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

i think the single greatest differentiator between the poor and the middle class middle class and rich rich and the truly wealthy is i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness please welcome now what's the difference between someone who's selling all the time and someone who's never selling and doing a disservice because they don't offer someone to buy something when they know like okay i have this coaching program or this course or this thing where i know you can get value if you took action but maybe they shy away from it because they

want to focus on brands so much and not be the sales person but then it's actually doing a disservice yes because they're not in your program so i think it actually has less to do with the ratio of how much they're selling versus serving in their content but more so the ratio of selling and serving overall because most times because of this like we were talking before this about the internet marketing space in general is that most people's products are not serving they're not terrible right they're terrible and so what happens is like it is

the most right hook of right hooks possible because like you just lose a ton of goodwill with the thing apple doesn't lose goodwill when they come out with an iphone everyone's just excited about it and they use the iphone they tell their friends so the difference is in the goodwill that comes with the quality of the product and so i think that's where the issue is it's not like do i sell or do i not sell it's just is the thing that i'm selling and the vast majority of people are pitching all the time are

natural promoters not product people right and so like most times the greatest product people like naval had this quote that i really like he said you're only selling because you don't know how to market and you only market because you don't know how to build a product because like the best products market and sell themselves now obviously if you're steve jobs or elon musk it's like you build amazing products and then you back them with unbelievable marketing and then you have an army of sales people that that you know are selling for you so it's

like then you have them all and then you have you know a trillion dollars yeah yeah yeah but like just just being exceptional any of those will make you money but you get the multiplicative you know compounding effect if you're good at two or three of them right were you always uh good at making money or was there a time where you were like man i'm just broke struggling and trying to figure this thing out it depends on like how much we're defining you know i mean like right out of co i finished i finished

college in three years and then did the management consulting path and so like out of college i was making like 50 000 right right um and i lived in baltimore so like my cost of living was like five dollars and so so i was able to save a bunch of money so i i saved fifty thousand dollars in two years wow living there and that's what i was able to start my my uh gym with did you understand money when you were in your teens or growing up or did you feel like you were scared

of it or it was scarce or are you thinking oh this i'm not really worried about money it'll come when i'm ready i was always i've always been a saver i've always been a saver not a huge spender i i think part of it is because i don't get a lot of like when i pay a dollar i feel something different and most times if i buy something i don't feel any different so i don't get a lot of utility spending right i just don't get a lot from it i think i've been aware of

that for a long time and so like if you don't spend a lot and you make even a normal amount of money for a decent amount of time you end up having a lot um and my my income went up i would say that there's definitely elements of scarcity that i that i just believed in for a long time really yeah i mean around competition was one tell me about it what was that about so like when i had you know when i had my gyms for example this is you know almost a decade ago

you know i was so concerned with the guy down the street was marketing is he copying my ads like i used to get so obsessed with this stuff and like it just so doesn't matter like at all like you he could copy and we could both have really big successful gyms it's not like there's a lack of people who need to get a chance right right and then even then it's like we're only talking about a five-mile radius not like the rest of the world like it's there's just like you know orders of magnitude of

thinking in terms of scale that i was just like completely like aloof what happens when we focus on competition so much what happens to our ability to scale grow our creativity our money-making abilities i think you become emotionally reactive to the activities of the other person and so you're truly focused on nothing that adds value and so it's because of it's not the competition like competitors don't put you out of business but you obsessing over competitors does right what should people be doing instead of obsessing over competition it's all customers it's all just being because

like if you can get you know there's a billionaire in my in my building who um he was asking anybody he's like if you had one thing that you could tell someone uh if they wanted to build you know a company like yours and he said your customer must absolutely love your product a lot of people just underestimate the amount of effort it takes to go from good to great uh in product or service it's like if you've ever been to like the difference between a five-star restaurant and a four-star restaurant you know looks like

20 percent but it's 10 times the effort you know what i mean the difference between like a one michelin star and a two michelin star restaurant is an ocean right right and so i think like i use the book as the example because it's an easy one to reference most people try and just write a book and then once the final word is done they're like send it to the editor edit it cool and let's ship it out but like that book i rewrote five times end to end the whole thing and each time the

goal was to make it shorter it's like how can i say this in fewer words how can i say this in less words and um and in doing that and the same thing happened with jim launch with that product is that every time we created a 2.0 or 3.0 or 4.0 we made it shorter how could we make it easier to consume and then also that was the reason we wrote the book about the value equation it's like what is value right how do we define that and so if we're customer focused we can obsess

on value and then have a very iterative approach and i think that you came from the internet marketing world like and i talked i i've given this in like a couple of like closed door masterminds where i'm like guys like you all say that your product's amazing i'm like what's your crc what's your chs what's your nps scores what are your ttvs and they're like huh i'm like well if i ask you your cpm your cpl your your cost per book call your cost of acquisition like all of these things you could rather lose off

in two seconds and like so you guys say that your product's amazing and yet you don't measure a single metric around product wow and so focusing on that right yeah so they just so the thing is like if we can get that part right then you get so much si because if we can just get each customer to get one more customer then we get our our return on ad spend doubles right but then if you think about what your contribution margin is on that extra customer if you don't have to spend the cost of

acquisition so much of that drops to the bottom line and then the company just becomes so much more profitable yeah just by like tiny levers that we do here like how can we take you know with i think we were talking earlier about our publishing business we're like okay publishing is something that takes a long time to do how can we figure out ttv is time to value so how can we figure out some sort of experience or some sort of win someone can have in the first seven days like how can we get them

a dollar is there anything that we can do to launching their book yeah exactly like something some proof of concept and we were able to figure out how to we're talking about mini you know minibook get that going in a very short period of time so that people could just and we're like hey guys this is an mvp this isn't your perfect product we just want to prove to you that it works and so then they get one dollar in their account they're like and we're like you are now getting some momentum yeah yeah and

now you have that identity shift that happens just like i just made money on the internet like yeah you did now let's do a real book that's like really good like we don't this is not the product but this is proof of concept and so that was like a a more creative one we had to do but like in other businesses it's like how can we always drag forward at least some sort of big win so we get the emotional buy-in to then fin you know fall through like when we had the gyms way back

in the day i would run people through like a six week really aggressive diet in the beginning and that was because even though the sustainable weight loss is it takes a much longer period of time you know etc the slower you lose it the longer it sticks off but the faster you lose in the beginning the more likely you are to stick with it interesting so you get this emotional buy-in and you're like cool okay we just did a lot of weight loss in six weeks i need you to chill for six right and then

but now they believed us because we had just delivered you know a big win kind of results exactly quickly yeah and so it's like we know how to do it but now we're like you can trust that we do know how but now let's just maintain for six weeks get your hormones back make sure everything's good hunky dory but a little more muscle because you lost them during this kind of aggressive cut yeah and then kind of then we'll get into a more sustainable phase right so it's just how can we drag that forward and

i think that level of obsession the way people obsess about promotion if they obsess the same way about product the amount of profit they would make as a result of that is just like it's huge and those are sellable businesses the marketing driven businesses do not have nearly the enterprise value that the product driven businesses do so would you say the key to going from good to great is obsessing on product great product greatness 100 what is what if someone you know they have any product the physical product digital product coaching is software and they're

watching and listening what should they be thinking about to making the product that much better they've put a lot of time and energy launching and building it they've got sales maybe they've had it for a year or two how do they break it all down and it says is it 20 different factors is it like just do these three things and it's going to improve the quality of product what should they think about it's a really good question so there's like three different angles i want to take so one is like what i talked about

in the book which is like the value equation so what it's like so there's four variables in the value equation the first one is the dream outcome which is is the thing that i'm delivering fundamentally valuable and this is especially for people probably more so who are trying like starting out in their in their like entrepreneurial career you want to map draw it out for me too if you want to sure well hold it up for people yeah so you've got you've got your dream outcome so i'll just put dream here right you've got dream

outcome which is the first variable the second variable is the perceived likelihood of achievement and so the idea is and i'll give you an example of this if you have let's say you wanted to get plastic surgery whatever and is that what you did with your calves that's exactly right if if you wanted to get plastic surgery and you had the option of two guys who are gonna do the surgery one guy is done ten thousand surgeries and one guy is fresh out of medical school this is his first surgery which guy would you go

with probably ten thousand it might even take this guy half the time to do the surgery is this guy and double the price right so we might and it's double the price why because of the perceived likelihood of achievement we believe that when we pay this man we are more likely to achieve what we want even though the work is the same probably longer on this side but our perception of what we are going to get in a real way increases prior to purchase which is the same reason that if you have like 20 people

who told you that this restaurant is amazing you're willing to pay way more even though you haven't experienced it yet because it's the perceived likelihood of getting the outcome to rewind on the dream outcome uh this is more a commentary that how is it that you have a 50 000 you can you can solve the same problem let's say weight loss because everybody understands that one if i'm trying to help somebody lose weight there's 50 000 solutions and there's five dollar solutions there's free solutions right 50 000 solutions you can get liposuction right and get

a full body lift and whatever in a day right or you can get an ebook you know for five bucks so the question is why are these two things you know more valuable and that again goes to perceived achievement but if i went from the weight loss to let's say making money if i had two things in general all the things in the making money category will be will be priced higher because there's a more direct roi yeah so that's why between categories stream outcome as a category can be higher or lower but then once

you're within a category it's the other three variables so perceive likelihood of achievements number one of the other three variables the next variable is underneath which is the time delay so between when i pay and when i get what's my delay there right so if i were to say using the weight loss example if you swipe your credit card and you look down at your stomach and you just have abs how valuable you'll pay a lot for that exactly and all we did was just decrease the time delay and so let's say in a b2b

example if you had a marketing agency for example and normally it's like okay you guys need to send me all this creative and we got to get everything spun up and it's going to take us you know 45 days to really get everything you know ramp we got to build a funnel and handle apollo out right and then let's do a different example we're on the same call the guy says cool we're going to get you going and you hang up the phone and your phone rings with the prospect that's pretty big even if it's

the exact same thing the pr 45 days from now your phone rings the prospect today your phone rings the prospect how different is the perception of value phenomenally different which is why the time delay is such a huge piece which is why time to value we're referencing earlier is such a huge part of increasing the perceived value of the product and so that's the time delay that's the third yep and then the fourth one is effort and sacrifice and so effort and sacrifice are two sides of the same coin so effort as i define it

are things that you must begin doing that you do not want to do that you did not have to do prior to the purchase give me an example if i have to wake up early to go to the gym that would be effort that is something that i now have to do and so sacrifice i use as the equal opposite which is what do i have to stop doing that i want to do yeah that i that i would continue to doing continue doing if i didn't have to stop eating milkshakes at midnight yes and

even in the b2b example with the marketing agency well now what do i have to do i have to start making this content i have to start hopping on meetings every week we have to start looking over these metrics like the higher these people i got to worry about right and so oftentimes especially like businesses they think that their price is the most expensive thing that they have in the cost and it's not so think about this if you've ever asked someone hey i'll give you my service for free and they said no it's because

there are other costs that you're not taking to consideration which also means a lot of times your price has far more wiggle room in it than you think it does and if you can decrease a much bigger hidden cost by asking for more money and you can solve a hidden cost you can make more money and improve their experience at the same time right and that's when you just make oodles and noodles of money when does someone know so this is a good degree concept right what we should be focusing on is kind of these

this main analogy and factor when does someone understand a lot of people talk about their worth like i'm worth this i deserve this whether they're an employee or they're an entrepreneur and they want to price something yeah when should they be thinking about their worth and increasing their rates whether as an employee or as an entrepreneur how do they know because you're only worth what people are willing to pay so how do you get people to pay what you believe you're worth so i think there's three variables that come into like how much you can

charge right the first one is value or perceived value from the prospect value so perceive value the second one is how good you are negotiating which would become which i put that are persuading you could probably put that as just persuasion in general that's because if it's if it's a job you might be negotiating if it's a customer you might be negotiating to but it's persuasion in general and that's a whole skill to develop on its own 100 and the third one is um how unique it is so that there's no easy alternative right and

so if like for example let's say i provide something that's really valuable i'm unbelievable at selling rare and then another guy is willing to just do all the same stuff for just less right right and so it's being de-commoditized let's talk about in the book too is that people have to be able to they cannot and the goal should be with our our services that we have that no one can hold up our service and somebody else's and say these two are similar enough i'll pick the cheaper one and so the goal is how can

we differentiate ourselves in enough ways by looking at the value equation and thinking what are all the things that are making this take longer and how can i remove them what are all the efforts and sacrifices even these micro things these nuances that make things more difficult and so like the kings of this if you look at uh like amazon right like the biggest companies in the world i'll reverse the small companies that are out there they always focus on the first two things let me let me promise something really big let me show you

all these testimonials and that's all they do just promote these things it's amazing listen to sammy it's amazing listen to tommy right that's all they do but the biggest companies in the world focus on the bottom side of the equation which is how can we make things faster and how can we make things more effortless like netflix destroyed blockbuster not because they fundamentally changed the product at all all they did was they made it happen immediately and from the comfort of your home right and so they just dramatically decreased the cost and effort that was

associated with watching movies and boom they blew up right and so like uh jason fladley and he's a friend he said you know one of the easiest business models in the world is just look at what everyone else is doing and do it in half the time right like that it's a simple like people like what do i do for business just look what like if someone you know like can cut your lawn in whatever amount of time you clean houses so you can clean houses in less time because it's just less inconvenience when when

people when you're there in their house less time and less money or same money same money yeah or more money you know like it depends on what are the what are the hidden costs so like probably like with cleaning what are they hitting what are all the things that people hate scheduling is probably a pain right uh hearing the noise is probably a pain like silent cleaners right right like what are like you you list this out and that's we outlined that in the book of like the process of thinking through this but what are

all the pains and problems that your customers complained to you about and so like the goal is always in in the support tickets so when you talk about like obsessing about a customer right it's let's go through all the comments on the videos right let's go through all of the support tickets that are coming in and those complaints inside of the complaints sure like what you don't want to do is say like well these guys are all victims because then you lose all the power as a business owner by just blaming them so if you

just accept all of it it's like these are all like as long as the thing that they're saying is not false if it's unreasonable then let's see if we can figure it out maybe no one else has figured out how to do this but we might as well try yeah right and so i think if if you can approach it with like very open hands of like when you accept the feedback it gives you the goal to really create huge breakthroughs in products and services were you always open to the feedback from customers or when

did you learn to be like when did you learn to be like okay this sounds like a victim conversation but there's something here where this person's struggling and if i can make it more effortless it's gonna be a better product for that person i think it's just taken time and i think it's because i think a lot of it i think is um is really beating down your ego and i think like in a lot of ways with business in my opinion ego is the enemy because it gives us too much confidence when we don't

deserve it when did you start beating down your ego i mean i've been trying to do it since i was 19. um it's just been a very slow process i just i just realized that it was the root of all the unhappiness that i had and like everything that i had was in comparison to other people with for no reason and like you know i've obviously adopted some perspectives we'll probably get into later but that are contrarian in nature in terms of like how we live but not just there's no benefit to ego there's just

none and then i have a different thing that i've been thinking about recently i'm excited to share with you sure um so there's you've probably heard this but there's a lot of evidence that points to with mitochondrial dna that we go back to like one one woman birthed like the mitochondrial dna of all humans just comes like tracks back to one one woman right and so i think that that's interesting within the context of legacy because people talk about legacy and they want to like like leave something for their for their progeny and we we

love our sideways family members right what do you mean like oh yeah yeah like you're a family yeah exactly but like if we all came from the same mitochondrial dna right then then we like not to be like weird and huggy huggy love you but like family 100 yeah of course i find that really fascinating it's just like it's like a super distant cousin and and this is why that's why when i met you for the first time yeah what did i do when i met you deep long hug deep long hug oh yeah and

i'd do this was a triple hug it was a triple because you you i i broke you up twice i was like bring it in bro there's a reason i do that is because um oh that's the thing i didn't know well i mean i i mean that's a unless it's somewhere where it's like maybe someone who's older that doesn't want to be hugged or you know your wife i'm going to give a quicker i'm not going to be grabbing so yeah but it's uh you know it's a respectful you know understanding the human being

in front of you doing your best to respect it but with you i knew i could just hug you and it's going to make you uncomfortable and it's going to make you uncomfortable but but for me i don't know if i'm ever going to see you again i don't know if i'm going to see you tomorrow or or anyone tomorrow totally and so why not embrace people with you know a three to five 10 second awkward hug yeah and let people know that you really appreciate the moment when you're present yeah that's what i try

to do that's what i try to focus on but um you know and if we're all distant cousins yeah then why not treat each other that way the best way possible you know and i didn't and i didn't mean to launch all the way there because i'll go right back to ego so i can screw this back otherwise we'll go in that direction um but yeah so i think because all this comparison is like well if i were comparing myself to a family member would i feel the same way and if if all these people

were on the same side as me because we're all family would i still feel like i would because i've just tried to attack it from a logical perspective of like how many different ways can i try and defuse this bomb and i think there's a lot of keys and you just unlock tiny pieces of it and you can just uh try you know piece by piece i don't think anyone ever conquers it but yeah or you know just hopefully i can over time get better and this i used to be very competitive as well as

an athlete that's all i thought about was winning it's like i had to win to feel like i was worthy or i was good enough or i was talented enough or and if i didn't win that i wasn't reaching my goal of winning the championship or the prize or whatever it was and i took that into business for many years and i felt like i needed to compete with other people and then it's funny when i started this show almost 10 years ago i was like it can't be about me it needs to be about

collaboration yeah in order for this to really grow and scale and change lives and impact people it can't just be the lewis house show all day long yeah one i'm not smart enough i don't have all the answers i'm not as talented as you shorter guys are way smarter that's why you're so much more brilliant um you know and i was like i got to bring on the smart people and create a safe space i could bring all the tall guys off right now i'll just catch it right like everything all my audience will get

taller as a result but uh it's funny because when i started to shift that the eagle goes back into still comparing and ranking some of these things and i was like okay when i started to shift that it's when i you know the platform and the community started to expand because i made it about shining the light on others yeah you know and doing my best to shine the light on others and when you do that when you shine the light on an idea or a mentor that taught you something usually good things come back

so that's interesting so when did you start to shed this ego mentality i mean i started attacking when i was 19. 19. how are you now 32 32. yeah um and i think i have like 40 percent less ego than i did yeah so and how do you have how do you diminish the ego as you continue to scale and exit these big companies and build your brand and get more and more attention and known how do you bring it back down to the humility i think it's linking the two so it's trying to link

these good things are happening because i'm decreasing this thing that's smart and so that way i can associ i can have a positive reinforcing association with the success that actually that would normally amplify you know the wrong character yeah what do you think would happen if your ego was at the highest level right now i think a lot of people would i mean a lot more people would not like it like i mean i don't think the message would get across because to be fair i think the message would stop it would the spread would

happen much slower or not at all because the message would change because the message wouldn't be about the message it would be about me and i think that i think that probably the reason that this has grown so much is because you've you've tried to quiet yourself in so that the message and the idea can spread to as many people as possible and you put the message on the pedestal rather than lewis on the page of course and i think your audience realizes yeah that's interesting so what do you think you were making 50k the

first couple years out of college you saved 50k within two years which is amazing so you were disciplined yeah what was the the habit or the switch from one year to the next that started to bring in more abundance financially not in a incremental 20 but it was like boom this was 5x 10x what was that habit or mindset shift for you that started to develop more income so um there's like the the science and the art kind of both sides so like the science side is just the leverage so the amount of money you

make is proportional the amount of leverage you employ in your life and so you know four types of leverage this is not mine this isn't of all robicons but i'll just say that yeah so you've got labor i call collect i use four c's because it's easier for me to remember he says labor i say collaboration so funny that you said that earlier yeah but it's just getting other people to basically use their time right for your cause the second level of leverage is other people's money is getting people to invest in your thing and

then the next two are so these two are permissionless the first one's like you need to get someone's permission to work for you and you get someone's permission to get you give you their money the other two are permission lists so you can do them on your own one is media which is what you have here because the cost of making one video and having one person see it versus a million people see is the same cost yeah right and then the other is code right so i say content in code so there's my four

c so collaboration capital content code and both of those are not binaries it's not am i using other people am i not using other people it's to what extent am i using other people am i do i use other people's money yes or no no it's how much of other people's money am i using and so each of these are continuums not binaries so like somebody could just use other people's money and be a billionaire because of the extent they use it but those are the types of leverage that exist and so as my income

went up it was by proportion of the amount of leverage i was employing really how are you what of these four were you leveraging the most so in the beginning i had no leverage because i was an employee right i was using my own time the next thing that i started doing was i became self-employed right so i had a little online training business that i started in between my quitting my job and and starting the gym um and so when i started the gym i started getting labor was the first people yeah not a

lot of it but i got some of it and so that gave me that first next year i went from part-time interns a month to i think about 30 000 a month um so that was the that was the big jump is just i had a team you know i made a small team but i had a team right now that's overall in revenue that's not your take no exact sales you might have been losing money yeah right we made we i made a i made i was probably making 20 000 a month at that

point for yourself yes after expenses and team and everything yeah that was then and then what did that feel like going from 5 to 20. did that make you feel something different was there a shift inside of you when you took that action because for me when i started this it was all about vanquishing my father so it was all about i was middle eastern father only child so like i was raised by a single dad it was just me and him that was it for the vast majority of my life and so he's middle

eastern came here the thousand dollars became a doctor he was a doctor came here learned english from watching television you know what i mean has the american success story absolutely that's amazing and so i was born here though speaking on the language too french was my first actually there's a whole story around it but anyways but yeah french is here yeah how many languages you speak that's the best one i i'll just leave it at that but all of it was about making him proud right um that's what you did you set out to do

that that's what i was trying to do and then i think that throughout my like adolescence i realized that it was something that was always going to be withheld from me so it didn't matter what it was the goal post would always move so that it would never be proud enough right it was just it was because he wanted the most out of me and so like if i got let's say you know a 99 on a test it wasn't congratulations what'd you get wrong oh man right and that was always what it was that's

okay like i'm yeah we're cool i'm very happy with my life yeah yeah and i realized that and so this desire to gain approval turn into a very deep anger and so towards the world him yourself other people mostly him mostly him um and most like him and myself probably split probably 50 50. you know and um and so it was like my earlier i'll say quote success was purely fueled by rage like it wasn't it wasn't like it was it was rage you know what i mean i was in the same boat yeah yeah

and it was like and i but there was probably some element of me that's like almost enjoyed the suffering because then like i just would get in the space when when you ask like how did i feel yes by getting the extra 20 000 a month first my goal was to make as much as my dad and then it was to make more than my dad and then it was to make more than my dad had ever made his whole life wow and so once i had done that the the i wanted the success to

be unquestionable like yeah it couldn't there couldn't be a but there couldn't be an asterisk it had to be so undeniable that that vanquishing was the word right and so for a five year period after i quit my job my dad did not support he didn't support me quitting my job why not even though they were making money and building a business and because he didn't he's like you're what are you a gym owner like he's like you went to vanderbilt you were on a management consulting correct youth like you got you know you got

above harvard's mid score for your you could have had an incredible career of course right right gym owner doesn't sell well in cocktail parties right right what are you would you uh you know he's uh he's figuring himself out yeah he's doing this little gym as a side thing yeah we'll snap out right and so you know i mean i made plenty of mistakes too when i had the gym so it wasn't like all you know sunshine and rainbows for me like i had a lot of mess-ups that i did i got in bad partnerships

i mean like all the things that you could possibly do and over that five-year period of me scaling to six locations with my with my facilities at the end of that whole thing i ended up losing it all really yeah lost everything six locations lost the whole business well i sold it i sold five of them i shut one of them down um because i wanted to start doing this gym launch thing which would be like flying around doing turnarounds because i started that's when i met layla um but you find a gym that's kind

of like not succeeding in trying to fly in yeah when you do a makeover yeah exactly bar rescue scene right like same exact thing she's on a tv show with it believe me the many regrets i have right that would have been an awesome one we did 32 turnarounds wow it was almost two years yeah and so um we we we started doing that anyways i lost everything um because i took all the sale money and i put it into my last location and then the partner that i had there siphon the money out because

i was like yeah like well i'll put all the money from the sale of these gems into this thing like it doesn't matter um it was my own mistake it was on me um but it was even then it was you know we'll see you know we'll see how like this isn't real like we'll see and then once i started once gym launch really started taking off it wasn't until i think we did like 17 million in ebitda like profit take home um in one year in one year that my dad i was 27. that's

crazy my dad my dad called me and he's like are you sitting down i remember like at this point like we were like not talking too much you know maybe every few months it'd be like a five minute phone call and so i was like sure yeah i got time what's up and he's like you're going to want to hear this and i was like okay what he was like i'm sorry and it was first time you'd ever apologize to me in my life and what's interesting to me though is that it didn't feel like

anything i didn't care why not because i had stopped caring about what he thought about me a long time ago and it was like when i quit my job was the day that like i i accepted dying to my father because because very much to me at that point was i was i was really really sad at that point in my life when i had the job because i had really done everything that he had wanted me i finished vanderbilt in three years as president of fraternity uh i had won writing awards i'd done like

a bunch like i'd done everything you know i was in i was vice president of the powerlifting team like yeah every club all the stuff i could possibly finish yet while still being president and did it in three years right and got a management consulting job that was like a good job had all the credibility and it just i knew it wasn't enough and i knew that and so i knew that the choice for me was that i either had to die to him or i had to die to myself wow and that was ultimately

like the choice that that i put in front of myself and that was whenever i was like maybe i should just get i was like die to him or daddy you and so that was what gave me the the the confidence to to break that and then i physically moved because i couldn't be in the same area wow so i actually went 23 at this point yeah so i called my dad when i was like in ohio and i'm from baltimore so i'm like it was for you i called him when i was there and

i was like hey by the way i'm doing the gym thing he was like okay he's like why don't you come over we'll talk about it because he knew because he knew that like if he came over with enough battering i would be like fine i know this is a smart thing i'll take the g you know i'll apply to you know booth and harvard whatever and i'll get the i'll do that whole thing and that because that was a cycle i just kept doing that and i was just like no i'm not going to

do it so i was like well i can't i'm in ohio he was like what do you mean and then the tone totally shifted and he was like you always do these crazy things you're always like he's like you're never balanced it's always extreme with you there's no middle path and so anyways i you know i did that five years gyms lost it all anyways and then started and it started jim launch and then that's one and then that really took off sure and then um but when he called me and he apologized um and

this is where i like you know i'm ashamed of myself but like i could have just let it lie and been like thanks appreciate it you know what'd you do instead um instead i said i was like you know when people get up on stage and they're like hey you know they get awards and they're like hey mom and dad i just want to say thanks so much for always believing me i was like i won't say that oh my gosh i was like because you never did i was like the only time you accepted

me i was like is once every other person on this planet had accepted it too oh my gosh man and so that's so i said that's intense on the phone he said that yeah what do you say to that he said well we'll see how long it lasts oh my gosh so that was he was still kind of in competition with yeah and to be fair when he apologized he said you know i'm sorry he said but in my defense if it had been in my time i would have been right and so you know

um but all that to say like i should have just said like appreciate the apology you know thank you because you know tony robbins said something that i thought was really impactful was like for the vast majority of my life it's been like how my father shaped me or whatever but rather than thinking like what what can i use from this dynamic like what gift do i have yeah like from his mother kind of like beating him or whatever yeah exactly like what do i like what do i you know they're blaming for the good

right and so like i have so many things to blame for good from that and i'm very very happy with my life that is why 20 000 a month didn't feel significant to me because the goal that i had my expectations weren't to make money my expectation was that i had to make more than he had ever made and so i had a very big vacuum to drive towards which i think in a lot of ways was a gift because like i blew past a hundred thousand five hundred thousand a month million a month like

i blew past those things because like it was never about having enough money for me it was about feeding this monster but once i got there i realized that what i had done was set up a game to win by my father's rules and so then i and you could never win right and to be fair would i want to win a game that i was wasn't for me it was making you suffer sure you're playing the wrong game i'm playing his game yeah and so i did win but i wanted his game not much

right right and so that was kind of what i think making that realization was it was kind of the slow shift that happened from there so when you won the financial game or the game of like i've made more than you in a month or a year then you made your whole lifetime how did that make you feel and when did you realize you needed to start playing a different game and what would that game become okay there's three questions there what was the first one how did it make you feel the moment you crossed

the finish line of the game of making so much more than he'd ever made in a short amount of time relief because we actually got our relationship back um not like you know i wouldn't say we have like sunshine and rainbow but like we have a functioning relationship um i would say it's role-based like i'm a [ __ ] you know yes but what happened was we are both very like strong personalities and it wasn't until i think that he accepted me as off in our relationship that we were able to kind of like move

forward again because before that my because my my dad's uh he's a doctor so he's always had you know like decent money and i wanted to be beholden to no one you know excluding including him like i didn't want his money right i didn't want anything you know right and so i think i had to establish my own i'd like really plant my own flag to be seen as a man in his eyes and so i think once that happened i think i thought there was some level of like there's no conflict here anymore like

this is undeniable yeah this is beyond reproach yes i have a attractive wife who's really nice and awesome i have a business myself i'm in good shape and if you think about it like the way i mean i'm just being really real with you i blame my father for the many things that that i have become in a lot of ways right because everything that was not perfect was criticized right and so like i've had a six-pack since i was 15. wow and it was because he used to always criticize everyone who was overweight and

being that they're undisciplined and they don't they don't try hard right and then i've you know like and then it was like about having pretty good nice everything perfect women right yes not just pretty but like everything has to be perfect right and then and then making lots and lots of money and so it's like all of these elements i had to max out to again win at that game and but my whole life was designed to be bulletproof was that so that i just wouldn't be criticized and so that was because that was what

i just i knew that if i could criticize myself harder than anyone could then if they did say anything it was never as mean as what i would say to me what's the meanest thing you say to yourself oh like it's all around just not being good enough right now i mean oh not now not now but i was like and it was it was about being to be fair that the actual thing would just be being weak ensued is all about strength mentally emotionally physically financially everything just weak that's how you felt yes you

felt powerless for you most your 20 teens and 20s for sure and so everything that i did was to counteract that right like what can i do as big and strong as i can get yeah yeah i'm going to make as much money as possible i'll have all the women i didn't get yeah exactly 100 and that was and so i pushed against that to try and to quell that you know that that need or that desire that feeling did it satiate that need when you had all those things yes and no yes because when

i got there it forced me to change my perspective the perspective is what changed the way i felt basically realizing that those things were never going to solve anything is what allowed me to but and les brown i think says this where he says like everyone knows that money doesn't money doesn't make happening but everyone's like i'll see for myself yeah and so i think it was one of those like i had to cross all the like and i'd say this not as a as a slight to anyone else but like i had to check

off the easy ones from the list which is like from getting in shape getting the good wife getting the money in the business all that stuff like those are circumstantial that means i can push with enough effort i can change my conditions i can change my surroundings in my environment and if i can change those things will they make me feel better and so i think once i knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that that couldn't that didn't work right um maybe they helped me maybe they helped in some ways but not the internal

ways so what did you have to shift your perspective or what was that shift yeah where you could still have it all and then have it all internally as well i think that the whole ego death concept that we were talking about the very beginning i try not to talk about this too much because i think it's it's um a lot of people find take offense to it and i don't mean it that way i sure this is just what worked for me and not as a criticism of any anyone else's beliefs for me the

idea that there was no such thing as legacy that when i died eventually everything that i had would become dust and that anything expanded over a long enough time horizon disappears right which if you are like christian for example it's the whole book of ecclesiastes um if you and i think the realization of that allowed me to quiet my ego a lot so that i could be more present in the idea that like this moment will only be here in my mind and anything that i do here will not last and so it shifted how

i worked it shifted how i saw relationships and a lot of my thinking is around like my 85 year old self i feel like my number one mentor is like my fictitious 85 year old self because it's the only person that i really believe has my best interest at heart and it's no ulterior motive and so there's this there's this tweet that i had that went pretty viral but it was like listening to a billionaire or a millionaire i'll just use that like when i was in my 20s i wanted to be a millionaire and

when i was a millionaire i wanted to be in my 20s and so the idea that my future self would trade all the money he had to be poor and 20 again made me really reanalyze how i saw living life in the moment if i literally in the future will value my present moment more than the achievement of the thing that i'm i'm seeking right now in the present then something's something's off because even my future self knows that because right now i would pay all the money i have to get 10 years back because

nobody was thinking about it and so then all of what i'm going to achieve in the next 10 years i would happily give up to be right where i am right now and so i think thinking about that really shifted a lot for me because it helped me quiet i'm not saying eliminate but quiet some of the thoughts that are more ego driven because the ego always wants to like separate and isolate from others and prove that it's better and if i know that it will all be dust there is no better because we're all

going to be dust and so in that same way if like if we're all going to be dust destined we're all siblings like two very strong frames for me at least it helped me quiet that aspect and i think in that way i was able i think asking like people but like i think i was able to show up better as a leader i was better able to show up better as a husband um show up better like to make content things like that like i don't think i could have made the stuff we make

now five years ago because i still think it would have been more it would have been to proving something yes it was perfect numbers proving 100 percent of improving proving someone proving a fictitious foe wrong right right they're all talking about right right no one cares about you exactly and so that was really it's like i had to shift from like no one cares about you two like i really want to have a shirt that says no lives matter but i feel like it would give away no like no one cares about you yeah yeah

but i feel but i think there's like a lot of like meat to that where it's like if we can because in that way we are all equal and so us i think it's almost the most egalitarian perspective is that like in the end we will all be dust yeah and so i think in that way that's like we have these exchanges that we have um and in some ways it makes it more beautiful why do you think so many people care about power and respect so much it usually was withheld from them i think

i think the things that we are that were withheld from us are the things that usually we seek the most i think how many how many really successful guys have daddy issues you don't mean so many yeah and so it's like okay well i didn't get his respect so i'm gonna have to compensate with my circumstances with my environment so that everyone respects me and some people do that through fear some people do that for violence some people do that through success it really just depends what vehicle you choose but like the i feel like

the deep need is the same yeah there's something like i can't remember the statistic but the a number of u.s presidents a big number of them like grew up without a father or their father died early in their life and there was i can't remember the status like 30 or 40 or something of like the us presidents lost their father or didn't have a father or something like that early on and it's like well you know now they're going to go prove something or go to be something you know to what about the the habits

that you learned of the wealthy people once you started to really earn and scale your wealth were you studying wealth or were you just fixated on like how do i get one more customer and increase my prices make better product what did you learn about the habits of the rich i haven't learned much about the habits of the rich at all to be very candid with you i think that maybe there are some beliefs that because like my dad was a doctor i wouldn't say he was like you know ultra wealthy but like we lived

in upper middle class you know lifestyle but in terms of like wealth as i think you and i would probably understand it i didn't know anything about that and i don't think i've ever really studied it very much i would say that my heroes now like i started studying wealth after i became wealthy so like what did you learn about it afterwards and what do wealthy people do that you think poor people don't do they pick higher leverage opportunities in a sentence so like poor rich dad poor dad like poor dad says get a job

poor dad says get a higher paying job like rich dad says like and the thing is there's so many innate beliefs that seem commonplace it's like well of course you don't mean like well of course you know and you know you buy some real estate and you know it'll appreciate over time before you invest in some stocks like yeah of course but like poor dads just don't say that and so you have to like learn that i think and i didn't so i'm grateful in that i didn't have to learn that because i heard that

just was of course yeah once you have some money like of course you don't spend your whole income of course you don't and so there's a lot of of course you don't that i think i i inherited just by being like a saving father but there's also some upper middle-class people who don't save anything so like right but i think my dad did a lot of i think he helped a lot with like money hygiene i've had a lot of really good money hygiene from my dad the big the big breakthrough that i had for

me was when i stopped focusing on and this is going to sound backwards but when i started my gyms i was all about building the business right and when i built the biggest companies that i've had and now recently sold and now we have our portfolio it was about how do we make the most money and i know that sounds completely backwards but the only way that you can make the most money is to provide an exceptional valued service and charge a ton of money for it and because i optimized around making money i started

going through for low capital expense businesses because i had lost everything after that five-year stint and so i was like never again am i going to reinvest every dollar from the business back into the business because i've lost it before so when i started the next business and every business i've had thereafter like we take dividends every month and we do that because you don't wait till there's an exit 10 years later i mean put all your money in i'd love to do both yeah yeah why not both sure right and so that would take

a dividend and get a bigger course yeah but not just put money in and wait and get no money back 100 and the thing is is and this was a fallacy i had because people always talk about like reinvesting in their business but i realized that that just meant that they weren't making profit and so and so the vast majority of businesses even the software world is somewhat shifting in this um but they want to see profit and then even better is if you have net free cash flow which is just a fancy word for

the amount of money that you can take out every month after making necessary investments in the business and so i wanted to have businesses that pumped cash flow uh because i lost it all before and so i think there's a lot of like every every one of my business seasons i've i would say i've had three business seasons i had my gym ownership period i had my turnaround and early gym launch day period and then i had prestigious labs the licensing business in allen that was like my last season where you exited yeah yeah and

then i'd say like now we're in we're in our this their third season i guess so brick and mortar gyms licensing supplements and software and then you know third season is what we have now and each of those has a huge huge magnitude of leverage that was added to it and so you know this like gym launcher started on accident in that i was like this might be a way that i could make money because people were like hey you're doing this pretty well for your own jibs can you help me determine what it was

yeah like can you teach me what you've done it was exactly all right let me go in here and oh i just helped them double their revenue in 60 days yeah maybe i'm good at this i'll go people pay me more for that then they'll pay me to help them lose 20 pounds right and so that was the big that was when i went from b to b to c to b to b yes um and then from there to be honest it was just going up another another order of magnitude because now instead of

just building the one business now we're building lots of businesses at the same time and so that's kind of like why acquisition.com i think has a much higher you know his his bigger feet for lack of sure right and so what do you look for when you're you're acquiring a business or investing in a business that has cash flow and what businesses have the best cash flow so this will be relevant for everybody in the audience and also hits on what we were talking about with the wealth thing like wealthy people choose higher leverage opportunities

and we went over what leverage was earlier um the best businesses especially in an inflationary period are businesses that have low capital expenses okay um and that's because if you have some examples yeah so i'll give you opposite examples to make and then i'll drive it so the something that does have high capital expense which is what you would not want to get into would be like stuff that has lots of inventory stuff that has lots of supply chain lots of manufacturing heavy equipment things where you have to constantly buy more stuff in order to

increase capacity right a low capital expense businesses are things like services right services uh you know digital businesses software is mixed because sometimes the development team can be considered a capital expense it really depends on how you build the dev team but the idea is that if you can produce 10 times more units without phenomenally changing the the cost basis then you will have a business that has lower capital yes and so that's what you like and most of those types of businesses produce more cash flow have more pricing power and so i mean that's

what warren buffett invests in right it's high you know like um insurance geico right there's no capital it's risk they're literally assessing risk error it's math like the business is math like if you really think it's just math is the entire business of insurance and what's crazy just a side note is that a great way of figuring out the highest leverage businesses that exist is looking the business has been here the longest insurance has been here since before world the world wars right thank you the banks have been around forever right jp morgan was in

1800s wow right the the biggest insurance companies they're all 100 plus years old they're found in the 1800s and so when you have a business that's lasted that long to me that's a great breadcrumb of like this thing has to print money because it means that they were able to still keep making money through wars through families depressions all of it and they were still able to keep going and so i think that when people are like when you look at all the like many of the biggest businesses that exist they have phenomenal gross margins

i don't want to get too like you know business terms here but like the the gross margin is how much incremental cost it is to make a new an extra widget right and so like a pill for example costs 100 million dollars to make the first pill and then every pill after that costs a penny right sure and so the gross margin on the pill is very high because if they sell each pill for 10 they cost them a penny those are great margins and most people who are small business owners or people who are

trying to get into small business price like small business owners they say well it cost me a dollar i'll sell it for three or i'll sell it for two but if you're already starting on like a fifty percent gross margin it's very very hard to make money because think about like that's at 100 you're already at half and then you have the rest of everyone else you have to pay off that extra 50. very hard to do and so like i'll give a couple rules of thumb if anyone wants this but like if you're if

you're building a service-based business for us i would i by all means i have to get gross margins above 80 which means five times the cost of goods so if it cost me 100 a month the minimum i'll charge is 500 right and so that also gets you to think about business differently which is not necessarily even how much can i charge but how can i provide value and make it cost this little to me how can i be as efficient as possible and if you think about what technology does over time is technology takes

something that's valuable and makes the cost of delivering it less and so that's what happens is a lot of people are able to have access to things that were once only for the wealthy but now become for the common man because the cost basis decreases as a result of technology and so technology is we see it you know like we can create technology but you can also have technological um breakthroughs just through process in your own business it's like and that's where niching down and being very specific about the avatar becomes important especially when you're

starting because then you can productize the service because if you're doing everything custom which most people when they're starting out do it becomes really difficult to become efficient and it's really difficult because a very little margin right or you have to charge huge fees which most people are too afraid to do and so the flip side is if i do the same thing over and over and over again i will get better and more efficient at it and i'll know how to do it faster and quicker and cheaper and i specifically choose this type of

customer so that i can have more margin because there are millions of even this one specific type of avatar and then from there i can take the gross margin the extra cash that i have and i can hire the best people i can invest in marketing but when you have such little margin to work off of it's very difficult to make money yeah it's so hard to grow that's interesting what do you think it's going to be harder or easier to become wealthy and start businesses over the next few years with everything that's happened in

the last couple years and where this whole great you know 2030 agenda is coming and all these different things are happening the war and all the you know there might be another pandemic whatever it might be do you think it's gonna be easier or harder to make money i think technology in general makes things easier for most people i mean because at the end of the day it's just it's it's increased access for more people yeah and so i think to reach more people yeah at any moment yeah if i were just to use history

as a as a as a guide business has only gotten easier to get into it's got more competitive and easier to get into and so i think that what happens is just the arena gets bigger so you got more gladiators so it's more competitive but more people can walk in and so i think but it but for the world in general the more people you have fighting to make amazing products and services the better it is for society yeah but the downstream effect of that is that in a capitalist system it is a winner take

all for most for for many not all but for many businesses and just by the nature of it that does create social disarray and it's just but the thing is is like it's still the best system that we have we don't have a perfect system because the other systems remove incentive and humans have driven by incentive yeah even the survivorship bias like every mlm in the world exists off the fact that there's that one guy who makes 500 000 a month selling shake mix and the other five million shake mixed producers are like someday one

yeah yeah and it's just survivorship bias right but that's why the whole capitalist machine works so i think they're like figuring out some sort of a you know creative way like my i put this in my on my youtube channel um but like the idea of having 100 death tax i thought was like take down like the income taxes and all the stuff but like the thing that creates the conglomerate at the top is that if let's say let's say i have a hundred billion dollars right that's interesting and if 500 billion i'm probably pretty

good at managing it because that's why i have a hundred billion so let's say you gave me 15 years holding it yeah you're not using it yeah let's say i gained 15 on my assets so make 15 billion dollars right on my assets it is so hard for anyone to to make that up in a lifetime with just the one and like that might be my kid who gains 15 and the next year he gains 20 like and so it the compounding effect of the wealth is across generational is where i think it gets crazy

but if there were a hundred percent death tax because obviously this is aligned with my belief that all of it disappears anyways um so this is obviously alex's two cents in the world um but it's just basically dramatically lower the income income taxes i think income taxes should be like as close to zero as possible and then make the capital gains taxes higher because that's only going to really affect the well if you really want to think about it right because people who if you make with your hands awesome right if you make on your

assets that's the stuff that has has infinite leverage with with time so if you trade the most expensive thing for your money then i feel like you should get taxed less than if you trade no time for your money sure this is like a weird thought experiment what do you think would happen if it was 100 death tax i think that billionaires would become far more giving and as they approach the end they know they can't keep it and i also think it would change the way the game is played because if you know because

this is the analogy that i like i haven't heard it anywhere else i think it's mine but if you were to imagine life as a poker game right and we everybody you know grows up 18 years old they can go into the casino they get a chip or 21 whatever age you can pay and then you get it you get a chip and then you sit down at the table and you're dealt cards right there's all the other players around the table and depending on the cards you're dealt and the skill you have you begin

to amass chips right and the difference between this fictitious you know casino and the casino of life is that in the real world you can amass chips you cash out you have a big wad of money you walk out the door but in the casino of life when the grim reaper taps you and tells you it tells you it's time you have to get out from the table but your chips stay on the table and they push them to the middle to be distributed by everybody else and continue to get played for it and that's

when you realize that it was a fake game with rules that never mattered to begin with and so i bought this piece of land in austin it was just huge it was like a big really really nice lot and i remember thinking to myself like this yeah i got me some land right yeah i have that tree to that thing on the rise right and then i thought to myself i was like well the guy before me thought the same thing and the guy before him thought the same thing and the guy before him thought

the same thing and i was like and we've literally still been looking at the exact same piece of dirt and it's just been cycled even if it was father to son even if it was family to whatever like that like death taxes everyone 100 like even if the government doesn't death taxes everybody 100 and then time taxes your money to infinity because like people are like i want to build a legacy it's like that's even just with like within americana you know within the times of america but like you go a thousand years and there's

never been the same superpower over a thousand year period right and so we're like i'm gonna leave a legacy it's like but that would be like you know let's say an ancient greek saying i'm going to leave a legacy for my kids when like they might change their currency by you know xyz year and there's so many things and i've had a real experience with this because my great great grandfather was a ruler in iran which is where we're from we got uh kicked out because we were loyal to the shah back in the day

which is why my dad came to us and so despite that my great grand great grandfather um had like 400 wives ruler very very really yeah very very wealthy different time different different culture very very well he's a ruler right yeah yeah all the money all the women all that everything literally a ruler right and it doesn't matter and here i am i'm not even that many generations separated from him right even that you don't have all that wealth you don't have that land yeah right and so like the idea that we're going to somehow

esc because the desire for legacy is the desire to cheat death like that's what it stems from it's like we don't want to die we want to last forever so we want to make something that is impermanent and so we fool ourselves into thinking that the accolades and the material success in the books we write whatever are going to last forever and they're probably not right and so like i mean the sun's going to disappear at some point right like if we don't do anything before then like at the very least that's going to happen

and so if that is the inevitable outcome i think it shifts the way people think and i think that's when you start changing i mean tony robbins talks about like global global belief systems and that's why if someone like adopts a new religious belief like everything changes because the reasons they do and the way they believe the world works changes and so i think that if they did do 100 death tax it would be a really interesting way to see the downstream effects of how it would change the way the players played the game what

do you think would happen if all the billionaires started distributing their wealth sooner i think or would they be as hungry to be and driven to push and build and innovate yes to generate the wealth if they knew i got to give this away anyways quickly i think they would well i think it's because it's i think it's i think i'm going to say something that might sound bad but um i think winners win because of who they are and so i think it's like sales guys like you can have an incentive or a comp

plan they just want to win but they are sales people and if i get on the phone i want to sell because of who i am not because the comp the cop has the ticket to get me to say yes to the deal but it will not change my activity i will do it because i love to sell right and so i think billionaires get there because they love the game like you don't get to a billion without just because you obviously don't need it for you you stop needing it for you millions and millions

ago right and so you do it just because you love the game what i do think the reason that i like that solution is because uh elon musk said this but uh private enterprise is ten times as efficient a capital allocation compared to the government right so every dollar that private private enterprise spends it's ten times more efficient and so it is like if if we were to death tax a hundred percent so whatever you accumulate while you're alive it just goes back like and the thing is it's not that it would go back into

the system through the government it would if you were lazy but most people knowing the government was going to take it the less efficient vehicle at the end of your life you would then start thinking about how can i allocate this money efficiently and so what i think what would happen is you'd create far more ingenuity and innovation around social enterprise um before they die solving problems knowing that the wealth would eventually disappear so like it's more there's this backstop that no one wants to hit and so i think what happened is they would change

their behavior before hitting the back side i don't think a lot of people just be dumping their billion to the government i think just knowing that they had to would then just trigger them to yeah yeah that would be you know that's alex's two cents of the world which is obviously different what's uh and you just had a big exit right last year what was that for how much it was 46.46 million so when that enters your account what did you expect would happen what did happen and what can you teach other people about what

they should expect to happen when they have a big exit so i will say that i i did not feel the money i did feel the loss of cash flow because i had this you know i had measured myself off cash flow for since now you don't have any right you got a big chunk yeah no money coming in every month so i actually felt interested and i probably still still feel poorer now than i did before the exit that's interesting because the cash flow is going down now i i know that the acquisition.com is

going to be i think significantly bigger than sure than those companies were um but in the interim i definitely did not feel any better after that um i am happy that i did it because i do think i'm in the right you know vehicle doing what we're doing now making the books making the youtube channels the the twitters the social medias all of them but the cash flow is what i felt and because i'd taken dividends my whole life the amount of money that we got out was pretty much about what we already had anyways

right so it was not life-changing in any way um it didn't change how i lived at all um like not at all we didn't we didn't have any big like what are you gonna buy i was like well i could you know i'm happy already yeah i could buy a hundred lambos before the sale yeah i mean like that wasn't good and i never bought them in and i never did so like you know because i i don't get a lot of out of that um what else was different losing losing the team is hard

yeah um because when you sell a company you sell the you sell the people like that's something that people connections because it sounds bad yeah but you sell you sell the organism you sell the system the people yeah the process and everything 100 and so that was that was hard because there's definitely times now that we're building acquisitions.com where i'm like man i wish i had so-and-so oh i already taught this person everything i'd like to have to do it again so yeah there is a but there's also some level of beauty to it because

now that i'm doing acquisition.com um i have a different appreciation for what i'm doing because every other time that i've started something it has been from a place of lack it has been from uh like well this is what's going to not make me bore you know what i mean like the gyms was all about that and then i lost it all so the second time was all about that again wow so this time i'm starting not like that and i know what it got like before we sold the companies last year i spent basically

12 months not doing anything because i wasn't required in the business like it truly it ran and so i had a lot like it was very impressive exactly it was very depressing for me what happens if we don't have a purpose i mean you you find one yeah you know what i mean and so for me but you're in a depressed state even though you have i mean i'm sure you're fine but you're emotionally mentally like what am i doing every day exactly i've never go to the gym for so long right can i go

out to dinner yeah like what else are you gonna eat every meal i want i can travel okay now what after three months of that you to have some mission you have some purpose right even though you have the money yeah your safety you have everything yeah security but it wasn't fulfilling 100 and so that was that was 12 straight months and it was because we were going through a sales process so you can't start new initiatives because i'm in the middle of a sale um and you don't want to like make any massive new

hires and so you just basically have to just like maintain and the whole time you're wondering i hope this deal goes through because if it doesn't then you just wasted a year just doing nothing and then you might have to do it again so it was just it was it was a super super it was one of the most emotionally tiring years of my life because it's always like this is about to happen it's not going to happen the deal's on the table the deal's off the tape like there's all of this drama that's happening

constantly and i also one of the things that sucked that i didn't like was as soon as i had made the decision to sell or that i was going to entertain the idea of selling and this is a mistake i made everything became about satisfying a fictitious overlord of like what will they think about this move well how would they value this and i started thinking whatever acquirer who whatever private equity was going to buy the company like how are they going to see this are they going to value this or is this a waste

and so what happened was i started making the private equity buyer my customer and that was a mistake and so i think that like at the end of the day and now that and what happened was interestingly we started the sales process because my wife and i were beat down like we were just very tired of you know we've been in gyms for almost 10 years you know at that point not to say that that's not a good thing but like whatever we it we wanted of course we're ready we're ready but in order for

us to sell it and make it a sellable business we had to fix all the things that we were wrong right and so we took a year before the year so it's like 20 20 years exactly yeah so it took two years basically one year to like fix everything and then one year to sell it but the thing is it's just like when you have a house that you like fix up before you get ready to sell it by the time your budget's up you're like i love this this is amazing i just fixed all

these all the problems i fixed now i've got more cash flow it's more efficient you know we've got where's the tax going exactly and so it was again a very like mind trip experience where i'm like well maybe i should just hold it as an asset that just produces cash flow yeah uncle warren never sells anything like selling is what makes you rich keeping is what makes you wealthy like you know i'm like i've got all these kind of things in the back of my mind but i think ultimately like i think no matter what

we had done we would have been fine but i think for me right now i think the likelihood that the choice if i had two alternate realities which i don't have to play in i think that the choice will ultimately yield more impact for more people i would not have the attention to do acquisition.com and the media stuff that we're doing right now i wouldn't be here just straight i wouldn't be focused on your gyms yeah or the yeah exactly on those companies that weren't in that portfolio and acquisition.com would still be a side thing

but it probably wouldn't be the main thing um whereas now it is 100 of my attention and the companies are killing it and um i feel renewed you mentioned you'd always created something from a lack yeah but now it sounds like there's a different intention for why you're building something what happens when people shift their intention yeah from scarcity lack mindset to growth impact service whatever it might be that you're coming from i'm so excited for this question um so i think the biggest thing that changes is time horizon time horizon what is time horizon

and i think the single greatest differentiator between the poor and the middle class middle class and rich rich and the truly wealthy is how they see time and if you think about money as simply a condensed unit of time right that's all money is like you trade it for time i mean you can trade time for money so like it is they're almost equivalent units and the people who know how to master their time the most mean that they know how to master their money the most right and so really if you want to master

to the original question of like how do wealthy people come off these because they match their time and so time horizon is just like the perspective from which we see what we want to achieve and so if i am doing if i'm building a company from the place of like i believe that this company should exist i believe this problem is worth solving and that is where you start it from then you build it differently versus versus i need to make money i need to make money this week i need to make money tomorrow because

what can i go make money with exactly and so i think like i mean you've built this amazing brand here if if people were able to not ask for 12 months and just serve dude this is what i did when i launched this because i literally sold another company i didn't make that much but i had enough for like two years to live yeah i was living pretty frugal i wasn't like i never bought anything fancy it was like you know whatever food and travel maybe right yeah but i was still sleeping on couches back

then you know just because i wanted to save i want to spend it on hotels i didn't start spending hotel rooms until about four or five years ago i would always find a way who do i know in that town and crash on anyway side note but when i launched school of greatness 10 years ago i remember saying i'm gonna do this for one year because i i wish i had access to this i wish this was a thing that i could go listen to yeah in the world to teach me yeah and i'm not

gonna try to make money like i'm gonna do it for a year yeah all in but i'm not going to try to make money i don't want to make money i mean if the money came great but it wasn't my intention it was just how can i create the best content to serve people on the things that i wish i would have learned in school growing up yes the school of greatness yeah and after one year i was like man this thing's really starting to take off yeah you know but it wasn't based on how

do i make as much money totally it was how do i create something that could really make a lasting change yeah and that intention is what's made me sustainable for 10 years loving the process totally so when people come from a place where i'm hearing you say when they come from a place of that intention of service or because this needs to be in the world art art exists not to do something it exists to exist right it's like no one says why did you paint that it's like because it needed to come out you

needed to have to express it exactly and so i think that if people chose their businesses that way i think and don't be wrong i'm all about making money like by all means go get your bag as much as you can yeah by all means but i think that what it does is it ends up freeing you to then make your real impact because then you can start the whatever the next thing and hopefully your first thing is that thing but realistically it probably isn't and all you have to do is look at every entrepreneur

that's really wealthy the amount of graveyard businesses they have in their bag right right and so like right now if you're listening and you're like i'm not sure if this is the perfect business idea let me just save you the time it's not because look at every other person who has been ultra successful they have 10 failed business ideas so just like just start so you can just start notching off the bad businesses right but extending the time horizon i think only happens if you do shift the intention through which you're building it or you're

just unbelievably self-disciplined but i think it's easier to just like start at it with the right heart because small tangent but i think it'll be worth it is that the reason that most people aren't successful in my opinion is that they sacrifice global benefit for local benefit and that happens in all areas of life you eat the piece of cake because you have an acute local benefit versus the global benefit of a six-pack that lasts for a very long time or better health etc right instant gratification as opposed to delayed gratification yes exactly and i

just i like saying global i just like saying local versus global because it it happens in an organization for example sales guys don't want to put the notes in the thing because it's a pain in the butt to put the notes in the crm but finance needs the notes customer service needs the both success needs like all of these other departments need those notes for all the other things that we're going to do and so it's a local cost but for a global benefit and so i think if people were able to delay that immediate

gratification which is like this is the nature of success i think it was funny man there was this study that was done i can't remember it it's the marshmallow test or the other okay god i can talk about the marshmallow test okay so fun fun one with that with the marshmallow test is measuring how long they delay for the marshmallow so at what point does it not make sense if they say you can get one because because they like everyone simplifies the experiment which is like if i give you a marshmallow one now or you

can get two later right but what if two is in a year yeah you're like i don't care i'll take the one now right so then the next question i would have is like if you were to test kids and then say at what point the global versus local crosses would be and then track the kids who had the longest marshmallow waiting period because then you could measure how long the most successful property of life yeah really interesting just total side note but the three things that i think were in common of the ultra successful

were uh inflated sense of self as in they thought that they like they deserved big things they want to go after big things they believed in themselves right inferiority never being good enough and impulse control those are the three factors of the most successful they're like when they did a common factors analysis like these people think they believe that they can achieve all this amazing stuff and then it's just it's an amazing paradox because at the same time they think they're not good enough and they're insecure about whether they they can achieve it and they

have impulse control and so it's like if you have a plan right and they just they and they stay focused on the thing and what i like i'd say the biggest breakthroughs that i've had i think that will create a lot of the wealth that we will have in the future is is really a deep understanding of how long long is and shooting with the intention of like i'm only bringing this up because my youtube guy said it he's like i've never had somebody who actually started it i was like we'll see what we do

in five years i was like we'll measure that and he was like no one has literally ever said that to me it was like as long as i see progress i'm good because everyone wants results in like two months yeah yeah like if we're making if we're going this way i'm cool i don't need to say like that's good enough for most people if if they could extend the time rise because like i'll give you another hack you can know how wealthy someone is based on the time horizons they speak in give an example so

if someone's talking about how they're trying to make you know make money this today hey let me hold 20 for today you know how you know how poor they are i have to say poor like you know right if someone's talking about what they're going to make this week or this month or this quarter or this year or this decade think about how different the people are who are talking in those time horizons and so i think that if we can shift the time horizon that we think in then we gain more leverage over our

time which we then know we will compound into money yes because i think if you can master the time you master the money that's uh you've been married for how long or five years five years in a relationship or six years or something six years of relationship five years married this is something i've been on curious about a different decades of my life right i'm 39 now just turned 39 in march and in my 20s i didn't think it was i was like how is it possible to be with one human being for the rest

of your life right yeah like there's so much adrenaline and testosterone and just you know desire you know i was thinking from a place of desire not from a place of i don't know from a spiritual foundation let's say right more of a sexual desire and i would study these different men over the years and the ones that i really respected were the ones who had amazing long-term relationships and who had healthy businesses that impacted people in positive ways and had you know semi-healthy families in general right i'm curious why did you decide to get

married i guess at 25 60. i was yeah 20 she was 23 or 24 and i was 26 or 27. okay why decide to get married in your 20s yeah and how has that been beneficial towards your inner peace your health and your wealth yeah so i think getting married um is a great hack for making money um i have a lot of thoughts on this uh first one is because at least if you're anything like me probably 80 of my attention went to chasing tail and so getting all of that attention back automatically just

makes you more money right all your energy is spread out 100 percent you're doing that it's spread all over the place and so that was that's just like honestly just getting into a relationship accomplishes that going from a relationship to marriage though was really surprising to me because i was i would say fairly against marriage for most of everything and it's by happenstance leyland i got married almost like as a dare and then we're still married and it's been awesome um totally like we'll get into another time but when i when we did get married

it was actually really interesting and maybe this is just my own personal experience but i felt this very sincere shift of knowing it felt secure even the long term i'm like why do we need a government body why do we need someone why do we need an external party to validate our relationship sign a document from the government yeah but there is some level of commitment that comes with it that makes it more stable and knowing that it was like oh she's in it with me just knowing the barrier to exit was significantly higher for

both of us i think increased our commitment to the relationship but it gave me so much more stability for risk taking in a lot of ways knowing that she was there knowing she had my back and you know i was texting a um a buddy of mine who was who was living the fast life yes oh girls every other night yeah yeah and it was like how do you know what do you how do you think through this and i thought about it and um i think that when you get into the into the committed

relationship or marriage um you trade novelty for loyalty and for me that to me loyalty i i was trying to define this for myself but like for me loyalty matters more than love or is a form of love or the one that i value the most and then as a secondary because i was trying to define like what like whenever someone says like what is love right like if you actually like start trying to peel the word back most people just describe activities that people who are in love do well it means and then they

use a laundry list of activities and so the best definition i have i know this is this made out there is of how much like measuring love is how much are you willing to endure to keep it and so if you have a relationship with someone and like and i would say love and liking to me is the same thing because it's really difficult to differentiate between the two if you have a relationship with someone and you're not really willing to like let's say wait 30 minutes later to go to dinner with them probably have

very little liking in there right if you have kids you're probably willing to do a lot for them and so like i'll give you an example that a friend of mine said he was like man he must love he's like if you have a car that you've been working on all the time like a lot of guys like tinker with must love that car right muslim that that thing's a piece of crap he must love that thing it barely runs because of what he's willing to put up with and so it's kind of interesting when

you think like you can measure love by your willingness to to to sacrifice or endure in order to keep it do you think we should endure a toxic relationship though or something that's no not adding value equally or or putting forth a level of effort to be fair the toxic relationship i'll use the quotes here because defining toxic would be another call another another video right i think that there are there are moments in relationships that are negative but if you loved someone a lot because you had a lot of benefit so going the other

direction right like but if it's more toxic than it is then you wouldn't put up with it right so then is it worth is it worth is it worth putting up with anyone having a negative experience it depends on what you have to gain right and the more you love someone the longer you're willing to wait for another positive reinforcement so if i meet somebody and i have a negative experience immediately i'm probably done right right if i meet someone and i have positive the next day positive two days later positive a week later the

next one i might be willing to wait two weeks and then four weeks and this is really just becomes a question of human conditioning rather than love not to get like i love this stuff but um but anyway i can get us back to marriage but uh but marrying layla gave me a lot of the security that i needed to make take the big risks and knowing that she had my back and laila and i have very uncommon views on marriage what's the i guess unique views on marriage you guys have so most people get

married because they feel a chemical attraction yes and then they just wait right until eventually it's been long enough and it goes away yeah and they're like i guess we should get married right yeah we had the first date we talked for four hours about business all business and at the end of the day i said you should quit your job and work for me i was like was it a date or was this a date okay it wasn't just like a casual encounter it was a 100 tinder date it was bumble but it was

a date bubble date yeah and all business all night the whole thing we walked for four hours just talking about business and the variant said you've got to like quit your job and work for me and she said no i just made it not quite your job and date or date me but i thought your job would work for me and i said listen even if i don't come with a deal like this needs to make sense for you like this is how much i'd pay i was just like this how much i pay you

this how much you'd make like you should totally work for me um and she said no but i kept working on her and eventually three weeks later she quit her job and she joined me and we hung out every day after that one and we did not have a super chemically sexuality not at all we just like doing the same stuff and we both wanted the same outcome and so at least as i see it it's like you have to have an aligned mission of what you want to accomplish in life values of how you

want to get there and then ideally there's like bonus bonus points for similar interests dude it's so funny to say that because i say that you know from all the mistakes i've made in the previous relationships that are all my mistakes it all comes to values vision and lifestyle and having shared alignment it doesn't have to be 100 but it's like an alignment and values vision and lifestyle yeah not in you know if you have the sexual chemistry which we do which is great but not using that as the main value the sexual chemicals yeah

because in two five ten years they may not be there but if you don't have the values of vision and lifestyle which you call values missions because it's all business risk mission is that what we're trying to accomplish value is how we're going to get there and then interest is like what do we want to spend exactly yeah that's so funny yeah so that's that's what i think and if you have those things you you create a relationship in my opinion at least this has been my human experience um it becomes very difficult to get

out of and i say that intentionally in that like the best way to stay married is to figure out how to stay married and so like well let's stack all the chips in our favors like we like doing the same stuff we like talking about the same things and then i think in a very important way if you if those three things are aligned you will get exposed to the same stimuli and if you expose the same stimuli you'll have the same adaptations provided you have the same values so if we get this exposure and

we both have the same values we'll both grow in the same way where i think what happens for many people is they're opposite sides and they attract right and what happens is you get on this you probably are esther perel yeah i just had her on a week ago i'll just stop right now go ahead yeah yeah well now i feel silly quote my understanding of meeting captivity is you've got familiarity right and and you've got for us a variety and then familiarity because this is how i do it and and so in the beginning

you've everything's so new and exciting there's all this variety right and then you get to know each other and it gets better and better cause you're like oh my god this is amazing it's amazing it's amazing but then all of a sudden you keep going and then your siblings and your roommates right and so it's not like she says you know a uh a problem to be solved but a dichotomy to be managed between familiarity and variety and um one of the interesting things um with with our relationship is that we have so many ways

to be familiar so for us based on that like so you need to create more variety yes how do you guys do that because you talk about all the same things you do the same thing all day long how do you create variety it's a great question besides the multiple businesses all the business boards just you're not doing the multiple people oh no we're not doing that no no no i think would stop um no but i think the the variety piece comes in through deliberate creation of room to be missed space entities if you

think about this away for a week yes and you're gonna go with your friends or family and i'm not going to be there you know how much you like someone more when you see them after not seeing them for a week it's so good isn't that weird best feeling right isn't that weird yeah so it's like we can create that deliberately so the longing exactly and so it's like if we can like physically separate ourselves in terms of when we work so we work on separate sides of the house uh we only come together for

food so we eat and then we go back and uh ideally we're not on any of the same meetings because the last thing i want to do at the end of the day sit down and say like how's your day just kidding i was there the whole time right right yeah so it's ideally so you work together but you don't yes you work in the same company but you're not on calls all day long together hand in hand right and we can accomplish and so that way when we talk it's like two business colleagues that

are both after the same thing that both believe in getting there the same way and we're talking about our unique things that are interesting for me that she wants you might want my perspective on and i'm like hey i'm thinking about this hook or this message or what do you think about this and we can bounce on it but because we didn't share every moment of the day it gives us that ability to have variety but i think esther said this so yeah but the couples that um have that do do star businesses together maybe

misquoting two research things anyways couples that start business together have uh a 10 divorce rate if you start and make a dollar in a business together wow and i think it's like birthing a child except in order to do a business i think it's harder than having kids and people like you don't know that because you don't have kids it's true but i do know that there's a lot of people who have both there's more people who have kids that have businesses who started together and i think that there's some magic in that because it's

like birthing an idea but you both got to agree on what you're going to create so you're not leading up to biology or living up to choice do you guys ever fight or argue sure like i would i would say we don't have what i would consider like real fights low observer yeah yeah i mean minor arguments but i'm sure that like the many common miscommunications that can happen as humans sure sure hey you said this that did is this what you meant no no there's i was like if there's two ways to take it

and one way makes you really angry the other one doesn't i meant the other one yeah whatever you're angry about round up that's like just round up for me what's the thing you love about her the most she's made of steel she's um play is just unbreakable so like i'll tell you the two moments in in our marriage that like or we weren't married yet but the two moments that like defined her to me so one was in we're probably nine months into dating um or maybe not i mean maybe like six months into we're

six months into dating and i lost everything again standard standard alex move right just lose everything and she had to go launch a gym and she had to absolutely crush it and i was so stressed out at this moment in time i had the six gyms i had a chiropractor agency a dentist agency i had that and i had the launch business where we're actually like flying out and doing launches i think i had one more thing i can't remember what it was but those was eight different businesses that i was owning i made no

money obviously because i had eight businesses right and i was just i was too stressed to function that was the only way i could describe it is like i was not present at all ever i was just thin i just i was so spread then she walked in the office one day i didn't look up and she was like do you want me to be here and uh and i was like you can do whatever you want and she was like well are you do you want to break up and i was like yeah that's

fine really and so she said okay that's fine um you know and she'd quit her job to do this with me so it had been five months like she'd quit every she'd build up a personal training business that was doing really well and she got rid of all our clients so she could come do these launches wow five months in i i was like you know i can't whatever and so she went to hawaii to do this launch which was going to be a really big launch and i was betting big on this thing because

so she's still working with you but not in a relationship with you yeah so we've actually like work is is the thing that was our first language it came naturally to us and so she went there and i had i think i lost all the money for the seventh reason in a row right and i had like 10 grand left and we needed to make a hundred thousand dollars in that month or i was going to get behind so i it was 10 grand to get her there for 30 days in a while because hotels

are insane and i was like you you need to crush this even though we just broke up oh my gosh you need to crush this like you need to crush this that's like all i can say and she flew there and she said every sales record that we had when she got there and did a hundred and something thousand in cash collected and she killed it and when she came back um i had a coach that i was like meeting with during the the time she was gone he was like look at the stats of

your life he's like are you in better shape now that she's here he's like are you making more money now that she's here are you like and to be fair like in general i was still doing better because i had started the launch business like i was you know um i was like yeah and he's like i think she's a very good thing in your life and i was like okay so anyway she came back and she crushed it when virtually every other person that i know would have either not gone like screw you i'm

out of this or just wilted under the pressure because i put a lot i was like you need i was like this is the last money i have like you have to crush this and i don't care about you intimately anymore yeah and i don't get it and so she killed it and then she came back and then two or three months later of course i lost all that money again um and then and so then at this point now we're sleeping at her parents house and you're not in a relationship no we're so we

got back together she came back so she came back got back together yeah i was like i was like you're awesome like you used to talk when everything else was crumbling like let's keep doing this yeah and so this leads me probably to probably the core point of layla is that and i i don't know if it's all relationships but at least the way this one is compared to every other relationship i've had is that i respected her first and i don't think i had that's so key like i don't and i say this not

as any i've loved a lot of people in the past but i don't think i respected them to the same degree and i think part of that is because it was harder for me to respect them because i didn't have a shared arena to witness it it would be like maybe for me i might not have been able to respect an athlete maybe maybe because it's just not a game i understand as well as like a business game sure i'm maybe just saying that i can appreciate excellence who knows but um i respected her and

her opinion mattered to me a lot of times i would feel like someone's opinion like like yeah it matters but like hey i'm going to do what i'm going to do my opinion matters more her opinion i valued equally or even higher than mine in many occasions because i trust her gut she's an amazing instinct with people especially um and so i respected her first and the second time that happened was i'm sleeping in her parents house winner that i am um he's 24 25 20. no i'm 27. yeah 26 or 27. sleeping her brown

she's 23 24 and um they gave me like the spare kid's bedroom so i'm like in this little desk you know i mean like with a little chair like crap tub and i'm like this is like make believe except it's a real business um and we had this horrible day where we lost like 150 000 and it was and i just saved like everything was turning around everything was turning around for us we lived there just to like kind of save some money yeah yeah but the first month of getting rid of all those businesses

that i had and just focusing just on gym launch we did a hundred thousand we did two hundred thousand three hundred thousand so like things were turning around and i was like okay this is happening and then we got 150 000 refunds which is pretty much all the profit i made and it was because a couple of the gyms that we had launched basically told all the customers to refund and then sign back up through them for half the price oh my god so it's like i go to a gym we pay for everything the

hotels the flights the marketing the sales guy then let's say we saw 100 people at 500 bucks we make thousand dollars right just for example they would say hey 100 people now that they're gone that's annoying yeah that's messed up it was it was a flawed model you know i mean like and i could i could lament it but i was not operating within the context of like human incentive there was a huge incentive to not be ethical right and so we we lost 150 000 which was all my savings again um and i at

that moment i had already lost everything like three times since i'd been with her it had been like 11 months at this point i think at that point 10 months because we got married in maine it was 13 months since we had met and so i just looked at her and i'm like in her parents you know room or whatever and i said listen um i'm a sinking ship and uh if you want to get out i was like i will have absolute respect for you we will be like we're cool like i will hold

nothing against you because i like i clearly am not good at this um and that's where she was like i would sleep with you under a bridge if it came to that and so that was when that was before you're married or yeah it was before we were married and so that was when and that like you know i think the the dedication in that book says uh or actually well i might be spoiling it but then i think the next book says you saw the light in me it's a it's a it's a strong

uh my writer died i couldn't do this without you yeah that's right it's a it's a very meaningful thing but i but i don't know if i would have done it without her you know what i mean and um and so anyways all that to say she stood tall when everything else was was crumbling around me and for that she has my eternal respect wow and so as a result of that that security knowing that she like even when she didn't have to she was there and she chose to be there alongside me because she

believed that we could do this even when i ran out of belief i think for that that's and that's and to be fair that was the first 11 months of our relationship and so like since we got married it's been super easy yeah really easy it has been like literally nothing was harder than the first year of our relationship i i want to i mean sorry no that's great i'm assuming you want to call yourself a marriage expert by any means but you've been married five years you've you've also know you know you have a

lot of respect for older men who've been married for a long time you've i'm sure interviewed them and have mentors in that space uh what do you think makes a strong marriage last more respect or love i mean you know where i'm going with this one um respect because i think that respect is based on logic love less so and so i'll say it i'll say it differently i think that love has a lot a strong emotional component some days like some days you feel like you love someone more than other days right but respect

doesn't change as much because it's based on facts it's based on evidence it's based on i the story i just told you will not change that happened right and so when emotions fade logic remains which is why i'm a big fan of logical selling which is when someone is trying to make a decision i do want to give them the logical reasons for why they should do that because when the emotions do fade which they inevitably do about the decision that they made what will remain is the logic and the logic will carry you through

the dips but if you don't have a logical reason to be together then when the emotions fade that's when you have no reason to be together because the emotions are on and there's no logic right and so i think that for the long-term relationship that's why the mission the values and the interests there's a lot of logical reasons for us to stay together we have a million logical reasons together we're partners in the business we love the same lifestyle we're both in the fitness like yeah and and so we have all these huge stack of

reasons um for why we should stay together and i think that if we can stack the reasons and as a funny side note with the length of marriage the average married person spends uh two hours a day together 45 of that is watching television average marriage 35 24 24 minutes of that is housework and then 35 minutes oh sorry uh 35 minutes is eating and so 45 25 before so there's like 20 minutes that's not that of the two hours that is just being with someone and so we have spent every hour of every day

of the day together for six years and so i feel like in that way we've had more we've had a 50-year marriage right from a time time perspective uh but anyways just and and these where do you think you'd be without her or a marriage like hers that has supported you and thrived do you think it'd be as financially successful do you think it'd be you'd have more time to build your businesses or you feel like you'd have scattered energy with lifestyle choices i don't know yeah i don't know if i would have learned the

lessons that she's taught me that like if i had so if i had a similar marriage to the one that i have i think it would be the same if i didn't have a similar marriage to this one i think i think i would have figured out the money thing was too important to me for me not to figure it out i think it was just too important to me because you had the discipline yeah yeah and i and the fitness thing that was alright that was always on lock and so like the missing piece

i still probably would have had that longing to figure out because i do because to your point like all the people that i respect have been in 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 year marriages and i think there's something about character it speaks to someone's character when they've done something like that and i think that was something that i wanted to have yeah what do you think you're 32 now yeah what do you think when you hit 40 the three biggest lessons will be that you will have learned or that you if you could

go into the future because you're really good at thinking yourself and your 40 year old self was looking at you right now or in a room with you talking to you yeah and he said here are the three things you're really going to need to learn yeah and try not to make these mistakes what would those three lessons be do you think if you could go in the future well the first one that jumped out at me was patience works so that would be the first i think i would have continuous reinforcement on the fact

that the longer i wait for things the better they are the second one would be define your terms socrates says wisdom begins with a definition of terms and so a lot of people make these goals but they don't know what the goal means and so they're like i want to be healthy like what does that mean i want to be happy what does that mean right like we have to define our terms before we start trying to attack them and breaking them down which is why like you've heard in my stuff i i tend to

define terms a lot so i think a definition of terms is is have to define your terms and then third one of lessons that um i think would probably still be because whenever i talk to my 85 worlds my my therapy sessions with myself it's always just remembering to smell the flowers more because if i'm 20 years old and or 30 years old and i would trade all the millions i have to be 20 again then that is the lesson so i would trade everything that i have when i'm 40 to be 32 and so

it's just like reminding myself enjoy this now this moment yeah because i would trade everything to be here when i'm 40. right so like if i can just if i can just even get a tenth of that uh awareness in the present moment if i can bring 10 of that future awareness to the present moment that would be a success for me can you break down really how to sell someone or how to enroll someone in your product or service who has a reason why they don't want to sign up yes so the the baseline

assumption is this person wants what you have and so that's why like at the beginning of every sale you're always asking what problem are we solving right like why are you here what do you want and sometimes you have to like ask that question a lot of different ways to get someone actually answer it because like if someone says well i just want to find out more it's like they're not actually here to find out more they're here because they want to solve a problem so i'm just saying what problem are you solving it's an

easier way to get to the core of the matter and so once they admit they have a problem then we can so so how you approach it then i'll give you the back of i'll give you the back of napkin before i give you the talk about earlier so the back of napkin sales scripting process that i have is called closer and so it's an acronym it's easier to remember so the first thing to see is clarify why they're there all right we've got to clarify why are you here right what brought you in today

why did you respond to the ad why did you take time to take this call whatever it is right clarify we're there and keep asking so you get the right answer if it's just information it's like you're not hopping on 20 calls a day taking information all right no of course not okay however we saw cool got that then l is label them with a problem right so that's where you're really repeating back to them so let me just get this straight so you're here because you're trying to lose weight and you are struggling to

do so at current is that correct awesome okay great then i think you're gonna like what we have so tell me so then we go to o so c-l-o closer oh is overview their past experiences or past pains so it's like well tell me what you've done so far to try and accomplish this i'm assuming that's not the first person you've talked to i'm assuming this isn't the first moment you realize you wanted to lose weight or you wanted to xyz right and so then we go through what i call the pain cycle which is

like okay what did you do you tried this and this worked for you what was good about it what was bad about it great what else have you done and you go back through and each time it's like and each time you affirm the person you're like that must have been hard appreciate you sharing that just affirming and giving them positive reinforcement throughout the conversation and that's just building rapport 101 right i understand how you feel i felt the same way my sister was like that too i totally get where you're coming from i know

that's difficult blah blah blah right oh s is then we saw the vacation so now that we've exhausted all the pain they're in the thick of the pain of remembering all the times they fail you're like you know what given everything you said i think you're gonna be perfect for what we have can i can i tell you about it so you get permission to sell right and then when you sell i like to have three main points that i hit um and i think it's because people remember threes very well um i know you've

seen russell stuff with webinar like threes are remembered well think for same thing with values in a company i think three people remember it's easy to triangulate ideas right and so when we sell the points the key a big part of this is not actually explaining the features this is obvious but i like giving short anecdotes that are easy to remember so if i would say a word like we offer accountability for whatever program you sell right and that doesn't mean anything to anyone so i want to give a quick story or anecdote to explain

the concept it's like all right well we have you know three types of accountability we've got peer-to-peer accountability which is people are gonna be walking with you shoulder to shoulder you're gonna have uh uh alumni accountability which people have already finished but they're they're just 12 weeks or 12 months ahead of you and they're cheering you on from the finish line and then you have expert accountability you have people who've helped a thousand people just like you get to where you want to go all right so those are the three levels of accountability if that

doesn't make any sense do you have a jif did you have a kid or were you ever a child that always gets a laugh they're like i was kidding you're like well remember when your parents just tell you to brush your teeth and you want to brush your teeth i don't want to brush my teeth right like of course but then every night you'd still go brush your teeth even though you moaned about it do you brush your teeth now you're like yeah well that's an example of external accountability turning into internal habit and so

what we're going to do is we're going to be the initial parent until you brush your teeth but we're going to be able to transition to getting that internal combustion engine going by the end of this so that you're brushing your own teeth right right you can use the same thing with the seat belt there's a million examples you can use sure and so that would be a quick whatever that was 90 second anecdote to explain point one and the same thing for point two point three that you have of like it's kind of like

and then you explain a little epiphany bridge or the story of how you realize that's important and then they would say like that make sense yes boom you move to the second point make sense yes move to the third point and then it's then you go for the closes like well given x y and z i will tell you this is extremely expensive and the reason we say that is because it's even better than a price anchor because extremely expensive for everyone is expensive if i said hey louis it's it's five hundred dollars just kidding

it's a hundred dollars you might have thought 500 and 100 were both cheap right but if i said it's really expensive whatever i say next is going to either be actually expensive for you in which case i braced you yeah which is actually more likely to close the sale or it will be less than what you perceive as expensive and you're like oh great because the problem that most people try and do when they sell is they try and minimize the thing they say next but it actually has a counter active effect you say it's

actually not that much it's only yeah right but when you say that when you say only that all of a sudden people expect low and then you rip their expectations and so it's much better to set expectations here but people are afraid of doing that but that's not how psychology works so you set expectations sky high you anchor and then when you say reality it either matches the braced person or it's much lower which most cases it is right interesting it's really expensive does that work for webinar sales to mass or is that only better

with one-to-one sales calls on webinars interesting but one-on-one i'm curious if that also converts well i do know that from the infomercial world you price anchor high so it would make sense to me that it's like i would imagine it would still work the same way it's like guys it's super expensive for guys it's not five thousand dollars right then you work your way down right and then when we do end up saying hey it's expensive we want to make sure that we're selling to goal um and the point there is that some people sell

a program but people don't buy programs to buy results and so the idea is we want to as closely as possible sell the outcome that someone desires and the same it sounds obvious but people don't do it you know like a lot of these like well duh but but no one does it right and so like in the weight loss example i realized that people didn't want to buy memberships no one's like i want to buy a membership of course not they want to lose weight and so what we did was we shifted our selling

style in the gyms and the fitness programs to how many pounds they needed to lose so we'd say okay cool you need to lose 36 pounds based on our calculations it's going to take 36 weeks for us to get there and it'll take another 50 of that time to basically re-stabilize you get your metabolism back up and now you're eating the same amount at a lower weight that sounds cool great and so now it's going to be a 52-week program it's i will tell you it's very expensive but it's normally you know whatever 500 a

week but instead it's only 150 a week interesting fair enough and then when we get into closing questions i always prefer neutral or negative questions because it's if i said sounds amazing a lot of people would be like well it's not amazing but if i said fair enough yeah then it's much easier to get someone say well yeah it's fair so it's like how low can i make the thing that they're agreeing to and then the negative version of that which uh chris voss talks about in the negotiations what's the difference is no base questions

yeah right it's just like that's not so bad is it or right or yeah you wouldn't be opposed to moving forward would it be totally crazy if we move forward today would be totally crazy we started you on monday like all those well it's not crazy okay cool let's do it yeah and so and then at that point let's say lucy says no right to whatever the thing we're selling now we we begin the e of closer which is explain away their concerns so c clarify l label o overview their past experiences s cell which

is the three anecdotes that you're gonna tell and then you present the price and then at that point hopefully you they say yes but in in the world of sales no is the job knows the job they say yes then you wouldn't be necessary right and so no like selling is everything that you do before you present price closing is what you do after and obstacles are what come up before you present price that's when you disagree with the prospect objections are what happen after you present price when they disagree with you all right well

it's all the money and all the time i don't have let me check with my spouse et cetera and so obstacles you want to you want to resolve as many of those as you can before because they become bigger scarier monsters of objections after you present the price right and so like that example i gave earlier with the information when someone says i just want to find out a little bit more information that's an obstacle like someone's presenting the first five seconds they're already telling you an obstacle like you have to confront it and so

a lot of people are like well you know i think it's my potassium slow right you're like is it though because like you know there's a lot of people in africa and none of them have stubborn body fat right right because they're actually starving right but so you would think that they have true starvation mode but they're but they look like they're starving so what do you think it is you know like and then you can get into it most people really offended about that though but you get it's an extreme example so once we

get to that point they say no or i have to think about so there's three circles and and this took me actually a really long time to think through because i've gone through a zillion different you know books and things on sales um ironically after i already knew how to sell not before which is just kind of funny but different people had different like grant had i think decision maker stall money those are the these like those are the three that you always have to overcome which is like i need to think about it i

need to talk to my spouse or it's money right that was those are history barry from sage she has five she has uh time money uh time money spouse fear shame interesting i was like that's cool noted um and then belford has his the 310s and like there's there's a number of different ones it's like there has to be and they may all disagree with me on this so who knows but there has to be a unifying truth here right because everybody has their own buckets and there's obviously some elements of each of these and

so i pulled back from albert ellis who is one of the fathers of cbt cognitive behavioral therapy he said and originally he had like 17 and then 11 and they had nine and they had seven needed three reasons that people upset themselves he just kept boiling it down and the three that he came up with are that people blame their circumstances they blame other people for their unhappiness and then they blame themselves and so when we are confronted with an objection underneath the pretense that the person has already admitted they want the thing that you

have and the thing you have would solve their problem so that has to be there if we have that then we have to walk through three concentric rings of power and so the first thing that people do is they blame their circumstances so they're casting their power to something else they're saying it's because of time the money or the money right and then you know with the money if you were selling a b2b thing i would say well what's the difference between a self-made billionaire that starts at zero and you it's not resources it's resourcefulness

right then you can tell a story if you want to reinforce the point but the other day like if you were resourceful you can make it so the question is if you were to die tomorrow and you needed to come up with the amount of money for this thing how did you do it you figured out exactly so what we need to do is figure out how to tap into those resources right so the mobile you go into that thing right and so each of these come in your insecurities your fears your people saying no

judging you and you just taking action and yes risking and so underneath the circumstances i have three big buckets so you've got time you've got money and you've got what i call fit which is actually an association with identity so usually it might be like well i want to i use weight loss because everybody understands it um i want to lose uh i don't i want to lose weight but i don't eat broccoli your prank has broccoli on it like you know what i don't like cardio though and so that is that's where you just

go through like you got to change the change right and there's a whole script around yeah it's like you can't you can't not change any of the variables because the end of the day like you know i used to have weight loss clients who would say like well can we make this this the breakfast because this is what i already eat i'm like well that breakfast got you that body so we got to change something right right right gotta change the change right and so we'd walk through and i'm like maybe maybe you're not heavy

enough maybe this isn't enough pain for you right and then they're like why don't you put on 50 more pounds right and then you'll finally make it yeah exactly yeah and all of a sudden they're like no no i'm like all right well then maybe today is the day yeah right so time money um and each of those has three so like time is three which i go macro micro when then uh which is this right right yeah yeah and then you know money i could go through when the ticket yeah yeah yeah i would

go through too many of them sure sure but that's circumstances right the next level and this is peeling back an onion so if you're a salesperson or you're selling someone and they blame money or they blame time where they blame the fit of your specific program understand that you're actually talking to someone two steps away from being in power and so making the decision yes and so if we believe ourselves as a sales people to be coaches first because that's what we're really in serving the customer the goal of the sale is not to get

the person to buy and this is a huge thing for most salespeople everyone has to understand the goal is not to get the person to buy the goal is to get them to decide if you get someone to decide then you have already given them power more power than they've ever had in a very long time probably and i guarantee you that you will make more money and you will also disassociate success in selling from purchases you will also get more purchases but if you do it this way then you won't have an ego that's

invested in being right because it's not about you it's about them right we get them to admit that it's not it's never been about having enough time because it's about priorities we all have the same 24 hours and you know what if you're really busy now do you think you're ever going to be busy in the future well yes i do well do you want it to be permanent well i do want it to be well if you're going to be busy in the future and you're busy today then you might as well start now

when you get the most support because you're already busy right if you learn how to do it when you're busy you'll know how to do it again when you're busy in the future that way you'll stick with it makes sense great time's over done right and so each of that's one of the three for time right you've drilled a lot of these and so and so the next one is other people with other people a lot of times it's spouse often right and so you know i kind of walk through a process which is you

know are they aware of the fact that you're struggling with this yes do they approve of the struggle well they don't i mean they're like well i mean no they're not not proving of the struggle say well then why would they be against them they already don't approve of right well and if the rules were reversed would you be support in support of them and usually they'll say yes to that most times like well then why would they be against and if you're anything like my wife i would do everything i possibly could to support

her and i think she would do the same is that the same that you have there with you with your relationship yes or no cool finally i'll walk through it's like honestly just listen to you you know tom i think um i think you're asking for permission when you should be asking for support and the reality is let's play this out right let's play this out let's say that you don't do this program whatever it is right let's play it out and 12 months from now you're more negative situation currently more overweight more poor whatever

and if you keep doing that who are you going to blame for your circle is going to be you should be her it's her so is that fair to her is that fair to your marriage no so i think what we need to be looking for is support not permission and so what we're going to do then we then we tone comes up and we're like so we're going to do is we're going to take control we're going to take the power you have to make the decision for you and then she will support you

and what you have to do is when you show up with her you're like listen i've wanted to be an entrepreneur all my life who knew that there wasn't an entrepreneur school and you go through that you know like just like doctors go to school but no one for me and instead of being a hundred thousand dollars it's only ten thousand dollars and other people and i'm not gonna moan about how i'm not making money because i'm actually supported with other people and i'm committing to being more present here to be a better wife or

be a better husband be better you know spouse to be a better mother to our kids and you give them the script to tell the other person and at the very end you say at the end of the day sometimes like i said we have our three day no sweat guarantee so for some reason you go home and your husband says listen sweetie i want you to i don't want you to be healthy i want you to keep the extra weight on i want you to live 10 years shorter i want you to pull up

those sweatpants and reach your bag into those cheetos and get them all orange and fingery and spread it over there and teach our kids not generational health and if and have you know early diabetes if your husband says that to me by all means and usually at this point they're cracking up and that's why report matters a lot with selling on the upfront which the whole goal is there is to find some some similar ground because sure if you're in paris and you find out somebody else is from the same city as you you think

they're amazing if you're in the same city you don't care that all they're from right so it's just like how can we find some similarities because people really are persuaded more by people that they find similarities with wow so the idea is how can we find those but anyways all that to say when you are selling first people will confront you with time money or fit and you have to be prepared to know that you might have two more layers you have to go through so you might have to peel back that first layer and

then they hit you with the spouse which is do they approve if the role is reversed and then uh you're asking for support not permission right and then you go three day notified guarantee right and then the last level here is self right and what people do here is they avoid so what we're trying to conquer is avoidance so now and here's the good news is that when someone says i need to think about it i'm not sure we're talking to the decision maker mm-hmm that's amazing yes that's like you're the decision maker yeah this

is amazing this is great news for sales people because they should be like oh my god they're not giving me a money they're not giving me time they're not giving me spouse they're just saying they don't need to they need to think about it well what's your main concern right tell me what you're thinking about what are the variables that you're going to use to make the decision let's walk out together because the end of the day you don't need time to make decisions you need information i'm the only source of information you got so

what what do you what are your questions about right and you keep going and then from here all we're trying to do is understanding the variables that they use to make the decision and if they don't know them which they usually don't we say do you know what it what it takes to make the decision about this and then you actually physically walk them through confronting the decision if they're not sure about you're like listen i use this all the time it's called the rocking chair clothes it's like let's be real you're not going to

go and actually like sit on your rocking chair on the balcony and be like hmm am i going to do this program of course not right you're going to get in your car and your mom's going to call you and got a kids and you got the laundry and you got dinner and you got all these other things you got to do and then five days from now you're gonna have some moment we either put your pants on you check your bank account whatever the thing is that we're selling and you'll be like shoot i

really should have done that thing and in that moment you have made the decision so you might as well do it today when you have all the information you've got all the momentum because you're six inches from gold right you don't want to be the guy who because like let's think about what we've already done i know you want to do it because you're already here right you saw the ad you put in your number you set a time you scheduled it you drove in your car if it was here or you showed up on

zoom even when you're in the middle of a work week you did all this stuff and you spent an hour on the phone with me up at this point you're this far and do you think that maybe the reason that you have that you're on this call today is because you haven't been able to pull the trigger in the past and then usually they'll come up with something like well you know what i tried a program like this before and i failed and i don't want to fail again which then you go into like burn

you twice which is well totally makes sense and i understand that i'm really sorry they had to go through that well did you ever date anybody in middle school or high school well yeah are you married to that person if you are they are then you can still sit but it never yeah they're like no i'm like imagine if you would go on your first sixth grade boyfriend or girlfriend and after that you swore off men or women after that one breakup that'd be ridiculous right what's the same thing here because the thing is is

if you had a bad experience you're gonna let that person burn you twice first time when they were with you and now when they're preventing you from doing the thing you really do need to do or for preventing you from being meeting the person you need to meet right right and so don't give that situation more power that already has had only let it burn you once not twice right and so then we walk through we just have to confront the decision and so at the end of the day does do you believe that the

product is going to get you to where you want to go the way you want to get there because that's the second part that i learned later in sales is that some people want to lose weight but they want to lose weight their way um and i'll say we learned it another time but like for sure we found that out because we would get people who didn't want to sign up for membership so we'd invite them to a free nutrition consultation and they would spend four times as much money on supplements as they would on

the membership because they still wanted to eat or they didn't want to train weight yeah yeah they just want to lose weight they're right away yeah so the first thing that we need to learn is these are the yeses that we need from them yeah so it's like listen if you don't have a decision i'll tell you what the variables are right now number one do you believe the product or service that we have to get you to where you want to go the way you want to get there yes okay do you want to

work with me or us yes or no yeah yeah like yes okay do you know someone who has or do you have access to the amount of money to start the program yes or no if it's yes then let's go we just made the decision together mm-hmm how much better do you feel like you're just like wow okay i feel i feel much better awesome card you want to use them and boom so a lot of it is just the ability to get them to decide confront yes exactly confront the decision and then if someone's

like still wishy-washy on it the easiest and best questions and sales in my opinion are what are you afraid of if you sign up what are you afraid of having happen right i lose my money or i don't lose the weight yeah right exactly well then what do you think would have to happen in order for that to happen right well i don't show up i don't do the work yeah well then what would you need to see in order to feel like that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day you

do know you need to work out and do all this stuff to lose weight right right okay so that's fixed so then what would you need to see from us to make sure that you feel good about taking the decision because like you can just always just take it apart and get to the point where like you know what if someone just texted me it's like well that's part of the program right right this is the weekly check-in yeah totally and we do have that yeah what do you know oh i didn't know that okay

fantastic let's get you because sometimes you can't mention every single feature you possibly have on every sale which is one of the benefits of 101 and one of the drawbacks right it's like you can cater it but at the same time you don't want to take the whole whole time and i'll give you i'll give everybody the audience two really easy ones if you're starting your business yeah number one is the reason clothes which i use all the time which is whatever reason they tell you that they don't want to do it is the very

reason they should do it like i don't want to do it because like i think my you know my spouse is really controlling i think the reason that you should do it is because your spouse is really controlling because you need control of your life wow i think that i don't have time to do it i think that that's the very reason that you should be doing that you need to get your time back right because you're trying to do this business program right and currently are you working all day they're going to say yes

because everyone thinks they're working all day you're like you're working all day okay well then obviously what you're doing now isn't working right so the first thing we're going to do is cut out all the stuff that's not working and then you're going to have all this time to do the program that's micro so the macro is the one i said earlier micros that's the second one for for time there you go um for everyone in the audience and so with the reason close it's just whatever reason they present with just say totally understand you

don't have money that's the how long do you want that to be an excuse of why you can't do things in your life that's the very reason you should be doing this more than anyone right it's like when someone says um this is a lot of money to me right this is really expensive and then you would normally say like this is a lot to you right and they say yeah like well you know what that's the perfect reason to do it because there's people every single day who come in here and they buy this

thing and the money means nothing to them but the thing that makes success the thing that makes you successful is that this is a lot of money to you and the only reason that this won't work is if you don't do the work and if this means a lot to you then you're more likely to be successful than anyone else here wow and so when you say that it's true yeah and it helps overcome the because a lot of times like i spent a lot of money early on by percentage of my net worth on

on skills and acquisition education and it is scary but it's 100 what you need to do when you're starting out it's the fastest route to getting to where you want to go is buying the lessons from people ahead of you and so that's the reason clothes you can use in all those different situations and the other one is one that i'm working on i'm trying to figure out like a skeleton key for closing because it's something like i just love this stuff but it's like a hypothetical close so whatever they present with you get a

hypothetical yes and then you and then you walk backwards so if someone's like i'm just not sure you just say well if the program were perfect would you do it they're like well yeah i would do it if it were perfect you're like cool then what's the difference between what we've gotten perfect right and usually they can't generate many ideas anyways and they're like i don't a lot of times they're like well i don't know and you're like right so then it's not that so let's talk about what's really like worrying you what are you

afraid of right and then we can then we can confront the real stuff right the fears the insecurities total doubt same thing with but like you can use that for any of them it's like i don't have time well if you did have time would you do it okay well how much time would so that if you did have so they get the yes it's like well how much time do you think you need and then they're gonna say something like did you know that it's actually one-tenth of that is what you're actually gonna need

oh i didn't know that and we already got the yes so they're already committed with commitment and consistency they're already committed to the yes that they just said and so it's really hard that if they it's like cool if you have the time would you do it yes cool now now they gave us one problem to solve and all we have to do especially if you sell services yeah it's like cool then oh so all i have to do is solve this one problem for you because i just got you to say yes because you

that also ties them down to not any other objections right they still might but it's much harder for them to to go back on that no yeah yeah now one of the things that i've heard you talk about a lot and also you just shared right here is developing skills and acquiring skills over over over the last decade that's something that i've been obsessed with since i was a teenager is acquiring skills because i didn't feel like i wasn't enough i wasn't smart enough talented enough all those things so i wanted to become those things

by acquiring those skills and investing in them what would you say are the three main skills if you could only learn three to reach your first million what would those be well i mean the reach the first one is you just have to sell something to someone so it's just sales sales it's just sales you can just make a million just doing sales like you don't even have to sell your own products you can just do a million dollars just selling right and in order to make more in sales you sell stuff that's more expensive

that's it like if what is this like learn how to sell and then find the most expensive thing you possibly can to sell and then sell that that's how using it that's it and i'll tell this to everybody who's like not sure the more expensive it is the easier to sell really why is that because you're dealing with better people like you've probably had a consulting client that pays you 50 grand is like oh yeah by the way i sent the wire yesterday yeah whereas the 50 person's like well what exactly am i going to

be getting with this program here i mean it's just it's a different person you know i mean you're dealing with a different avatar and from an actual selling perspective almost every sale is the same regardless so you might as well just do the sales that you're getting paid five thousand dollars for rather than sales you're getting twenty dollars for right like i learned and the the one thing that i will say is that if you're starting out with the intention to develop the the skill of sales selling the highest volume environment possible that's why a

lot of i think some of the best sales people are fitness people because so many people every you know you work at a la fitness you get 25 memberships a day that you're you're i mean you're sitting on 25 consults a day and i did that for five years you know four years every now 20 plus consults every i was an early fitness at my own gym but like so like you get you there's just so much unconscious competence that you develop at that point like and those those the time and the money like those

things become so ingrained in second nature yeah and your language patterns that um and it and it gives you power in all different areas of your life so sales is number one you might want to develop the skill in a high volume environment but understand that that's not you might make some money doing that but the goal will then be to sell massive buildings sell super expensive cars sell yachts sell jet sell you know i mean like sell huge software packages to enterprise software like all of these are roles that you can make 400 a

million dollars a year doing so that's that's where you you know you want if you and that's a million income not even gross that's a million income um but if you just want to like make a million dollars just reverse out a million dollars and just do it looking at daily so it's you know 3 300 a day whatever roughly um and so at that point it's like okay well i can sell three 1500 things you know and i'll be over it and i can sell one five thousand dollar thing i can sell you know

i mean and or you could sell 3 300 things and it's just which of those sounds easier they're different you know and i will say that i have this desire maybe in the future to like look at some sort of entrepreneurial personality type where like i do believe that businesses are extension of the entrepreneur in terms of like their personality their thumbprint is on it based on just how it works and so like i've met guys who do super high volume really low ticket transaction um and they they're a little different than the guys who

sell ultra high ticket like service based stuff and so yeah it's and so i think and i've seen people really successful on both sides um but i do think that the more expensive the ticket in general the the less operational complexity there is you still have to take if you're going to take 10 sales calls you might might as well make them worth all exactly exactly right i have two final questions for you but before i ask them i want people to get your book it's really inspiring 100 million offers how to make offers so

good people feel stupid saying no which is a great tagline as well so make sure you guys get a few copies of this um and also go to acquisition.com right which is the main business that you're running right now acquisition.com so when's the right time to acquire business if you're a small it depends on whether you're going for majority or minority that's the huge that's the huge lever here so there's the what you're trying to buy and then there's the life cycle of the business so it's like if you're trying to buy a majority then

you want to get it before its peak right and you want to have it when it's already established the good leadership team and you want to make sure that you can pull the entrepreneur out it still functions like that's how we're able to sell the companies that we had and that's what we do with acquisition.com companies that we actually so we buy minority minority yeah exactly so we buy what's minorities 10 20 30 20 30 is usually the is the stakes that like we we need to be invested enough to care um and usually the

companies are between three and i think 36 million is the is the biggest one so three we don't really have any threes i think the smallest one we have right now is six but six million to 35-ish million is the it's kind of the range and we have seven companies in the portfolio and so um for those companies you know we buy them because we think they can get better we think we can grow them and we think that we can put a team in place and we can transition from face-based branding to a brand-based

business so that it is sellable and then what happens is interesting there is that we might triple the revenue the business but we might 30x the enterprise value because it's not valuable if you're just you know johnny johnny teacher or whatever which we do mostly internet businesses because we know how to transition from being the personality brand who teaches some sort of niche skill like we talked about earlier into teaching the same thing but being like salon university or being plumber u or gym launch you know like those are all like very specific niche skills

that provide real value that's history um two people so we're almost the entire portfolio except for one is e-learning um and that's because we're huge education people i like the business i also like the impact the market yeah i love the cash flow it's a low capex business it it's very inflation responsive in that like we can always adjust prices very easily um it has there's there's real impact on people's lives compared to like a four-year degree you've got a great price anchor and alternative and i think the education my thesis is that education is

becoming increasingly fragmented just like media has and it's just catching up the fact that all of these quote gurus exist is a telltale sign that more and more people are not going to college because they don't see the value and i think they're right in that in that assessment and so rather than spend a hundred thousand two hundred thousand dollars or four years or fifty thousand dollars over four years you could spend a a a quarter of that way more yeah a way more tactical training that can replace your entire income and so um in

terms of for us we we look for companies that are growing that are cash flow positive that are typically e-learning or internet businesses that have that have really good products so ideally somebody who really knows who is good at the thing that they teach which is silly but you also know that there's lots of people who don't have that and if we have those things we on average triple the profit of the business within a year anyway so we're very like when we have the when we have our very narrowly defined avatar which is doing

three million or more so 250 a month or higher um that's just to be considered usually they're at like the usually like five to a million a month 500 000 a month is usually when you take them on um that's that's our sweet spot and then we can buy it we can ramp them and then um with regards to majority it kind of goes back to like i personally i think long term we're going to try and figure out a way to maybe raise a fund so i can help all of the founders take some

cash on the table and maybe do some sort of conglomeration thing because it's all you're learning which would be cool or you know we might have them sell off individually it's really up to the founder because we're and this is kind of cool for me because like i'm really just there to support them um and we recruit the key players for them and because we have the reputation we have we have so much more reach and leverage we can find the people that will help them so much easier than they can and so that's how

we can build these things into enterprises so quickly and we can get outsized returns and so that's that's what we do that's cool and do you guys teach also how people can acquire a company on your site as well we don't no the the the courses on the site correspond with the books so the book has a free course that comes with it it's on the site you can go through it as all the downloads everything the book the ebook is 99 cents on kindle yup i think it has it has five thousand i think

five star reviews on amazon um who's counting you know anybody yeah who's good um it's but it's 99 cents i wanted to make it exactly for anyone i think that the hard copy is a little more yeah um but you know i wanted to like i've got people from like nigeria being like i could afford this thing so much so that's um and i know they're probably never going to be on acquisition.com right right um but yeah if you're a ua space company and you're elearning we're always happy to see how we can do it

we'll have to have you come on next another time if you guys want wanted to come back on to talk about how to acquire a smaller company and teach that process then let me know in the comments below on youtube uh if you're interested in learning that but acquisition.com alex for mosey on instagram twitter and youtube your youtube is blown up your facebook as well but you're doing what daily almost daily youtube now you shorts shorts yeah we do the shorts daily on instagram tic tac youtube uh we're on twitter we have a podcast that's

actually grown a lot oh wow yeah it's it's what's the podcast called i don't even know the game the game okay i see more your youtube stuff yeah it's the game yeah the game is the podcast it's just me just just talk about whatever check that out it's they're they're same style as youtube in terms of short short share like 10-minute stuff yeah exactly and yeah then we also have the linkedin we're we're we're everywhere i'm trying to be louisiana twitter twitter's everybody the twitters yeah the twitterverse and the metaverse i love it yes make

sure you follow you everywhere we'll have it all linked up this is a question i asked everyone at the end called the three truths so imagine it is your last day and maybe you've surpassed 85 maybe you're 120 or something extended to life as long as you can and uh you've lived your life you've accomplished the things you want to even though they don't matter anymore you've made all the money but you've given it all away because it doesn't matter anymore um and no one has access to your content or information for whatever reason it

goes with you everything the books the videos all this stuff goes with you this interview is gone uh and you can only share three things with the world three lessons that you've learned from your entire life yeah what would be those three lessons or three truths that you would share give first and without expectation and you'll get more than you can imagine in all aspects of life one if you can't do it forever don't do it for a day and probably something to the extent of if nothing matters then you get to decide what matters

so use the power wisely mm-hmm that's good man i want to acknowledge you alex for your growth and your and your ego death and the constant journey of that yes i'm sure you know i'm on the same journey um and it's uh but your acknowledgement of it your ability to look yourself in the mirror and see okay here's what's working what's not working and how do i continue to develop that and now you're this stage where it really feels like you're trying to create add as much value as possible to as many people as possible

yeah through your books your content and your information so i really acknowledge you for the the example you're creating for your your really uniqueness you're being a hundred percent who you are i mean you're in like the basement with your wife either with like just like you don't care necessarily about what you look or whatever you know you just want to add the value and not think about what are people saying about me but how can i make it about others which i think is really inspiring uh example that you're leading from so i want

to acknowledge you for that man and um hopefully we'll have you back on for more times but uh final question what's your definition of greatness when reality exceeds expectations oh man alex thanks good stuff good stuff you end up broke you end up struggling financially and you you can never figure out why so the first thing is what is it that you want to achieve in your life financially and then you have to go out and figure it out yourself because unfortunately school will never teach you the stuff so you didn't learn this in high

school or university of michigan or no