and i would charge 100 of the upfront cash collected uh that we would do while we were there so we averaged about 100 000 in cash collected in 21 days and that's what we would average per gym that would come into so that means each gym is making an incremental 100 grand a month from your so if i were launching eight gyms in one

month we would make eight hundred thousand dollars got it right oh that and this was when the model before you were like exactly doing gym live and so what ended up happening though was like and it started scaling really quick i was like [ __ ] this is this is the game like this is what i need to be doing this is awesome and they didn't have to spend money on ads they like they did literally nothing they gave me a place to go market and sell is basically what happened and so what happens we would dip out and then all these customers that we sold would then be fulfilled by a facility that was struggling because that's why they

called us so they typically had pretty poor product and i didn't have the bandwidth to stay there for six weeks on top of that and retrain trainers and show them how to set up like i didn't have the time to do because we were marketing some of those times were there and so anyways we would fly out and then what happened in an unfortunate percentage they basically were like hey you signed up and paid this guy 500 i would give you the same thing for 200 refund with him and just sign up and i'll do everything through me and so within a matter of months i had uh like 150 000 in refunds between like

three facilities because they talked to each other and then i was like [ __ ] yeah and i already incurred the cost of the marketing the flight the sales guy the hotel rental car everything what was the name of this gym franchise this this gym okay but i'll tell you this the original concept was gym rescue um it's like bar rescue that was kind of the idea um but you said jim motors didn't want to be rescued bingo so who doesn't want to get launched though right so it's gym launch even though you're already open um it's a nice branding switch uh and so anyways we were like okay this is not the model something's wrong here so i had to you

basically keep selling more every month to cover the refunds from the month before it was horrible very stressful um and so my wife had a little side training business that she had kept she was doing like three or four thousand dollars a month um and i was like you know what screw the gym thing we know how to sell weight loss uh you know direct consumer that's what we're good at i was like why don't you become the face i'll go in the back and i'll just run the you know i'll run the acquisition side and it will sell like 16 week transformations just over the phone and so we started doing that that's it that that doesn't seem

like a good idea does it right i mean it it started working 14 days we're doing a thousand bucks a day uh switching it and um well i just thought it was so crowded we're yeah i mean we're good like we're good at that you know like we that space we understand very well um and so we were able to do that and i was like all right the eight sales guys can come in we could do 8 000 a day selling these like the the the transformation programs great and so i had eight gyms i was supposed to launch the next month um and so i called him up and i was like

hey we're not doing the thing we were doing before you know you didn't pay anything so best of luck you know i mean basically it was kind of what it is and then um the first guy was like dude i just refinanced my house i just maxed out my credit cards like i need this my buddy like filled his gym up with you like i know your thing works like i just need i please like help me and so um we heat and hog and finally i was like all right man listen i'll show you what to do i was like but i'm not flying out there to save your ass if you can't close and he was like no no that's fine that's fine and he was like well how much and this that was

like the magic moment where i was like uh and so just to show you where i was at the time i picked the highest number i could think of with the intention of getting him to say no because i didn't want to do it and so i said six thousand dollars and he was like done and i was like i just remember looking at the phone and be like holy [ __ ] six thousand dog and so i hung up the phone and then i called the next guy who i was supposed to cancel on same spiel he was like how much i was like eight thousand dollars and he was like what are you giving these guys so that you're giving them a playbook to sell in their

market which included what what did they do but you probably actually didn't even know what you were going to give them well so we had already had the entire the entire front end process was super super uh lubricated so like these are the ads these are the pages here's how you place them here's the targeting once they come in these are the five texts that you send here's how the reminder sequence works once they walk in the door here's how you set up your lobby here's where you need to sit this is that's the stuff that a gym owner would send to a client who wants to get trained so it's not a course it's also not like eos it's not like a back-end

operations thing it's it's like a marketing machine you would you'd basically like i licensed the acquisition so we were the ads so it was ads that i was in because i was like these ones work so i would run these ads that i had written to pages that i had built and i would and so what i was doing but on on their url you basically were you were a services business 100 were a services business and the training component was like okay well how do you sell so instead of getting one on one i was like one and so what i did was i actually gave them my internal sales training so it was this thing that i put my guys

through and like a lot it's kind of interesting because i fell into this where i think a lot of the the e-learning space try and create stuff to have stuff rather than creating uh as as short of a time commitment to get someone from point a to point b which is i needed to get a guy in who used to be selling shape mix from mlm and get him to close 500 deals day one with two hours of training and so that training is what i gave to them so i already had everything i just didn't have the marketing part so all i did was i built

the marketing part over the weekend because i already had the ads i didn't make a training for it but the training for like how do you weigh them in how do you do the food stuff how do like all that stuff already made because i had to do that during the gym rescue side so i literally just added in how to run the ads and then the whole product was there and um we helped them implement it implement the acquisition system within the business and the average gym collected thirty thousand dollars in additional cash in the first 30 days so we would do a hundred but them not being as good as us still

did thirty thousand dollars additional cash in the first 30 days and so the price point for the for the system was was 16 grand so they were stoked and then at that point we signed three-year licensing agreements for 42 000 a year um so they were like what else do you have and what would happen and what didn't bring their gym because all of a sudden they go from 100 members to 250 in two months and be like how do i hire trainers how do i scale a sales team how do i it'll be like and then all of the other problems emerged and we already had done this because i had six gyms so i was like here's my ads for trainers

here's how i train them here's how we set up the classes to maximize square footage here's how we do the ascensions into semi-privates here's and so we just we just did the whole thing what could i google to see one of these gyms i i want to see like like did you do that i know you use click funnels i think i could tell by the favicon because i like click funnels too but you what like can i google something to see one of your uh clients one of your students i don't know what you call them yeah one of their channels look different because they're all they don't they don't take my brand

so franchise is system fee name right so we were just system and fit otherwise i'd be operating as an illegal franchise and so let's zoom out for a second so you basically go from for those who don't know the story and i i only barely know the story but the story is you open up a couple gyms yourself so you open up a gym and you get to six locations you're sleeping on the gym floor which is always you know any business i do i'm just to sleep in a garage at least one night so i could say that but uh but you know you know maybe you did the real deal where you actually had to sleep

throughout i don't know nine months all right so you're sleeping on the gym for nine months uh you end up getting six locations off of cash flow so you know you're not like you know getting a bunch of investors to come in or whatever and somehow someway you stumble into this like i don't know like a mastermind or a retreat by russell brunson the or i don't know if he hosted or he was just there um who's the clickfunnels guy how did you even get to that event and then i want to ask you a couple questions about it yeah so for for avoidance of doubt i had two partners that after i had my successful gym uh one was the

ex-ceo of broadcom number two at broadcom 10 billion dollar company and the other guy had 22 tanning salons and so the broadcom guy brought in the tannic salon guy and was like hey let's scale this thing and i was like awesome long story short the partnership didn't work out um and so i ended up opening the next full three on my own um and i opened up two more with them and then i ended up buying out uh both of them over time so just did you have a job before this because you're only 29 32 i was a management consultant uh before that

so i quit my major and then and then started this um the question that you asked though originally was so how did you end up at this thing where it's at this hangout or this mastermind or this meeting where you you realize i'm in the wrong business i shouldn't be running gyms i should be teaching other people how to run run their gyms right uh how did you even end up at that thing it was it was and it was like russell's idea right at least i saw the video it was wonderful i um so the the long story compressed was two years before i went to that mastermind i went to traffic and conversion summit because i knew i

needed to like learn more about marketing and like i'm a gym over like i'm not internet marketer i was like not this is not my world you know i mean i was like i got to learn more about marketing so i'm gonna go to this marketing event so i go there and one of the side rooms is russell and he goes and pitches click funnels but he couldn't actually do the stack because they weren't allowed to sell so he did his entire sales presentation and then literally just stopped before the buy button and i was like i want whatever i was like screw the gyms i want to learn how to do this

stuff and then like most things because i couldn't buy there was nothing that i did and i went back to my life for two years and that was it and then when i was having some sort of existential crisis because i was now 26 or 27 at the time um you know all the gyms were you know they were making money and i remember like texting one of my managers and i was like hey do you need anything he was like uh i think we're good i need some ink you know and i like ordered my amazon cinnamon ink and then i was done for the day and i was like trying to be useful but i needed to be useful so i googled i was like you know what that russell thing was really cool so out of

the blue i google his name and the first link that comes up is are you one of my dream clients or something which was directly to his mastermind so i applied to the mastermind i got sold to the mastermind and transparently i should never have been sold into this mastermind it's for internet marketers and i was the only one and it's like 30 grand right and i was the only brick and mortar business owner there they're like oh yeah tons of motors and i've already told him we laugh about it now but like anyways i show up and i'm like all right all the guys show their funnels and all stuff and i was like yeah i own a bunch of gyms i'm

trying to get to ten i've got six so that's kind of i'm just here to learn you know yeah that's where i'm at yeah yeah and so i walked through my acquisition process because we were we were getting 30 to one on the front end so 31 ltv to calculation in the first 30 days right not including my my recurring on the back end and i walked through everything which basically means which means you're making 30 30 x what you were spending on average you get thirty dollars out on cash in the first month yeah so the university launches which is which is like absolutely a good for a lot of brands like one to three over a year would be all right it was

insane i mean so it would cost us three dollars to get a lead and one out of five leads would give us five hundred dollars and the reason that it wasn't more than 31 is that that's me giving the average with the sales guys but like when we ran it and i was selling and we were working leads like we'd get 100 it was insane so anyways he saw these numbers and was like what is going on um and so anyways i walked through it and he said the sentence that changed my life which was alex um you shouldn't be running gyms you should be showing gym owners exactly what you showed me and right now you're in a

level two opportunity with a level 10 skill set and that would those were the exact words that he said to me and it honestly hit me like a ton of bricks is i was like this is my vision united fitness we're going to be america's next gym we're going to make more healthy like we've got this and um but you know i he he made more money than me at the time and so i was like if i don't listen to someone's advice then why am i paying for it um and i saw an interview with you you said something that i've had this exact moment before which is you meet people who are doing you know on whatever the scoreboard is

they're they're they're richer their business is bigger their valuation's higher they're younger whatever so they're more successful quote unquote and uh you meet them and you're like all right there's nothing more special about them than me okay so that's the first realization i want what they have and they're not they don't have something i don't all right so then you know how do i do this and it seems to me like that's what kind of shattered the glass of that whole like business plan that you had was that

realization is that right yeah 100 i mean i didn't even know what an opportunity vehicle was i was like what do you mean he was like you should like and i didn't same was that same yeah let me know what that means either yeah i remember i remember when i didn't know what that meant either yeah well i mean i i define that now as uh the number of potential units to be sold and the gross margin per unit possible so it's just one times the other and then the third multiplier would be supply and demand dynamics within the

space so like if i were to try to get into telecom amazing tam amazing potential gross profit per unit sold terrible supply demand ratio for me to enter right so it's like how do i measure the opportunity vehicle so those are the three that i used to measure that vehicle and so in this instance uh he was like okay you have all these gems that you can sell you have a huge and the big one that he saw was like the amount of potential gross margin per unit sold was enormous right and so for context our second year of business was in the licensing business we did 26 million top lines 17

million in ebitda amazing wait say those numbers again it was 25.9 million in top line and 17 million in ebitda for the life first i've got a bunch of questions about that that was in year one okay first of all what made you you said that you were getting this thirty to one um uh ltv the cac what what were you doing that was so good just good copywriting are you just a good salesperson on the phone what was so good about you well first off facebook was way cheaper in 2013.

you know i mean when this whole thing started right so i mean like just the cost per lead was insane the percentage of people would convert on landing pages was higher everything was more responsive et cetera but from uh from from like what we were doing is we were offering an irresistible offer so we had a free six-week challenge is what we'd offer people when they would come in uh we'd walk them through you know what the program was etc and then the shtick and the reason it was so cool and compelling was that if they lost 20 pounds uh in six weeks we'd give them the entire amount of money back and that's what

made it so cool and that's why we got crazy results we had like 70 80 success rates which for a weight loss program is insane and it's because people were basically wagering money um and that was because i didn't know that like wagers are managed by lotteries and like i did like i just it was like you put 500 bucks down you lose the weight you get it back but the reason it works so well is that someone come in so i'd pay i'll walk you through the math so let's say at this point i'm probably paying 10 bucks you know cpm so like and you know so i'm getting and probably

like four percent five percent ctrs because it was like back then so i'm getting 50 clicks for 10 bucks right i'm like okay and now my landing page is converting half okay so like it was it was just you know like bonkers like and that's why some of these in some markets we're getting 25 cent leads you know what i mean in some markets like the highest markets back then were like five bucks right and so you've got an average cost per lead of like two dollars which was no you're getting what their phone number was that yeah name phone number email um

and so from there we'd schedule usually like 50 to 70 of those people half of them would show and then we'd close um and depend on you know the skill of the sales guy the average gym closes 35 our team averaged about 50 when layla and i sold we averaged 80. um and so there's a big range there but we'd collect the cash up front for 500 bucks and then 24 hours later they'd come in for a nutrition consultation which was complimentary we'd average 200 a ticket in supplements you know creatine pre-workout etc that we'd sell them right after that so we get another 200 pop three weeks later what we do is say hey

listen you lost 12 pounds sandy um is that your ultimate goal and then she'd be like well no i want to like get an amazing shape and blah blah blah we're like all right so you understand that it's not about the six weeks it's about six years from now right and she would say yes then i'd be like congratulations you won the challenge you got the point of this and so what i want to do is i'm aligned with your long-term goal too so i want to do is because you won the challenge don't take that 500 i want to spread it over the next year so you get a discount for doing it so we can align with you all fair enough she said sure three weeks

after that she gets billed for her first billing so if you follow the money 500 200 and then she gets billed right for the eft even though she won the challenge right right yeah and then six weeks after that we'd say hey wouldn't you like to like have a little bit more attention instead of being in this large group we can put you into a one-on-four scenario we can give you even more stuff we can show you cooler more advanced exercises blah blah and so that was that was how we did it and were you just um but but then this parlayed into the actual product that you really crushed

it on right so which was when you were doing 27 million in year two or whatever 20 something million with like 17 million in ebitda on year two that product was the was gym launch right yeah and what was that what did that look like was it what software were you using and how did you package this like that's because i want to get really nerdy on this stuff because i think about that i'm like that's a great idea but packaging a service is that's a challenge that's interesting and i want to so i want to ask you what you did and then i'm going to ask you

um what other industries would you do it for so i mean that's what acquisition.com is so it's like it's exactly that like i know how to do this within a within a niche so like b2b services if someone's like i know how to help a lawyer make more money with their law firm i know how to help a bookkeeper make more money with their bookkeeping business i know how to help hair salon you know people make more money with their salons like that's what i'm looking for is niche e-learning service companies um that we can invest in our our good friend jack butcher has a phrase called um build

once sell twice and that's basically what you were doing um you were like people who were selling one to one they had to sell then do sell and do you were like no f that we're gonna build one cell a bunch of times and and that like process is what i'm asking about that's interesting yeah i mean that was when i'm sure you're familiar with naval because i know you're on twitter um like i i kind of fell into like it's like you realize why you start making money like i'd love to say it was a master plan like you realize later why something worked so well it's like i had zero incremental cost i was selling cars

over the phone and i had no cost of goods like it was insane um and so we basically would onboard people you know we had a concierge service back then this is i mean it's five years ago you know it's been it's been a while um but we do an onboarding process we kick their ads off we basically check in with them we had calls every single day so i would hop on a call with every new customer every day um i did it as a group call but i was always available and then we had a 35 person tech support team that would help them with like the pixels and setting the landing pages up and all that kind of stuff and so

because that was that was the issue they would get stuck with was the tech so they could understand the sales they could understand the nutrition stuff they got both of those things for the most part the tech is where they struggled so we really ramped up like our implementation hump um and then on the strategy side i would be there every day to take calls and i took 400 calls over the first year um and so like that was kind of how we did the fulfillment and then but it was like a set of videos yeah there's a set of videos you watch along with like a file a folder a file yeah it'd be like here's

how you set up that you know i'd be like here's why you set up the lobby this way this is what they need to see when they walk in you have them sit down here give them this ipad here's the download for the the swipe file of the presentation that they should be leafing through before they come to the office when you come like when you're ready say these things make this joke do this thing when you come inside like sit on the corner don't sit across from them because it seems confrontational uh have them step on the scale make sure they step on it make sure they look at the weight then she cries and you're like okay sit down now listen we're here to help you let's

figure this out what have you done so you know i mean like it was very scripted so it's like here's the video explaining it here's the script that does it and then here's six examples of guys in different gyms with different styles of selling because that's one of the things that like we started to learn early on is that i was attracting guys originally like in my team i just had everybody selling my way more or less right and then i realized that a lot of people over time as i learned more about sales like people have different styles of selling and they're just as effective some people are more you know very analytical in terms of like their

approach like basically make a logical argument some people just very emotion driven some people just do it off the poor like and so i showed different styles of selling but still following the same framework and so we went away from scripted process to more of a question-based framework which is what we've pretty much stuck with since then and if somebody wants to get good at selling what uh like you know there's a go out there and you know try to sell a thousand times it's one way to get get better but if you wanted to improve your rate

of learning what books courses whatever what what youtube videos uh like do you remember that like that really clicked for me and that was like kind of like a game changing uh thing for me and getting better at selling i have relatively stronger beliefs about the topic um so i think first off a lot of people read books before they start selling and i've thought a lot about it and i don't think that's the right path because you don't know what they're talking about yeah like you only know like what the concept of building rapport is until you've not had rapport and like oh

okay now i understand how this works but like until you like until you confront the reality like you can't you can't bucket the knowledge into something that's actionable so i'm a proponent of doing first realizing the deficiencies and then going to find the information now to match the the real life scenarios that you have encountered the second part of the question is like which books or things like made things click so um there's one moment that made things click which was i said this in the book sam which is like make people offer so good they'd feel stupid saying no which was the secret of selling right

it's like if you just make it so good that they won't say no then it makes your job a hundred times easier and so i did work really hard on that side to make my job easier yeah and i agree with that my problem when i i'm a copywriter a former self-talk copywriter and i knew i know all about that but i'm like uh if people want to refund this is going to be a pain in the butt like if like in order to make this like in order to make an offer irresistible you could you could go a couple different routes but one of them is you just do lots of stuff and when i think about that route i'm like oh my god that's going to be a lot of

work i don't know if i can actually execute on that what's an example of that so uh give an example of where you see uh people with a kind of substandard offer and how you would give me and how you would switch it to be a more irresistible offer i mean a simple one we did within the agency space and the software company that we started um was we helped them transition from a retainer model to a pay performance model so that was an implied guarantee and we just said listen pay us one time up front which by the way for most of them was what their ltv was because most of them sucked so it's like if you're charging 1500 a month which would be

probably the standard small business b2b you know i would say commoditized price point for a generic lead gen um they're charging 1500 bucks a month we said hey charge a person 5 000 up front day one and say you'll never charge them again unless someone walks in the door and so they'll cover the ad spend after that and you don't get any percentage of it unless someone walks in the door so you generate the leads and work the leads and when the person shows up you charge x and that was based on a pricing survey that we ran internally to our customers where i said if we worked your leads for you

what would you be willing to pay as a flat rate and so there was a big pricing curve and the the concentration of like 75 were willing to pay between 300 and 400 a month for that just as a flat service and i was like okay now i asked the exact same scenario same result same everything later on in the survey and i said if we just said hey uh pay per show what would you be willing to pay for somebody who walks in the door for the same exact performance they're willing to pay four times as much and so i said well i'll be why don't we price

it that way and so we did it on a paper show model and so that's what we transitioned and it also makes it way easier to sell we could cash flow the acquisition because we were making the ltv that we're not we but like the agencies could make normally upfront day one in cash and what's cooler is that the first 30 days they had people show up so they get cash up front and then in the first 30 days they're still getting cash that they can use to finance the acquisition of the customer right and so that's a much more irresistible offer from a chiropractor it's like well how do i know it's going to work it's like you pay us one time just get all the

[ __ ] set up and then from this point going forward only when someone shows up you have to pay and so people understand this you said software company and so i look i mean i watch a lot of your videos so i know this but you basically had like three or four or five businesses the first one was this main one which was gym launch and that was doing like 30 40 50 million seconds down to 26 uh you're so we did 6.8 million year one that was the hybrid between me doing gym rescue and transitioning the licensing model so about halfway through your one i was like this model is not working and so we flipped it and then that's when we

shot out like a gun like the first month we did 120 the next month i think we did like two something then it was 360 then 480 then 780 then a million then million two million five like that was literally the next like six months and so that crossed us into the second year of business and then that year we did uh 26 million um so we did six point eight with three million e but a year year one uh the second year we did uh 20 25.9 with 17 million and then year three and this is why i'm a big advocate and this is maybe just my own deficiency

but um we did 37 million top line 13.4 million in ebitda so alex made a big [ __ ] up um and was like hey because at this point even though it may sound like there's a short period of time i was like i had heard that i could sell this for like a hundred million dollars so i was like [ __ ] yeah let's do that um three year [ __ ] journey but um anyways and there's this flu that went around people lost their minds it didn't affect the gym space at all that was good um i'm joking uh so anyways uh we started the supplement

company prestige labs in december of in december of 18. and you're basically selling supplements to your clients well it's through the clients so they never actually purchased from us directly what we did was we created a drop shipping model because one issue that small business owners have is cash flow so i said what we did was we sent out retail kits that had 130 bottles on them or empty so the result was like 100 bucks and they could stock their whole wall because all consumer research shows that like the more stock the wall is the more likely they are to purchase and they would only have one

sampler of all of them out and then we sent them a kiosk with a with an amazon fire on it right that was pre-loaded with their affiliate link so someone would oh my god and they would make the purchase right there and say hey this is so much better because now to go straight to your doorstep you don't need to take it home with you and better yet you won't miss a month because it'll automatically ship to you so we gave the gyms a second recurring revenue stream through the supplement so when someone walks in when i was telling you earlier like some service and we sell them product

we'd sell two eft so that's the gym word for electronic fund transfers or recurring revenue so we'd sell them a service recurring and then we'd sell them a product recurring so that we'd have two different streams that would come in the nice thing with the product recurring is there was no there's no operational drag for the gym they don't have to do anything they just have to make the one sale one time and they're gonna make 80 bucks a month from that point going forward pure profit for them like just straight to the bottom line and so what you know interestingly uh a lot of gyms made more money selling the supplements they did on their service

because service is low margin but the the product was like almost all marching for them and we paid really aggressively so we paid 40 um commissions to them because they were paying for the cost of acquisition and doing the sale so i said you know you guys should get disproportionately rewarded in the first month we launched that uh so we beta launched in december and then january of 2019 is when it kind of officially launched in the first month we did 1.7 million and so um because i figured i was like okay if we've got you know 800 active gyms if each of those guys sells and who's actually under my

projections because i was like we're gonna be you know so wealthy i was like if all of these guys just sell five thousand dollars a month i was like we'll do a million a week um it didn't work out that way but uh we ended up doing that year 37 but my licensing business came down and i think it went to like 20 ish and then the supplement company was like 17. and part of the reason the oopsie that i did was two big oopsies number one was i started a second active company when i already had one which to me i think was a mistake uh given the skill set i had

at the time and then the second uh oopsie was that because i thought potential acquirer would want lower churn which is true um i lowered the price and so i thought that if i lowered the price that would get more people stick and so i cut my top line price by 25 and saw absolutely no change and just lost what what was it and what did you reduce it to it went from uh the it went from 800 a week which is the licensing uh on the back end to 600 a week what's 800 a week times 52 i don't even know like what's the annual cost 42. what is it so it costs 42 grand to be

a part of your election what do you call it part of your not court yeah but what do you what's like the noun that you use to describe this uh like your the program was called legacy the people were called gym lords and so we would sell launch as a front-end program and then they would go into the continuity which was legacy so if you're if you're if you're following on from home for anyone in the podcast i've copied the exact same model so i sold a six week defined in program for a lot of money and then i down sold the continuity because 16 000 for 16 weeks is a thousand a week and so i said

now you're gonna get more for less for eight hundred dollars a week you're gonna get what you have before plus all this other stuff for less money than were currently paying and they're like what a deal at the gym i'd say hey it's 100 a week 600 and if you stay we're going to drop you from 250 a month to 200 a month because we'll take your 600 and we'll spread it over 12 months we'll go 50 a month in credit and so then you get to 199 a month and so it was front end to liquidate the cost of acquisition so they wouldn't need outside capital to acquire customers and then the back end i would down sell the upsell so that we

could keep the continuity and make it which is all like the most classic internet marketing [ __ ] which like a lot of like tech startup stuff they don't do this in their fools for not doing it in tech startups we do the opposite typically so we say hey we want to get you in we want to make you don't know us we don't know you let's make the cost of trying so low so free free trial don't even put a credit card on file and then try to put the bar as low as possible you did the exact opposite you said okay i'm gonna put actually more friction up front i'm gonna ask for five hundred dollars or sixteen thousand dollars a huge number

up front and then over time i'm going to actually be selling you on more value for less cost why do you think that works or why do you think that worked for you to charge have such a big kind of commit up front when you know that's usually when people are you know hesitant i think there's a couple pieces um one is most software companies have funding not all but a lot of them have funding i did not have that and so i could not afford to be in the negative and incur caught i did i couldn't have a burn rate burn it was alex's bank account so that

wasn't going to work for me from a psychological and behavioral standpoint it always made sense to me to sell someone when they're the most excited so you're the most excited day one before you've gone to your first workout because once you get your first workout you're like [ __ ] this is gonna be work so and i'm gonna have to start dieting and not eating the stuff i want sell them when they're excited about the bikini and not about the tsa and the airplane they have to go through to get to maui right and so i followed that and then the reason that we decrease cost over time is because it's my belief that

information decreases in value over time and so the longer someone has it and exposure to it the less valuable it is you know marginally and so we tried to accommodate that with the pricing and since our our gross margins were still basically 100 it still made sense for us so let me try something this might be a bust we can go back to the gym stuff this is a bus but let me try something you've said a couple things that i thought were really interesting nuggets i want to kind of rapid fire just say i'm going to just quote you and

i want you to riff on it for as long as you feel like doing and then we can switch to the next one all right so i'm going to take one of yours let's let's start with this one passive income is overrated we seek freedom but what we really want is options for engaging activities what does that mean and how did you come to that realization so 2021 uh we sold three companies so we were like i didn't it was interestingly my cfo was someone who's really engaged in those activities and like i was not so i pretty much like took a really passive seat in 2021 because i didn't want to really go start

hardcore on on scalingacquisition.com until that was done and so i was born out of which which three companies so allen prestige labs and gym watch so those are my three majority holdings right now i have all minority holdings so between 20 and 33 are the holdings that we target for acquisition um and so i had this i don't want to say existential crisis but more like i'm bored out of my mind i thought this is what i was always optimizing towards which was you know quote freedom which is like you're always you're always outsourcing all of your activities and buying your time back and then you have all your time

back and you have nothing to do and i was like this sucks and i look back on the times when i was building into those companies with lots of nostalgia and i was like man that was like some of the happiest times of my life and so that i'm in this position i'm getting back into the game and like right now we're heavily recruiting like we're two days a week we're just doing interviews uh to build the core team out and um i honestly i'm happy as [ __ ] doing this uh and so it's like but the difference between this time and last time is that i have the option to do it that i'm choosing rather than uh because if i didn't have this business i wouldn't

have the option to work so i have to create the option for myself and so it's like for me the shift was going from freedom to optionality at least for as i had to understand the word right first you start you do what you have to do to pay for life then you take that money you buy back your time but then you need to spend your time on the thing you want that's the thing and acquisition.com is basically you're buying other you're going to buy businesses and deploy your model what are you what are you doing 100 yeah so we buy an interest and we buy a majority interest in the

business um and we deploy the model i mean that's sorry the business is somebody who's doing like what you did for gyms they're doing it for legal or hair salons or something else or photographers that's your latest right yeah that was the that was the fourth company that one we still yeah we have a 20 interest in that company and you say hey i just had a business just like this and i scaled it up i know what it's going to take for you to go national with your kind of like with your business let me take a minority seat and uh let me like help you grow this thing yep that's a great what's a great model what

niches interest you i mean really it's just services like i and it's silly because like everybody's like really hot on software and there's all the valuations and stuff but like i may just be a simpleton which is very possible um i just like high cash flow businesses so i just really like service businesses are super malleable i can chase price points i can change a product i can change client experience without a ton of devwork or engineer or ux and and i just like that i feel like they're simple businesses it's very easy

to get tons of margin in them if you know how to you know deliver value and so uh right now the the four kind of they're all related but the four targets are e-learning businesses that are in a niche uh brick-and-mortar chains that already have multiple successful locations so they're probably looking at do i do i go national and own them all which is what we we did with the photography business so ironically we actually own we own all of them um which is different with that one uh which we have i think 13 locations and when we started we had one and that was like a year ago so like we're just it's an awesome business that one i think is

gonna be worth more than all the businesses that i put together um uh software as a service or tech enabled services uh more tech enabled services that could potentially have some mini you know software component but not as the the main thing necessarily um and then uh and there's a fourth one that i'm just forgetting because i'm on a podcast so you you said that might be the best business what what people are like photography what what is it so what does that do and why is it going to be such a good business so it's a great business um

the it's children's photography first off um it has an awesome mission we donated a million dollars last year to kids stuff and so the founders are super mission driven the the short story is their daughter got told at school to shut up um because she was stupid or something and she didn't talk for like nine months and so they couldn't figure out how to get her to talk again and so they did was they started their photographers so they started taking pictures um and put it into like a story

experience and read her a story where she was her own hero and so in the story that they put together for her she like gets her voice back and like whatever and so that actually like their daughter started to talk again and so that's why they're like super mission driven around like the donation stuff that they do but the actual business model itself is really really good um i mean people come in and we take you know take pictures and it's really about the it's called magic you know chain of fairies but it's a magical storybook experience um and so it's kind of like the idea of like taking disney um and

putting it you know in some in other areas you can walk out with a book but then what's with you in it there's another one of the products we sell there's and you're going to now like teach photographers how to do we don't teach photographers oh i got it so that so this business was interesting so he at the time when he came to me he had one location and he had i think about 100 customers who were b2b who were doing like some sort of like hybrid agency business coaching thing

and i really hated the model um and i was like well how much extra does like a photography studio make i'm not going to share the numbers i'll just say it was a lot um uh and i was like how much you charging he was like five grand and i was like all right we're never doing that again so how much does it cost to open a photographer studio and he was like a lot less than it makes and i was like okay well why don't we just front all that and build them all and so that's what we learned sean he uh alex maybe i don't remember how long ago i

think recent had a call the headline was like grant cardone just made me a billionaire or something like that it was like a funny headline and he did this he paid grant cardone 30 grand for an hour of time oh yeah pretty crazy and basically on it he record he youtubed the call and on the call he basically you know how like you and i will talk to each other or our friends and you're like hey i'm in the middle of selling this company what do i do and then you also be like by the way like here's my net worth portfolio like is that enough like you just asked all these questions like you know like what do i do now like once i have this like

how much should i expect you know like all these like the things that you ask like your rich uncle like as you're growing he asked all these questions and he was so transparent it was uncomfortable almost he said um he goes well look like right now i've got 21 million dollars in the bank after this i should have like 54 after taxes um and he like this is all on youtube it's it's wild why why are you so open about that i think that's that's um cool but uh uncomfortable for you yeah um i

it feels like the right thing to do um i think like what are what are the things i'm most afraid of and but usually they're the things that i should do and so it's like i'm afraid of saying this because i it because i know that when i say those numbers people can immediately judge me in one direction or the other but in my mind all the people that i want to talk to think that's a really small number and so i feel insecure saying those numbers but i want to like i'm a big believer that like shame only exists in the

darkness and so like if i can shed light on it then i can hopefully quell some level of the insecurities that i have right so yeah but the panda express guy wasn't doing that when he was 32. what are the numbers yeah no like he he didn't like you're saying you think it's small or they they think it's small um age is a fact age and liquidity are huge multiples to net worth so like the fact that you had that at age 30. and cash is way different than owning 10 restaurants it also seems like you know for your model with acquisition the more you go

out there as the entrepreneur's friend and entrepreneur's helper and you provide a bunch of value by giving out free content and stuff like that then you're basically creating your own deal flow because of that right like people when they think god what do i do with this business i've learned so much from this guy maybe i could reach out to him maybe maybe acquisitions would be a good partner for me like as the next phase like to me that's the model right that's the why to me aside from like you know like okay this podcast is similar in that sense right we go on here every week we risk getting canceled we risk

getting judged as idiots for saying stupid things off the cuff about stuff we barely know about you know we risk all kinds of stuff but the gain is a it's kind of fun to do it and b um you get either people thanking you or opportunities coming your way and you're like all right net net i think that the combination of the the good feels and the good deals uh you know makes it worth it i would i would have to quote that the the big thing with like fields and deals the mission and like this is might be like my personal mission and i don't really understand the value of it because people do like mission

statements and stuff but like i think people just put generic ones and they don't like resonate um like my mission through acquisition.com and really my life is like i want to document and share the best practices building built of building wonderful businesses like that is what i want to do and i'm like i will die and the [ __ ] that i accumulate is irrelevant and so like it's a travesty to me that like elon and bezos and warren like they they don't they didn't write any books like like that's i mean that's the point you don't even like

it's just as for me for me you know that's real for me uh is like sharing that um and so the businesses are just there to lend credence to what to to the books and the topics and the lessons and give me real stories to drive real fundamental truths from um and candidly to discover them as i go because like i mean i'm horrified at the things that i you know said five years ago that i thought were true but you know the only thing short of that is not saying anything which is is something that i consider every day of like

is this this is this is as strong as i can think of it currently you know and maybe i will think of it less wrong in the future were you um you seem like a grinder when you were building these businesses were you just like uh doing 80-hour 100 work weeks and what about now because you're like yolked you're huge you're like a bodybuilder so so like how did you balance like uh being fit and getting married and you but i don't know you well but you seem like you'd be grinding hard so my wife works in the business with me so we are true 50 50 partners like it's very rare i

like i recognize how rare it is she actually is 100 matched with me and like should just as much be on this call because she runs the other half like she from a work standpoint she has more output than i did um she is the operator so she builds the infrastructure she does the recruiting she sets the they are the hr stuff she does the culture she like she does i mean she runs everything um i just you know occasionally come up with a good idea and try and stick with it long enough to see it come true but in terms of grinding we this is what we like i love business like i love this and there's nothing

that really stimulates me like this and so i do as much of it as i can and if we want to go into dinner we'll go out to dinner you know but like we're we're i was just saying we're single so we don't have kids and so we work from like five-ish to four ish you know um and then you know usually in the middle of the day we'll probably go to the gym for an hour or two and then come back and keep working and go out to dinner at night and that's that's kind of our lives you seem pretty um

this isn't i would say i'm a little bit i'm definitely this sean has a little bit of it too like manic's not the right word but like neurotic maybe is a better word um where it's like uh you you're there's something that's deep rooted inside of you that's kind of it's not like you want to do something necessarily it feels like you're it's more compulsive um or obsessed you're obsessed about stuff which i am as well um where if that's true what's that rooted in what are you trying to get done so i

think originally the drive was from just crippling insecurity and needing approval right um and then i think from like a behavioral conditioning standpoint i got a media feedback that was positive and then i was conditioned to continue those actions now uh i continue to do them without the original catalyst that got them going to begin with so i don't i don't think i suffer you know from the insecurities as much as i used to i'd say i'm probably 30 better than i was at the beginning and it might just be because i have this massive big pile of money that i can use

as an emotional crutch to why i'm not a piece of [ __ ] um that would help i'm just being like i mean if it were all disappeared i'd find out how much actual growth i had or if i just compensated by circumstance and you know compensate for the divisions yeah i don't know you can send it to me and we'll we'll find out we'll see let's run the experiment i like so there's the compulsion and like this last year i pretty much took off like i did not work that much um and so i saw the difference and like i have i have come to accept that i love

working and i don't need to judge myself for that or or take in other people's judgment on how much i should quote do like this is my life and this is what i like doing and their ideals that they've arbitrarily made up as what they define as balance are irrelevant to me you said you took last year off what'd you do what'd you get up to we went out to dinner every single night to a five-star restaurant for seven straight months we went to i mean we we moved to vegas temporarily um we traveled a lot uh went to cabo went to

scottsdale went to sedona went to flagstaff um traveled all over um went out did did stuff um felt felt honestly pretty empty like you can only eat so many times like there's just not a lot to do um it feels good having that rest though i mean when i sold my company which was a year ago last week the first six six months i was like i need to decompress it felt good to have it and then and then i was like and i'm in that phase now where i'm like all right now i'm ready for war again you you can't like i i like you can't be in the trenches i think like or rather

you need breaks from from being in the from being at war i think and maybe even phrasing it i'm just throwing this out there like phrasing it is instead of like a break is a shift in how you're thinking because like it's really like it's going from dirt to clouds but i still think it's high leverage activity you know what i mean or like output it's just a different type of output you said something on one of your videos that um you're one of the only other people that i have heard say this phrase i use it a lot which is yeah i had a season like or this season i'm doing this or i had a season where i

was really just focusing on x and that's been like a game changer for me my personal trainer and kind of coach he's like my mindset coach plus trainer he does this all the time but he's like he's like i'm in a season right now where i'm i'm just uh he'll be like you know i'm practicing not waiting and he's like he comes up with these little themes or he'll be like right now i'm in a season where i'm going to eat whatever i want and it's kind of like in the entrepreneurial world it's like time boxing it's like all right i'm going to give myself two hours to get this [ __ ] [ __ ] done or i'm going to launch in the

next two weeks no matter what right like we i've used time boxing for productivity and now this seasons thing it makes every like decision you're making less heavy of a commit because you're like it's okay yeah because there's yeah there's beginnings and ends and this season is gonna feel a little different just like winter feels different than summer that's how i use it do you do you use it like that i just noticed you said that phrase 100 yeah and maybe it's a fitness thing i have no idea um i i've yeah i i have no ownership over here

yeah i mean i i think about in terms of entrepreneurial seasons um and i at least for me might have been like five year chunks and so this is gonna be my fourth season um and they've roughly been about the same length so i think that it probably takes me like three ish years to like really see something through and then two years to figure out how i'm going to transition from that thing or realize or monitor you know whatever that's right it's kind of like a pe cycle almost how much of your look do you think is a lot for your success accounts for your

success because your face are on a lot of ads and on your youtube videos it's like you looking jacked you've got this in a lot of videos you've got this badass handlebar mustache for the people listening not watching you look i don't know what your what your heritage is but you've got like cool jet black hair you look like uh i don't know you look like a like a like a like an italian lumberjack like i don't know what it is persian all right there it is yeah like you drive a you drive a g wagon but there's an axe in the back so i read a book

by dan kennedy five years ago that said that people who have noticeable facial features are more easily recognized and remembered and so i read that and then i grew a handlebar mustache and that actually actually i sold the likeness of the mustache with the company um because it was still a core part of the branding like you know at the events everyone would have stashes it was like money you know stat you know stat cash money stash or whatever you know there's a bunch of different hashtags you had to stop having your mustache after that was you had to stop having just the

handlebar mustache because you stole it no but but they were allowed to use it yeah i got tired of having the mustache after five years but but what about like just be cause all right again what do you weigh what do you how tall are you you're huge i'm 5 11 220 okay so uh just when you're getting getting big is it like do you think this is going to look awesome [Laughter] before he started internet marketing right you were built when you started the gym business i saw a video or a photo of you like starting your first gym and you're already jacked so it's

not like well i i watched i was i've been working on my squat and i was trying to figure out how what i can make how what the gains i can get in three months and i came across an article that you had when you were in your early 20s i bet and this article the gates that you had in like nine weeks that was the craziest [ __ ] i've ever seen what was that sean you got to like look at this that was natural i like i'll tell you because i'm on trt now um me too yeah so i was i was that was 100 natty um

and no in the comments they do not think that that is yeah it's like trend much you know whatever you know i mean um but the that training methodology is pretty much what i've done since then so i had a i had a roommate whose name was greg knuckles he's really big in the strength space [ __ ] amazing name he has his real name greg knuckles yeah and he's he's one of the two smartest people that i've ever met from a pure processing power standpoint like sounds like a mafia guy i mean you know he's you know got a perfect sats when he was 14 like very very bright but also

stupid strong like when i met him we were in our 20s and he was pulling 800 like stupid strong and natural and so anyways he was like i read this research paper what if we had you lyft six times a day but for like 10 minutes each time and i was like cool and i lived at the gym so i was like sure whatever so i set a timer and every 45 minutes i would go and do one set on three exercises then i'd go back to work which side note is actually an amazing productivity hack because like i had this nice uh timing i like cadence and i got this nice like boost from my nervous system every 45 minutes to like wake back up

and so i did that and that's when i gained just a tremendous amount of weight um but coupled that with another thing that he had done research on which was like a pure carbohydrate diet with no fat and so basically the efficiency of fat conversion to fat that's stored is almost 100 the efficiency of carbohydrate storage into fat is lower and so if you don't have because you're gonna have a calorie surplus and so to give yourself a smaller percentage of that surplus that gets stored as fat you would want a hundred percent of the surplus to be carbohydrate carbohydrates and so the idea was like i had you know

200 grams of protein and like 800 grams of carbs and basically zero fat besides yeah i saw what you were eating it looked like it would be awesome for a day and then horrible after that horrible anybody was like it didn't work i'm like just try eating that now the big caveat to this is like i have what i you know i think i have elite genetics i think like dr cashy who's my closest friend he's a biochemist he's a national strong man he's like you have potato chip genetics he's like you shouldn't give advice to people he's like you can just like drink coca-cola and work out like you'll have a six-pack so like i had that

plus i was doing everything maxed out like as i possibly could and like it was not sustainable like my knees were shot my elbows felt like [ __ ] like by the end i was sleeping terribly because i was i was bordering on over training um but i put a ton of weight on and i put a ton of strength to all my main lifts and uh from there what i did was i dialed back the total volume but i kept the split not to get into two fitness stuff but instead of doing uh seven sets of every exercise every day um i just dialed it down to like five and then well i was reading that article while i was listening to your videos and i was like oh man this guy carries this

[ __ ] over to everything i understand like it was super precise very like well obviously i think what's interesting about you is you don't have a or maybe you do but you've overcome it a self-limiting belief that a lot of people have and you're like well of course this is going to work you're going to do this you're going to do this you're going to do this you're going to do this and it's going to be hard but that's the outcome is going to be blank and and you here's the plan attack and you took that same process to business yeah i could i could hear it in your voice when you talk about business and fitness and that's why i thought it

was cool thanks let's do like uh one thing you one of my favorite things from you is uh these little tick tocks or shorts i see where you're giving like a sales tip or a little sales trick or whatever and um i would love for you i think most people probably you know most people who are listening to this just you know the bell curve of people listening to this probably have spent you know zero time trying to improve their sales and have not seen some of these things so i want to give them the opportunity where they don't got to go click and find this

random tick tock that i'm talking about in the ocean of tick tock i want to uh role play a little bit um give us kind of like um give us an example of normal like here's the default way people are doing something and then here's the rephrase of the reframe that has better results i would love to to give get two minutes of learning sales from alex sure and just as a quick caveat to complete the loop from like 40 minutes ago you said like what was the book or training or whatever that so it's my belief if you look at belford

you look at bradley you look at grant cardone some of the big sales trainers that are out there almost all of them invariably have the same story which is i started selling and was the best guy on the team by a [ __ ] mile and then i tried to figure out what i was doing and so i do think that some people naturally based on their childhood their upbringings their whatever are just have a higher proclivity for selling which yeah just a gift of gab and and empathy yeah and i think it carries over into how you recruit for selling too because we've built a lot of sales teams and i actually have a very short allowing for

people to fail at sales cycle probably much shorter than most people and it's just because i've never had a killer sales person who didn't do pretty well the first week and so for me we you know we turn through this quickly but as a result of that the team is just killers and they know that so i like this quote from from grant cardone he says you know my sales team is a dangerous place to work and i i love that so in terms of uh sale stuff i think that i think people don't know how people are really freaked out about the idea of selling right and so i think the first reframe is like you're not selling

you're helping someone make a decision that's going to help themselves and the the the front part of that is that i do think that the number one predictor of good sales is conviction and so fundamentally you have one person who should believe in something another person who does not believe it yet and trust is the thing that transfers that conviction so if fundamentally there's the two things you need you need trust and need conviction most times sales people don't have 100 trust i'm sorry 100 conviction and so the also the idea of conviction as a binary is false so it's not like i believe it or i don't believe it is to

what extent do i believe it right and so that's why like in terms of if i want to improve a sales team i can do the drills which we do and that's like blocking tackling but the thing that really juices the sales team is hearing the testimonials of the people that they sold last week and what they're doing today and how their lives have changed and so i noticed this because on my sales teams when we were in person whenever i did weigh out day which is when everyone finished their challenges and everybody was crying and so excited i tried to stack as many sales appointments as i could while people were weighing out and during those days

we closed like 100 because people were like dude how can you not think this works it's right there and so the thing is is like you can either trick yourself into having the right tone or you can train yourself and i think that it's much easier to trick yourself into it by just simply believing because if you talk if you truly believe in the product you will talk about it differently and so in terms of an understanding of selling if you need to have conviction you need to have trust trust is going to come from expertise and some level of rapport right and so um i think that overarchingly to help someone sell we

just have to ask the right questions to get someone to come to the conclusion on their own and so most sales conversations follow more or less the same framework if you know what you're doing otherwise people are just chasing their tail and trying to chase a prospect to an outcome that the prospect doesn't know how like we've had this conversation a hundred times they have only had it once we should be the one knowing how this conversation's supposed to go right we should also come in with a massive advantage to how to have this conversation go the way we wanted to because we do it on [ __ ] day right

and so you know big big front end pieces is like why are they there what's the problem what have they done so far understanding where they failed seeing why our product is different from the things that they failed asking for permission to explain about the product explaining the product not in any way based on features but only based on the experiences that they will have as a result of it and using analogies to explain those experiences right um and then and then having a close at the end which the the tic toc i think that

you he references like a no base close and i think a lot of natural sales people do this anyways like if i want something i might be like hey can you do this for me i'm like hey would you mind and they say no they don't i don't mind right like it's natural communication dynamics that most people who naturally know how to persuade people or at least influence do that on their own this is just retroactively looking at it and saying what did i do different like why is this different and um in terms of like overcoming because people are afraid of confrontation right that's what they're afraid of and so i believe that you can sell

without ever having confrontation and you can do that with what i like to call childlike curiosity and so if someone says um well my husband's not going to approve that i'm like why wouldn't he like huh that's so interesting tell me more about that rather than like all right let's like your husband's an [ __ ] like that's not gonna work because in arguments no one wins right and so like why why would he think that because because i would think that he wants what's best for you right yeah he wants what's best does he know

you're struggling with this right now well i mean yeah he knows i'm struggling with it okay so he wants a special he knows you're struggling with it so why do you think he would be opposed to solving something that that you're currently struggling with so just so i understand would he be happier if you continue to struggle well no it's like well great then would you be opposed to moving forward today and that way and hey if you go home to your husband and you make a joke and the lightning scenario then you close it right and so it's i think child like curiosity is the immediate

that you have to train because people get defensive so that is one thing that like fighters talk about when they're in the ring like in the beginning you breathe in too much right i don't know if like if you've been like sparring and stuff like you breathe in you breathe too much you hyperventilate and so the guys who've done it enough they slow down their breathing because when they get things get intense they can slow it down and so i think sales is a lot the same way where you're like your adrenaline kicks in start breathing faster it's fight or flight so you got to be able to slow it down and be like huh

that's crazy i wouldn't have thought that okay tell me more about that and like now you're interested and then they don't feel like you're combating them they feel like you genuinely are interested and want to help them which is what you should be doing because you should be them dude only if it makes sense you're exhausted you are full of like interesting insights and like it's like you're you just you you just have you have a you know a lot of [ __ ] and like you've clearly packaged this in really easy to understand ways it's almost exhausting listening because

it's like every it's like when you read a really good historical book or something it's like every sentence is packed with a fact yeah and it's like oh my gosh like i cuz i got it i want to pay attention i was like exhausting this is awesome uh but then now i know there's a picture right now that's like like one of the best books i've ever read literally the first 10 pages have more insight than any book i've ever read and i'm only on page 30 because i'm like i'm like rationing this not to like not because i don't i think i'm gonna run out it's like i can only it's like i can only have my mind blown

so many times per minute and so i gotta like chill out with this book right now and i'm reading 10 pages at a time then i hand it to my trainer and he reads 10 pages just so i have a two-day break and then we bring it back that's our book club right now and i think it's more like that like what you what you just said which is how many lessons are there to learn right so there's like there's the lesson of like you know guy goes from sleeping on the gym floor to you know like hustling but then realizing i'm hustling a hundred percent or i'm hustling level 10 at a level two opportunity okay how did he recognize that wait what and then people got to

ask themselves what level is my opportunity that i'm at right now and you had that formula of like number of units old times gross profit per unit times like you know supply demand dynamics of the market that's like that one nugget alone isn't all these things put down the podcast and go [ __ ] reassess your life all right then we go to the next next space so it's like the part where you're like yeah we charged 500 up front and then we had this continuity thing where we would actually say hey great congrats you've made awesome progress we're actually going to offer you more for less because we want our ltv to go longer and uh we know that

that reduces churn blah blah blah and i'm going to do that because the best time to sell somebody is when they're most excited boom nugget two go rethink your sales and pricing strategy you're probably doing it backwards or you know you're not maximizing the opportunity because you just sold to them once you never figured out how to sell the back end then three is you know like you've had five in this session and that that's my explanation of sam sam's weird compliment sam is the king of backhanded compliments he'll be like you're like uh you're like the weirdest looking handsome dude i've ever seen and

you're like the guy you know the guest doesn't know what to do they get frozen by the uh the backhanded compliment it's so good well i bet i bet your dear friends when you're with your your non-work buddies buds are they just like dude alex chill i don't care let's just like make a fart joke i don't have many non-uh entrepreneurial friends honestly so you're always able to kind of shoot the [ __ ] with them i guess a little bit and that's how i am mostly with my friends but every once in a while i'm like i'm like i i got i can't talk money related stuff today like i i do i

i purposely have to take breaks sometimes one of the things i want to mention that you had said that resonated with me um uh conor mcgregor has this quote where he goes some people will look at my success and get bitter most will get bitter and a few will get inspired and he's like you know that says more about you than it does me and um and similarly you had something in one of your talks where you're like you know if i share you know how much money we make or you know how we did it whatever it's like some people get envious some people get angry some people are skeptical and want to say is

this guy a scammer some people get confused like i don't know what the hell this guy's talking about and some people get inspired and i'm here to talk to that group at the end like that last bit whoever you are in this room of a hundred people like the four people who are here to get inspired that's why i'm doing what i'm doing and uh i think that's just a great like question to ask yourself if because we all get stories all day about elon musk and about whatever's going on and you're gonna have some kind of reaction i have it myself sometimes i get envious why should i get envious uh you know like i gave this example i went to

i went to vegas and i visited somebody's house who has a eerily similar sim story to you they're in the gym business uh 60 gyms that were super successful then transition their bigger opportunity was real estate they owned the real estate around the gyms and have since made a ton of money and i felt envious because their house was the most baller house i think they lived near the panda guy by the way uh he has a house in the neighborhood that's that's big as well um and you know unbelievable houses like you know you gotta [ __ ] swim in a river to get to the door type of thing uh

and you're and i was like and then my trainer helped reframe it he goes he goes oh man he heard me saying i was like yeah i'm feeling you know a little bit envious he goes he just kind of ignored what i said he goes man that's so cool you get to sample you know what you like and dislike so when you make your money you're going to know what you want to spend it on is it their cars or is it the pool or is it that he's like that's so cool you're getting to sample it and just switching switching the reaction to you know instead of envy that i don't have excitement that oh i'm getting to play

with all these toys to figure out what i want what i really like what you know i could think about it or look at images on google but like this is way better i get to drive the car instead um and so you know i just think that's a good thing for people i want to leave people with that is like study your reactions and then also if you are sharing information just speak to those who are going to take the positive and don't get so caught up in all the people who are having the other types of reactions to it that's good um even without the hair i still got the

guru shawn no that was good i i i'm learning you cut the hair but you can't cut it away i gotta ask you one last question for being a you i don't know you're a business guy who's having a great time on youtube and you're succeeding a lot why is your setup so bad like how do you you are in a room right now that like doesn't have a carpet i think so it's like i could hear the echo you um don't have a microphone you're on your oh my god nice quads uh you're sitting on a on a laptop i think that was sky's out thighs out baby that was a lot of thigh um but you're set up

you're set up thank you your setup is horrible for such a uh uh someone who does this for a living what the hell i think i don't do it for a living um you know what i mean the first answer um honestly all the technical i i spent like 80 grand on a studio on in my house in vegas i started in austin and i couldn't get the damn thing to work half the time so i was just like and then i ended up like getting just like immediate annoyance around the idea of having to [ __ ] with it again and so then

i realized that i stopped making stuff because i was just annoyed by the idea of having to fix it and so then i was like is it better that i just make the stuff and that'll just be it is what it is and hey if i can dancers yes if i can figure out a way to not have it be a pain in the ass then i will do it but up to this point like i'm literally my video guy got on today he's like dude your video is stopping and freezing for half seconds like 13 times during this video and i was like i don't know and he was like can you just do the laptop when you do the laptop it doesn't freeze and i was like sure whatever you know what i mean and

so like it at the end of the day i think it's like the in gym launch when we started uh it's probably maybe a good wrap-up point but like we didn't have a website until we did 20 until after our second year we'd already done 40 million in sales before we even had a website and then we didn't i didn't send my first email until we crossed like 70 or 80 million collected you know what i mean and so like we've i don't know we kind of just do things our own way and if people are down with it they're down with it and if

they're like you know what i'd rather have a really polished guy who says less in more time then like go you know i mean that's it's all good it's badass thanks thanks for coming i i've learned a lot sean what do you think this was fun thanks for coming on dude i uh i think people are gonna really like this i'm honored you guys decided to have me on the platform i know that you guys don't take the time of your attention of your audience attention lightly so i want to say thank you for for thinking that whatever i had was worthy of their ears [Music]