Alex Hormozi’s $100 Million Business Blueprint

Alex has just stepped me through his blueprint to make any business work and make you a million dooll business from opening gyms to launching software startups Alex knows how to make any business worth a million dollars so Alex what are we going to learn today from you so we're going to go through nine steps number one is figuring out who you are number two who to sell to number three is what to sell them four got to get them to buy number five how many times so this is getting them to buy more times number

six who's going to help you do that even more number seven is you're going to keep your advantage cuz now you're starting to get ahead and then stick with it because this is usually when it's like okay I feel like business uh business is starting to get boring and then you just keep getting better and you never stop and so those are nine steps to building a million dollar business as I've gone through in my life and I try to translate from my audiio so tell us how people figure out who they are what what

was the process that you went through and what's the process people need to go through so I think there's a lot of um confusion around identity and I think a lot of it is around like I want to have these I want to have these traits or like I wish I were born was I wish I were more charismatic I wish I were more patient and I don't think people translate them into the behaviors that create the trait and so the traits themselves are just bundled terms so let's say someone's charismatic they're like I want

to be charismatic all right well if I look at somebody and say cool be charismatic someone would just stare back like how right well you need to do small easy no but that's and so what's interesting is that you've already went to start translating it but Charisma patience a lot of these things are what I call bundled terms and so there's single words that actually have series of behaviors underneath them that when we see them in in the wild we then describe that person as charismatic so they nod up and down when you talk right

they repeat back what you say at the end of whenever you take a pause during your breathing breathing they they smile um they increase the volume of when they talk uh and they have different tonalities as in like they go up and then they go down they speed up uh they emphasize words and so it's basically looking at all of these micro behaviors and if you do all of these things they shake hands firmly uh they make eye contact and so all of these things then it's like oh so I don't I don't need to

try and be charismatic I just need to nod when people are talking I need to repeat back to them what they just said I need to smile when they walk in the room I need to be able to enunciate and speak with volume and not just be monotone I need to be go up and down and up and down and speed up and slow down when it's important I need to shake people's hands uh with confidence I need to make eye contact if I do those things other people will describe me as charismatic and so

when I look at you know the version of who I would like to be I say what are the traits that I think of and then what are the behaviors that associate with those traits and then that way it makes something that seems unattainable like man I wish I were more X it's like well you can be that if you just think what must occur in order for someone to describe someone as this thing and so that's been honestly one of the big things that like it really changed my life because a lot of these

things feel like out of your control it's like I wish but it's just a lot of times we just break skills down same thing when we're teaching someone if I said um hey build a company you can go do that because you have because that would be like a big bundled thing can you just go build a company sure I can now leveled down one it's like okay so do you know how to advertise do you know how to sell do you know how to create a product or a service do you know how to

hire people it's like all of those are bundled skills underneath and you can basically derive everything all the way down to turn on the computer turn on Internet Explorer type in in a website and so at every level whenever someone gets confused about what to do it's like just break it down and that's fundamentally how we like to train teams but also it started with me which is like who what do I need to do and I think this is my um this is something that I'm going to be hitting on really hard doing is

being and so if You' ever heard that the saying be do have have you heard of this yep I hate it because people are like have to become this type of person to do this type of stuff to have this thing but if the doing creates the having then we don't need to worry about having because doing is the actual thing we control and if we describe someone only by the behaviors they do then being also happens as a result of doing which means it's just do so Nike is always had it right it's true

though yeah like I definitely wasn't charismatic when I was old younger and and I think this also people almost embarrassed to call themselves a certain label but you can train to be anything this is my thing about entrepreneurship that kind of like anyone can be an entrepreneur true and people get really annoyed me when I say that oh no it's no it's tough you know you got to worry about cash flow well if you can't get a good accountant you know like you know I I think it's interesting because people always have a reason why

it's such a bloody hard thing to do and if you break it down like this it's not right um but how do people this this thing of who you are though is it a genetics thing though as well like maybe some people just can't be charismatic maybe they can't smile I mean you know what I mean like it's because I think my my wife is and she she never listens to this stuff so I can say this I wouldn't describe her as charismatic I describe her as beautiful and intelligent um but she doesn't she doesn't

really bother shaking hands firly she just who she is you know so do you think this is a personality thing here or anyone can learn to be charismatic that's the end of it or is it going to be feeling a bit false for no I think 100% of people can learn I mean I have a fundamental belief about the world which is all things are trainable it's just that not all things are worth training yeah you got to be motivated to be to turn turn I think about it from return on resources so it's like

even if like I think as a I I believe someone genuinely with Down Syndrome could learn to become or at least rather learn to do brain surgery would the amount of resources required in order to teach that person be a good use of resources probably not if intelligence is rate of learning then it's the rate of behavior change like how quickly can we get someone to change Behavior at least for me that's how I Define intelligence and so if I were to train my team and say hey do this thing and the next time they

walk in they do that new thing under the same conditions they've learned quickly they're a more intelligent person and so um I think it's simply that the rate of learning differs between people but all people are trainable that's how we learn everything Plus what you're saying if you reverse it if you train yourself then it's not about us deciding the resource you get it's about you deciding the effort you make is it right so so so to concluding this bit I mean who you are is who you what you want to be is it so

so that goes back to modeling yourself and perhaps the people you admire or the people you have the life you want sure and then go learn what they know MH and do what they do and I think that's and um I'll actually give one that I think um is helpful for a lot of people is like it's making sure that we're doing the things that they did at that stage and so you know uh if you want to become a billionaire doesn't mean go fly on private jets because billionaires fly on private jets if you

want to become tall it doesn't mean you go play basketball and so it's it's conflating what like what was the cause what was the effect right and so um we want to not model where people are today and how they act today but we want to model the rise we want to model what they did at the beginning and so one of the tough Parts about that is usually when you're in the grind like one of my biggest regrets in the world is that I have zero sales that I had recorded when I was in

person and I have over 4,000 101 sales that I done and all the stuff I learned there I never had any recordings and so it's like because I didn't think oh I'm going to later someday in the future have a YouTube channel and I'm going to be teaching this stuff I was like just trying to sell memberships you what I mean and so I I I say that because I try and remember to the best of my ability and I do that through teaching you know our teams and whatnot like hey do this and do

this and so um we do our best to remind everyone who's coming up like this is what I was doing don't look at what I'm doing now look at what I was doing then oh I think yeah doing things so powerful because that's how also you remember you can read you can hear someone tell you how to do something you can listen to this video but if you don't go out and apply it you probably won't remember it yeah yeah nothing will happen that's the guarantee so that's a good place to start you can be

anything maybe decide what you want to be I mean a lot of people in sales for example um say oh you need to be an extrovert to do sales I'm like my biggest salesperson in my last company was my accountant no one more introverted no and do you know what cuz she was introverted she was slightly more trusted yeah cuz she would only say things that people she' go to a meeting CFOs and talk about how brilliant our company was those CFOs who also introverted would go back to the office talk to the CEO and

say you should get Simon's company in cuz I just heard from the CFO what they're doing there you know best sales technique ever but she didn't think she was a salesp person if i' interviewed her and said welcome to the company you're going to be our number one sales person would have even started yeah but yeah so it's all about using your personality traits to also be applied right what next um so the second one is like okay so you have to acquire enough of these traits bundled terms to just take action so if I

had to do the what's the tldr of the last phage which just do something that's it like if all of this was around doing it's do something because currently nothing is happening in your life and so in order for something to change you have to do something now once you decide okay I'm going to take action then it's like okay who am I selling to this is one that people get really confused about and I think people want to start with what do I sell like two and three what to sell are very much interrelated

right because who you sell to is going to determine what you're going to sell right if I decide that Pilots are going to be my the people that I feel like selling then I can't be like oh well I have these you know this uh this insurance thing that does for houses it's like I don't know if that's really the the right match for that particular thing and so sometimes you come in with some past experience um and so I like to I know I'm going I'm going out of order but hopefully it'll it'll work

out in the end um but I think there's three PS around uh what people figure out and I I tend to talk more about Services than products and I do that because at least in the US 8% of businesses of services great way to start as well service is very easy business right at the end of the day you're just doing something that other people don't want to do for money right and so pain profession and then passion and so almost all businesses can get derived from one of these three things which is like you

had some painful experience you overcame and so that's you know a mom who helps uh her kids pack lunches who have uh food allergies it's like if you figured out how to overcome that then you can help other people do it too if you overcame some sort of depression thing it's like you can help other people do that if you didn't know how to advertise your big business and then you figured out how to do Google paperclick it's like that's something that's it's a pain pain is you know uh relative but time saving if you

can save people time is way translating it oh totally and then the second one is profession so a lot of people do have jobs but want to start a business and so um whatever you do in a company fundamentally is something that other companies probably want and so you can always fractionalize whatever your professional skill is between multiple companies and so that's just taking a skill that you already have in the workplace and just selling it to other people and then passion is like okay well I love uh I'm really interested in model cars okay

well can you build a a business around model cars absolutely you could build a subscription on building them you could build the actual products around them you could make a Channel about painting model cars you like there's a zillion things that you could do there but in each of these it's usually something you overcame some sort of professional skill that you learned or some passion and so that usually goes into what to sell the most common person to sell to is someone like you so most if you look at uh like w combinator and a16z

some of the best uh Venture startup investors uh one of the one of the requirements that they often have is what they call living with the problem and so they want people who've had a lot of surface area a lot of exposure many repetitions over years with many different types of solutions and why they don't work and so on one hand sure you can be like I'm going to just I'm going to think of this beautiful idea but most of the times it's like what do I hate what what bothers me um because you because

then you don't have to do all this market research to figure out like how do these people talk like what are what are their innate desires you just say like well what do I want and it's a much faster path and I think that's where um this is where a lot of people um end up starting in terms of who to sell to they sell people like that you don't much research in the market when you when you know exactly your own problem and interestingly even at the top level like Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook to

solve his own awkward problem of being socially awkward yeah he didn't he wanted to meet girls he wanted to be liked he wanted friends but he found it socially awkward to go out so he built a platform to solve his own problem turns out a lot of people have that problem so I think this like you thing is a really easy way to sell I guess Um passion and purpose do you differentiate the two um no I just not to say that it's not true I just I usually use those three PS CU I think

if people I I my I believe in sales it's a it's a there's three steps right which is like people do it the one way around normally but the first step is do you like the person does the person like you the relationship stuff I don't know people spend enough time doing that second is do people need what you're selling sure lot of people spend a lot of time selling something they don't need right and then the third step of course is like pricing and all that sort of stuff but I think lot the time

like I I took 9 years to get to Apple as a client n years but it's because I had a passion and a purpose to build a company I wanted to build something that was respected Apple being a client would would help my company being be respected I think that purpose really helps you get through in the end on sales oh yeah and so um yeah these are I mean this is kind of like the the the cycle of of of figuring it out and then when you once you're like okay well I get it

pain profession passion but underneath of those things um like what what really is it and so typically you're going to have you can either sell products so that's physical stuff right tangible things you can put it in someone's hand there's Services which is you just do stuff for other people which is fundamentally services are wrapped to time and there's two types of time one is the time to learn the skill and the other is the time to do the skill so underneath it's some sort of information advantage that you have and then the actual doing

and execution and so those are F like Services can be as simple as I know how to how to mow my lawn I just don't want to do it um on the other hand it could be be hey uh I know how to code and I can code this you know site a certain way it's like okay not only do I not want to take the time to do it to learn it I also don't want to take the time to do it and so when you're thinking about products or Services those are those are

the two um kind of buckets as I think about them and then you have SAS or software you've got software as a service you've got apps things like that um you have something that I like to go into which is just access you've got risk you've got money and so these are all things that people can buy and sell Banks buy and sell money insurance buy and sell risk access if you think real estate there's physical access they digital access um SAS is basically these things just put in a digital format and so this gives

gives you kind of like a a jump start of like well what do I how do I take my passion it's like okay we'll pick one of these ways it's like you could sell the model cars you could build the cars for people and then sell them you could have assass that helps people design their own cars you could have events where you bring people together uh and they can show off their cars and race them and whatever and then you can charge for T you know for access to that or media access like if

you have um like for me like this would be like education would still kind of fit inside of here it's like access to some sort of media risk you could ensure people's collections around their cars if they have really valuable car collections uh you know model cars and then money is hey maybe uh people need lending for this stuff who knows and so fundamentally like that's how I think through um what am I going to sell I I think as well it's very interesting around the service side because in my agency business for example I

was selling the services someone else's design ability their time to someone I wasn't even doing the service but I helped the person the designers didn't like to sell they're shy they want to sit at their computer creating right so I didn't even have the skill to do the design but I was able to sell the service I think I think this list is brilliant um so when okay so people have who to sell to and what you're going to sell are in interl so you've decided what you're going to do here I'm going to add

one thing to this CU I think so will be helpful for people we're starting out and so I talk about this a ton in in my stuff but one of the in my opinion one of the things that matters a ton is is pricing right and so it's a lot easier to sell a 100 people a $10,000 thing than is to sell 10,000 10,000 people a $100 thing there's just so much more distribution that you need to get and so for me I look at do the people that I want to sell my thing have

the money for my thing and if everybody's broke in this particular market then I might consider well is there anything else I know how to do or anything else I'm I'm passionate about or anything else that I I a professional skill around so the first thing is money the second thing um is how easy are these people to find like is it really hard to find this you know this particular subset of people um or can I find them pretty easily are they directories or their associations with them if so then it's easy for me

to reach out or show up at those conferences or whatever um the next thing is I'd rather have the market be growing like if I can if I'm about to pick what business I'm going to get into I'd rather go into one where there's more demand than there is Supply right like I'd rather just have the Tailwind rather than a headwind one of my uh one of my one of my friends friends um had a business that sold to newspapers and Brilliant guy and basically he was trying to transition them from print ads to give

them a second ad product that was digital so he's like he could convert all of their uh print ads into digital ads onto their website and so it makes sense it's like you know it's AV on guard it's like hey you just have another product you can now sell you don't have to do anything you just make more money like it's a good offer the problem is that newspapers at least in the US were shrinking by 25% per anom every year compounding the wrong direction 25% a year and so now if he he had to

gain 25% market share every year just to keep his company the same size because people were just going out of business even it's in the digital space which is the growing PA right but they didn't have any money to pay for that service yeah and then the final one is uh if I had to pick between two things I'd rather have one where people are in pain and so you good at dra excent um is is you want searing hot pain whenever you can and when I say pain it doesn't necessarily mean like people are

like oh my God like you know I've got cancer I'm going to die but just that the annoyances of taking out the trash every day it's like it's just the problems are things that people would rather not do and again it's going to be things they'd rather not learn or just things they'd rather not do and those are the easiest things now when you combine these things together is when you can charge a lot more like if it's just like a lot of times when you start out like very very early days you probably don't

know anything that other people don't know I'm just being real right and so a lot of the the the earliest businesses you start are are what you know we' probably consider Blue Collar businesses so it's like it's cleaning it's it's lawn care it's painting um these are not you know you can learn how to do it in a weekend but that's okay because business takes a really long time to learn and so it's like okay well at least let me I'll just have something simple that I can do here and then I can learn all

the other skills around business by practicing it and so I just these are kind of the four characteristics of if I'm going to get into a market I want to make sure that they've got the money they're easy to find it's growing and they're in pain I hope you writing this down folks I wish i' done this when I was younger I mean I I built a service business we talking about it off camera and sometimes you you're selling so hard to a market that doesn't have enough money it's so much harder anyone's going to

faed it sales if you if you put yourself in a place where the people don't have enough pain they got too many choice too choices you got to have that pain to create the closing situational selling and this is actually um I think this will be really relevant for your your history with the creative agency so there's this story that I really like a lot where a father gives his son an old car you might have heard this one um but father gives his son an old car and he says if you want you can

sell it and then you can take the money and you know buy yourself some what something else and so he says why don't you go down to the um the pawn shop and see what they'll they'll give you and so he you know kid goes comes back and he looks a little bit down he he's like what's up he's like oh they said they'd give me 2500 bucks he's like all right well go to the dealership see if you can trade it in there for you know for something else so he goes there comes back

he said well hey they they'll give me $5,000 he's like okay that's an improvement uh and he says hey why don't you go down to the uh the old the old Collectibles uh Auction House see see what they'll do and so the kid goes there and he comes back and he's he comes back he's jump for he's like Dad you won't believe it you won't believe it he's like they say this is an old collectible car and it's worth $100,000 and he was like the biggest lesson here is that sometimes it's the exact same thing

but who you sell to changes everything and So within the services that you have if if Simon had gone back and sold to really small businesses the like branding and creative and logo design and things like that I would bet that the vast majority of those businesses couldn't appreciate what the service was and what the value of even branding is to begin with because they' be like yeah but how's this give me leads and only a more advanced business can appreciate the upside of how much uh return on Advertising return on throughput you get by

having kind of a brand halo effect but you have to be of a certain size and so if you had that skill set and then you were like hey Alex Simon I started my business but no one wants to buy it the first question we'd probably ask is okay well are you good at your thing and if if you check the box he like yeah I think this guy's good well who are you selling to it's like well I'm just tring to sell to uh to local lawn care services it's like well that's un that's

not surprising to me that they wouldn't buy but in that moment you might think oh I suck at business you were just selling to the wrong people and I think that's why this is so important is making sure who you sell to is one of the biggest levers that you can have on success can I tell another story yeah go please so there was a um a cro company that came through here um that we were looking at to invest in and it was it was great so this guy was a really good coder really

good CR you know conversion optimization for websites and um um he had a really really cool business but what was interesting is he and I had this conversation we said oh yeah when I work with a million-dollar year e-commerce store and I you know raised their througha by 10% he's like it only adds $100,000 to the business he said but when I go to an e-commerce store that does 100 million and I add 10% it's the same amount of work he's like I had 10 million to the business and so I can charge so much

more money for the exact same work because in a very real way it is more valuable I did create more value but it wasn't because of me it was because of them and so one of the biggest leverage you can have on success is doing the same work for better people yeah I you know the stories really really resonate with me and again I wish I'd heard you speak uh 20 years ago I I remember um when I first started the business we were selling graphic designs we go to someone do you want a logo

do you want a brand and they pay a certain amount and I I managed to get quite good fees out of it because we were good but then one day I gave ideas to someone for free yeah and they said oh I would have paid a lot for that and what I realized is we shouldn't be selling the creative we should selling the concepts the creative is almost like a commodity so we started selling the ideas that's where we were getting millions of dollars from and then the execution was like well lots of people could

design it now you just give them the brief you know go fer and they'll they'll go make exactly that got commod which by the way is a little bit unfair cu the actual creative part is really tough but people don't value it and pain isn't pain is in the idea so we go to CNN and give them an idea they well that's that's valuable but just the execution almost is secondary so you can always take your existing service and just tweak it a bit and you'll get a lot more uh out of it if you

do that all right so people hopefully have made a list of who they're going to sell to and what they're going to sell what's next in this so now we got to get them to buy so it's like this is all great you know we've got some of these character traits we decideed to start taking action we figure out who we want to sell to we figure out what we want to sell so now and we're going to write there we go I need to have a purpose in this see this is it I get

to write one and so now we got to give to buy and so uh I know s you've got your you've got your sales framework the one that I've been teaching for years is is uh is closer so there are a million sales Frameworks out there this is just the one that's it's just consistently work for me teaching uh you know teams of guys out in the road whatever um and for years I actually just taught clothes and it was only uh probably in the last four or five years that I added the r on

there hope you trade mark this I don't know who knows CL I hope everyone just learns how to sell um so the first thing is is like basically okay now that I'm in front of this who and I've got the what how do I get them to give me money and so this is basically a structure for our conversation which is the first thing that we like to do is clarify why they're there so the person and the nice thing with any sales conversation is that there's always something that someone has done to indicate interest

like you can't unless someone is still listening to you they opened the door they clicked on the email they responded with with a comment they dm'd you they opted in on your site like someone has to take some initial uh move towards you in order to they they indicate interest and so all you have to do then is just ask them why so say hey why did you why did you respond to my post hey why did you why did you DM me hey why did you opt in on my site and you're just asking

them why you're clarifying the problem right and so the second step and this is all listening right you're just asking questions so what brought you in today what was the main reason what are you struggling with right now and then and this is just a very small step but super important which is we label them with a problem and say okay I got it John uh so it sounds like you're here and you want to get here and this has been the thing in your way does that sound about right and this is also active

listening so for me from a rapport building perspective if you say back to someone what they just said they're like oh this guy's great this guy this guy's brilliant charismatic exactly and so we label them or problem and we have you're here you want to get here here's the scap okay so then and this is just out of just experience um we overview the past experiences that they've had and I call this the pain cycle and um I didn't know why this worked I just knew that it did work and so so the key Point

here is you say hey so what have you done so far to try and solve this what have you done and then they're going to start listing out I did this and then we just ask okay well how'd that work for you and then obviously they're talking to you so it didn't work so it's a loaded you know like you're you're just pushing on this pain getting them to realize it yeah basically yeah and so I have this um fundamental belief that all salespeople are just motivational speakers fundamentally just on a one-on-one basis and so

all we're trying to do is motivate someone to take action and so if you know that at least for me if I think that that's that's what it is it just comes down to motivating someone then what creates motivation and so I spent a really long time trying to think through this but it's actually the opposite is what creates motivation deprivation creates motivation so if I'm starving then I'm very motivated to eat if I'm if I'm exhausted I'm very motivated to sleep and with that same concept what we want to do is basically remind them

we want to deprive them remind them of how deprived they are of this thing and how much pain they've gone through up to this point and so we try and ask them what they did ask them how that worked ask them what they liked and what they didn't like about that thing when they say the things that they liked you associate that with oh I think if you like that you're going to love this and if they hated that it's like oh that's great I understand why you struggle with that because later we're going to

take notes of that and we're going to make sure that we don't talk about that stuff if we have anything similar to that in our product and so after we've gone through this pain cycle and you just keep asking anything else you've done anything else you've tried until V is like no that's that's about it they say awesome John I think that you're going to love what what we've got for you can I tell you about it so this is where we asked for permission to make the sale and so um I go sell the

vacation so I have this little moniker about um selling that a lot of people sell the plane flight and not Maui or Hawaii or whatever your vacation spot is and so they they then go right into you know jargon they're like oh we're going to we're going to do these color tones and we're going to have this palette for your logo and like they're like what is is going on but what people want it's you know people don't want to buy drills they buy holes right the drill is just a vehicle and so what we

want is to talk about the the the the the light Breeze in their hair what it's like at Sunset what they're going to feel like when they've got their feet in the sand and they're drinking the cold you know my taii at the beach and they're with their loved ones and making a memory that they'll have for the rest of their lives so so the sizzle nut steak it's a simple we exactly but what we don't want to sell is the TSA the plane checking take your shoes off the guy farting next to you the

terrible I don't know why they have sell planes flying in the air that's not the enjoyable B is it unless you're in business class maybe but I really it's not enjoyable why do they settle that every Airline listening should change right now what they're doing and so I do something that I call a three-pillar pitch and so I almost always try and chunk up my basically my selling points to three points why three I don't know but three is just always worked really well and so the three-pillar pitch I like to have basically one statement

and then a metaphor and so if there's and I used to teach this for Fitness sales all the time so it's like there's three things Fitness Nutrition accountability and with that it's like you want to have a three-legged stool that if you're missing one of the sides it's not going to work right and so it's like if you just work out then you're and you're not eating well then you're going to it doesn't matter you're not going to lose weight if you just eat well but you're not working out you're going to lose muscle and

you're going to rebound back is that right and if because we just knew about their pain cycle they're like yeah I've had that happen before like no exactly so you know that and if I give you the best fitness and the best training in the world I say the best fitness and the best nutrition plan in the world but you don't actually do it cuz no one holds you accountable it's not going to happen either and so you got to have all three and when you have all three you can't lose right and so that's

the three pillars and so when I would create scripts for I was to like a completely opposite script I made a script for a B2B mortgage sales company and so I was like okay they were selling leads to uh Realtors and so it's like okay so I spent the whole morning I was like what are the three things it's like okay you want leads that are exclusive to you you want them to be qualified and you want them to be timely you want them to be like they just stopped it in they've got they're really

interested and no one else is calling them but me that's what you want in leads and so it's like these are the three things and so then for each of those three things you then just make one analogy or story that relates it and so if I wanted to do you know explain accountability I would say okay have you ever heard of The Amazing Race it was a show that happened even if they had doesn't matter they're like yeah so there was actually this this couple that won so many times they had to change the

rules do you know what they did differently they're like what he's like so what they did was whenever they land into a new area and they had to find the new location they would immediately grab a local and say hey can you get in the back of the car and just tell us where to go and by doing that they always beat everyone else and so the thing is is that you want to guide and so that's exactly what we're going to do with the accountability and so I have like six different accountability stories but

that's one of them right and so it's like you just want to have one story for each of the pillars and then you just say does that make sense they say yes and then you just move on to the next pillar and you'll notice that like at least for me especially in high volume transactional sales so I would say like b2c sales consumer sales where it's you know oneandone kind of sales I found that like when I'm like on fire in terms of selling the person's walking out the door and they're super excited they're like

I don't even know what I just signed up for because the thing is is that like the more and the weeds we get the more questions they're going to have about it and as long as you're confident whatever it is that you sell just know that you're going to take care of them because you explaining the macros and the calories and the rep schemes like they don't even know what it is anyways and so they're going to KN along and try and ask questions they don't even know why they're asking the question like what kind

of certifications you have we just ask which ones you're looking for and they're like like right so you're just they want to seem like they're in like they're asking informed questions but they just don't know what to do and so we do a three-pillar pitch and and then we say great so then we transition to the close so we ask for the sales that makes sense awesome you want to get started on Monday yes or no whatever and then you start moving through it now if they say anything but yes away says explain away I'm

writing vertical concerns all right so you want to explain away they're concerns and so most concerns mind if I eras this top here so most concerns at least as I I think through them is you've got timing concerns which is I'm really busy right now you've got um uh preference concerns which is I don't like this particular thing about your solution you've got uh money right you've got money SL Roi whatever you've got stalls which is uh sounds similar to timing but completely different which is can you give me some time to think about it

versus I don't have time they both have the word time in it for sales guys off finally you want to just cover past experiences and so this is where I I signed up with a creative agents you just learn like yours and they burn me so so you want to make sure that you have something to overcome um that particular thing and so once you understand what the core things that people have in that they present with that are the reasons why they don't want to do something you just need to understand the logical arguments

for each of these these bullets so with timing uh this is all about priorities so everyone's got the same times you just say hey how important is this to you okay then it means that there's something else in your 24 hours a day that we need to trade that's less important than this as long as you explain that to them then you're good preferences is they want your result their way if you change the variables of the way that I do it if you just want to do Fitness and Nutrition not accountability then you're not

going to get the result so if you change the variables you change the outcome and so it's just like always thinking they want my results their way you can't uh you can't just I mean the amount of times I'd have you know ladies trying to lose weight be like can I just eat what I'm currently eating and then do your program and I was like no because what you're currently eating is getting you what you're currently getting right and so then we have Roi which uh we solve with logic proof and payment terms so logic

is just understanding like if this does this is it worth it okay so if it is then the problem is that they don't believe you and so then it's all around proof like how many different varieties of testimonials can I demonstrate that are as similar to them as possible to get them to believe me and you know we have our little belief breaking formula but I won't even get into that uh and then you've got uh payment terms so it's like okay the person logically understands they believe they could happen then it just gets into

Logistics of payment which is like okay can you break this up for me can I do half now half later whatever you've got stalls which is again I need to think about it um but here what we do is we walk them through a logical decision so we say okay do you think that you'll be more successful uh if you do this than if you didn't do it yes okay do you think that uh if you do it on your own versus doing it with us you will get close to your goal yes do you

have access or know somebody who has access to the money to get started yes yes yes great then you made a logical decision and so a lot of people are just afraid of making mistakes and so um with stalls we want to figure out what the fear is and so the number one triage question that we ask is if you have less Rapport we just say what's your main concern if you have a little bit more Rapport I just ask like what are you afraid of having happen and you can lower your voice a little

bit they're like I just don't want my husband to say that I spent money on this thing again you're like totally understand what if this is the thing that 5 years Som now you look back on and you're like what if I hadn't done that and you're sitting there completely changed your lifestyle and you you know your husband and you guys are so much better now I was like what if you look back on this one moment because I think about this with my wife I'm I'm swiping on my phone if I had left on

the app and I hadn't met Lea my life would be completely different than it is right now eight or 9 years later and so it's like I just don't want that to happen to you like oh man okay and so then I didn't know you met an app did you should give him a plug who was it it was Bumble oh really there you go Bumble hold on and so this is uh so if someone has a past experience so hey I I worked with a creative agency before and it didn't work therefore you won't

work yeah and so I have yet to have a an overcome here um there's also decision maker I use I use for this one but oh this one's killer so I'll tell you how to do it so um with Bern you twice you just say listen you had something bad that happened in the past and the only thing worse than having a bad investment is letting a bad investment prevent you from making a good one right right now great and so then we do a metaphor so it's like hey are you married a lot of

times if you're old like they're like yeah you're with somebody yes okay did you ever date anybody before that person yeah you ever da like middle school or high school yeah yeah now imagine after your first Middle School boyfriend or girlfriend you said so it just means that that person wasn't right for you it doesn't mean that all people aren't right for you and so there's a big difference and so they're I get it it's like you don't want to let that person burn you twice once for when it happened and once when it stops

you from having the good thing and then there's decision maker which is uh I don't have the authority to make the decision I don't bring that one up because it's one of the hardest ones to overcome and people have a lot of uh harsh beliefs in the comments about how I overcome this stuff cuz they're like you should always get permission from this spouse and it depend if you're buying a house yeah you're going to need permission from the spouse kind of yeah and so obviously you want to bring that person if you know that

whatever you sell requires somebody else you want to make sure the decision makers are on the call but there are times when you're in a selling situation where like you've got one shot and so for us I try to overcome decision maker um or authority to make the decision by by first saying okay well uh what if they say no and so if I have a guy I'll lean into his ego and i' be like what if your wife doesn't give you permission yeah better ask to forgiveness than permission I used that at the very

end yeah yeah but yeah so what if she what if she doesn't give you permission cuz then it makes them really and they're like no I could it's like oh great let's get you going you know what I mean as soon as they bounce back you're good but if they say no I wouldn't do it then you say well what do you think they'd be against so now I'm still not on I'm now isolating towards variables like what like what are the actual things that they would say no to because I can overcome that not

the decision and so they're like oh they'd be over you know it'd be this particular thing but now I'm off decision now if they're still like no it it it doesn't matter it's like okay well just do they know that you're here right now they know that you're struggling with this thing yeah they know that you're struggling are they are they are they do they approve of that they don't know they don't approve of it they're not happy that I'm that I'm struggling with this it's like oh then why would they be against something that

they already don't approve of so they go relying on past agreements so it's like you you already have the permission they know that you're struggling why wouldn't they want you to solve it and it's like well if your wife's anything like my wife like we end up making it work in the end anyways right and then we'll go into um I think you I think you might be asking for permission instead of support deep psychology get started to be marriage counselor is it it's time you stood up for yourself you know like well cuz then

you play it out you say listen because if you if you don't do this and you don't do it because of your wife or whatever cuz let's say you go home and she says no okay fine well play this forward 5 years your business isn't in the place you want it to be you're not the weight you want to be you have this back pain you whatever the thing that you sell around is it's like 5 years from now who are you going to blame you going to blame her you going to blame you I

don't think it's fair to either of you because at the end of the day it's your life and you got to be able to make these decisions now again I just think and this is where you go into like I think you're asking for permission when you really just give need support by the way Amazon do a brilliant job of TI Tak most of these off but just saying we'll give you a refund you can send it back and it won't cost you anything so my wife gets a package a day and she's like don't

worry if I don't like it I can send it back so like I don't object and it's like okay fine you know I don't see much going back but the point is you can just get rid of it money back guarantee or giving people some comfort oh 100% yeah or delay or you can do a delay pay with the payment term you say hey just say yes now sign the contract I'll delay the payment till Friday and between now and then if you go home and your husband says no sweetie I want you to live

10 10 years less long I want you to be fat I want you to have generational unhel Die Young yeah exactly if he says that you call me out first I'll talk to him exactly and so I make some jokes about it and then the final one here is let's assum you explain a way they're concerned they're like yeah I want to do it um and I added this one later which is you reinforce the decision and so one of the the major things that happens and I I had to add this in because I

wanted my sales guys to make sure that they completed the transition or the handoff to customer success in onboarding and until I had this it was just like explain their concerns close the deal and then it was like I'm done and so it was like no we have to bridge this we have to reinforce that they made a great call so say hey right now I'm going totr you to Sarah Sarah's going to get you started hey Sarah this is John John's trying to retire his wife John's trying to get in shape for a wedding

whatever it is um Sarah's going to help you take the next steps now then Sarah is going to start the onboarding conversation of how do I relate the actions that this person has to take with their goal and say hey we're going to help you retire way we're going to help you get look good for that wedding but these are the first three steps anyway so that's so that's how you get people to give you money in England there's a new gym that's open up called third space and one of the things they've done is

they've also limited Supply so they basic I went there it's p gym it's like $1,000 a month for it and they're like we don't have his space right now yeah but put you on the waiting list and then and then a few days later they ring you up say someone's just left but do you want it now yeah and that's actually a brilliant I'm like yeah okay I'll do so limiting suppli is another element great I hope you're enjoying the podcast of Alex I've just written a book guys it's taken me 35 years to get

all this knowledge and I put it all in here it will help you remove any subconscious bias you have for stopping you from starting your dream the keyy in this book that I want you to learn is if you want your dream to happen you've got to make other people's dreams happen first the link is down in the description it would mean a lot to me if you bought it all the proceeds from this book I'm giving away to fun dreams so please buy if you can now let's get back to the episode of Alex

all right next cuz that was awesome so how many times they buy so um now we want to get them to obviously buy again because um I think Dan Kennedy said this and I just love this quote he says you don't you don't get customers to make sales you make sales to get customers and so the idea is that once you have a customer then you want to get them to buy as many times as seemly possible and so at this point there's so many things that you can do um to make a business make

more money right and so you've got get this out the way again yeah yeah so one is that you can increase the price of whatever you have I'm just talking about eight different ways that you can make more money um to get them just basically make more money from any customer so one is that you can just charge more the second is that you decrease the cost of whatever you sell so so if you have a service you can either pay people L that's usually not the right idea but you can improve the service ratio

of how many customers to every rep you can add Tech in order to make their jobs easier um you can go offshore things like that the next one is you ask them to buy again so you just do this times two you say hey um you have that thing do you want to buy more of that thing you just bought uh one of my favorite one of my favorite upsells ever uh the next one is that you can get continuity which is you say buying which I see this as a quantity this one as uh

you're they're buying once and then there's a delay and then a day so this is a quantity then you've got quality which is do you want to buy a better version of the thing that you have then we have uh down sell so it's like hey and this one it's like wait how do how is this going to make me more money so down cells make you more money in that if you you turn a no into a yes and so okay you don't want to buy the the the normal Burger do you want to

buy a junior Burger do you want to buy a smaller one do you want to just buy the burger not the other stuff okay then we've got cross Sals where you sell something different so I'll go through this whole example real quick uh but with with a burger store because everyone can understand it so I can take my burger and make it more expensive I can lower the cost of each burger for myself I can get them to buy two burgers I can get them to come back again to buy another burger or put them

on a burger subscription so this would be through like follow good idea for business idea Burger subscription business in and out should do that what they yeah did you did you eat it there today it's great not today we have to there's no Su sure yeah I don't know what's in it but it's not sugar don't it's me either but anyway you can have uh you can you can increase the quality of the meat you he oh this is mystery meat Burger you can have Sirloin you know Burger that's ground up mystery meat yeah we

can go uh lower quantity so this is uh making it smaller oops sorry that's you know what is quantity there you go and then you can lower the quality all right now I don't like saying lower quality but it's a more economical this is a HP strategy for all their printers they start off as really good printers that never break don't need an ink cartridge and they reduce the quality so you need ink cartridges and you need the faster one not the slower one they make it slower so you want to buy the faster one

and so uh you you get the smaller Burger so you have less uh or you go from regular meat to just completely questionable like what is this thing uh or you say okay what are the cross cells well do you want uh fries with your burger do you want a drink with your burger and so those are basically the eight ways that you can get a customer to buy more stuff and so the whole process though especially if you're selling doing a cross out which is very common in terms of what people are thinking about

selling next is that there's a problem solution cycle that exists in business which is that if you actually solve a problem with whatever you do you also create another problem so all problems all solutions create more problems all problems create Solutions and so if you do accurately solve it so let's say I um like let's say someone has the burgers and all that stuff well once someone's full then I created a uh a dessert problem right right which I can solve you know with uh with my milkshake or my ice cream cones or whatever right

just to use the very simple example but if I solve the traffic to someone's site then the next thing they're going to need help with is sales the next thing they're going to need help with is delivery there's always going to be something else that's going to happen you know if you if you help someone lose 20 lbs the next thing they're going to want is they're going to want to tone up or they're going to want new clothes there's there's a ton of things that happen as a result but there's um another piece that

I'll bring up here which is something that I've learned over and over again which is that people enter hyper buying cycles and so let's say that I sign up for a marathon right if I decide I'm going to start a marathon and then I go to the the shoe store the running shoe store and I say hey I want some I want some running shoes if that business owner it's like well well they just bought the running shoes I don't want to I don't want I don't want to scare them away I don't want to

seem too salesy well what are they going to do they're like well I still need the iPod thing for my for my shoulder so that when I'm running I need new tank TOS I need running shorts um I got to have uh you know the the app that tracks my progress whatever it is right and so and I've got to have those gels that I whatever marathon runners eat but the thing is is that if you don't sell it they're going to buy it just not from you and all of this going to happen in

a very short time cycle they're going to make the decision I'm now a marathon runner and so I need to get all the stuff associated with that you buy a pet there's a zillion things you buy you go to a wedding there's a zillion things you buy like whenever someone makes a decision to enter it like basically they have a new identity that then Associates with whatever purchases they're going to to make they enter this cycle where they just buy lots of stuff and you want to be there right at that moment to make that

next offer again and again and again and offers are only bad if you present it at the wrong time or it's not a need and so that's why we don't try and sell them we make the offer we present it if they're not into it no big deal and so that's at least how I think through um upselling and getting more out of every night stores do this so well you know they put the socks on the out to check out right they put the and all that stuff and brand brand plays such an important

role in this because once you've got trusted then people want to buy from you cuz they know you know your shoes are good quality well your tops are probably good quality your socks are probably good quality your arm band's going to be good put my iPhone in so who helps you isn't that next yeah yeah who helps you that's it who helps by the way um we have a platform that helps people it's the hardest thing we've noticed for people to actually ask for help love giving help that's the shocking thing but people don't ask

for but but what's your take on it so who helps you so the the way I think about this is you have you have four ways you can let other people know about stuff right so you've got you got oneon-one uh and then you got one to many it's people who know you and people who don't and so one one to people who know you is warm Outreach so you just text your friends you DM people you email you call whatever you've got one to many to people you know you which is posting content that

you make a post to your Facebook page and you say hey this is what's going on in my life one to one to people who don't know you is cold Outreach so that's cold calling cold emailing cold whatever and then you've got one to many uh to people who don't know you which is paid ads and so these are the only four things that any one person can do to let other people know about their stuff you can talk at events the similar things put oh yeah totally and so once we know this this is

how we advertise to anything um to get customers then it's like okay well we do the exact same process to get employees and so you need a team that's going to help you and so in the beginning a lot of times you start by reaching out to people you know and saying hey friends family do you want to help me with my business um and then you probably make a post and say hey I'm hiring you know anybody who knows anybody please like make the introduction um and then you start running ads on job boards

and saying hey uh I've got this great thing please apply it's great and then when you get more advanced you start head hunting uh and you start looking for people who are really good at that thing and these are typically in my experience these are the highest value uh and the hardest but it's just like it's just like the sales that you made with apple it's like these people sometimes it takes 2 three years to get that one killer on your team but that person can just build an entire division or anire department and just

continue to scale and so it's basically taking the same concept that you have with advertising at customers and applying it to employees now I have a a little another framework if you're good with it yeah um so you've got lead gen how you get uh how you get customers right and then you've got nurture you've got sales and you've got onboarding and then you've got uh retention SL oops SL ascension all right so they you retain them and you upsell them okay cool everyone a lot of people at least in business understand this pipeline but

they don't know that they already have all the skills just like all the things that you do to currently cut customers you already have the skills to advertise to get people to help you out and so then all this is is just application generation which you use the same core 4 that we just went through nurtur is the same is that you should be nurturing so fun facts SOA might have shared it yesterday but like a candidates take on average eight days to find a job and B candidates and Below take 30 days plus and

so if your process of getting someone from the first uh engagement to getting higher takes longer than that then you're by definition getting B players and Below now I'll say my only exception to that is if you're hiring C Level and up it just takes a very long time but you want to make sure that the communication still rapid between those things they probably make a decision quite quickly they might have a notice period That's longer but they might still make a quick decision and so the application nurture here is that like a lot of

smaller businesses like they should they should be honored to work for me they should they should be calling me I'm going to put a 100 steps of friction it's like well okay you're just going to get fewer applicants well like you say a a won't get a players you get players they just want to deal with it and so sales this is the interview and so a lot of people are like well tell me why you should work for me that really only works for low-level individual people at a certain level you're selling them just

as much on why they should work for you as they are on on them and that's that comes with talent because the higher the level of the talent the more options they have they don't I'm not I know you know but I'm just saying it's so it's it's so this thing I don't I don't want people to miss it because a lot of people don't understand when they're recruiting they're selling and and I work personally so hard to get good people like it's the hardest job people don't apply sales process to it the they sit

back and say well tell me where you going to be in 5 years or while you're good for my company and people just don't give a [ __ ] good people be like well you why why should I be here yeah yeah right why should I spend my next five years here totally and onboarding is the same you onboard employees the same way after someone takes the job they accept the offer they sign the paper workk it's like great now we have the onboarding here's all the passwords this is what it's going to look like

and typically people do I think people do this backwards which is they basically bring people on and say good luck uh whereas the basically the more work you do up front the less work is required over time in order to get someone to be proficient at whatever their work is you do a big onboarding we're super big on onboarding anything particularly on onboarding you think really useful honestly it's just a lot of touch bases I mean the first two weeks they're probably like managers usually meet twice a day you know with uh with with new

hires just to say like okay what are you going to do today at the end of the day it's like how to go tell me about the conversations you had and usually especially it depends on what level of you know person's coming in anybody who's maybe director leveling up they're going to they're going to talk to all the directors across the Departments they kind of Shadow a lot of people CU we want them to get a very good idea of a holistic understanding of the business so they can understand where where and why their work

makes a big impact and then finally you have the exact same thing which is retention and Ascension which is how do I keep good talent and then what's my career path um for them so they can see their vision of what it's going to look like in 5 years it's like listen we're bringing you in a director but longterm we'd love to have you as a cro or a VP of this whole division or something like that and this is these are the requirements this is what you would have to do in order to move

up there and again we try to we try and Define things by behaviors so if you're doing all of these activities then you will by definition be this role and so our way of promoting at least at acac.com is we want people to just start doing the role and then the title feels obvious rather than hey I want that title okay here's the plan I'd rather you just go do the next role and then everyone's like well yeah he he deserves the title like so everybody else is already bought in cuz you're already doing the

job anyways and I think it's the one of the the biggest hacks at least for those of you who are who are employees at a company one of the best ways to move up theya said yesterday which I absolutely love was growth yeah give people a chance to grow cuz that will keep them everybody I've ever lost in past companies has been because I didn't have a thing they could do next yeah so this is brilliant framework okay keep your advantage all right how would you keep the advantage well I mean I I I think

for people is always a key part right it depends on the business if it's a service business you like if it's a creative agency business the people literally keep the client if if so that's that's one way so you have to keep recruiting probably never ending most CEOs are permanently recruiting that that's the main job right to keep Advantage I I personally think these days it's like well if you're not building a personal brand you're going to lose yeah I actually think the brand piece is actually this I think the keeping your advantage is the

brand and so if we think about the brand as a virtuous cycle right and so I kind of think about it like this which is if we have different levels of communication so this is you a about you so you say we're great and people some people might believe you some people might not so let's just say you go and watch you know Godzilla the movie or you know you see an ad for Godzilla you say okay you know it looks decent maybe I'll go see it whatever then it's your friends so your your friend

John sees it and he says oh it was a great movie or oh it was a terrible movie this is going to weigh way more than whatever they said about themselves and then finally it's just you say so you go see the movie and you have a good experience or a bad experience and so what happens is that this person then becomes the friend for other people and either perpetuates the cycle of advertising uh for the business and this is what reinforces brand and so at the end of the day we can make whatever you

know we can we can have the most brilliant advertising campaign of all time the best associations the best celebrity endorsements but if as soon as people try the food or they try the product they wear the shoes if it's not good it doesn't matter it like it doesn't matter how good all of that stuff is is is that you have to keep the edge and I think that's where the the connection between the brand so it's like the brand makes a promise That Remains the Same more or less but the way to keep the promise

changes and so it's like we want to be the so if Apple says we're going to have Elegant you know products that are welld designed blah blah blah okay that promise has remained the same for many years but the way they execute on that promise has to change right because technology changes there's new advancements in foam so the shoes become lighter they become better fitting and so um from an R&D perspective what we did uh was that we we actually had a r& R&D department at um at gym launch the the company that we sold

um and what we did was I said okay here's here's your budget and I want you to spend this money no matter what every month and I just want you to spend it on solving our customers's biggest problem so every month you're going to give me a list of all the problems that they that they're saying they have and I want you to try and wait them is how big is the problem and how many of them are suffering from the problem and so we use a little format which is you might have seen this

one before which is um let's see you've got impact got the expense you've got the the number of times I can't remember what the r is and then you've got confidence this is reach there reach and then you've got confidence and so basically with the product it's like how many people are suffering from this thing how much are they suffering How likely is this solution uh going to to solve the problem and then how much does it cost us to do it and so with that we can basically create a power ranking of okay this

thing is impacting a lot of these people so this is a high high high priority issue but we don't have any solutions that we're actually really confident about we've got a solution that we're really confident about but it's really expensive right and so this is where you basically Factor all four of these things in into your Innovation cycle so you say okay this is how we strategically prioritize uh our resources to get the best returns and so if we think about what strategy is strategy okay so a lot of people use this word and no

one really defines what it means and so I'm going to Define two words for the audience that I think will will make a lot of sense so strategy is just prioritization of resources so when people are like man I really need a strategy it's like dude it just means what are my priorities that's all it is and so if we think about the universe as having Unlimited things that we could do but we have limited resources time money energy effort then the people who get the furthest in life are the ones who are the best

at allocating those resources to get the most bang for the buck and fundamentally that's what the best strategists are it's just this big amorphous word that people Define in all sorts of ways but that's all it is and so then it's like okay well if I'm going to prioritize my resources I want to prioritize my resources in a way that that provides the most value and so for customers um I see value as this value equation which I taught in the um $100 million offers book which is I see there's four variables to Value you've

got the dream outcome like is the thing the thing they want the need thing that you're referencing earlier we've got perceived likelihood of achievement which is if I buy this thing How likely is it that I'm actually going to get what I want and this is actually the the last one that I added to this because I was like there was another thing that felt like it was missing you've got time delay which is how long is it going to take between when I buy and when I get and then I've got sacrifice and effort

so uh they're two sides of the same coin effort is what are the things that I have to start doing as a result of this purchase that I don't want to do and what are the sacrifices what are the things I'm going to have to stop doing that I wish I could keep doing and so fundamentally the goal here is you want to increase the the dream outcome as much as humanly possible and increase their perceived likelihood and you want to decrease the time delay and decrease the effort in sacrifice and so in a perfect

world you'd have something that they click a button they get their dream outcome absolutely guaranteed immediately by doing nothing and if you had that you'd have an infinitely valuable product if you think about like hey uh buy a six-pack if someone could just simply click a button and then all of a sudden they could pull their shirt up and they would have a press that button right now of course so many people would and so think and then because of that we'd be able to charge a tremendous amount of money and so by thinking through

this these these things in my opinion will never change people will always want things to be faster people always want to do less for them they will always want to have less risk or a higher perceived like of achievement and they want to make sure the thing is actually what they want and so um I obvious you know I use Fitness examples a lot because a lot of people understand it but it's like okay let's say that someone wants to uh lose weight okay that's the dream outcome well then why is it that uh a

PDF is $5 about how to lose weight and Libo section is 50 Grand well the other three variables so if I think about the PDF if I if I buy a $5 PDF when I make the purchase do I really believe that I'm immediately going to lose weight probably not and so there's a huge discount that I'm going to put on the value of the PDF because I don't think I'm really going to do anything with it whereas lipo section if I pay it I they're going to put me to sleep they're going to rip

this fat out like so the perceived lik of achievement significantly higher on the liposuction for time delay it's like okay this one I might have to work out for a year in order to see the results the lipos suction I go to sleep I wake up I'm thin much faster and then effort and sacrifice well I'm going to have to sacrifice uh you know taco Tuesdays nights out with the girls uh I'm going I'm going to have to sacrifice sleeping in I can't do that anymore sacrifice my weekends uh and the effort is I now

have to wake up early I have to eat food that I don't like I'm going to have to be sore I'm going to have to feel stupid because I don't know how to exercise it's like there's a lot of cost with that compared to you just wake up and you didn't do anything and so for that reason one thing's $5 the other thing's 50 Grand and so if we think through that like there's many different things that solve losing weight making more money you know getting more leads there's a ton of different things but if

you want to make sure that your thing's more valuable you want to decrease the risk which is increase perceived likelihood you want to make it faster decrease the time and you to make it easier this framework works so well a case study like Blockbusters you know it didn't keep their advantage because because people wanted it quicker they could going to Netflix originally it was getting posted to them Blockbusters didn't think people wanted posted they thought it was more convenient for people to go to a store and buy it and so there was a less time

delay there's no less sacrifice just press a button at home they people don't keep their advantage they die like BL Blockbusters do so youve got to keep thinking about how you can make this this is a brilliant equation by way I'm glad you went a bit deep on it because I think a lot of people just just talk about this Top Line as you say they don't think about the time delay and they don't think about the sacrifice element it's so funny you say that because the first the first half of my career all I

thought about was was this all I would do to me was this was promise and this is proof mhm so all I did was I had bigger promises more proof bigger promises more proof but if I look at the the biggest companies in the world all they focus on is this Amazon's like how do I make it easier how do I make it faster how do I make it how do I make it less effort for the person and this part is usually where all of the operational effort goes in this is all the marketing

and sales totally plus this promise if you make it too big you damage your brand this is why this all links together cuz if if you're not careful you you want to get the big sale and you sell something you haven't actually got and then you're in real trouble right next stick with it stick with it right this is a good one most of the best things in life happen um so we have this we have this little orientation that we take our sales guys through and so um we show this line and we say

okay so this is you today and this is you uh you know later and so this is your skill as a salesperson and so this might be you know 2 weeks in and this might be you know 2 months in and this might be you know 6 months in and so you're like 6 months I'm almost I'm almost at the top it's like yeah well let's let's move this up a little bit my my drawing's a little broken and let's say this is three years so you're like I'm only going to make this tiny bit

of tiny bit of improvement between 6 months and 3 years yeah and the thing is though is that your income is going to look like this yeah and so it's going to basically not change much at all and then at the very end is where you're going to get because this little difference the difference between number two in the world and number one practically for running is a tenth of a second but the difference between number one in the world and number two is everything and so all of the best gains come at the very

end of the compounding it comes from the very deep knowledge that only comes from repeating many failures in a very narrow field and so that's actually one of my favorite definitions for an expert so who's uh who's made more mistakes than anyone else in a very narrow field so how do people stick with it though because I mean social media is a great example first three years I did social media I made no money and it probably cost me a million pounds yeah so it's only in the last year and a half I've actually started

to be a to make money and be able to pay the team and all the rest of it so I I I look at it as a purpose thing right I'm trying to fix the education system it's broken it should be teaching the skills that you and I trying to get people for free how do people stick with it what do you think is the formula there so I'm going to I'm going to go back to something that I said at the very beginning so if motivation is equal to deprivation you need to feel deprived

of of something and so in the examples I gave so you know if you're starving you're hungry if you're sleepy you if you're if you're if you're exhausted You're motivated to sleep but money doesn't work the same way because if you take that that logical extreme you say okay well then all poor people should be more motivated to make money than anything and the reality is they're not so why is that so because all the ones that I first at are all physiological needs the other one is completely made up money is only a new

I mean in terms of humanity it's a very new thing right and so it's a psychological construct and so the idea is that the deprivation actually is completely made in our own minds and so um you know Harvard at least did this did this study which is they talk about your reference group which is the biggest predictor of people's long-term um Financial wellbeing is their reference group which is and this is important is that it's the five people people you compare yourself to not The Five People You spend the most time with and I think

that's a huge a huge difference and so um I had this little this little tweet that kind of went like viral or whatever but you want to take advice not from the people who are closest to you but the people who are closest to your goals take advice from them and people are like oh yeah I'll take advice from them but when you're about to make a big life-changing decision who do you talk to if you're talking to the people closest to you none of them have relevant experience and if you don't want their lives

then definitely don't listen to what they say right and it's very hard because that's what makes it feel so lonely I think in the beginning because you have no one to talk to and so that's why I'm such a big believer in Heroes uh Heroes and mentors so mentors are people who actually interact with you but heroes are just like what would Warren Buffett do you know some people are religious what would Jesus do whatever your thing is right like who's that who's that ideal and sometimes you know one of my friends is like what

do the ideal version of me do what's the person I want to become do and all of is again around doing because if I do those things like I might not be a patient person but if I to be patient for 5 years people start calling me patient I might actually be patient because all I did was patient things even though I don't feel patient right and so it's like we can change basically how we feel and what we do don't need to be connected at all so you can feel horrible and still do things

and be kind and people like you can feel like a very nasty person because of the things that you think and the things that you want to do but as long as you don't do them then the only thing the world will ever judge you on at least the only thing that I would ever judge you on is what you do and so it's like okay a deprivation so back to this so in my opinion I've always struggled with this question the most because it's never been an issue for me and I think and that's

and that's why it's one of the hardest things that I have to translate to somebody else so everything that I have is more around how do I translate how I see it more than this was the series of steps I followed to become motivated I was so afraid of failing and being this deprived right I was so deprived of respect or at least how I perceived it not continuing was just never a choice and I always used to think when when I was like the earliest days of the gym was really tough for me I

was sleeping on the floor all the whole the whole the whole story right and and it sounds it sounds cool in retrospect but when it's like you're sleeping on the floor of a gym because you can't afford two places and you know you've got kids the same age as you who are partying on the rooftop of your gym because I it was below parking garage is where my gy was so a parking garage people with like these cars would drive over the top like and it was it was Concrete in metal so it just it

sounded like a gunshot and it would happen all night long so I couldn't sleep but I'd have to wake up at 4:00 to teach the 4:30 class and I taught all the classes so I take eight classes a day but then I also ran the whole business I had zero employees so I did all the billing I cleaned it I fixed the equipment I marketed and got leads I did everything I didn't know that employees were a thing that's why I have it as one of the steps I had no idea and so the thing

is is that whenever it would be really hard for me um I would I would always think to myself as long as I don't quit I win mhm and so like if I just keep going I just have to survive and so just kind of approaching it from that perspective because the the more painful thing was the idea of going home a failure and I just couldn't do it I was like I would rather die and I think thinking through like past human experiences which is okay across all the globe slavery has happened everywhere and

slaves for their entire lives for thousands of years had to work all day every day and they had no opportunity they had to work all day every day but there was no upside they just had to work all day every day or they die or get killed or whatever and so I was like if they can do it with no upside I can absolutely do it with the chance uh that I can win and I think seeing business as an infinite game is what was a huge perspective shift for me which was the there is

no number one in business and this was something that was like really like it's for anybody who's listening to this I think it's powerful to understand is if I were to say hey who was who is the richest man in the world 30 years ago there a couple Japanese guys because the Japanese economy was booming at that time now no one even knows who they are and that was just 30 years forget 500 years and so the thing is is the number one guy in the world at business if you want to measure it by

net worth which whatever but even if you did it's like that guy just touches the top for a decade and then someone else touches the top MH and so when we say I want to I want to be successful success is about sticking with it and so the only way that you become a failure in business is by stopping MH and so all the infinite games like all the games worth playing in life in my opinion are all infinite so it's not about it's not about getting married it's about staying married it's not about getting

in shape it's about staying in shape it's not about starting a business it's about staying in business and the only thing that gets you out of business is you choosing to stop and I think that's a very powerful frame because it puts it 100% in your control and so as long as you keep trying you're still in business and I think a lot of people give up so much they they give up just on the idea of a negative comment or some Snider remark from a friend of theirs or you know their their dad or

their brothers you know makes them trying to feel stupid for for taking a risk that they were unwilling to take and I think that's [ __ ] and so anyways motivation comes from deprivation and so at least my number one rule for entrepreneurship is use what you've God and so a lot of times there's there's a lot of Social Media stuff I don't think there's anything wrong with it that talks about like find your passion find your purpose find the thing that you love and I think that's great but when if I were to go

back in time I can say that now from this lovely you know position that I have but when I started you know my first business I wasn't doing it because it was something I was passionate about it was not it was not this like sunshine and rainbows it was miserable and I had a lot of Shame and had a lot of anger and so I didn't feel any of the Butterflies but that's what I had and so it's like I think you just use what you got and if you need shame to get you going

if you need if you need anger to get you going then you can that fuel can change over time but wishing you had a different fuel I think is what gets people in trouble I think that's what that's what stops a lot of people like I should feel it's like you should nothing like should just just shouldn't exist it's just what do you have and what are you going to do and I'll say the last piece is they're trade-offs and I think being able to name the price of the things that you want is super

valuable yeah which is like you know the the cost of of of Fame for example is privacy you don't get that anymore and the cost of you starting a business is for you know for me it was like I stopped being able to follow the the football team that I used to follow I stopped being in fantasy Leagues with my friends I stopped being able to go out to you know the bar and drink and things like that so there was a cost and so the thing was just like am I willing to pay that

or trade that for this thing that I want most and I think for some people maybe you don't want that M and I think the thing is is like and that's okay but I think the problem is where you you want you want to have your cake and eat it too yeah I want to have the sixpack but I also want to have cake I want to you know I want to I want to you have to and you go got to learn how to play the game uh but it's it's that it's it's people

aren't willing to make the trade and I think that just comes down to the very bottom of everything like when I wanted to you there was a period where I wanted to get into Harvard's business school when I had I'd done two years of Consulting and that was what I thought was going to be my path but I'm always very grateful for them because on one of the application questions they had was how are Harvard MBA help your short and long-term goals and I thought about it for like three days and I realized that well

I wanted to start a business and so me start doing another two years of school I could just start a business like that was this the goal and so I'm grateful that they asked me that question but before I ended up getting to the application I spent four months taking um I basically did 10 phone books of problems because I read this research study on uh on standardized testing which said the the score that you get So for anybody who has standardized testing that they have to do maybe you're a Tradesman and you need a

certification or something it goes like this which is uh score so this is like score number of problems so basically it was just a direct correlation between the number of problems that you did before taking the test was directly correlated with your score and as soon as I saw that I was like oh I'll just do all of the problems and so I did 16 like it was it was it was huge it was like I it was standing on the floor books of problems like the really thin Bible paper like really thin paper and

so I did four hours a day of problems for four months it's all I did I just did problems and so I got above Harvard's mid score and so for me it was like this is the only thing that I have to do and this is what I care about most and so people like how do you stay motivated I was like I don't know I just didn't have any other choice because the alternative is just was something I wasn't willing to do and I think a lot of people aren't willing to cut things like

I've been i' say one of the things that's been you know blessed with if you want to say that is um I'm very willing to cut people and things out of my life very quickly I think it's healthy to do that and so this is my this is my North Star question that I would encourage people to ask themselves does having X in my life increase the chance I hit my goal that's my North Star question this could look like like it off Twitter but I get it it's it's it you know uh first of

all I feel a little bit emotional hearing you talk about that I don't know why that's triggering something in me um do you know what is cuz I I have the same problem trying to help people have a better life they kind of got to help themselves what do you think of this like you know I think it's Pablo's cave where people get brought a fish in the cave every day and it's easier right they don't ever leave the cave because that's what a salary kind of is the food comes to you every day and

people have forgotten how [ __ ] amazing is to go out in the rain with your mates and Hunt yeah or or go together and make the food and men and women made food men and women went out hunting in the old days you know like there was no fridge there was no get up and eat [ __ ] get up and go out and make [ __ ] happen and you know what what it is I think that and it's absolutely fine with people don't want to do it but I don't want people to

say they can't be an entrepreneur or they can't sell I want them to be honest they can't be bothered yeah cuz and I think the key is and you you describe your story I have a similar story I love the hunger I have from the deprivation that I had the Vikings used to land places and burn the boats of got them there yeah then they got no [ __ ] choice and I think that's what people need to do if they really want to do it they need to burn the boats that got they can't

go back to the cushy job the middle class life that's it you're in or you're out yeah and then like you say you got to like figure out what you're going to cut out isn't going to give you the goal you want so especially in the beginning you have limited resources right you have limited time because you have no leverage you have no one helping you and you probably don't have that much money and so time is the only thing that you have that you really have to be uh really careful with and so that's

it's what are the what are the activities does this activity you know like drinking for example is this like does this does this increase the likelihood that hit my goals that's it does it increase the lik my goal does does does having these friends in my life increase the lik that hit my goals and the answer is usually pretty obvious it it doesn't and then the thing is is that most people are again just cowards Y is that they're not willing to just make the make the cut but I'm pretty sure you live the same

framework that you did when you were younger I act like I've got no money like I don't I don't put I don't this is Gucci right sure me know like I I think people get comfortable as they grow as but I think people the motivation thing really gets to me cuz sticking with it which is the theme around this is Al to down to perhaps limiting your choices not increasing them some people have too many choices yeah you know like die on the hill you know like go for it and people don't do it so

okay getting better this is the one step before we get a million dollars so um I'm looking forward to the U million dollar in cash yeah all right getting better cuz I I've done all these things so I hopefully a big suitcase of money is coming my way get better so I'll um I'll describe a process that uh that I I do and it's all based on action so I Define work right as volume times leverage which is how much you do and how much you get for each time you do it because that equals

output which if you're looking at this transitive property work equals output so it's not about how hard you try it's about what you get done and if you have more leverage you get more done now if you do a lot of work so I'll give you a simple example so if you if you if we're learning sales right so if I start cold calling and I do 100 calls a day and I have low skill then I will have low leverage I'm going to get fewer appointments than somebody who makes the same amount of calls

as me and has high skill they'll book five times the appointments as I will so did they work more in my world yes they had higher output and so a lot of times it's like you have to learn how to work but the thing is is that how did that guy who is good get good he did volume he did a lot and so then it's like okay if this is our equation for output in terms of getting better and the getting better part is going to be leverag this this is a constant you have

to do work you have to do volume okay so we start with the doing which is the volume cool so we have that first and so whatever it is so let's say it's I want to start making uh you know Instagram reals fine I want to get good at Instagrams so it's like great so I'm going to make 100 Instagram reals and this is the part that people well people people don't even do this but let's assume that you did this okay so you do the 100 Instagram rails people then say well I did 100

and nothing happened it's like okay so then what we do is we look at our 100 let's say this is you know the the the 100 reals that we did we say what's different about these about these top ones these top ones did better and what's different about these singers do this all the time don't they they put a music out all the time 60% of Adele's songs never went in the top 10 or something right you know so yeah this is that they also do it and so then once we figure out and this

is where you have to this is where you have to uh be as detailed as possible and a lot of times you'll start having almost superstitions it's like okay I coughed at the beginning of this call well that was different well did all of your top 10 calls did you cough well no okay then disregard that so you run something called a common factors analysis which is just saying what do all these ones have in common what do so like what do these ones all have in common with each other but that's different than all

of these ones and so once we do that we say okay so my next 100 that I do I want to look like this and then all of a sudden it's like huh I got 30% better on my total views by just doing more of the stuff that worked yep and so this process you just do for like 10 years um and you just keep doing it over and over again I mean like the first the first YouTube You Know video that I did I think probably has like you know 100 views or whatever it

was and any for anybody who's listening to this like Simon had a had had a big business but I'm assuming that when you started you had zero subscrib when you started your account and so did I across all platforms and so people have this idea that like everyone starts at zero and I'll also give you this other kind of word of encouragement which is there's this there's a huge media narrative around the idea that like Millionaires and billionaires are evil I don't know why but there is and so what's interesting about that if you look

at least in the US statistics are that it's over the overwhelming majority of millionaires and billionaires are self-made not inherited and so it's like okay wait if the majority of them are self-made then that means they all started at zero mhm and so they had the same thing so let's say they didn't have a lot of money actually think having zero starting at zero is a competitive Advantage oh yeah we have nothing to lose yeah exactly anyone with zero you think you don't realize that you've got an advantage so you have no money and all

you have is time mhm and that means that you're in the exact same position as every self-made millionaire and billionaire when they started and the only difference is that right now you're a self-made poor person mhm it's just that no one likes to claim it by the way selfmade doesn't exist because everyone had help oh for sure no no but Con in terms of in terms of starting here yeah we with no no you can have nothing and still make it I do you know what's really interesting about this for people listening as well like

I I've invested in 78 companies I know you've invested in a lot of businesses as well sometimes too much money can destroy a business like I've seen people like we works for example their biggest problem was they never thought about actually making money just kept their business was raising money yeah right so I think that that's another thing people don't really quite grasp but getting better I mean do you think there's a a mental framework to help people get better cuz I I mean even myself right I'm I'm pretty good at business I've had to

get better to compete yeah but is is there a framework for getting better as a as a human like do you think as a human being not as a business person I think they're linked but what well I mean I I really 100% live on that common factors analysis thing so if I look at so I'll tell you how I live my my whole life so like when um so I really did this which was uh the whole the thing that started this was I was 20 one 21 or 22 and this is my first

job out of college and I remember I had a really good weekend and um I was just like in a good mood came in on on Monday and my boss was like hey uh you know what's what's going on I was like just you know just had a good weekend and she said to me this line that I I just it kind of like hit me um she said I'm pretty sure stringing is many many days in a row like that as you can is the secret to living and what what it did though is

it took this whole this amorphous idea of like Joy contentment purpose and just made it really tactical was like okay how do I live as many days in a row as I can of days that I like so I looked back at like last year and I said okay what were the days that I like the most what were my top 10% days well the things that I had in common as I worked out okay cool I did that um I ate with people I like ate with friends and then I worked until I had

nothing left that's exactly my framework and so if I do these three things then if I do that on all my days then more of my days will look like that and so the majority of my days now feel like what used to be top 10% days and so obviously these are different for other it might be playing music it might be whatever you know whatever your thing is but that common factors analysis and it's like okay what are the top 10 you know we've you know Leeland have gone on 100 dates okay the top

10 Dates what do they have in common okay well Al I think all of it yeah how make stes better it's brilliant I got flowers right he got flowers he had a gift is this coming from her side she told pre-planned no he had pre-planned he had pre-planned something right she's told you her her list I wrote some sort of note right um and so and we dress up and so those are the things they're like this is my this is my recipe for for making good dates and so it's like a lot of a

lot of times it's like no one just takes the the look back and says okay what I but it's because they don't start with the I did stuff that's the first step like you got to do the 100 reps you got to do make the 100 posts you got to make the 100 you got to make the 100 C calls you got to make the the 100 sales and you got to record them and that's the other piece like you have to be able to record it whatever whatever to the greatest degree possible you have

to recall what were the details and so then you look you see the common factors it's like all right well I'm going to only do those five next time and by by by Randomness because life happens in there's variables that are out of our control again there's going to be another top 10% in the next 100 dates and we're like okay so in those dayses not only did I do these five things but I uh we had a driver uh was a was a big difference and there was a surprise uh element for some of

these and at a certain point the thing is the the the Improvement is going to go like this right just like that just like that sales thing you know the first time you do this your your dates are going to get way better right and then after that though the dates are going to get incrementally better but all that happens is like man people are going to be like how do you have such a healthy relationship you're like you know all I did was I just looked at the stuff that worked and I just stopped

doing the stuff that didn't and I just did it over and over and over ago Amazing Alex honestly you're an amazing human being I love this I hope you guys enjoyed it we're off to have some chicken now we'll see you later