the reason that I'm going to go from 100 to a billion and 10 billion and Beyond is because I am working harder now than I work to get here and it's because I've learned a better way to work and so this is me sharing that better way to work if I had thought the way I think about business now and work now I would have been here faster but for the court of Alex I know what it's like for me to give it my all and it's the absolute proudest I am of myself and there's
nothing anyone can do to take that from me what do people not understand about making money reaching millionaire status that they need to know before they hit that I will probably answer this differently than you expect I think you got to have a dream the school of greatness really please welcome Le how we both know a lot of wealthy people um people have made a lot of money people had huge exits people that have private jets and multiple homes and massive bank account do you think the people that you know who have a lot of
money um are typically happier or you know more people who are wealthy who are unhappy than happy I think it depends on how they got their wealth so I think if they were given their wealth absolutely I would say Bara and they are not as happy um and I think it I won't even get into the why I say that's just my observation um for the people who earned their wealth I would say many of them are I would probably say the same same schor's board as the rest of society maybe with like one movement
upwards because money cannot buy happiness but it can help you avoid pain and so I think that is the that's the hard part that is difficult it's the same thing as health where like uh you can you know money can help get the hospital you know get you out of the hospital hypothetically but it's not going to get you into super super Fitness status they're they're completely different continuums that people see as one straight line and I removing pain versus gaining Joy I think are two completely different Journeys and so I think money helps absolutely
decrease the punishment that we experience in life and the pains that we have to deal with our inconveniences for sure why do you think some people I agree with that and there's also some outliers where it seems like people with a lot of money almost have more problems more pain more stress more overwhelm maybe it's too much to handle or everyone wanting something from them or everyone's expecting something now from them how do you learn to manage the approval or people pleasing of others once you have more money especially your own family your own friends
who are now saying oh you've gone beyond where the rest of us are financially and I want some of that or I have an expectation how do we overcome that navigate it I wholeheartedly reject all of it reject what all of it any any expectations of me and so my my litness test for doing deals for giving jobs any of those things for people that I know is that you have to it's actually the first conversation I had with Lila when we were it was our first date so our first date I pitched Lila on
quitting her job and working for me cuz I was like this might not work out but you should totally work for me we'll make a bunch of money together and I said this compensation has to make sense for you independent of our relationship so like if we're not together does this still make sense if it makes sense then we're cool it's on your first day of dating yeah if we're not together in a week or two months would this still work for you yeah yes yeah it's clear I saw Talent you know and um and
I think and I think that that limus test has served incredibly well for me is like if you want to hire your mom would you give somebody with your mom's experience the bookkeeping job now if she's if she's a 20-year bookkeeper then yeah maybe maybe and to be fair but would you pay the bookkeeper $200,000 a year I don't know probably wouldn't so I believe in making all deals as though you weren't friends or you have no relationship and if it still makes sense then all of the relational benefit becomes as a bonus yes rather
than I'm going to amend the terms of the deal because of this amorphous value that we have which can change but the if the deal is made logically then conditions can change and you will still both always feel good about the deal because it was made without the relation component because sometimes you have good days with your mom sometimes you bad days with your mom and all of a sudden you're like I can't play my pay t Grand here right I would she messed up the books and he she bar she took a course online
you know whatever right and so but like but people make that mistake all the time and so I think that it is been significantly easier for me to just say like would I give you the role or would I give you the thing if you were a stranger and if the answer is no the answer is no and if that person really wants it that be like then do the same things a stranger would do and then I'll have a reason be now if I have two candidates and they're identical which would be impossible but
if they're identical then yeah maybe I would give it but like they have to still meet all the standards and then that way you give objective quanti you know like do these things and then we can have the S right seems like a lot of young people people want to make a lot of money people people want to make people make a lot but it seems like you know at least of I'm thinking of social media context yeah you see a lot of young people in their their 20s yeah early 30s that are striving for
that and they're striving for it fast yeah they striving for it you know I just graduated college and I want to get there in the next couple of years what do people in their 20s not understand about making money or reaching millionaire status that they really need to know before they hit that so I will probably answer this differently than you expect I believe that sex is colorblind age blind everything blind because there are certain activities that you have to do if you do the activities you can get the outcome now if you're in your
20s it's very difficult to do the amount of activities for a long enough period of time in order to get that now you know you've got Ben Francis who started gym shark when he was whatever 16 or 17 years old and he's when he was 28 it was worth over a bilon ion so he was in his 20s and it was you know he made a billion dollar company is that the exception for the most part yeah that's not as common um you know I made my I became a millionaire when was 206 26 or
2 can't remember was between 26 and 27 is when I became when I had my first million dollars my bank account and so but I started business when I was 202 and so I still had had five years in and now that's still fast don't get me wrong it's still fast um but the accumulation of knowledge because I spent almost all of my excess income on education and so I wanted to I wanted to pay down my ignorance tax as fast as I possibly could it's rather than buy the Bentley or buy the watch so
that I could Flex on it I still lived split a room in a house with six other people while I was making 20,000 w't take home because I wanted to have all that money so I could go on the offense if I wanted to go to a seminar or buy a course or go to a workshop or whatever it was so that I could uplevel my skills and get there faster and so I think the idea that you want to get there fast is fine it's just having a realistic expectation of how many skills you
need to acquire to get there because if you have all the skills cuz I think we'll have continuously younger and younger and younger uh Millionaires and billionaires that are going to continue to happen because now a viral I mean Taylor schwift was 16 when she started recording music that was a long time ago right she's 33 now now she's a billionaire she keep showing up consistently and building it Mr a billionaire she's 24 crazy so like it's it's going to continue to to go down as the access to education increasingly gets democratized so more people
can access it for free and so a 9-year-old can watch like there's nothing that stops a 9-year-old from making and running a Facebook ad there's nothing like and usually they're more Tech savy anyways maybe they just got to get a credit card or something sure yeah yeah yeah and so there but the but if we break it down to like the physics or the action it's not that hard there's nothing that prevents people and so I think that the level of competition will continue to rise I think young people are more techsavvy and so we
in general have a continuously improving competitive advantage over older people because the rate of technological change uh hastens cu faster and so the the advantage of being young versus old is actually I think going to continue to to expand because Tech moves so fast now um that I think there will be more what do you think about I mean I had a mentor once told me when I was 24 when I was broke on my sister's couch and I was uh living for free I was not paying rent I was you know eating leftovers good
life man and um I remember saying to a mentor I was like man I could really use some money right now like I could really figure out how to make some more money MH and he said money comes to you when you're ready for it I was like I feel pretty ready sorry he goes yeah it could come you know maybe you get it and you're not ready and you you lose it all because you're not emotionally ready yeah so what advice do you have to people in their 20s who want to make a lot
of money but if they're not emotionally ready what might happen to them everything is trainable and so if like if if we Define hling money as a skill then it can be learned and so if you and you can you can look at anything like if you were somebody who continues to hop from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing and you can't stick with it it's usually because you don't have the skill of sticking with something you haven't been rewarded enough in the past for staying with something or you haven't been burn
enough from starting over like on your fifth time of starting yet another thing and not getting deep enough on it you have to think to yourself maybe this isn't the right way to do it I love giving this kind of like scurve analogy which hopefully your audience will enjoy but there's five stages I see it somebody goes through the entrepreneurial Journey when they're starting out in the beginning you've got the midline right where they start Step One is they go above the midline and they they go to uninformed optimism they see the grass on the
other side it looks Greener and they're like my buddy's doing Drop Shipping and he's making all this money and that's going to be me and then they buy the course they start watching videos they try to connect things things break they you know buy some inv they don't know how much to buy and all of a sudden they go to the point 2 which is now below the line which is informed pessimism say hard yeah they find out all the things that they didn't know in the beginning they paid down some ignorance debt but they're
still more to pay they're like okay wow so they keep going because they're like I got to figure this out and then they go to3 which is the value of Despair right which is where they're like this isn't going to work this is never going to work and one of the hardest costs and this is like what entrepreneurship feels like if I can if I can give it to anyone who's new to this is the feeling of uncertainty that you don't know if all of the work that you've been spending all of your nights and
weekends and off time investing in will ever pay off and so it's this fear that you're wasting your time but the reality is that the outcome isn't the thing that you're building the person you are is the person that you're building and that continues to work and so there's a proverb in the Bible I'm going to butcher it but uh I think it's in all labor there is profit and you can rephrase that as um I like as the work works on you more than you work on it say it again the work works on
you more than you work on it and so it's about who we become while doing the work more than the outcome from the work itself because like I lost everything 5 years into my entrepreneurial Journey but I still had all the skills and beliefs that have fromed before that and then I was able to reapply those and then have a really you know big outcome in what we have today and so I remember when I lost everything that first time I thought did I just lose five years of my life like I just I just
moved back I'm at Ground Zero again but I wasn't because I had all these skills that I had learned you know owning and scaling six gyms at that point and so point1 uninformed optimism point two uh informed pessimism three VI to spare and then go to point four which is informed optimism so now you do have a lay of the land you understand that there's some skeletons you do have to understand how you you know manage some inventory you got to get ahead of some of stuff but you start you learn how to forecast you
can know that weekends you tend to do better and weekdays you tend to do less and so you can dial back support on those days and dial it up on the other days you start to recognize patterns and so you start to start to know what you're doing right you started paying you're paying down all the ignorance debt and then finally step five is you achieve whatever the original goal was but the problem is that most people go step one two three and then they jump back to step one with something new right so they
go to the yet yet again the grass is green on the other side but what they don't know is that it's still fertilized with manure they're still the other side too and so there's always everywhere let me get into real estate now let me get into this inves right of course there's all these you know quick make money things but if you look at the people who are making the most money in it they spent usually a significant amount of time and I'm I'm saying this again but I'm burying for repetition is that the rocky
cutscene lasts 2 minutes in movies it might Last 5 Years for most people or 10 and I remember my so my neighbor I met him he was 15 years old he now works for us at acis.com um but he uh this is this is a cool story so he's 15 years old and he's like I want to be an entrepreneur and so I you know he worked out with me every day for a couple years um at my home gym and so he he Jack now never never more Jack than me um and so he
then goes to college and after his first semester he's like I don't know like this is you know I'm studying business and I was like dude are you willing in this or not are you really doing this and he was like well you know I just I'm not school's not really blah blah blah and I said the world doesn't need another 31 Business Degree either Crush school or don't go if your goal is entrepreneurship he's like well I want to be an entrepreneur and so I apparently told him this that he remembers because he's he
brings it up all the time but I said you are afraid of going all in entrepreneurship because staying in college is safe from an approval perspective so you're do doing all these side things but you don't have to bear the brunt of not failing because you're still in school yeah it's like so you need to get rid exactly and so he quit school and then he started on the call floor of my of gym lunch now that's not glorious and to be fair to the point we're making earlier I said I can't get you the
job I won't give you a job I said I can get you an interview I was like it's going to be up the sales manager and I'm not going to tell them that I know you he was like okay I was like you better be prepared and so he did get the job to be fair the qualifications for Frontline caller not not subai and the reason that I started him there was because I actually walked in on him one day when he was waiting for me to go work out and I heard him on the
phone trying to do one of these wholesaling you know real estate deals and I said you know you close the deal and he said h no and um he said I'm not sure if real estate you know the wholesaling thing is for me I said well uh have you heard you on the phone I was like what do you mean I was like you sound horrible you can't sell anything on the skill of course he's said well how do I get good at sales I was like you work on a sales team with somebody who's
been there before and can tell you what to do and so I got him the interview he took the job he became the top uh salesman on the on the on the setting team wow and then he became sorry the outbound team then he went to the setting team which is the second rung of salesman they qualify the elites then became the top one there and then he got to the top of the Christmas tree which is closers and then he became the top closer he learned skills 26 guys wow big team and a lot
of these are men you know have families kids wow and how much can you make as a top closer 250 250 a year yeah it's pretty good money yeah that's good money for a 21 year old 22 year old or yeah yeah 19 at the time 19 making 250 yeah that's lifechanging of course and you had to learn how to talk to men talk to gym owners 40-year oldold gym owners telling them how you can help them with their business wow right takes balls and so I I I I I bring that up to say
is that when you were when you starting out you need to focus on learning rather than earning now he obviously earned but it was because he quickly fast-tracked his learning process and so I think one of the biggest hacks in the world is getting paid to learn like right now we have this big societal context of like you pay in order to learn but what if there were a world where you could get paid to learn well that is what working at a company is if you're mindful of what career path you want to get
into now if you're like I don't know what I want to do then I would recommend starting with a meta skill so sales is going to like if you learn how to sell it'll work in any company you're in if you learn how to Market it work in any company I mean to be fair if you get into HR zillion businesses need HR stuff if that's what you like if you're like I don't know what I like well you also aren't going to like anything unless you start because we usually only like things that we're
good at and we usually aren't good at things that we start right and so the only way to get good at something is to do a lot of it and when you start you suck and so a lot of the time there's this fallacy of finding the right thing or the perfect fit but one almost every entrepreneur that I know has had many many many businesses and mostly many failures before they had their success is because each one of them stair stepped and so there's this paralysis around I'm like I got to pick the right
thing and it's really you got to pick something and then you'll learn all the inadequacies that you have no idea about once you get into it like I started a gym when I was 202 years old like brick and mor signed a lease ,000 it was stupid I had no idea what I was doing but I did have I did sign I was I you know kudos to younger me uh I had a mentor early on who was in the gym world that's great right so you could get advice and learn from yes I mean
still it was still incredibly hard but I got I was able to just get you know suck everything like a you know fire fire like a vacuum cleaner um to get all the information I needed to just barely keep my head above water until and then things started to work out because I just I would every weekend I'd go and drive over to a gym owner and say why do you do this why is your lobby like this how many leads do you convert how do you call like whatever and so I just kept doing
that every single weekend because I was such a young guy everyone exactly and I have a lot to I owe a lot to those older entrepreneurs who help me out and so in some ways a lot of what I do at acquisition. comom is kind of my my small way of paying it forward and one of the cool things is when you're someone who's getting started and you're going out and humbly asking for advice but you're taking the actions hey I'm launching this thing I'm taking the steps I'm just trying to figure it out but
I'm taking the actions and I'm in the process people usually want to give advice and support and say hey why don't you come check out and well go out for lunch whatever it is but if you're just saying I want to do this yeah but I'm not taking any action yeah people are less likely to help you maybe they'll help you a little bit but they see you struggling and trying and like yeah leaping before you're ready it's like all right cool let's help you get it going I love the saying luck favors the prepared
so like if you if you want to go ask you know Lewis to have you on or to get lwis on your show right well what do you do you don't just ask Lewis you show how much you've prepared you say hey I went through 50 hours of your content these are nine questions that have never been asked to you before that I think would be really good I've got two guys two buddies from college who are going to also video it I've I've got this uh church basement that I can get the lighting to
look really cool so we can be cinematic because to be real I know I don't have the audience that you have but I can help at least give you clips that will distribute and actually convert for you and hopefully that's enough a value ad now Lewis might not say yes but if you do that a 100 times count in hundreds right one Lewis will say yes right and everyone loves to help people who help themselves always because the biggest fear that anyone who gives advice has is that someone takes the advice and does nothing exactly
they they didn't learn they didn't change their behavior that's true right it's a waste of the time so you don't feel like you're teaching you only teach if they change their behavior if they change their behavior they learned and so everyone many people like being a teacher I think a teaching role is nice I think most people feel good about it but you only feel like you have a teaching role if you see a change and someone takes action and you can you can hack the whole system if you just show people that you'll take
take initiative 100% if you take and that's what happened for me early on I was just taking a lot of action and people like they wanted to had me in the room they wanted me at the table because I was willing to take action even though I was young and broke and struggling they were like hey this guy's showing up I go to Every conference that I could in kind of the social media blogging World early on and somehow get to the late night dinners at 2 a.m. with all the speakers and they were like
hey why don't you come tag along young guy you know you're bringing us a lot of Joy at least right even though you have no clue what you're doing you can't offer anything else but joy yeah but you're asking me some interesting questions that people don't so yeah I'm happy to talk about by myself for another 20 minutes totally and you get in the room you get access and you take action people will want to keep supporting you totally cuz you're applying their teachings and people like that makes them feel important it does it validates
oh I know something about my you know when I'm doing and that's good you want to keep helping this person grow what do you think your 85-year-old self needs to tell you now to get to where you want to be faster oh it's funny that that was the question um I mean he would tell me thinking have the mentors you know yeah no I mean he would tell me why do you want to go faster be like why why can't it take 10 times as long ah from 200 to a billion sure why not like
why why it need to be 5 years or 10 years why can't it be 50 years right if you if it took 50 years but then it all happened at once at the end would you like that I don't know right it's you know it's kind of like the the man who lives an amazing life in the last day everyone finds out he's a fraud or the man who lives his entire life with everyone think he's a fraud and then in the last day of his life he's proven right which one would you rather be
if you're gone you're not going to get the experience the fruit of it all but interesting question though yeah it's like the painters that become famous once they're dead yeah and so I think I mean 85-year-old me I'll tell you the recurring things that he works on with me um patience is a big one uh focus is a big one sticking with what I committed to um focusing on the controllables of like what are the activities what are the actions that I have to take and being okay with potentially varied outcomes sometimes it's good sometimes
it's bad but being consistently divorced from the outcome but trying my absolute damnest to make sure that everything that in my control was done to the utmost and I like we started there but I just like it's hard to understand the context like you hear this you hear people say this like it's about the journey it's not about the destination and you hear people say like you know it's it's it's about it's about doing the stuff it's not about the outcome and you're like yeah yeah yeah it's easy for you to say when you have
the outcome right when they've already made the money course of course I get it but if you can if you can make that FL like it's just the hard part is the action is so much greater if you really measured Yourself by the actions you take then you might be embarrassed so you really hope to measure yourself on the outcome because you can get by on sometimes winning when you don't deserve it and so 85-year-old never lets me win when I don't deserve it oo man I would rather lose but now I gave my all
than win and be like I just kind of just barely showed up today right you know you would know I won but it's cuz I had an inferior opponent it's not because I played my best it sucks to lose to know man I freaking gave everything every ounce of my energy and every trick and skill that I had to play this game and win it I came short it's going to sting it's going to hurt but at least I know I don't regret the effort that I put in and I can be like here's a
great example this still haunts me today yeah 2002 was October so 21 years ago is that right October 2002 old yeah almost almost 21 years ago is that what it was two we're playing um I'm playing football at principia College small School in Illinois and we it's my sophomore year there my freshman year I went to another school so I transferred into this school we're playing and it's a tight tight game at home back and forth can't remember the final score but we lose by a touchdown I score three or four touchdowns I think I
got an extra point I got a two-point conversion and I had 17 catches for 418 yards and we lost in the last couple plays we didn't score to to go and win and I remember being the last one out of the locker room I was in the shower I was so upset that we lost and my coach comes in it's kind of an awkward moment cuz I'm in the shower you know an exposed open shower you know I'm just like kind of pouting and like sad and depressed or whatever and just like in there everyone's
gone yeah I'm sad we lost the game and he kind of comes around the corner and says hey Lewis good game um just to let you know you broke a record today and I go what and I go what do you mean and he goes yeah you had 17 catches from 418 yards no one's ever done that in the history of a football game you're a new NCAA all record holder and I go I'm sad and depressed and angry cuz I didn't do more to help us win and we lost yeah and at the same
time I hear that I did something that no one in the history of the world had ever done in the football game and it was it was tough cuz I felt like man we lost but I gave it everything yeah but I was like but could I still give it more it's like I don't know yeah but I feel like you know what at least we didn't win and I played to a lower level and didn't create that result yeah at least I created something that for me I can be proud of even if we
lost it still haunts me that we lost interesting but it's but I know because we were behind I had to give so much more that I was capable of and if we were winning I wouldn't have gotten that effort out of myself uhhuh so it's an interesting Dynamic yeah it is cu I would wonder if you had that same exact experience but you didn't break the world record or no one ever told you whatever exactly right if you would still because you said that you had the sting of the loss and I wonder if LS
today would feel that way because if you because you said like I don't know if I could have given more but I feel like on some levels like at least for me like sure we can get into the hypotheticals of like you can always give more okay of course yeah but there are certain times from I'm like I know I could Sprint after the guy uh even though I'm probably not going to get you know but I could give it the last 20 yards yeah right exactly and I think that this is where 85-year-old me
is the one that he is ruthless and I love this David goggin's saying I don't know if it's a saying of his I heard it in one of his videos but he said there's no shortcuts for you Goggins and I just really love that like he doesn't even look for them because he said you don't get those you don't get shortcuts there are no Corners to cut and that to me is like the embodiment of that that 85-year-old self because he knows if I could have Sprint it or not and so it's if I can
appeal to that man's incredibly high standards which is why like commit to the journey is not the easier path I think it is the harder path because the standard is higher and when you really do that the winning does happen by default but even even saying that still makes winning the objective right and you're just saying this is a different pathway of getting to winning but winning still kind of matters it does matter I I think it's a both it's a the journey matters and the outcomes matter the more the more because the outcomes also
give credibility they give more context they give more experience they give more wisdom yeah to the teacher oh yeah I I if you had no outcomes but you said look at all the efforts I put in though but I put in 10,000 hours yeah but I haven't sold a company I haven't built anything because this is really didn't work yeah you need a both yeah this is really interesting because on some so I think from uh this is I'm like really liking this so from a yeah from a from a fulfillment perspective yes I believe
that truly giving your all actually not like try your best that's just like it's such a it's repeated so many times that it's lost its meaning but leaving everything on the field having the tank on zero or empty when you walk off and truly knowing and looking at yourself in the Mir like I could not have done anything more and it's tough to do that because we're naturally built to conserve effort right and so you really have to push and overcome the internal mechanisms that you have that say don't Sprint the last 20s put a
little more yeah right and that's why like when when I walked on stage for the for the presentation I was like I have done this before I am prepared I could not have prepared more for this in any way that would have been reasonable and so to to that degree I can still define success that way the outcomes will happen and I think it's but it's still that little thing where it's like do this in order to you have to cut off the in order to I Really genuinely believe that because I remember when I
was in my retirement year which is I still own the company but we were in the process of selling I had nothing to do and it was an incredibly depressing year for me which is why I've oriented my whole life around work because I I really enjoy it and I remember getting really angry about this and thinking like it's not you work hard so that you can I like the hard work is the point like the point is how hard you learn to work and that's the whole point where like what has changed from last
year to this year is like my understanding of my capacity to work continues to grow and so I able to work harder and therefore am more proud of the effort that I put into it because at least for me I feel like I am I know in the mirror did I give it my all and if I try to play out this is a stoic frame but like if I had had like a hurricane go through and we had not been able to launch cuz all the energy would have been gone let's just say hypothetical
and we did all this prep fear virtual event yes would I have been proud of the effort that I put in the answer would have been yes you see be let down and disappointed that you didn't get to do the thing yes but I think that it it would have been shortlived because I think that is like if you you asked like early on what has been the biggest difference for you specifically and this has been whatever whatever you want call it super power secret secret whatever like this is what has been allowed me to
keep my internal temperature separate from the external temperature to the greatest degree possible is knowing that I'm using my internal thermometer to gauge my success and I'm not perfect by any F but the more I do that to use your example if I had worked my absolute hardest for 10,000 hours and I knew that I give it my and I had nothing to show for it now I've actually had that instance cuz 5 years ago I lost everything no external results to show for it so I do know what that's like I think at the
end of your life you'd still be more proud of the man that did his everything gave it his all left it all on the field even if he didn't win and I think that would be the man that I'd be more proud to be I I hear that and I'm also like if I reflect back if we would have lost every football game yeah I think winning matters also you got to have some wins you know I mean you got to have if i' lost every game for four years I'd probably been like this is
not fun sure I'm becoming a better athlete and I'm competing against rap people but just always losing would be a challenge absolutely because you be like this is not fun it's fun to win it's not fun to lose consistently yeah i' you learn more in your losses probably you learn more from the bigger breakdowns and the challenges you face and always winning yeah the difficulties the challenges develop us having easy wins does it make us stronger and better but I think having all losses yeah may just say that okay maybe this is the wrong thing
you're in you should be in something else use this energy and effort and and attitude towards a different thing a different purpose a different sport a different Mission a different art after a period of time I yeah it's so much losing you cuz I want I I I mean I could Jam I think the conf I think the confidence comes in the effort and the journey but it also you've got to back it with some external results I think yeah or or some type of credibility somewhere yeah it depends if so the credibility is if
you're trying to be an expert and a spout and give advice but credibility to yourself if you have no external results I still like I you were broke today yeah yeah yeah no one would listen to me that's okay but how would you feel about you after 10 years totally 15 years I'm busting it dud I did it for 5 years I get it okay but 10 years though 50 years right right I think but that's where I'm saying like what has changed about me that has made me Better Stronger Faster is because I I
genuinely believe that the more I can divorce that win even when you say like you know you got to win sometimes it's like even that small statement still makes it King yeah easy for you to say with couple hundred million yeah easy for you to say at this stage like you said to others but I think that the reason that I'm going to go from 100 to a billion and 10 billion and Beyond is because I do genuinely like I am working harder now than I work to get here and it's because I've learned a
better way to work and so this is me sharing that better way to work now to be fair maybe I have certain skills that if I don't work as hard I can still win but I would still know and so I think that if you can like if the whole point of anyone who's listening to this is that you can open up another level of effort I think that is the next level of effort because I if I had thought the way I think about business now and work now I would have been here faster
and that's me catering to the audience who wants to win but I'm saying I would have become who I am faster and I think that as a result I would have evidence that would support that for every for the court of public opinion but for the court of Alex it's it's just it's I I know what it's like to for me to give it my all and it's the absolute proudest I am of myself and there's nothing anyone can do to take that from me and that's when I feel bulletproof and there's not many times
I can do that and so when I have realized how much work it takes to do something well to gain the approval of my 85-year-old self I also realized hand inand that there's only a few amount of things that I can do because I have to be dramatically more focused because the amount of work it takes to do something well is so much greater than I used to think that I can't do 20 things if I'm going to do it well and so it goes back to like one of my favorite things which is if
it's worth doing it's worth doing well and the thing is is that most people focus on the back half but I think it's focusing on the first like most things aren't worth doing if it is worth doing then it is worth cut out the things that aren't worth doing right so that you have all of the energy to actually give your a something and I would say this is that most things aren't that hard if you really try it's that most people don't know how to try hard they just don't have they don't have the
skill to try hard and so the the number I mean you probably know the stat from the podcast world right which is uh it's 90% of people only upload one podcast of the remaining 10% 90% of them don't make it past 20 uploads so to be in the top 1% of podcasters you have to upload 20 podcasts right it still may not be successful yeah you still may get downloads but you're doing a lot better than the other 90% 99% the price for Excellence has never been so cheap yeah it's showing up consistently everyone is
so soft now that to win you just have to not be made of glass and be willing to have someone tell you I don't approve of your life and you say that's okay why do you think so many people are soft in our society today uh well I think we've put a lot of guard rails up that prevent people from getting hurt I think that ends up resulting in people who don't know what getting hurt feels like and they feel like it's death but it's not death you know I think that's just I mean at
its absolute core no one knows how to have hurt feelings and I think people think their feelings matter a lot more now than they used to yeah I don't think they matter that much why don't why don't you think people's feelings matter that much why should their feelings matter why should my feelings matter like if I if I hurt someone and I say what makes me feel good why does that matter you hurt somebody so it's just looking at the actions and I that's I mean to be fair I'm very extreme in that manner but
I think that if we can for me the more I can ignore my feelings and simply do the things that are required the more I tend to see the results that I want and one of my favorite internal sayings like the things that you repeat your I'm sure everybody has like a couple things that like you say to you um whenever I have something that I'm like God I don't want to like the the next rewrite of the book or hey man we got to reshoot that whole thing because the mic was off or you
know the wor yeah the wor man is um I have this I have this refrain that's been trained faster and faster which is I will do what is required it's not what I want it's not what I feel like it's I will do what is required I'm enjoyable I will do what is required yeah and that's it and so like there's not there's not a question there's not a if it's just I will do what is required and that has helped me a ton yeah and you try to learn from the the pain or the
challenge that OCC Ur so it doesn't happen again but you got to do what's required I saw this um clip recently of this podcast called the all-in podcast which I saw the I see these clips a lot online I want to start actually listening to this whole show but I think they go too long um but they have a lot of great insights it's like these four like Venture capitalists and they're all billionaires and they all like are Puppet Masters in their old world right and one of the clips was of a guy I can't
remember his name but one of the guys who said he was spending a lot of time in Italy over the last month or a couple of months and he was saying you know I really like spending time over here because my friends in Italy know how to relax they know how to have great conversations they know how to talk about life and art and yeah magic and wonder and music and not just focus on more money cuz this guy's a billionaire multi-billionaire and he was like there's more to life than just making lots of more
money when you already have a lot of money what do you think about a a point like that or a conversation like that where it's like you know live in Europe and yeah take three months and relax and travel and I think there's an overarching assumption which is that life should be a certain way and I think that I would I would reject that notion and so it's like we should because implied in that statement I think is we should be more like them and whenever I see a should I kind of don't really accept
any should frames it's like why why should we because you prefer that which is fine you could say I prefer to live the say in which case go live that way but to then say everyone should live that way or you know then now you're casting a your personal preference on everyone else and I reject that wholeheartedly so if you if you want to if you want to play video games all day and be the absolute best in the world at it and you are the best in the world at it and you get twitch
sponsorships and you have all that stuff and you learn to eat because of you're so good at it you're so obsessed with it who am I to stop you from doing that you're going to die and I'm going to die and at the end of your life would you rather just go you know be a for at a factory that's not a disrespectful thing I'm saying more so that if you loved doing what you were doing choose to not do what you love because you now are legitimate in the eyes of people who you don't
care about like there was one rule for me is do you do you yeah I wanted to ask you about this uh yeah this book launch just happened and I I know you did Vlog on this recently which I want to dive in deeper but can you give big context yeah why this book why the launch style that you did yeah how many people showed up how many people bought and upsells everything and uh how did you get that result to happen yeah not that we focus on results here but uh the efforts how did
you get it all to to come to fruition so my first book $0000 million offers uh was a book that answered one question which is what do I sell and so now that 17,000 five stars and you know incredible it's great book actually it's still on Amazon charts top 20 of all Amazon and so is that one so it's two of the 20 yeah right not that we're calculating results or success here of course of course and I didn't even sell it on Amazon I sld it on Shopify so all those sales didn't count but
anyways um this book the purpose of this book was to Once someone knows what they're going to sell they ask the next question which is who do I sell it to you need leads right and so uh this book is about advertising now I split test the title uh four times to figure figure out what people like I tried marketing versus advertising I tried advertising versus leads i t tried leads versus promotion and leads uh one as the categorical leader for what the name of the book and so that's why I called it $100 million
leads but advertising in of itself is the process of making known if no one knows about your stuff no one can buy it and so say that one more time if no one knows about your stuff sorry the first part advertising what is the process of making known is making advertising the process of making known period if no one knows about your stuff no one buys it right if so what happens is most people have an offer and no one knows about it and so you have to make it known you have to advertise it
and so um this book so the first book all hinged on something called the value equation which is people talk about hey provide value provide value but how do you mechanize that how do you operationalize value and so it was actually solving a problem that people want increasing the likelihood that they think it's going to happen in other words decreasing the risk that when they buy they're not going to get the thing that they want decreasing the time it takes them to get whatever the outcome is and decreasing the effort and SA sacrifice that's associated
the work that they have to do in order to get the outcome so those are the four variables you decrease the last two you increase the first two and you have a more valuable thing which we covered in a different in a different video so you can watch that one with $100 million leads I talk about the advertising cycle and so there's eight pieces to this so it has a little bit more pieces to it but I think it it's simpler to understand in some ways so the first four is a core four it's the
only four ways any person can let other other people know about their stuff advertise and so it's just a four box there's 101 and one to many and you've got people who know you and people who don't so if you're letting people who know you one on one you were doing warm Outreach you reach out to your friends and say hey come to my book event if you're letting people know one-on-one who don't know you that's cold Outreach that's reaching out to strangers if you're letting people know one to many two people who know you
that's posting content and if you're letting people one to many know who don't know you that's running ads so these are the only four things that you can do to let other people know about your stuff now the natural question is are there other things that you can do the answer is yes and no no in that you can't do anything else but yes there are other people who can let people know about stuff yeah right and so there's four which I call the lead Getters so you've got customers who can send you referrals now
in order for them to send you referrals they use the core four they either reach out to friends they post content they the same four things they the only four ways a person could let other people know about stuff the second is you've got employees right like so when I was making content for the book I didn't actually make the content my team made the content and then they posted it on my behalf and so I got leverage on the amount of content I could put out because I had other people help me from the
paid ads sorry from uh from the lead getter number three is uh agencies so you can pay agencies to help you make content you can pay agencies to help you run ads and for me for this book launch I had agencies run the actual ads for the book right because we're a holding company we don't actually transact so it made sense to contract that out but my team made the ads their team ran the ads but it was still leverage and then finally we had Affiliates so that's another business who refers you business business and
just a funny for the audience they get a commission yeah they get paid in Money free stuff or both right and so uh we had 27,000 Affiliates 27,000 and we had 104,000 people who attended from Affiliates we had 137,000 people 137,000 people came in from Paid ads we had uh just probably just like 210,000 people came in from content um organic yeah and then uh the hour um and then I would say that employees kind of factored into into that piece right and so I used all eight methods in the book to advertise the book
itself so I could have just made a I could have just emailed my list and just you know done a presentation or just released it and I probably would have sold a lot of copies but I wanted to use everything in the book to advertise the book to demonstrate that everything proof that everything that I do here works and that they it'll work for them too if they just follow the steps in the book and so I purposely followed the scripts that I have in the book for making ads I followed the scripts that we
had for making content throughout the whole thing so that people could look back at my ads they could look back at the content that I made and be like he followed this to a te and resulted in a you know world record-breaking event and so how much did you spend on the ads to get the leads 275 275 yeah which is not for anybody's that sounds like a lot of money but for the context of how big of an event this is nothing and then how much did you pay out Affiliates which is another form
of advertising how much does that pay out I guess zero zero they got free stuff how many people 20,000 27,000 affiliates they didn't get any commissions correct on nothing really why did they promote it then what was the leverage or the the value at for them thing was Goodwill wow and they also knew that the last book was good and I'll I'll give you the the the Tactical piece of this is that most people require money to advertise to Their audience because it's extracting Goodwill to a degree MH and so what I made rather than
saying hey the top 10 affili good skate Lamborghini which only benefits the affiliate not Their audience I said the top 10 Affiliates I'll do a live Q&A with your entire audience wow and so it benefits the audience to have the person who's promoting it win and it doesn't extract any Goodwill in fact it builds Goodwill because he's like hey I've got this amazing event this book I I know Alex I've been following this stuff forever it'll help you out so go do this thing and if we're in the top 10 we'll also get you know
time with Alex and we can answer his qu you know answer questions and do this stuff so we can apply to us so like it's a win for everyone and so trying to find like in my opinion I talk about this in the book like the best way to use Affiliates is to find a win-win win which is it wins for me it wins for them and it wins for their customers right usually it's only two wins and one loss and that's how most people do Affiliates it's why they have to pay an arm and
a leg in order to get them now a lot of times also they haven't built trust or Goodwill with an audience before making an ask so I'd spent two years doing hopefully nothing but providing value and everyone expected the launch event itself to be probably a pitch of some sort and I tried to sprinkled that in because I wanted to build up the anticipation and the tension for the event um but you know upon the event so we had five so the official count was we had 542,000 people who uh who registered for the event
we had 180,000 click to join live with us um and it was uh it was wild right how many Book Sales in that first day do you know we sold 100,000 in like 10 minutes or something yeah yeah insane day that's incredible and that was with no large bundles wow so that wasn't like buy 100 get this like one two or three maybe three was the largest one that was incentivized wow yeah so I just said if you buy three you get a hat and the main reason that I did that was because um the
whole mission of acquisition. comom is to make real business education accessible to everyone and so I was like if you share my book with two friends you've earned this hat and so this can't be bought only earned and so you earn it by giving it and we had 50% of people who chose to get three that's incredible win and so was there an upsell after that or how was the that was it that was it the I mean if I if I had wanted to make money right do would have been a very it would
have been a very different you know I would have I would have structured things very differently but the objective of the event was to demonstrate that the concepts of this book work and the objective of my last book was to show that making an amazing offer can grow the sales on its own so that one I did zero advertising for and it sold 500,000 copies wow none no paid ads no event I had 10,000 followers on Instagram when I posted that it was before Alex rosi became Alex rosi it was literally internal sop that Leila
encouraged me to post as a book so I said fine and I added stories in it to make it interesting for my team because I was like if they don't read it it's not not going to matter so I added stories in it and then I post it as a book and then it just continues to S more month over month and so that is the hope you know obviously with this book too is that you make the product so exceptional that you get that that that lead getter bucket of customer telling other customers and
Affiliates telling other people um and I think that the goal was if I if I ask people to promote something and I say that it's going to be worth it that I have to absolutely deliver on that so that next year or two years from now if I say hey will you promote my next book they'll do it now if I had gone and and sold whatever some you know coaching thing or something like that right that would have been the last time they would have promoted me because I would have been for free right
yeah I would have been siphoning Their audience or whatever um but I wanted to just install even more Goodwill at scale by doing something that hopefully would be memorable that no one else would do and so I made uh a huge pitching presentation uh to stack all the value that I gave you know with this book and I price iner it at $122,000 and I started you started dropping dropping down um and and then uh I was like it's free and then everyone you know it became much more memorable event and then after the book
was free or was free book's free too the book's free too so the course is free the book's free on my podcast so on the game I have I actually also made my offers book free as well um just because people are like Alex makes his money on the $2 that the book cost so just just to dispel the myths uh offers and $100 million leads are both on my podcast in sequence you can just listen to them straight through but if you want it all together in a physical book you got to pay for
if you want to pay for yeah I mean if physical books cost money to print and ship so that but it was other get it for free on your podcast and we have to just and the course is on my site with no optate you don't even have to opt in for it you can just have it and so what I will say this this you might find this interesting is that it's always the scariest thing in terms of give like giving is always scary no matter how how much you have whatever it is like
if you work really hard on something there's a part of you that wants to monetize it right it's just it's inate to us right you want to get something back and so that's why it's so hard to delay gratification for such a long period of time but it's also what will make you stand out in a Marketplace of takers and so um that was what I I have consistently I mean I've preached this message of just give give give and you will be able to grow faster than you can imagine and the event EV was
probably the largest demonstration of that that I could do and what has now happened since then is you know we're number one in business on Spotify we're you know we're 19 in all podcasts um from doing that we get a you know 150,000 unique views a day on my site wow because the course is free it's huge and so people share it and that's the thing and people share the podcast because they got value from it and they know that they you know it's a $20 book I think on Audible audible picks the prices for
that but like it's but because there intrinsic value people will share it and I think it's that's the thing is people give away free fluff that sucks because they spend no time on it and then people consume it realize it's junk and then associate that junk with the person and then say you have a junk brand because I've Associated you with the one thing that I've consumed from you and so despite the fact that uh your customers only going to be 1% of the people that you ever advertise to or less your reputation is made
by the 99 wild and so if you want to control the reputation that you have then you need to give away more stuff and in a world where Trust is going to continually decrease and the amount of information and content is going to only increase with AI and things like that uh I believe that personal Brands and trust and Authority are going to be increasingly important I think that more companies will have celebrity Partners uh in order to gain trust because cost to acquire customers on paid ads has gone up 100% in a very short
period of time when you have when you have CAC so cost of work cust were increasing at that rate you have to have something that is going to counteract that and that's what brand is and so brand has never been more important than it is today and I think will only increase in importance and so this was a brand play that's incredible and so yeah we still you we sold 190,000 copies so far the first what week and a half two weeks yeah 10 days or 11 days whatever wow man 90,000 that's crazy man yeah
with no with no thousand pack bundles it's amazing yeah it's inspiring what are the um what are the how many pieces of content do you put out a day on all social media platforms right now we put 300 a week out 300 a week yeah and if you could go back to two years ago when you only had 10,000 followers yeah to now you have 5 million yeah on all platforms and two years what would you say to your younger self two years younger about the path to getting here the honest truth I wouldn't say
anything because I wouldn't want to mess anything up that's like that's the the real real do you think you can get there by posting less uh no I think the volume the volume is you know quantity creates quality like you learn you learn how to do things better by doing more of it and so I've I've wholeheartedly embraced that that perspective when it comes to making content um but I do believe that it's not just qu like because there are people who will post every single day and they get zero engagement Etc you know you're
not learning from it right you need feedback you still need feedback you need to take the feedback from the market and ideally you can also have feedback from people who know more than you and so use those two feedback mechanisms and the faster you can make that feedback loop the faster you'll learn and change your behavior and get better um and so you want to do tons of volume with tons of feedback because the like quality is better than quantity but you only get quality through quantity and the only thing better than that is quantity
with quality right then you really start to grow yeah and then you then you get you get wild um in terms of all the different platform distribution yeah it's been a it's been a super fun ride I'm very proud of the book yeah it's great man I know that there's nothing else that I could have done to make the book better at my current level maybe in two years right um I might have been able to I wrote I did 19 drafts I had four four rewrites um I did six hours a day for two
years that's great so I work from I work from six to noon uh every day on the book on the book and then unless you were here doing the interview with me of course and the afternoons my afternoons when I do my meetings and take calls and and do the remainder of my actual job right uh the only thing that I would add to this conversation right here I'm sure there's a lot more but the things popping out for me is people could hear that and say okay you could keep working on this for another
two more years until it's perfect cuz you said I like what you said is you put it out at the current level that you're at you couldn't anything thing else the where you're at right now maybe in two to four years you would have been like ah I could have changed this a little bit I think a lot of people get hung up on that they wait wait wait wait it's not ready yet yeah and this isn't ready for yourself 10 years from now right it's it's not as good as it could be in 10
years writing it yeah but it is as good where it is right now for your current self and I think people need to learn how to also ship quality with with what they can do it now and not just wait forever I think a lot of people uh hide under the guise of perfectionism when it's really just laziness and fear so the reality is they're like it's not ready yet but they're working on it three hours a week they're not going all day and obsessing no so I mean like I I think the whole like
it's it's tension between two extremes right you've got the MVP which mean Min minimum viable product ship it as fast as you can if you are proud of your first product it sucks right and on the other hand you have uh you know Apple that ships a new product every like three years or you know and they they really only have four products than built a$3 trillion doll company so where you know where on this Continuum do you lie and I think it's it's learning the rights it's honestly probably matching your personality to the work
that you do but regardless work has to be done and so I could say this it's like if you work on something for six hours a day every single day and you truly work on it when I say work I mean like you set a timer and when the time when you step away or you look at your phone you stop the timer when you six hours of actual work on something every single day um you will know the things that you could do to make it better and if you do all of those things
and the difference is is being very clear on the problem definition so that's okay so this might round out this whole conversation you to be really clear about the problem that the product if you're if we're talking about making product is supposed to solve and so I could then of course write a whole book on sales and I could write a whole book book on you know monetization I got like so then then the scope would then change so you have to be ruthless with the problem definition of the scope of whatever thing that you're
trying to solve is but then within that very narrow line is this everything I can do in this tiny little sliver if it's everything that I can do then you can ship it and so I think that's the that like you're not going to create the everything solution you're not going to create HubSpot CRM when you're a coder in your basement but you can probably create an autoresponder that works exceptionally well mm mhm and so do that just do that don't add the other do just make the one of my favorite stories about product iteration
was Dragon Dictation do you know Dragon way back in the day like '90s right and so you got you got a headset and you would talk and it would type and this was thing I remember and they got uh louded praised by like Tech magazine or crunch or whatever it is um for Dragon 2.0 and in Dragon 2.0 they literally added zero new features they just made it work better wow and I think that is like the spirit of true product Innovation is that a lot of people think they need more bells and whistles but
if you just fulfilled the first promise that you made and really did it and did it better then you can make 10 times more money by doing something twice as well because it's just how much better like if I said it's more efficient yeah if I can if I said I can get you customers I don't need to also hire your stat if I can just do that I fulfilled my promise and this book specifically only sits between somebody who doesn't know you exist and someone says they're interested in what you have to sell that's
it as soon as someone says I would like to find out more that book is done everything that that 280 pages is to get you from I don't know who you are to I'm interested to buy to find out more I would I would like to consider buying your stuff which is why the sub headline is how to get strangers to want to buy your stuff not to get them to buy your stuff to buy your stuff is sales yeah and that's the third book stay tuned for that uh they can get the book for
free on your podcast you got a course on your site acquisitions.com acquisition. they can follow you everywhere Heros if you love hard copies you can go to shop at.com and grab a hard copy I would get this get a few copies for sure um uh it's pretty right it's on where can they get the hard copy it's on Amazon too yeah it's on yeah uh the I think I think paperbacks are hardback if you like hardbacks uh I have them yeah have shop. acquisition. comom shop. acquisition. I'm sure if you just go to the site
all my money all your $299 in books exactly um if people are business owners that are looking to be a part of your portfolio I'm sure they can go to acquisition. comom and they can learn more and apply and see what's going on there in business owners it's just for for absolute Clarity it's really like if you're doing 2 million or more in profit and we have actually narrowed our focus a little bit more to brick-and mortar chains so we've just we've just crushed all the brick and mortar chains that we have invested in and
so we are smart we are at least what you know best of you did brick and mortar yeah I mean so you're speaking into it've you did gyms you photography studios teeth whitening we've like like if you have like a if you have like a health or a beauty uh I call them like body Services anything t salon exactly you know tattoo removal uh laser skin hair removal that kind of stuff like that is our that is our Jam there you go yeah that is our gy they'll reach out to you they can message you
they can go on acquisition. comom get a few copies of the book I think this is really inspiring I love this stuff uh you know I've been doing a lot of this for the last 10 15 years on myself and I went through this and I was like oh there's actually some stuff that I can really start to start to apply even better even though I've you know mastered to a certain level there's so many different things that I was pulling out from I was like okay cool I can steal like an artist here here
here here so control X I was like this is really smart yeah so um it doesn't matter if you're a beginner or if you're you know got a big business you're going to learn something from this so make sure to get a few copies give them to friends uh I can't wait for the next one I can't wait to have you back on in the in the future soon grateful for you Alex thank you for being here is there anything else you want to add before we wrap up you guys are savages I appreciate you
all and uh man I was about to curse can I curse on this show we bleep it out but you can okay could anyone who tells you otherwise do you I actually think in some ways the lazier you are if you can get over the initial hump the more successful you can be because what happens is if you give a hardworking person a problem they give you a hardworking solution if you give a lazy person a problem they'll give you a lazy man solution what's the easiest way to do this right and a lot of
times some of the best problems in the world get solved by deciding they're not problems what do you mean it's like uh