Why Alex Hormozi Will Be a Billionaire in 3 Years I EP 33

If you could actually do that, like for real for real, not for the podcast, not for the Instagram post where you cry and say how great hopefully you are. I think if you do that you become very poor. I just wanted to be right. Alex, thanks for having me here, man. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Awesome. Great to have you. Let's start by hands, Nick, right? You're about to pop on your head. What's going on? It's my highest sign of respect.

I appreciate that. That means a lot, yeah. That's like this is how I get engaged. I get ready to go. I've been chewing nicotine for ever, honestly. When I was in high school, I did a little bit of dipping. When I was a wrestler and then I went to college and I found chewing tobacco and dip and I was like, this stuff's awesome. I never got addicted to it or anything like that. I just chewed it at parties or around or hanging out but never on a consistent basis.

I was like, man, I do like nicotine. I just started chewing the gum in college. I was 19, 20 years old when I started chewing nicorette. I figured I could get the buzz without the rest of the stuff. Nowadays, I think it's considered a neutral pick and there's all these benefits and things like that. I think there's fairly convincing evidence and I'm not a science bro. But against Alzheimer's. I have Alzheimer's and dementia on both sides of my family. So I chew nicorette.

You can get on that kick. It's preventative. It's medicine now. Yeah. Exactly. The thing is the carcinogens are in the delivery mechanism and the tobacco and the other things that they have in there rather than nicotine. If we found out that coffee was bad for people, doesn't necessarily mean that caffeine is bad for you. So it would be like just taking the pill form versus the drinking coffee itself. Same with you.

I did the chewing thing for a little while when I was super young and then I just overdid at one point, peaked at a party and I think that was about it. I just got to get back into it. Yeah. I was in time. Slowest movement is fast. I just said, find the right delivery mechanism. So you're on this journey to build a portfolio of companies doing over a billion and be worth over a billion. You're documenting that journey.

I just want to say first off, I'm super thankful and grateful for all the content you've made. You're incredibly generous, sharing all the kind of inside baseball, if you will. Starting off like, why a billion? Why is this matter to you? I don't think it actually does matter to me. I think it's more like it's just an easy target to shoot for and then once we're at one, it'll be 10. You know, one, it'll be 10. It'll be 30 or 50 or whatever after that.

I think it's more that, you know, PBD said something that I thought was pretty interesting and insightful. After he sold his company and I don't know the exact number of them guessing it was between 200, 300 million. He sold his own. PBD, sorry. Patrick, Patrick with David. Okay. And he made this statement that one of his mentors was like, man, something's changed about you. Like, you see more confidence, you see more certain or whatever it was.

And he said, yeah, it was just this feeling that what I was saying all this time that I was right. All along. And I think that that felt kind of profound to me and I think that, you know, we have a certain level of success that we've achieved up to this point. I'm obviously young in the entrepreneur game.

And I know that I could say the exact same thing at a billion in that worth and probably have a significantly wider broader audience because I'll have proof or evidence that what I am saying is true. And so I'm trying to build this publicly so that I think it'll be cooler to call a shot and then hit it. Yeah. Well, no, I think it's a cool journey.

I mean, I really resonate with the vibe of kind of documented the journey because, yeah, we definitely do guys like us wish that someone like a warm buffet had kind of documented it right from the early days beyond just the annual shareholder letters, which legendaries there are. There's a lot of like in between there. There's messages. There's mistakes. Yeah, just a lot. Like I'm curious on your journey, you know, I think on social media and these videos, you know, everything can seem all rosy.

You can see him kind of easy going and you talk about a lot of the challenges. I'm curious kind of over the last six months of your journey. You know, what's been some of these messy situations that come up and how do you kind of diagnose them and get around them and keep on overcoming these. I mean, there's all sorts of them. You know, I mean, there's there's vendors for companies, you know, making promises that they can't deliver on and it costing us, you know, 10 plus million on one deal.

You know, hard cost. There's there's deals that take, you know, four months, negotiate and then fall through. There's, you know, unfortunately, based on the nature of just like when sticks get really high, you know, you make an agreement day one and then the company goes from, you know, a few million dollars a year to, you know, a few million dollars a week.

And, you know, people's eyes change, you know, in terms of how they they see the contribution and whatnot. And so there's just, it's just, you know, it's interesting because I think the actual messes are the same. It's just that the zeros are bigger. Like you're still playing poker, whether you're playing with dollar chips or what playing with million dollar chips. It's the games more or less the same. It's just the stakes are higher.

And when you think about the goal of a billion, like, is there a date you've got in mind that you're like, this is when it's happening. And do you feel like you're on track to that? I do think we're on track to that, which is cool. There's definitely like room for a lock, which is cool. And we've definitely had a few, a call him lucky breaks. But, you know, to what I think somebody wrote a great article and like four levels of lock, I feel like you would have been exposed to something like this.

But, you know, you can increase your lock, lock surface area. And I think a lot of what we're trying to do with the content and whatnot has been to deliberately create more lock, you know, for ourselves. And so that has worked. I think that if we were to just take the actual money and just put it in the S&P and just if it compounded it, whatever 9.7% for the next 40 years or 30 years, we'd hit it kind of regardless.

But I'm hoping to be that. And so, you know, if we can do it in in in five to seven, that would be that would be pretty cool. And so that's that's kind of like if my honest answer to like, what are you really shooting for? It's probably five years. And, you know, I love that Peter Teal kind of frame. I'm sure you've played it through your head a lot. You know, the idea of like what's your five 10 year goal?

How would you go and accomplish that in one year? You know, they're dialing up like better people, better systems. You know, better opportunities. You know, like when you think about ways to accelerate that vision, like what comes to mind? I think it's all about opportunities. It's opportunities.

Because if you think about like, because I mean, I talk a lot about leverage. So different soon what you put into what you get out. And there are a few things that give greater leverage than the opportunity vehicle that you're pursuing. And so like, if you run a local business or restaurant, for example, you may work 80 hours a week to make that restaurant successful.

If you run a platform that, you know, creates aggregated buying power for all restaurants to buy together. And then you make some sort of spread on that. Then you still probably work 80 hours a week. But you probably have a significantly larger opportunity. And so it's just like making sure that we pick, you know, the right boat to use more and puff its analogies to be in the right boat.

And I think that's where like strategy and having people were ahead of you because the biggest thing when I was starting out was that I just didn't know. I didn't understand any of the stuff. And just like how much leverage you can get on opportunity. And so it's like if you have one successful gym. They're like, you were never going to make $100 million on one gym. It's just not going to happen.

And so just like just stating that fact outright really does shift your behavior until like what what opportunity could I put the same five years into and it could result in a hundred million or a billion dollars or $10 billion. And then just being ruthlessly selective about those things. And I think that from an entrepreneurship perspective, what really happens like the risk at richer sure because they get smarter.

But I think a lot of it is because what they choose to not pursue. And so like when I was starting out, I would be really excited about 10,000 more month opportunity. And then you know, you make $100,000 a month. And then basically you can say no to everything that's below that. But then all of a sudden, other 100,000 more opportunities seem like a double.

Like, oh my god, this could be huge. And this is where the shiny object syndrome gets really dangerous. But I don't think the shiny object syndrome really disappears ever. I think it's just the the opportunity is just look better. And so you can easily you've leveled up to the point where I can say no to a 10,000 opportunity now or a hundred thousand or even a million of opportunity. But like it's still hard to turn down a 10 million dollar month opportunity.

Yeah. Right. And so that's where I think some of the discipline and one of the hardest parts of entrepreneurship is like knowing when to push and knowing when to pivot. It reminds me of that. And of all, Robocon, quote, around finding your kind of ideal hourly rate. And making it super ambitious. I think there's a lot of people that undercut themselves early on thinking that their hourly rates $20 an hour $100,000

maybe a thousand dollar opportunity and trying to get that to like, say naming a $5,000 an hour or $10,000 an hour. Now you start to look at everything a lot different where you're spending your time, who you're hiring the kind of task you delegate.

And you know, I think a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with that kind of self-loathing belief that their times not worth that much to do that extra thing or do that themselves when really you know it's something that they should either pass on say no to or delegate. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really interesting frame. And just for back of napkin for everybody here, like just multiply whatever your hourly rate is by 2000. And that's what you make per year.

You know, there's a lot of like work smarter, not harder, especially in like the Twitter sphere, which I think is where we first, you know connected. It's easy to say work smarter, not harder, but the problem is in order to get smarter, you have to work hard. So it's like you have to work hard to get smart in order to then work smarter not harder. So like you really can't avoid the hard work part. You get there one way or another.

Yeah, you can't just name that hourly rate and just sit back and just wait for a tap. Yeah, that's it. I only work for 5,000 an hour and everyone's like, okay, no, because you don't have that skill. And then that like, okay, now, now where do we go?

So I think you kind of earn the right. And so there's, you know, it's just like reality's gray. You know, it's not black and white. It's like you go into it like you level up your skill. And then I think I think Peter T. Actually, it was, you know, value created the marketplace, multiplied by your ability to negotiate to capture that value.

The third piece that I would add to that is the amount of supply demand around the scale. So it's like there's this much skill that comes from a salesperson. This is how well, you know, the salesperson can negotiate their comp. And how many other people can do the job? And so it's like ideally you want to be able to create tremendous value, have very good skills at negotiating and have no one else who can do it.

And then at that point, when you put those three things together, you can pretty much name your price. Yeah. And how do you think you go about like, you know, between, you know, over your career, it seems like you've had like a lot of amazing mentors around you. I know Russell early on was someone that was kind of key in terms of a board of advisor around you.

I'm curious over your side, like we're both big on leverage building audiences, building a mode around your business. Is there a specific point like early in your career that was like a pivotal moment that maybe change the trajectory based on like building leverage that was like people, capital media. Early on, not really. I think that the, I mean, the most valuable thing for me was to get around people who are making more money than me. And that's just, and that that hasn't really changed.

I've always tried to get around people who make more money than me just to see what they're, what they're thinking with, what opportunities are they pursuing, what things do they say no to. And I think that's been probably the most valuable thing that I've done in terms of changing my thinking and like what frameworks I use. And what were some of the patterns that you feel like you picked up from them?

Just the games they were playing, you know what I mean? Like I learned about the private equity game was like, oh wow, like the largest percentage of billionaires come from private equity. Weird. Okay. Noted. You know, on the flip side, you know, real estate has made more millionaires than anyone. But real estate is a far more efficient marketplace overall.

And so you don't have like 100 access, not really, you know, in real estate. But you can, you can do that absolutely, you know, in the business space in a much shorter period of time. But it's definitely a higher risk higher reward like the building still there. Pete. There's still a roof. People might still run it. But like a business can go to zero buildings don't really go to zero.

Yeah. And what was it? What was that epiphany that you had around the private equity space? Like why is it that so many billionaires from that? I think there's just more observation. So just more like, okay, is there something that's weird here? Okay. Well, let's learn about that. If this is the highest concentration of of mega wealthy people, then there's probably some sort of arbitrage to this game.

And there's multiple levels of arbitrage within private equity. And when you combine them together, that's when you can create these hundred ex outcomes. It's like, well, you can buy things for a significant less than or worth far more so at a discount than like real estate, for example. And then you can still lever using debt from, you know, third party financing. And then on top of that, you can have even more leverage by raising money to do it.

So like somebody who has one million dollars can put a million dollars in raise a hundred or raise 99 to get to a hundred million dollars. And then by, you know, five businesses that are a hundred million dollars each because they put 20 million down. And then they, you know, okay, let's be realistic. Let's say they buy three just for arguments. They put a third down on each of them. So 300 million dollar businesses and they get bank debt for the other.

You know, 70 on each of those businesses. It's like, so one guy with one million dollars just bought three businesses in total for 300 million. And if those businesses just grow out like, let's say a 20, you know, 20% rate over the next, you know, five years, those businesses go from a hundred million dollar businesses to 200 million dollar businesses.

So he goes from, you know, whatever was 300 to 600, right? But he probably also bought those at a discount. So maybe they inherently were worth more than that. And all of a sudden, it's like, wow, now we're at 900 million. And so then he just, you know, gives his, he has his hurdle rate to his, you know, his partners, he has to pay his debt back. And then after that, you just have this massive net left over.

You can take that 100 or 200 million left over for the managing partner and then just play the game again. And there's very few ways that you can do something like that within a five, seven years span than anything else with so, so little capital. Now people are going to only trust, you know, somebody who might have a level of experience or saying, OK, well, I worked at a private equity fund for 10 years.

You know, I did two funds and I feel pretty confident I can do it. It's like, OK, well, then you can do it in your 35 because you start when you're 20 and you get 15 years in or whatever. You know, two, seven year funds and you start your own. And so, yeah, like, I see those types of games and I'm like, that makes sense. Like where is the, where is the huge lever opportunities that exists like software is obviously a big one.

Like how many things can you go from zero to a billion dollar valuation in three years? Like you can't do that with the chain of dry cleaning stores. This is not going to happen. And so it's just like, OK, what are the nature of those things? Well, most products that have zero cost of replication to have more leverage. So like media is an example or software stuff as an example, even licensing stuff.

All of those are zero cost replicate. And so they're just more leverage baked into the business model. And you work just as hard to build the restaurant or the dry cleaning businesses you do to build the software company. You just need different knowledge.

And so I think finding people who have expertise in those things helps you move faster. It seems like another formal leverage that we both have in common over the last decade is the importance of media, you know, you talk a lot in hundred million dollar leads and kind of doubling down on.

Organic content and leveraging that I know early on in the cannabis industry with herb, you know, we built that, you know, 10 years ago with the goal of kind of building a more tasteful authentic platform to help connect kind of our brands with the best community out there in the space when it was really kind of sketchy. A lot of good stuff out there. We talked a little bit about that a year ago.

You know, I'm curious on your side with, you know, you got quite the mozzie media empire going on here, amazing team. I know a number of them, you know, how to bring us back to kind of your piphany when it you realize like damn we got to start building more of an audience here. Move off of sort of the paid outside and build this business different. What was the kind of thinking pattern there?

I mean, I just I had reality kind of slapped me in the face a bunch of times in a row in a very short period. So like I was just for the audience to like understand the gravity of this 180 degree flip for me is that like I think episodes seven of my podcast is called stop branding. Yes. And I do I mean, I leave it up there because I want people to see the you know the progression over time. I respect that too. Yeah. No, I appreciate it.

And so I was just like cold hour each run ads don't talk to me. You know, like that's what it is. Like that's you're going to get customers. And obviously referrals and filets and things like that. I just the idea of just organic content. Didn't really make sense to me and to be fair, I was also a local business owner and talking to local business owners and I kind of I think that there's actually some truth to that.

Because the thing is is like if you actually build an exceptionally large, you know, personal brand, it doesn't make sense to monetize their local business. And so what does make sense for local business? Well, they probably should have you know have stronger referrals from the existing customers, creative, affiliate relations, other local businesses. They should run as they should do outreach.

Like that is probably the bless you. Yeah. Yeah. That is the that is the approach they should be making. But I saw Kylie Jenner become a billionaire when she was 20 and I was 27 and I thought I was, you know, hot shit. And I was like, she is way richer than I am. And so it means that she's doing something different than I am by order of magnitude that I don't understand. And she had a personal brand. But I was like, you know what? Kris Jenner's been building her brand since she was five.

Like, okay, I'll write that off as a fluke. But then, you know, who to beauty, you know, sort of chunk of her thing at 600. Now I think it's worth over a billion. And you know, Conor McGregor had proper 12 and George Clooney had Kassamigos. Yeah. Right. And then the rock has Termana and each of those billion dollar, billion, multi billion dollar things like seemingly overnight.

Now you've got Logan, Logan Paul with prime. And so, but in that short period, all of it was like 12 months, all of these, these plays started coming out. And I was like, I'm, I'm playing this wrong. And so I still wasn't convinced because I didn't want to be famous. And I have another clip of me being like, I never want anybody to know who I am from a few years ago. And I was sat across the table from a friend of mine who's famous, who recognize him.

And I said, like, don't you get bothered by having like weirdo shut up your house, like three times a week and like letters to your kids and like, is not like that doesn't seem worth it to me. And he said, if that's the price I have to pay for the impact I want to have, I'd pay that price twice a day and seven days a week. And you just kind of look looked at me and I just like, I just felt very called out just like for being a pansy.

And so I was like, all right, well, that's what I'll do. And so that was like the last straw that broke the camel's back. And I started making content that week. Yeah, I see that self-limiting believe a lot with people where, you know, they're like, oh, personal brand. You know, I don't want to be famous. And I think we live in a totally different day and age now. And there's a whole other kind of game being played. I'm curious on your side with, you know, your personal brand.

There's a lot of people out there that just can't see the ROI to this. Like, why am I doing this? I don't know, these are my privacy. I lose all this and like, what for? How do you look at the ROI of what you've built? And, you know, I think you guys are spending like millions of dollars now on the whole content operation. We'll have a little bit of the inside baseball and how that kind of all delivers results for you.

So right off the bat, I don't, I don't, I will say up front. I don't think everyone should be famous. I don't think everyone should build a personal brand. I don't think everyone should anything. You can do it every want. And I have billionaire friends who want to stay anonymous and they're pretty smart dudes, you know, and so they've made that decision and I respect that. I do think that from a money making perspective, it is a, is a time warp. You can just go way faster.

And that is because you can attract talent at such a higher rate than you could otherwise. You can bring people on who already know your values, know what you're about, have already consumed more content than most people's employees currently know about them. Yeah. And their way of doing business, you can basically pre train your entire team before they come on board because of the amount of stuff that you put out.

And those are just unbelievably valuable things and not to mention, you know, if, if you're on the deal side, you know, like for us, like investing in companies, we have so much more trust at the table. And I think Charlie Munger said, trust is the ultimate lubricant for deals is like, there's just what you're both trying to make the deal happen rather than being competitive.

And I think that just it's so much better as a process having been on in both types of deals, very competitive deals like white knuckle deals and really friendly deals way more fun to do friendly deals.

And so those are, you know, those are kind of the pluses and obviously you have an audience you can test things quickly, you can fight solutions like I remember even this week I had one of our companies does three or four million dollars a month in just loan volume as a percentage of their revenue for consumer consumer spending.

And we were, we were switching processors and we were kind of linked to a different loan engine. And I wanted to make sure that we be able to transfer it to the new processor. And so I needed to get in contact with somebody high up at that loan processing company. And it's like, hey, if anybody knows anyone, let me know and I got like seven people who message me and they were like, I know the co founder, let me introduce you and like just you don't have that right without the kind of brand.

So that's the pros. Yeah. The cons and there are cons is that privacy is the cost of fame. Like that's what you give up. And for some people that cost is always too much. For me, I'm not really that different in private than I am publicly. So it didn't seem like too big of a deal. I mean, it's the thought about it. Second is it's irreversible.

You like once everyone knows what you look like, that's it. Like you can't stop like it's irreversible. That's why I think I think I'd still probably get recognized. And there's like small social costs like, you know, if I walk outside of the house, I'll get recognized four or five times every time I walk outside. And that's fine. Or if I go to dinner with Layla, I'll probably have to stop three or four times during the dinner to take pictures.

And that can be, you know, disrupting. And the hard part is, is that you always have to be in the best mood ever because this is the one time that this person will ever see you. And they will make 100% of their lifelong judgment until every person they ever meet, how you are based on the 30 seconds of how you interact with them. And then 10 minutes later, you do it again.

And so basically being able to manage that is a skill, I think, and I've worked really hard at that. Just because it doesn't matter. Like, no one will ever empathize. It doesn't really matter. They're like, boohoo must, you know, must be tough. You did choose that. And that's the thing is like I did choose this. And so I can't lament that. I just see that as part of the price.

And so giving a privacy is the TLDR big umbrella cost of getting the fame wheel going. But there are, in my opinion, pros and cons, but there are more pros than there are cons. Yeah. I also don't talk about super racy subjects. And so I don't have, at least in my knowledge, you know, a huge hater base. I'm not political for the most part. All my stuff that's out there is like to try and help people, you know, make more. And I also lean really far away from should.

So I just, you know, up front, like do whatever you want. Like this is just the stuff that worked for me. And if it works for you, awesome. If it doesn't work for you, I'm sorry, try someone else. You know what I mean? That's just, that's what's worked. You know, I completely agree that, you know, the benefits definitely far away, the cost, you know, just your service area for like luck, community connections, cash flows, more deals, more opportunities.

You know, I think at the end of day two, like personal brands kind of just get a bad rap. It's one of the things too. It's just building your digital reputation. Everyone's online. They're going to check your LinkedIn before meeting with you or diligence in your company or doing a deal, you know, just making sure that you're putting your best face forward, your best foot forward in those deals.

And hopefully having a reputation that presweights you, you walk in the door, you know, the deals almost already close or just trying to meet you, talk to you, chop it up and hopefully get it across the line. Yeah. I think it feels really obvious to people, you know, whether it's, you know, the rock with Terra Mano or Logan Paul with Prime that needs kind of consumer products. Like, of course, that makes sense with those products is everyone's your market. Yeah.

But when you're talking about the private equity space, I think that's where sometimes people are like, no, no, no, this is different. This is different. You know, how do you kind of give me some of the details I'm curious like how this has actually helped you, you know, close the deal or, you know, and really change the trajectory because you guys are doing $200 million or revenue now.

Yeah. Well, my quote fame or audience size in no way directly helps any of the portfolio companies to say maybe ancillarily, but like I purposely try to not, I'm not public about the companies that we own almost at all. And I get into that because I'm curious. Yeah. No, I mean, there was by design. I will explain now. The reason I don't talk about them is because I don't want to be included in whatever the exit is.

And so if I bought it without me, I want to sell it without me because I don't want to now have a five year non-compete on the back of another deal in three years because I promoted it. And so if I'm going to use money and expertise with our team to grow a business, then that is what that is what the deal is about. If I'm trying to approach the thing as a brand deal, which I have done almost never, you can probably tell I haven't really promoted anything.

It would have to be for a really good opportunity that would make a lot of sense for everyone in my audience. And so yeah, for that reason, I have kept it private because I want also to a small degree because I think the founders that we that we work with that we've invested their companies, all of them want the credit.

And I think that as soon as the world hears like Alex was involved in the deal, I will probably get a disproportionate amount of the credit. And as an entrepreneur too, I don't want that because I might not have done a disproportionate amount of work.

And just curious on that, just a double click into it, like Warren Buffett, who is something that we obviously both follow a lot of his stuff on. At the end of the day, with Berkshire Hathaway, all those companies, most in the portfolio, kind of, hey, we're a Berkshire company, that company's bought Warren Buffett doesn't necessarily come with the company. What do you think, either he's missing or what's the difference and what am I missing, maybe?

You're good. He is a decentralized management model. And so he buys outright and he usually doesn't buy to sell. And so selling is not usually part of his playbook unless absolutely necessary. And so at that point, his reputation provides a lot of value, but he's not necessarily trying to like, he's not trying to have another acquireer in the future.

For us, we are trying to have another acquireer in the future for most of the companies that we buy. And that has shifted in the beginning, we were just planning on buying and holding, but I would say that we have now learned that it's very tough, especially if you keep the founder in place, which is usually how we do our deals.

Because usually the business will be limited by the founder. And so at that point, it's like, okay, it's clear that this founder is not competent past this level. And so we should sell. When you're going and analyzing different founders, companies to buy, what's like the dream founder kind of characteristics? And then what are the dreams sort of company characteristics that you specifically are looking after you're like, okay, this is a grand slam.

Yeah. We can start with founder. So founder, it's, it's all comes down to character and experience. So if a founder has a huge amount of experience specifically with the problem that they're trying to solve. So we're talking five to 10 years of dealing with whatever the issue is. And a lot of times if they made the solution to help themselves that helps because they usually tend to be a little more more product focused.

So a product driven entrepreneur who's lived with the issue for a long period of time is incredibly coachable. But balance is that with a lot of confidence, willingness to take risk and ambition. Because one of the issues that we've actually had more than once is that we have a company we take, you know, we invest in them and then we trouble the company in like a year.

And then the founder is making more money than they ever thought possible. And then they just go golfing every day. And that's frustrating for me. And so, and things is like, this is where, you know, if you're at the deal table, everyone will, you know, make promises and be like, oh, I want to go to the moon. I want to go to a billion. I want to go to 250 million. But all of a sudden you actually find out that 500 grand a month in personal income.

That's actually their number. You know, and so, and a lot of times also the flip. So one of the cons of of the fame is that people also know what I say I want before they come in. And so they will say those things. Yeah, they'll say those things. And so unfortunately, I have to be like, cool. That is the right thing to say. And we will find out if that's true. You know, it's the greatest repossible.

And so from a character perspective, those are probably the traits that I that I look for. So an absolutely unimpeachable. So like our personal values are, since your candor unimpeachable character and competitive greatness. Now within that, the micro is context around the problem, product driven overall, super open to feedback while maintaining confidence and ambitious. Like for a different reason than money.

Like I'm all good with money being a primary motivator in the beginning. But at some point, if you satisfy all your personal needs with money, you will stop if that is the only reason that you're doing it. For the business quote, like missionaries over mercenaries. Yeah, I love that. Yes. The from a business perspective, I just look at it in terms of incremental revenue to enterprise value. Like that's really just it is OK. So if I add.

So like if I add $1 million to 10 different businesses in top line revenue. In one business, I might add $50 million enterprise value. Like call it on the extreme level of leverage, like a social platform, right or a marketplace of some sort. That is going to be the highest leverage. Highest multiple earning business possible on the other extreme. You've got like a personal brand that you know cash flows off of one time transaction courses.

That would probably have the lowest increment in terms of enterprise value that is attributed to a $1 million increase. It might be literally just a $1 million increase in enterprise value for $1 million increase in sales. And so when I look at that, then you think about the leverage is like, OK, well, if we think that we can triple a business or we think we can triple businesses of this type.

Well, then I'd rather get $150 million if I add $3 million to a business in terms of enterprise value versus three. And so that's where picking the right opportunity. Now usually that comes with increased risk because you know a platform, the number of platforms that have been successful, you can probably name on two hands. So there is a risk adjusted return kind of factor in there. And so, you know, one degree closer to that would just be like a SaaS tool.

So just like some sort of tool or software as a service that you could either be enterprise level or consumer level. That would probably maybe trade at five to 10 times stop line still cool, not the same as a marketplace or platform, but still a really valuable company.

You know, next to that, you probably have e-commerce companies physical products. They might trade at one to five times stop line depending on how strong the brand was and how recurring the customers were, how sticky they were, etc. Gross margins profitability growth.

And then, you know, you've got probably brick and mortar chains as a or serve actually probably a services business would be the next one over and then probably a chain of brick and mortar and then probably some sort of solar operator with non transactional business are very transactional business. And so that's kind of like the range that you're looking at from most valuable to least viable.

And there are different competitive dynamics though because like if we look at like we have two chains right now that are both relatively large to 30 plus locations that we own 100 like we own all of the locations not franchise. One of them we have four franchisees sorry 28 and then four. But those ones are the interesting part is that the people you're competing against are also not usually not well capitalized usually not very sophisticated.

And so there is like a little bit of a landscape versus like a platform you're going to have super well fun competitors from very sharp people. Lots of stakes. I mean it's the high stakes game and so I think there is definitely like play there and we kind of look at all those components when looking at a deal which is like okay is this a super hot space right now or is this kind of a quiet space.

Okay so we can just like quietly accumulate and keep opening you know one or two or three locations every month. And the nice thing that I like about brick and mortar specifically is and this isn't the only part that's just two of our company the portfolio but the returns on capital are really really predictable. And so it's like if it costs you 100 grand open location each location makes 500,000 a year in in in every cash.

I mean really good you know and so you can actually just really really print money and that's also one where it's very sellable you know if you go to an acquire and say we have a hundred dry cleaning locations. They're not really worried about Alex being involved at all right it's just like.

I'm not cleaning the clothes and I'm not in the ads so I'm just an owner here and so it makes it easy to sell in the back end and so anyways all of those are different dynamics to kind of feed into like what opportunities is a grand slam. And are you generally moving up the chain then so to more like SaaS and platforms is down to the default and kind of go down from there makes sense.

Now we still look at deals you know I mean if there's a scream and deal that we really like the you know like anyone has a pseudo medical stuff so if you're looking off you have hair treatments or med spa or laser stuff. I'm really interested in that space right now overall for brick and mortar because some of the the margins of these business are phenomenal the operators are horrendous and people are making money who have no idea what they're doing and so.

Yeah if you're in the spaces let me know if you've got like five or two spaces to compete in yeah those are exactly you know like really good returns on capital in up to operators and not a lot of like super well capitalized competition. So speaking of platforms I've been following your meteoric rise on YouTube here last you know couple years.

My understanding is watching you with Eric Sue should air you're spending about three million dollars a year on content that's a lot of money for a lot of people.

And you know I know that there's probably a good good location of this obviously based on your goals and I'm curious like when you look at that three million like what is that going to you know is that going to your editors you know what where's this money going it's all team I mean it's all payroll so it's all it's all labor so it's you know creative director brand director. You know manager who actually manages like when all the post got across all the platforms you know when you're making.

I don't know I think we do 350 posts a week so you know it's 50 posted day that happened across all platforms so like somebody has to manage that's two it's two two an hour. Just like making sure that the dot you know eyes are dotted teaser crossed making sure that the captions are what I would want them to say.

Which can be has we've solved that pretty well some really proud of how we solve that and then and then a lot of it's just editors just people who because there's there's there's being able to say there's like. And you know my team will correct me probably Chris my for simplifying it this way but like.

One is you have to have somebody who can recognize moments that are valuable yeah the next scale is kind of re ordering it away that would make it a more or more viral or more rewarding piece of content for the audience. The next piece is understanding does this build the brand or does this just give you's because like they could probably step some you know ridiculous things that I say at some point and probably get a ton of use but it wouldn't build the brand the way that I want.

And so you need somebody who has who has the incentive align to really take care of the brand understands what moments are valuable and understands how to package it and then probably also make a contextual to the platform that's being distributed on and so that's a lot of kind of different skills that pretty much all editors have to have. Yeah and that's we're having like a really good culture within that team and you know Caleb does an amazing job. Yeah shut up.

Yeah he is awesome. He does an amazing job running that team and giving the guys creatives and gas creative space to both experimental things but also still do the 80 20 if like OK this is still the blocking and tackling. And so he balances really job of like a lot of people there personal freedom while also making sure that we stay within that we paint within the lines.

Yeah and so when you kind of break down that three mil like where do you think like where's it go back in African and you're obviously going to fight your teams in a kill you for this. No I mean it's literally what I just outlined I mean it's you've got you've got the creative directors we've got managers and then we've got by platform and then we've got editors in general. And so by platform you have like one person managing just that well.

And then sometimes there's multiple editors underneath depending on how much stuff we put out there. Yeah and so then rewinding to when you started because I think this is useful to people that are looking to start an audience from scratch so can they get going.

You know I talk a lot about you know and found a lot of us getting people like a core team to start with you know you're looking to build your personal brand you maybe need to chief of staff to start getting some of the operational stuff off your plate. Getting a social manager you know getting a writer because a lot of this stuff you know takes a lot of writing oftentimes how do you kind of see you know the core team when you started out and how's that kind of skilled up.

You know I've seen a lot of your content you've talked about you know going from the top down so like I know you brought on Caleb earlier you had experience with the media and doing that side like how would you advise someone to architect a squad. So this is a really tough question because it really depends on the means that you have so for me I can I can bring on you know multi six figure people right off the bat.

No I'm not going to get any ROI for two years I can do that let's say you're doing a hundred K profit because there's a lot of guys I know. Then yeah I would then I would hire somebody like that who has experienced building a personal brand to a large degree and what I would what I would actually refrain refrain away from is the guys who only talk about like views and algorithm stuff and like our what I call hacky.

Because like it's like the people who have the biggest brands on every platform do none of the things that the quote growth experts talk about they just have great brands because they provide value to their audience and so you need someone who sees the big picture and is not. Hey we need to we need to do let's do a listicle it's just like okay you know sure is that really going to is that is that going to like really build the brand.

Yeah right I mean actually bus feed is a perfect example of like optimizing the crap out of all of the hack stuff but like missing in my opinion like the main point. And so I mean I look at I look at brands like the rock like a brands like I mean I think the Kardashians I look at a lot just from a branding perspective I look at Taylor Swift.

And you just look at like what the moves they made are like Taylor Swift's not hacking anything you know what I mean and she has one of the most influential broad bases like ever and that is the type of brand that we strive to build. And so you need somebody who really understands that and most people don't because branding is a harder thing for most people understand like that will probably be one of the next books that I write will be around branding and that'll partially be for my own team.

So that we can be really really clear now I they've heard many of my. Rants on on brand overall but just to put it in a really succinct way for the masses because I think like one of the most under rate I mean the most underrated scale and the difference between. Alex at you know 100 million dollar not worth versus a billion dollar not worth is going to be the brand like is under my understanding of brand I think will be the pivotal thing that will take us from 100 to a billion.

And what do you think is the breakthrough that you've had there because I know you know there's a lot of people out there with misconceptions they think like designing a fancy logo just getting a good name you know it's a the right color palette this kind of stuff and they kind of are to slap and lipstick on a pig.

I'm curious like how do you view it what's changed over the years that you're like okay now I kind of feel like you know I've got the ability to create a brand that gets good will they can get to the billion other plus you know that you're looking for. I'm going to use different language in the audience is probably used to when talking about branding.

But branding is teaching behavior at scale and so if you think about the origins of the word branding was branding cattle so you had a cow and you would see or you know some sort of logo into it and so then we have to ask. What was the objective of that action well the idea would be that if someone saw the cow.

Next to a cow the had no brand they would behave differently right and so for a cow the had no brand they might take it they might kill it they might leave it alone whatever whatever they would do with an unbranded cow but with a brand of cow. They might return it to a specific owner or they might kill it because they hate the owner right so like there are it's still a brand and you might hate the you know hit the person is the owner. But the key difference is that it would change your behavior.

And so if we kind of extrapolate on to that what we did was like by changing behavior that's functionally teaching and so when we teach things from from you know babies all the adults it's associating things that people know with things that they don't know and so.

You the thing that they know should be the valuable thing and they don't know is your brand and so then you associate the thing that that audience deems valuable with this logo or this tagline or these colors or these shapes or this person and they say oh these are similar and then you do it enough times that eventually they become one in the same and then you can drop the thing and have the person and they will still behave the same way as though they were receiving this value but that has now been disassociated or at least not.

It's not paired in the same image but then you can take that logo or brand and associated with something new because now they do know this thing and put it on to a t shirt and then they will behave in the same way and so fundamentally that is what we were trying to do when we create a brand is that we were trying to program behavior at scale which is why brands are the most valuable thing that a company can have like if you look at Warren Buffett and the company city buys.

He's he's begun he's begun brand buying a lot of brands like apples not really even technology company anymore it's really just a brand and brand you can measure the power of brand based on the difference between what you can charge for commodity and what you can charge for the branded version of the product and so if you can continue to raise price on a product based on the brand that is an indication of the power of the brand itself and how much it has been trained and associated with value for that audience and so.

That is what we try to build because you know it's one thing to have a salesperson it's another thing to be able to literally just imprint something on it and immediately buy you know sell a shirt for $500 that cost you 10 bucks and like there's a reason that LVMH just prints money you know as a conglomerate because they understand brand.

100% yeah no I talked to a lot of founders and you know they're confused around like you know I want to build this brand I'm not trying to get my content out there and you know what I often talk to people about is when they're when you're having that much difficult

to do is just remember like the purpose of content that the person brand is to help people solve a problem and to drive value for them and at the end of the day your customers problems can very much become your content strategy helping solve those I'm curious when you're going in like buying a company investing in a company and you know the brand

suffering and they're looking to kind of turn around what's your process then for you know developing that word cloud of things that you want to be associated with and then actually a question that brand through the messaging yeah it's inside out and I actually think it's the same thing for personal brands it's inside out it's you have to have the evidence you have to

prove that you are who you say you are and then add to three years add a thousand reps and iterations and continuous and consistent association and then people will start to say it because like brand is what you say about you it's what your customers say about you and it's more that branding happens and you do things and then branding occurs so like you do things and then your reputation happens and you try your best to associate with the things that you think the

widest you know percentage of people will associate with positive thing for specific audience you know like what is it a black coffee has a very specific audience that it it puts out stuff that that audience will find valuable that other audiences would find

despicable right and so still also being okay with the idea that you're going to lose a percentage of an audience whenever you make any kind of any kind of polar stance you will lose some and you will gain some and the idea is that you just want to gain more than you

lose like Bud Light made a made a gamble by doing the Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light thing right and they lost more than they gained from that move but they did gain they gained some people who didn't drink Bud Light that were like good for Bud Light I'm going to drink that

but they lost way more people who are like no I will never drink Bud Light again now look at what they've done now as they made a partnership with UFC so they're like our bad how do we do the opposite of Dylan Mulvaney the UFC is probably you know the strongest brand in the

opposite direction that they can associate with and I'm sure Dana Bentham over backwards for that you know endorsement to try and you know try and save them save them you know a very iconic brand otherwise and so whenever you make any change to a brand you always

ask and you just want to make sure that you gain more than you lose and so what are the words that you guys are trying to be associated with why would ask you what things do you think it's from the audience what do you think we're associated with I think that some of the things I mean 100 million Cs be a moniker that you're already using and we'll be using a lot more I mean the marketing side of things I think generosity is a big thing seems like you know the whole slogan there for

was like I'm not trying to sell you anything and so when you guys are then going and architecting like YouTube content strategy off that is it like how you're kind of like ideation sessions going on is that like the balance between kind of data the brand you know stuff you want to be putting out there you know I think a lot of people get lost in the soup of like how do they develop a content strategy and I'm curious you guys are someone that's doing it right and I don't

think you're following like you know the path that everyone else is telling you to so what's what's the path that you guys are yeah we don't have like our five pillars of content and like we have we've only done for the like you just like laugh at this like you're like oh we did for this we have to make sure we get the fifth one and yeah um we just try and reverse engineer from the consumer from the audience member and reverse where they're

currently at to where they want to go and see how much bridge we can build for them and people have different problems some people are not in shape some people are not motivated some people are you know struggling to go from one million to ten million some people are struggling with you know recruiting right people some people struggling with co-founders and you know fortunately or unfortunately I've had experiences with all those things

and so I share the things that have worked for me and if they work for the people awesome if they don't know what and so I think that's that's really what we just trying to focus on to your point like we try and solve problems we try and provide value and using that you know using the value equation in the conference book is still kind of the predominant the North star for what we do it's like what's the dream

outcome how can we increase their perceived likelihood of achieving that outcome how can we decrease the time that it's going to take someone to get there and then how can we decrease the pain the effort and sacrifice associated with the actions of doing the thing to get the dream outcome and so it's like if we can maximize the the dream outcome the perceived likelihood minimize the time and minimize the pain we will have a valuable

thing so you just released a hundred million dollar leads read the book went to the exercises listen to the audiobook wall reading book I feel like I did right here for a couple weeks now I'm sorry no it's

great it's great you know when you're going I'm actually currently writing a book and I'm curious from you because you've been a bit of the mystrovus over last little bit how do you what were the goals of of this book and how do you kind of approach the book writing process I want the book to be

exceptional and I want the book to continue to be spread after I die and so that's the bar is will it will people talk about this book when I'm dead and so that's that's the bar which is pretty high bar it's very easy to just like ghost right make a slogan put a cover on it do a marketing campaign

and sell a book and then have no one ever buy it again and that is what 99% of books I mean probably more than that 99.99% of books are and it really comes down to I think the intention of the author because most authors write books to make money in one form or another I I would say writing is probably one of my true artistic expressions like if I happen if I if I were a musician I would make books outright albums that had like entrepreneurial motivation is just not me so I write books about it

but like I was you know I was I was the the editor in chief of the literary magazine in high school I was vice editor of the newspaper I got a full ride to the Tufts for writing scholarship I didn't go I didn't know that yeah

I enjoy writing a lot and it's getting the books is actually giving me a really nice thing to do that I haven't been doing in a long time and I really love it a lot and so I think people can see the amount of time and effort that goes into the books they are really an inefficient monetization

vehicle it has none of the things that I talk about but I do think that there's an element of brand which is what I give myself as my excuse for why I write them yeah but instead doing and writing it from that perspective

technically I'm like a point zero zero zero zero one percent author based on book volume and book sales like we're almost out of million copy sold between both of them that congrats there we go yeah without without any like paid ad campaigns to the book you know with the exception of the launch ride

purposely was showing that to show that paid ads work for stuff nice but I think it's really like always thinking how can I make the simpler how can I make the shorter how can I make this easier and I really do write to a fifth grader yeah because if you can write to a fifth

grader then everyone else will understand but people mistake making things simpler as making them dumber yeah and I think that's a massive mistake that a lot of content creators make specifically within what I would consider high brow industries you know in the investing world or finance or even

business is that they try and make things sound complicated to make themselves sound smart but all they do is confuse people and then no one listens yeah well I like that a couple things about you know like unbelievably generous I like the framing too of like I'm going to write this book

and it's got to live beyond when I die you know I was talking to Travis actually and he's saying you know Travis when you're involved with the book right Trevor Trevor sorry yeah yeah Trevor Trevor so by my mind yeah Trevor was talking about yeah that was one of your guys goals when writing it

was just like simple language don't overcomplicate things no jargon you know people should have this understand the stuff in a hundred years so you don't see a lot of talk around algorithms or platforms or fancy language unnecessarily most books written before the 1950s were written

because people would end their career and that would be their contribution to the field they would say like this is my 30 years of work and I've put into a book to move move the field forward that then started to come with status then people were like maybe I can just write a book

and get status and then they started short cutting it and then the bear it entry to getting a book published got lower and lower and then oneself publishing started anybody could publish a book and so I think books overall have decreased in value trip tremendously since they were

written the old way with the old intentions but from if you think about a book as a product our goal has always been one that it lives on for a very long time and the way to achieve that is that if one person reads the book they refer it to more than one person and by doing that

it will continue to live on proliferate and from a monetary perspective if you if you work for two years to write a book and then it works you know it continues to get spread for 200 years that's a high leverage activity but you really really have to index on the fact that it's good

and so that's where it's like if I spend six months on a book and it's pretty good it won't yeah I might get two years of sales right but if I spent two years on the book I might get 200 years of sales and so it's like the difference between you know a 90 a 9 out of 10

and a 9 and a half out of 10 is probably five times the work and there's been a 9 and a half and a 9.7 is another is 10 times the work you know what I mean and so the orders of magnitude in terms of the effort that are required to get to squeeze out those distilled the really to still the knowledge down into what does someone do at the most basic level allows it be accessible to more people in more places in more contexts and that's where from a third frame that we use is validity and utility

which is how useful is this thing and then how true is it which would be how many context is this framework true and so to to give a really simplified example if I would say some things work and some things don't that is valid it is not useful right now if I say

here's my 21 you know step sales framework for gyms that might be incredibly useful but if I apply it to salons it might not be valid it might be something entirely different and so trying to find the intersection of those things which is what is true all the time

and what is still also useful in every one of those contexts and that's the kind of the venn diagram or the cross point and then how do we communicate that in a way that fifth grader can understand it with pictures and words blow fifth grade and how can we define terms that makes sense rather than just taking dictionary terms because at least my opinion and Trevor shares with me is that most dictionary definitions are not useful like half the time they use the actual word in the definition

and so we try to define words by behavior and that has helped me personally and I think a lot of the audience. And you're also someone that I think practices what you preach like you know it's almost like almost like a religion you know with the you know webinar book launch that you had there you know is a perfect example of you know $100 million offer and you know what you've been doing yeah I'm leads right so wait for the next one will be all three.

Okay there we go I can't wait so break it down for me because you know for those that don't know like randomly you know about a year and a half ago I just started doing workshops on about a monthly basis just helping out giving back to people enjoying these it's actually become a great monetization source for founder OS. I'm providing value on a consistent basis people what a crazy idea.

Yeah exactly but I was blown away by your execution of that book launch and I know your team in yourself you know kudos like you guys put in a hell of a lot of work into that. You know what for you is like the perfect sort of like book launch slash like webinar like can you break down maybe some of the principles that went into that?

Well let's talk so let's let's go let's go for four components that are different right so component number one is the product itself is the thing that we're launching is it exceptional and after we launch it will continue to grow in sales on an ongoing basis

will people who buy it want to tell their friends about it and then they buy it too that is that is thing number one by far most important because otherwise in my opinion it's just it's just a transaction now you're just promoting something you're it's basically a movie promo yeah you just you promote for opening weekend and then you just that's it you know and I mean hey there's there's there's a play there but yeah that's not the type of business you really you do a launch you make a movie

you're not you're not building a business so number one is the product the quality of it and will people who get it tell their friends number two is the promotion itself and so with our stuff we talk about at least in the leads book I talk at the eight different ways you can advertise there's four things you can do four things other people can do I'll just say I'm really faster the audience but you can reach out to people you know one-on-one you can reach out to strangers

one-on-one you can post content publicly which is the stuff that we've talked up to this point you can run ads publicly so that's one of many to strangers you can use those four to then get you customers who then use those same four to get you other customers through referrals so person can post they can leave a review or they can reach out to a friend they can reach out to a stranger all those things they can even make it doesn't want to use it in ad right all

those things the customer you can use to get more customers you can have affiliates which are other businesses you have your customers and you can make deals with them to send you their customers in a way that benefits both of you and so that's where you can kind of tap into a network of people who've already done the advertising on your behalf and you can just get leverage right you put less in than you get out so I get a hundred people who already have a hundred

person audience then I have a ten thousand person audience that can show up to my thing and I might not have an audience at all so if you're starting out making affiliate relationships is a great way to get going quickly you can have agencies

who can help you in you know I would say specifics around platform so if you don't know how to execute let's say tick-tock ads and you don't have that skill set in the team and you have a shorter timeline sometimes it helps to have an agency who has experience doing that make you know make those

promotions and ads with you or for you and then finally you have employees who you know they knew they have to do the core for you which is they have to reach out to people they have to post-contro they have to run the ads on your behalf so that you don't have to do any of those things in order to get more people to find out about your stuff and so you know part two of the perfect books long would be you use as many or all of those promotional methods to get

people to find out about it the next one would be basically is there is there a a bigger picture goal that it ladders up to so that can either be a brand play of some sort it can be some sort of monetization play but I think that I think it's worthwhile to have because with just some thought you can

you can get even more leverage on the launch by having another reason for the book to exist and so I think a lot of author especially very good authors like real authors not you know people who write books but like authors who do

this as the main profession I think they miss out on this a lot it's just having like is there a goal beyond the goal is there something beyond the book and so I think that's that's probably number three in terms of the perfect book launch and then the fourth one is you know my first book the offer

itself which is is there a way that I can enhance enhance the the book so that it's not just a book it's it's a solution and the more I can transform written words on pages into a better life for someone and make that fast easy cheap pain free then the more people who will buy it and

ultimately experience the benefit and then hopefully that ladders up to 0.3 whatever my my next thing is and so those are probably the four components that I would break down for like the perfect not just book launch but just launch of anything yeah me and friend we're actually just talking about

you know $100 million leads 100 million dollars offers all your content the other day and it's interesting like one thing that doesn't get lost in all it is the importance of an exceptional product no you hear a lot of like marketers are people out there kind of like breeze over that aspect but

really it's the foundation of it all you know there's a lot of people out there too though on the other side of it struggle with like perfectionist you know just like not launching building some beautiful most trap and never gets out to the to the world no how do you kind of find

that balance between you know it's a 9.5 out of 10 it's a 9.7 9.8 okay it's 9.85 you know okay now we're going to launch this thing you know what's that point for you like as an example you're writing $100 million leads you could give it another revision and

another like what's the point you're like no no it's time to ship this thing really good question so I say there's three eternal questions that every entrepreneur has no right answer to maybe four one is risk which is how much risk are you willing to tolerate that's 100% personal consumption

versus investment how much are going to consume of your income today versus what you're going to invest for later that's again completely personal when do you push through and when do you pivot on a hard challenge because there are definitely times where it's right to pivot and it's right to push

and you need to have some level of wisdom to discern between the two and I think the fourth one is what your point is right now which is you know when is something good enough because these all exist on continuums and that's why they're so tired like all neither none of those are buying

their false binaries so people perceive them as binaries and they try to make decisions around those binaries but they are not right like taking to the extreme if you invest every dollar for the rest of your life you never consume anything you die with a big pile of money and what a great life

right if you if you push through everything you'll probably run to a wall at some point that you can't push through because of something outside of your control if you pivot all the time you'll also never stick with anything long

enough to see any traction right so like the extremes on here are hard so it's really about the nuance of which of these which what amount right now is best and so for when is something good enough I have done a decent amount of writing kind of in my life now that my litmus test for that is there's

nothing else I can do this to make this better and so you know for the for I think for offers is probably five drafts it was a shorter narrower concept and it was easier to do I mean when I look at the offers now there's a bunch of things out tweak and cut out and

appreciate that nature but as of right now there is really not a lot I would change the leads now it's only been four months or five months or whatever it's been but when I finished that book I was like one I'm sick of this and two there's nothing else that I can do like anything I would do to

this book would make it worse based on my current school set and so that is that is how I saw it now if you're developing a software product then this probably isn't doesn't necessarily apply to you what you have to do is just narrow the scope of the problem and so I think that you

absolutely still want to ship a product that's exceptional you just narrowly define the problem and then over time you will expand the scope of the problem and so like if you ship a product like it's done is better than perfect right and it doesn't solve the problem that you're going out for

you will fail like now if you it's it's better to really narrowly define it and then solve it really well and let the narrow definition of the scope allow you to say I have 100% solved this very narrow problem and then expand it rather than say I'm going to solve this big problem on my first

go round and that's really unlikely and then that is where you get into the problem of like I'm a quote perfectionist and whatnot now I've never had an issue shipping things and so that's just not been a struggle for me I just I have a pretty good feeling for when is when it is good

enough and you know I think my fifth draft I sent out to a bunch of people and they're like oh this is awesome I was like no I'm going to rewrite it again and it was way better you know I just like and that's where I think some degree like you have to trust you in terms of your your bar for excellence like the most successful people I know have the lowest tolerance for mediocrity and I think that you just have to have that for you so when you go about

launching it I'm curious like what's going on you're like your brain your body like is this something that you're excited to launch it you feel really good about it and you're like okay I got this like I put in the reps this has

been through the ringer this things a banger or is it something that you know like a lot of people you know it's like you're nervous to the last line of hoping it's being received you're also kind of following up and we all know how sequels go yeah you know a lot of pressure and so you know curious

how you're feeling like going into launching something like that well the sequel thing for sure in terms of I said a bar with the first book that was unexpectedly well received yeah and so I worked I worked probably five times maybe seven times more hours on leads than I did on offers I also made a massive mistake with leads which is that I did not nearly define the problem so I made it it was such a hard book to write because the book was the I mean I literally

just I did lead generation like I did I literally made a book on advertising that I don't think left anything out which is insane the first book was on how to make an offer which is literally just such a tiny I mean it's super important very high leverage which is why such a valuable book you can read the book immediately make ten times the money which is which is great but other other components of the business aren't aren't don't have necessarily that level of

leverage and so to help someone get leads it's like well I had to cover different platforms media types consumption types I cover lead magnets I had to cover actually like doing this I make content content across different like audio or video like there's so many things but I think that I think we did a pretty good job tackling those problems after you know thousand plus pages of actual writing to just distill everything down but to just to ladder back to the point

that you're you're asking earlier I felt truthfully very confident about the product when it came to the launch and so I just wanted to get in people's hands I felt truthfully incredibly prepared for the launch I had done that presentation three times a day for an entire month wow and so every

morning I would do the presentation in my head so I'd go through the slides saying it and then I would do one live and record it and then I would play the recording back to myself with the slides in front of me and I would pause it and make edits or add slides or take away slides or smooth over

language where I felt it needed help and so when I got there that day I had done this before and I knew what I was going to say and I could probably do the whole thing by heart without the slides and so I tend to go into high stakes situations that way which is the higher the stakes the greater my

preparation is because I can eliminate my anxiety by preparing and I know that if I have no anxiety on the day of I will do well and so I can control that to a great degree so I do they were same that way you know just put in

the reps put in the practice and then that anxiety has a way of just working itself out kind of channeling the anxiety into just some action and you know delivering the evidence to conquer the self-doubt well I think a lot of people go into things under prepared yeah and so I think it's reasonable

that they have anxiety like it is good it is right that you have anxiety you're not prepared you know because the flip side is if I went in and I it's just like the book where I said like I could not have prepared more for this and so if something goes wrong I have done the level of effort that I am

satisfied with you look yourself in the mirror right and I think that if you can actually do that like for real for real not for the podcast not for the Instagram post where you cry and say how grateful you are but like if you can really when knowns there look yourself in the mirror and say I did

enough and I'm satisfied I think if you do that you become variable approved and there's not much that can phase you because you go into it having one already and so now you're just exercising yeah and hopefully you found that thing in life that you know is your calling that you feel that much of a

duty to you know really crush it that you'll put in the work to do that you know because I think a lot of people are doing things for the wrong reasons and they think they can just put some funny dutty shit out there feel good about it slap their name on it and some idiots are going to go buy it and you're just certainly not that what's why do they do it right so over you know over recent history from a a greater and greater percentage of my enjoyment comes from how hard I worked

on something and a greater percentage of my satisfaction comes from that and so if that is the win then you can win before you go and then you already want to now you're basically playing extra credit rounds whereas if you make all of the win about what happens there's always things that are out of your control like you know when when we did the book launch there was rumored to be a massive thunderstorm right at the facility that they were like there's an

80% chance that we lose power and I was like what am I going to do you know I'm not going to postpone it I just spent a month you know promoting it is what it is you know I mean like that's that's it and so there's always things that are going to be outside of your control luckily you know the power didn't go out and so I you you you can you can massively improve your life by changing what you're optimizing your outcome for and so you can eliminate anxiety

by optimizing for you being satisfied and then you can absolutely control that and then you can say I am satisfied and so I have no reason to be nervous yeah and seems like you have a switch like you know like for you like when you say hard work that I think means a lot different it's a different thing than you know I think you know for me like when I look back on my history like you know it's for me a lot installed by my father you know I'm a real going to work

work my ass off my dad you know being there one day when I came home and being like you know you look pretty lazy out there because he saw me working across the street and then think I was working that hard you know the kind of person that you come home with an A and he's wondering why not an A plus I'm curious like where do you get that you know gene from or how do you look at that because I think it's easy to say like you know I just work hard but there's

no one else going on there I think it's who you're trying to impress like everyone everyone's trying to impress somebody yeah I agree and I think the the closer you can make that person you're trying to impress to who you are or who you want to be the more in control impressing the most and so like if you're trying to impress the crowd it's tough you know because they can change their mind really quickly and you can't control that you know you know impress your your parents

maybe you can control that maybe you have more understanding what the things are that impress them and you can just try and hit those keys maybe it's your spouse but I think if it's if you can make it you or what I try to do is like future me then I know 100% of the things that will satisfy that man and he's ruthless but he's fair and so a lot of it is just repetition is like I you know it's funny I this tweet that that did kind of well that I'm amazed how many times

in my life my response to self is great I'll do it again but better and how many times you can apply that to anything like great you learn the sales script front to back now do it again but better and you can do it you know write the book you can do it for asking the girl out you can do it for the

product you can do it for the UX design you can do it for the email like great I do it again but better and I think that if you can if you can keep doing that iteration without getting without getting frustrated with it and seeing the character trait that you want to develop as the output of the activity rather than the thing that you're working on that I think is where you can get the W that no one can take away from you.

Yeah I think that future self frame is really important you know building something for the long term like you know really you are the whole term as exactly I mean how do you kind of define that like give us like for some people like I get what you're saying

right but you know when you're talking yourself about a given you know thing you're looking to release and you're like okay what my future self be proud of this like what are some of the principles that your future self is judging that work off of. Honestly it's just level of effort.

It's really a it's just level of effort relative to the task now do I do you know 28 full you know three times go throughs on on an email no because the the reward relative to the input doesn't make sense right so it's like calibrating the effort that would be hard or hard workable or a hundred

percent based on the task to something that's reasonable now the reason that I was willing to put so much into the launch was you know I did the math on this where I was like okay if I had a 5,000 person audience for a big live event how many how long would I prepare for that I was like I probably prepare two three days for that you know because I went on every single person there is going to tell 20 other people that this one guy was just blew everyone away and that's what I

want you know I think I think the background your phone is Michael Jordan wasn't that yeah like in his in last day and see this this comment that just like sent chills through my spine and he said there's going to be a kid in the audience who's there with his dad and they can only afford that one ticket that one time and they're going to make their judgment on how Michael Jordan plays on that one game and that's why I try to bring it every game and I think I try and think of

that frame and I had that with that you know with this audience there's so many people who would never actually see me live ever and that might be the only time you're seeing me live and I was like I have to I have to fucking bring it and if I would do that for 5,000 people if I 500,000 people then it would be reasonable that I would prepare a hundred times I mean if I think it's reasonable to prepare for two to three days for 5,000 then why would I not think it's reasonable to

prefer you know a hundred times for a hundred times the audience it makes sense and so if anything I underprepared but it did get to a point of proficiency where I was like I won't gain more from doing this right and so it really comes down to the number of repetitions I will allow myself to do based on what I

get from the activity. And the $100 million leads exercise on your site I was going through them a few weeks back and you talked about the story of years ago having a group of people you were with there was a mentor there you talked about this principle of setting aside you know an experiment budget like a learning budget to you know just put towards different things different bets that you have some will pay off some won't but either way you learn

and that this is pretty instrumental early on in your career. I'm curious you know how do you kind of go and allocate a learning budget for yourself today what do you invest in those things in and I know you're someone that's massive on investing in yourself you know yes and me and all this stuff. Yeah I think I mean pick a percentage or pick an amount I think 5 to 10%

is a good amount of personal income. If you're so okay so depending on who you are and it's if you're if you're like have a job right now that I'd say personal income if you're if you run a company then I would say of your marketing spend okay right rather than revenue because it depends on you know the margin of the business and whatnot but 5 to 10% of the marketing spend in a business I think should be for crop crazy and wild ideas and you do it really just to

learn and the idea is like a lot of our biggest wins have come from just like crazy experiments but nine times that it's and we lose but if we don't experiment we will lose in the long run and so I see that 5 to 10% is basically long term insurance that we will continue to stay relevant continue to innovate continue to stay on the top of things and so even though we have the micro losses losses of of not having something perform we still get the macro win of learning

why that didn't perform and then trying to iterate and then two or three iterations later getting some of that smashes and then being ahead of the curve for the next six months and meet that then goes into the 90% of the effort that we put our put our resources behind and then we continue to rate on that 5 to 10% and I think we have done I think the team's done exceptional job, Cale's an exceptional job at giving what I said earlier about giving the personal freedom like

he's also incorporated that so that the team also doesn't get burnt out from doing the same thing over and over again. And is there something that kind of stands out over the last you know six months that was like okay this is a bet we're putting we're not even sure if there's really going to work out like you said 9 or 10 probably aren't put as something it's like what's one that stands out that just smashed it. Oh, maybe two. I mean we've we've invested time into a vlog which we were like

maybe this will work. I don't know. It's been going well. It has been going well. But that was like a walled idea. Cale was like what if we just follow you around for a day and like make something I was like all right man I don't know if it's going to be interesting you know. He's heard your adoration for the Kardashians and now it's a guy. It's been up and that was you know that like there's there's so reasons that basically there has to be some sort of reason that we think that it like there's

a chance of it working. So it's really just like can we generalize something that's been successful in one place to our current context. So it's I don't think anything that we're doing has never been successful before. So I don't want to say like we're that level of animator. It's just like okay there's something that

works here. Can we apply it here? And that's probably how we use kind of our thinking process and if we can understand why it works there that's where you can understand like the validity utility like what are the things that make it valid in multiple contexts and if we can apply the right principles then it should be we can do it our own way and still make it work for us. And so that's why I think the study of this stuff has been really interesting.

But you know the vlog is one you know Twitter overall was just a meta experiment like the whole thing for me was just has been a massive experiment platform like I tweet stuff all day long just as it comes up and when people find something interesting we repurpose the hell out of it. Yeah they become Instagram posts they become shorts they become and if we have you know three or four five or six that that do really well around a specific

topic then that becomes a long YouTube for long YouTube video. And so all of those are just micro experiments and I think if you can create a place where you have low risk to experiment you should lean into that as much as possible. And one thing I just want to close the loop earlier that forgot to say for the people who are getting into making content I would say decrease friction

to the absolute highest degree possible. So if you like if you like doing podcasts or like you like you like you want to be behind a mic but you don't want to be in front of a camera then start there. If you want to if you're like I'm great on camera but I don't like interviewing cool then start there if you like writing then start there so there's a lot of different mediums that you can start

on start with the one that comes more naturally to you. And I like to think about getting outsized returns on things by getting again getting more for what it put in so the ideal scene is I changed nothing and I get more

from it. And so if I'm already doing certain things like the vlog works like I already work and so if we can now get something from that I might behavior doesn't change at all I just now get more out of it which is super high leverage and so thinking about it from that framework of what are all the things I'm currently doing and really like looking at your calendar and saying okay what

are literally all the things that I do. Are there any of these things or periods of time or days of the week that I recurrently have tasks that other people might find interesting and I think asking your team might be helpful because a lot of times we don't have as much like I don't think a lot of my stuff is interesting literally on the way here Jason we're talking and I was and he was like I'm really glad we did because I had a whole meetings day yesterday and at the end of the yesterday I was

like I don't have a guy I think man. He's like oh no dude like there was like there were six different moments throughout the day that were like awesome that we're going to clip out and do stuff with and I was like cool well I was just working so it was it was high return for me so I think if you can don't try and start a media business try and put a media business around your life as it currently stands and changes few things as possible and then if you are

going to change something or add something to your schedule you better have a damn good reason to know that you're going to get a return on it because you're not adding things to your plate which I take really very seriously.

Yeah I think it's a yeah frame shift of going from it I got to create this new thing I got to make this new thing that kind of shiny toy five to moving more I'm just going to document what I'm already doing because there's got to be like you said either me three years ago that would have really been admired you know what I'm doing now and get a lot of lessons from this.

Let me add new ones to that because I think it's important I think people must understand it when when we say document don't create first off I think Gary was the first person to say that but document doesn't necessarily mean have somebody follow you around with a video tape all day because a lot of you have really boring lives and no one wants to watch it.

I'm just being really real with you but you can document in other formats and I talk about this in the hundred million all leads book which is look at your calendar and think okay what were the lessons from this week you can still you know crystallize or create an artifact from the week that consolidates a week's worth of stuff in the 10 minutes that will be valuable.

I'm thinking like how can I distill things that happen so you're still documenting it doesn't mean you have to just capture it in real time. And so I think having a method for document is for me Twitter is my actual document is that something happens so like if you ever want to know what mood a men whatever is happening on Twitter is what I'm thinking right now now I tend to whitewash like names and businesses and things like that but

like what I tweet about is like what my thoughts that's my thoughts that's my thoughts right that's what's going on during the day and if you see so if I talk about like how someone's being a bonehead like look at my schedule around that time that's that somebody was doing something you know and

so I would encourage you to have some outlet that allows you to most with with the least amount of friction possible crystallize the learning from the week or the month or the day and I think doing that will provide value to an audience because anyone who can compress time provides value so

you learn a lot in a year if you just made one video a year on everything you actually learn it probably be a pretty decent video now if you do it every hour you probably don't have as much and so it's really just like at what interval do I have enough substance that I can provide value to an audience and I think that's a decent frame to start with. It's when I get into one last question here we had a question from the Founder-O-S community surveyed everyone in there.

Okay. One of the founders was asking out of all the different methods that you go and delete generation in 100 million dollar leads what do you feel like is the one that's like the most overlooked but the most impactful. Oh it's referrals for sure. I mean, so taking it from the reverse scenario if all we did was make a product that every person who bought it brought 1.1 other people we would never need to advertise every again and so like well then solve for that. You know what I mean?

Like all the other things in my opinion are to give you the reps to iterate the product such that you get 1.1 people to refer a person who purchases and at that point now you can gas you gas everything and so I think the big the unfortunate thing in the marketing community is that you can make a decent amount of money just being good at marketing sales and when I say decent I mean you can make 10 20 million dollars a year 30 million dollars a year just being really good at marketing and sales.

But in order to get from 30 to 100 to 100 to a billion and I haven't got to a billion so I can't say that but in the next five years hopefully I'll be able to say that and it'll still be valid but the cost to acquire customers will only go up and so you need to have an equally strong

force that will cause it to go down and that is for every person to get you get 1 2 3 5 purchases that come on the back end from other and new customers and so if one customer brings you to you now get three customers the price of one and now your cat goes down from a monetary perspective to

one third of what it was before and that allows you to to spend money to reach bigger and broader audiences and that's what allows you to scale and a lot of guys will mess it up where they have a product they learn something about marketing and sales they make more money and the problems

that they then associate marketing and sales with the only way that they're going to make more money but they quickly hit a plateau and then they're like I don't know what to do now and the reality is sometimes you have to take

five steps back fix the product so that when you do add the gas to it more people find out about your good stuff not about your mediocre or shitty stuff and so there's this this is this exercise that I love that we took some companies through which was we had them divide up into teams and of

10 or sorry we had them divide up into teams of like four and we give them 10 minutes to create a pasta tower right they get like a piece of paper like duct tape or marshmallow and like a pound of pasta and then at the 10-minute mark you stop it and so it's a really interesting exercise because you then ask questions about it so you say okay who could have done this better right never ever says okay if we give you a full day to think about you think you

could come up with a better one yes okay instead of 10 minutes we give you 10 days you think you build a taller tower yes okay now everybody has their current tower that's shitty you know straight line up say okay if I need you to 10x this tower could you do it and the answer most of the time is no

is because the fastest way to build a pasta tower in 10 minutes is not the fastest way to build a pasta tower that's 10 stories and so a lot of times people build their businesses that way is that they're trying to hit a goal as fast as you may possible but in so doing prevent themselves from

hitting a much larger goal later and then their ego prevents them from taking the step back to then build it right and so in being a rush they never get there on that note this has been a lot of fun a lot of great learnings here Alex appreciate it appreciate all you've done with your

books and with all the free content online every once you go check out a hundred million dollar leads legendary book appreciate you making the time here Alex means a lot to help you ever lovely day dude thank you so much for having me and awesome questions