Alex Hormozi on The “Weak Links” That Will Make Anyone a Millionaire

David:
This is the BiggerPockets Podcast, show 649.

Alex:
So, they have to just figure out a way to tie whatever the thing… If they’re really passionate about something, by all means, go all in on it. If you’re IT, then you’re thinking, “How can I decrease page load times? How can I get conversion rates up?” You start getting into the CRO side. How can I organize the data in such a way that the CEO can make better decisions, and we have real-time reporting against all the sales guys so we can optimize our funnels towards the best converting guys. Right? All aspects of the business can make more money, but people don’t think about it through that lens, so the first thing is how do I tie what I do every day to making more money in the business. You connect that dot and then you improve that connection.

David:
What’s going on everyone? This is David Greene, your host of the BiggerPockets podcast here today with a special treat. We have an amazing guest who I think probably brought his best performance that I’ve ever heard him do online. Here today joining me is my co-host, Rob Robuilt Abasolo, to take down this awesome interview with me. Rob, why don’t you tell people about our guest since I know that you are a huge, huge fan, and then tell us what you like about the show.

Rob:
Yeah, it’s right. So, we had Alex Hormozi on who is somewhat of the YouTube poster child for entrepreneurs everywhere. I started noticing him popping up about, I want to say six, 12 months ago when my channel was growing, and man, I just really gravitated towards all of his videos because he puts a lot of information there on how to scale, business mindsets, how to manage people, and yeah, we get into a lot of the nitty-gritty there of scaling from zero to 1 million dollars, 1 million to 3 million, 3 to 30 million dollars, and honestly, I felt like for as big of a fan I was, I didn’t fanboy too hard. I don’t think it came through, so I think I held it down.

David:
No, I thought you did a great job, and Alex really did most of the heavy lifting in this one. He breaks down some of the struggles that I’m having in business and that Rob is having as well. He gave us a cool origin story of where he started and what he would’ve done differently as he built himself up to a net worth of I think he said over a hundred, 150 million. It was a lot.

Rob:
Hundred million. Yep, big.

David:
Several businesses that he’s built and sold and what he learned from that, the struggle of scaling, and how you need to learn how to hire, and how your ego can get in the way, and wanting to hire the right people, building funnels, both for leads and for hiring, all stuff that many real estate investors trying to scale their business are struggling with right now. Probably worth several hundred thousand dollars, if you had to pay Alex to get him to tell this to you specifically, it’d be very expensive and you’re all getting it for free here on today’s show.
Before we bring Alex in to blow your mind, today’s quick tip. Alex talks a lot about how you need to invest in yourself before everything else. He actually says you should continue to pour your money into growing yourself and increasing revenue before you do anything else. I highly recommend that you consider investing in yourself before you invest in stocks, bonds, treasury notes, cryptocurrency, whatever it is that’s fun. Don’t forget to invest in yourself, and if it’s the right fit for you, you can try that out by visiting biggerpockets.com and checking out the Rookie Bootcamp. So, if you are new and wanting to learn how to invest in real estate, they have a course set up for you where you can show, and one of us BiggerPockets personalities will be teaching you specifically how to invest in different asset classes that you might be interested in. So, head over to the website and check that out. Rob, anything you want to say before we get started?

Rob:
No, no. This is really inspirational for me because I never knew that there was someone that liked Chipotle more than me, but Alex actually might top this, and we’ll get into that towards the end of the episode, so stay tuned.

David:
All right. Let’s bring in Alex. Alex Hormozi, welcome to the BiggerPockets podcast. Great to have you.

Alex:
Thank you for having me. Very honored to be here.

David:
Yeah, so for anyone who’s been living under a rock and hasn’t heard about your astronomical success, amazing insight that you’re giving to small business owners, would you mind giving us a background of where you started and where you are right now?

Alex:
All right, I’ll give the world’s shortest play-by-play milestones. So, I was a management consultant, went to Vanderbilt, graduated, did defense contracting for two years, really didn’t like it, got my top secret clearances. It sounded sexy on paper. It wasn’t cool in real life. Wanted to leave Baltimore, went to West Coast, started a gym, slept on the floor for the first nine months, was able to figure it out. By month 15, we had our second location. Every six months after that, opened a new one, had six locations, had lots of gym owners started asking me, “Hey, how’d you grow so fast?” and so I started helping those guys out. I ended up doing gym turnarounds where I’d fly out to a gym, fill it up, fix it, et cetera. We did 32 or 33 turnarounds over the next two years, and then from there I sold my six gyms and then transitioned from the turnaround flying out guys to gyms business to a licensing model because it was more scalable.
And so, that was 2017 we transitioned to licensing. That business scaled to I think 37 million a year with very good margins, and then we started a supplement company, Prestige Labs which we sold through our distribution base. We had 4,500 locations. From there, we started A.L.A.N. which was a software that worked leads for brick and mortar businesses of any kind. We exited all three of those businesses, one to a strategic buyer for the software, and the other two as a package deal to American Pacific Group which is private equity firm. Just that one was 46 million. The other one I’m not allowed to disclose it, but I can tell you that we did 12 million top line the year before we sold it for the software company. It was an all-stock deal.
And so, anyways, that was last year. We started Acquisition.com in 2020 which became our holding company for our portfolio. Right now, the portfolio does north of 150 million dollars a year. I’m only going to timestamp this, it is currently July of 2022, because people hear these clips later and they’re like, “You said.” I’m like, “I know. We grow. That’s why the numbers change.” But at this moment, north of 150 million dollars a year in portfolio revenue between our companies. We specialize in high cash flow service businesses and things of that nature.

David:
So, it sounds like you started the gym business, you jumped into it, you pursued excellence in that area, you learned sales techniques, the psychology behind how you get people to do things, then you learned business techniques, how to run a profitable business. You took the step that most people never take when they hit that point, as you said, “How do I scale this?” and took on bigger and more difficult problems to solve. You started solving other people’s problems, constantly helping them to do more, and then once you hit this point of big success, you said, “Okay, now what synergy do I have? I can go sell supplement products because I understand fitness, people trust me.”
And then you solved a new problem, and you said, “Okay, now I can have a software company that’s going to help manage this,” and you just spread in this synergistic way rather than, “I’m going to go start a gym, and then I’m going to go start a car wash, and then I’m going to go start something like a loan brokerage, or something completely unrelated.” Is that more or less a good summary of your approach?

Alex:
Yeah, I definitely did a whole bunch of things that I probably wouldn’t do again and probably wouldn’t have done it necessarily in that order, et cetera. A lot of things were more difficult than they should have been, but yes, that was a hundred percent. They were synergistic in nature. I felt like I was leaving money on the table and so I took those opportunities. If I could do it again, I wouldn’t have done it that way, but they were still obviously very good outcomes, but I feel like I’ve learned since then.

David:
Yeah, I don’t think there’s too many people that would be in a position to criticize how it turned out for you. I think if anyone is-

Rob:
Well, actually, I’ve got notes. I’ve got lots of notes.

David:
On today’s episode, Rob is going to tear apart Alex’s business strategy and teach him what he should have done instead. All right. Well, thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate it. You are an incredibly intelligent man and I’m not saying that to butter you up. I’m just saying I take a lot of what you say. It’s not fluff. It is very, very practical, well thought out, the type of advice you only get from trying and failing a lot, and then figuring out, okay, this is what actually works. It’s like listening to Gracie talk about jiu-jitsu. That’s the same feeling that I get when I’m listening to you talk about business. So, before we get into today’s show, we actually have a fun game that we’re going to play. It’s going to be called Mozi Nation or Mozi Imitation.

Alex:
Oh.

David:
So, in today’s episode, Rob and I are going to try to guess if a fact about you is true or not, and then you are going to let us know which one was right, and we’re going to see who wins.

Alex:
This is great. I’m so excited.

Rob:
I feel pretty confident. I do watch some Mozi YouTube videos, so I think I got this one in the bag.

David:
Yeah, he’s been practicing. He’s been researching this so that he could win, so we’ll see if talent or preparation wins out here. You guys can figure out which one of us is the talent based on what we’ve said so far. All right. Fact number one, Alex and Leila Hormozi met on a dating app. Rob, what say you?

Rob:
I think I’m going to go no. I think I’ll go no, they did not meet on a dating app.

Alex:
Met on Bumble.

David:
Okay, they did meet on Bumble. So, I was going to say no.

Alex:
Oh my bad. I thought you were asking [inaudible 00:08:42]. My apologies.

David:
It’s okay. I did confuse you there. The reason I didn’t answer right away is I remembered hearing an interview that you were talking about, I can’t remember who it was with, but I remember you talking about your relationship with her and how you were super busy, and there was a time she came in the room and she was like, “Do you want to break up?” and you’re like, “Yeah, whatever. Okay.” And then at some point you needed help on a business deal, she went out there, she absolutely crushed it for you, and it had a paradigm shift, like, “Oh maybe this person’s a little more special to me than what I thought,” which I frankly love that you shared that information because this is something dudes go through all the time and we never want to talk about. We want to look like Batman. We just show up and everything goes well, but that’s not how real life works out, so I was trying to remember if you had mentioned the dating app or not.

Alex:
That’s [inaudible 00:09:24].

Rob:
All right. All right. I was going to say in a gym for sure, but all right. I’ll get it on this one. It’s all good.

David:
Fact number two, Alex spent $75,000 for four private phone calls with Grant Cardone.

Rob:
True.

David:
I’m going to go with true as well. That just sounds like something that Alex would have done.

Alex:
Whoever made the question, it was a little tricky. I spent $135,000 for four phone calls.

David:
We’re both wrong. There we go.

Rob:
I didn’t remember exactly that one, but yeah, I do remember it.

Alex:
Directionally correct.

Rob:
Right, directionally correct. I’ll take it, yes.

David:
Let me ask you this. Did you get more value out of the content of the calls or the relationship you built with Grant?

Rob:
If any relationship.

David:
Yeah.

Alex:
Honestly, both. I got more than that in value very easily. I got more than that from the first phone call.

David:
It makes a lot of sense why you’d talk to him with the way that you’ve scaled. He’s the scaling expert in the business field right now in America.

Alex:
Yeah, in organic branding which I had not done, and so I figured, I couldn’t get in touch with Gary, and Grant was willing to take the call. So, I was like, “Hey man, I have all the means, just lay out the plan, how would you do it?” and he just laid out what he thought I should do, and I was like, “Okay, cool. I’ll do that.” So, it worked.

Rob:
Well, hey man, if you ever need advice, I charge 120 cents per call, so just let me know and we can get it set up. I’m on Venmo, Zelle, all the major outlets.

David:
All right. Question or fact number three, Alex emailed himself all of his failures for the last five years.

Rob:
I think I’ll go true on that, not from something anecdotally that I know, but it does seem like something you would do. I could see how you use that to fuel your success. I’m going to go yes on that one.

David:
I’m going to shoot with yes, but not for any of the reasons Rob said. It’s because I watched Alex’s micro expression when we asked the question.

Alex:
I was like…

David:
Just going to read him completely.

Rob:
[inaudible 00:11:14]. I’ll allow it.

Alex:
Talent got it. Yeah, no, a hundred percent. That was how I remembered the lessons.

David:
Yep, that’ll keep you humble too, and that’s, I mean, something we could talk about later on in the show. Purposely pursuing humility when you’re having massive success is absolutely in my opinion crucial. It’s not something that just happens. You have to make an intentional effort to stay in a humble place when it feels like everything that you’re doing is just falling in line perfectly. So, I can see that would be very wise. All right. Number four, Alex starts his mornings with a hot sauna and an ice bath.

Rob:
You go first.

David:
I’m going to go with no. I think he only does the ice bath because a hot sauna would be too comforting, and that just seems like something that Alex would not reward himself with comfort before he earned it throughout the day.

Rob:
I’m going to go yes because I know that you wake up at 4:00, and that’s a lot of time. You talk about how you get most done before people get… More done in those hours than people do all week, and it’s very time-consuming to take ice baths and sit in the sauna, so I’m going to go yes.

Alex:
No. I wake up, I drink a cup of coffee, and I work. It’s my morning routine.

David:
So, you’re not doing-

Rob:
Also a great answer.

David:
I love that, man. There’s certain trends that you pick up on when you follow people in this business space that everyone starts saying it because everyone else said it. One of the really common ones that I noticed was Mark Zuckerberg was credited with saying, “I wear the same shirt every day because then I don’t have to think about what I’m going to wear, and I am so incredibly beyond your level that I don’t even have mental energy to spare to pick out my shirt.” And we were like, “Oh, that sounds good. Say that. I’m going to start doing that too.” Everyone started wearing the same shirt, and I heard him on an interview with Gary V, and he said, “Yeah, I just said that because really I’m not good at dressing myself, and it sounded better than admitting I don’t pick out clothes.” And I was like, “How many of us have been repeating this as this business maxim that’s super…” and he’s like, “Yeah, I made the whole thing up.”
So, there’s a lot of things like that, like the ice bath in the morning, the waking up super early which I think is really good, especially if you’re in a competitive environment where you’re competing with others for business. But if you’re just someone who writes books, it doesn’t really give you an advantage because then you got to go to bed at eight o’clock at night. It’s a similar situation. So, I really appreciate you admitting that you’re not doing it just because everyone else says they are.

Alex:
I could go hard on that question.

David:
Well, let’s start with that. Let’s hear your opinion if you think that I’m way off here.

Alex:
I think it’s a big pile of gobbledygook. I mean, the amount of stuff that is espoused by the TikTok gurus of wealth and finance is insanity. You’ve got the cold plunges, the finger tissues, the yellow glasses, the affirmations in the morning, the gratitude journal. By the time you (beep) do that, you’re already halfway through your day and you haven’t done anything. And so, if you break this down to a first principal’s thinking, it’s like, “Okay, in order for me to do more, I must do more. Anything that is not me doing more is detracting from my ability to do.” And so, period. That’s it. And so, time thinking about doing, time procrastinating doing, time recovering, all of those things are just not things that you’re doing. So, I think the ability to work itself is trainable, and so if people feel like they need that prep beforehand, then I think that is something that is a crutch that can be eliminated and then ultimately make you more productive, not because you have some hack, but simply because you just put more time in.

Rob:
I do love the simplicity of that. It’s really just breaking it all through and it’s just like, “Oh, it’s just this one really simple thing,” and I remember I watched one of your videos that was like My Hundred Million Dollar Diet or something, and then you talked about how you went into a room with a bunch of CEOs, one had wheatgrass shots and then the other one was meditating in the corner, and then you’re eating Twizzlers and they’re like, “What are you doing, bro?” And then you basically broke down how all diets are shams and it basically comes down to calorie deficits. Ever since then, I’m like, “Okay, I need to stop micro counting. It’s just calorie deficit.” I mean, obviously, I don’t want to oversimplify, but it was just how funny these perceptions really cloud our minds, and it’s much more simple than what we think a lot of the times.

Alex:
I had a mentor who’s told me this quote. It’s a two-minute story, and I think it’s very memorable. It’s don’t be cute. Right? He was from Long Island. He’s like, “You know when I used to play backyard football?” I was like, “Yeah, sure.” He’s like, “Yeah. Everybody wants to be fancy. We’re going to flip it to Timmy, and then Timmy’s going to reverse this way, and then we’re going to fake it, and then we’re going to go longer. What happens? You drop the ball and then it’s fumble and you lose the yards.” He’s like, “Nah, we’re talking fundamentals football. Put the two fat guys in the middle. Run to the right.” He was like, “Don’t be cute.” He was telling me this because I was talking about this idea that I had for Gym Launch in terms of a new initiative that I wanted to take, and he was like, “Don’t be cute, man.” He’s like, “Just do more of what you’re doing.”
I feel like there’s a lot of truth to that in terms of people overcomplicate things that they already know because the truth is too difficult to stomach. Right? They don’t want to accept that they should just eat less and move more, and so they want to come up with a hundred ways to be cute rather than just confronting the fact they just need to eat less and move more. They don’t want to confront the fact that they just need to (beep) work, and so then they’re like, “I’m going to do all these things to prepare myself to work, right, and get myself in the right Zen and have an attitude of abundance Aurora and read my affirmations and do my daily journal,” and all this stuff when it’s like, “Dude, the doing needs doing.” So, it’s just who’s going to do it.

David:
I have a theory on that, that our audience is particularly susceptible to these gurus that say, “I will teach you how to make a million dollars by taking my $100,000 course, and once you take this course, you’re going to go out there and you’re going to flip 40 houses a year by showing you how I do it.” And even if they gave you the information to flip 40 houses a year, you’re not in shape to jump onto that level of a workout. It would be like if The Rock said, “I will show you my workout.” That doesn’t mean you can go do his workout. It takes time to build the skills that you would need to accomplish that.
Whenever someone’s being taken advantage of, there is a part of them that is making them vulnerable to that because like you said, they don’t want to do the work. They’re either lazy or they’re greedy or there’s some component of that that isn’t what… They don’t want to accept it’s the case, and I feel like this is why there’s constantly a new diet or a new trend or a new something, and if you’re the person that sells that to people, they’ll buy it, you’ll make a bunch of money, and then it’s funny because now you actually have money, and so you can show that your system worked, but you didn’t do it by working the system. You did it by selling other people on what they could be doing. I really like you because you took the opposite approach. You went in there and built these gyms and grinded to learn these things, and then you said, “Okay, here’s what I’ve learned after everything I’ve done.” I love that don’t be cute approach. It’s just this is the fundamentals. This is how it works. Do this better.

Alex:
It definitely wasn’t a new opportunity. So, one of the things that we call it database marketing, but when we work with a portfolio company, especially if they’re in the education space, one of the first systems that we implement is data tracking our customer success. And so, we have activation points that we want to track. We know that if someone does X, Y, Z by day 30 or whatever, the likely that they stay or assent goes up threefold, whatever. And so, what happens is then we can make substantiated claims based on what we can observe. And so, the more data we collect, we can say, “Hey, of the people who actually send a thousand emails to prospective homeowners, people who do that on average, four out of five of them will close the deal in their first 45 days.”
And so, then it gives people prescriptions of activation. It’s like I can’t guarantee that you’re going to do it, but I can give you the data to support what actions are going to create the outcome. And so, then you can start reworking the marketing message rather than being another guy who’s making the same promise. You just say, “Hey, again, I’m not making the promise. I’m just telling you what’s happened, and then you can make your own decision based on that.” That’s how I prefer it. It also gives you unlimited amounts of kind of marketing angles and hooks because once you have data, you can talk the top 20%, the bottom 20%, the median, the average. You can talk about people who do X, Y, Z, add contingencies to the claims that you make, and it gives you an unlimited way, but it all starts with actually focusing on the customer and making sure that they’re getting what they’re supposed to be getting.

Rob:
Right, yeah. So, I like this a lot, the don’t be cute. And I am a frequent watcher of your YouTube channel, and it’s a very raw channel where you sit, and you talk about life lessons that you’ve gone through, and I really like that. I really appreciate… Basically, you leave it all out there for people to kind of take and apply to their lives.
So, one of the things that I hear you talk about really often is scaling, and that seems to be somewhat of your specialty. I know that there’s different tiers of kind of scaling companies. Right? There’s the first million, then million to 3 million, and then yeah, 3 million to 30 million. So, I was kind of hoping we could dive into that a little bit because I think a lot of people in the BiggerPockets audience, they’re trying to get to that first million dollars. Right? We want to really dive into some of those concepts and what’s needed to really hit that million-dollar mark in the company. So, do you think you could just sort of walk us through those different tiers, starting with that first? How do we get to that golden egg of a million dollars for a business?

Alex:
I’ll actually even break it down to six figures too because I was asked on a different podcast about six figures, and actually, it’s even simpler. So, to get started, you have to sell something to someone. That’s it. Literally, that’s all. One avatar, one product, one channel. That’s it. So, you have one way of getting customers, you sell one thing to one specific type of person. That is all you need to do to get to six figures. To get to seven figures, you need to learn how to do those three things, reliably, consistently. Right? So, it’s you know how to sell one product to one avatar and one channel in a consistent manner. So, you start having predictive metrics on how you can acquire customers. So, it’s either I spend this amount of money on advertising and this is how many calls I get booked, and then from that many calls, I get that many sales, et cetera.
If it’s outbound, it’s like I send this many emails or make this many calls or this many texts, and then this many reply back, this many schedule, this many show, this many close, et cetera. If you’re running organic it’s I know that I need to have this many posts that I have to make across these different channels with call to actions that drive towards this page. For every thousand visitors on this page, I get Y opt-ins. You know what I mean? So, each of these vehicles, or I have to hit my email list once a week, and if I hit it once a week with a call to action again. So, all these are the different ways you can get customers. You could also do affiliates, you can do referrals. There’s many ways to do it.
But the point is, is you pick one avatar, one channel, and one product, and then as soon as you can start predictively… As soon as you can start predicting how many inputs it takes to get an output, then you get to a million. Right? At that point, you’re at one, two, 3 million-ish a year. One to three, you have to build out your core team. So, that’s usually the first five hires, first five to 10-ish. It depends on the ticket of the thing that’s being sold. If you’re selling $25,000 things versus $500 things, the team size is going to be different, but it’s the core team at about 3 million. That’s the reason that we take companies on at three is usually because there’s a core team and at 3 million there’s product market fit. So, they’ve demonstrated that people want this thing and they have enough support that we can take them from three to 10.
Three to 10, and this is interesting because this is a mistake a lot of people make at three, and I can stop whenever you want me to cut the lines of the problems that come up, but the problems that come up at three-ish are that people start getting cute, right, and they start saying… And here’s what’s difficult is that you get reinforced on the fact that the more you market, the more you sell, the more money you make. Right? And it’s true, and you can’t scale from there by doing more sales and more marketing, and that is what the vast majority of the industry will do because they got reinforced doing it early.
The problem is that they switched the objectives. The objective of the first phase of business which for me is like zero to three is just to demonstrate product market fit and an acquisition channel that is profitable. That is the objective. Now, at this point, we transition objectives to increasing lifetime value per customers. So, this is improving the customer experience, putting data tracking in place, if there’s an ascension opportunity that makes sense, we need to build out that product or service line so that, and this is the big point, so that when we do choose to add another channel or expand on our current channel, we can do so more profitably, right, where if you just sell a single product that might not have as much LTV as you would want. As you scale or put more in, your margins begin to compress. So, you might go up to 10 million, but your margins have compressed over time, and then you get in this place where you have to keep selling to maintain your overhead, but you’re not really taking enough home and you can’t have enough free cash flow to grow the business.
And so, sometimes it’s like you have to take the step back, fix the product, fix the customer experience, fix the service, fix the data, fix the infrastructure that everything’s built on, probably hire and fire some people that you promoted a little bit too early that didn’t have the experience because they’re actually not running things that well. And then once we fix that stuff, then honestly, going from three to 10 usually almost happens on its own.
Once we’re at 10, then we go far more aggressively on the acquisition side which is the easiest moniker that I use is more, better, new. So, we do more what we’re currently doing until we max that out, and then we do better of what we’re currently doing. Is there any CRO opportunities? So, conversion rate optimization, can we switch this headline out, can we change this lead magnet, can we implement some of the best practices that we know to get more people to show up if it’s a service business. Now, I only focus on service businesses so lots of our stuff is over the phone. Can we change the video sales letters and the follow up emails, things like that, all the improvements that can happen.
And then different is okay, or new is can we add a new channel to this. So, we have six that we can choose from to get new customers. We can hit up our own lists. We can do cold, cold outbound, we can do content, we can do paid ads, we can do affiliates, and we can do referrals. And so, those are the only six ways to get new customers, and we look at those six and say, “Of the skills that we currently have, which of these would make the most sense to add to it?” And you can even go adding a new thing within a current. So, if you’re running paid ads, it’s like going from Facebook to YouTube or going from Facebook to TikTok. Each one of those six squares has channels or media channels or platforms that you can tap into that give you new audiences. So, that was a little bit of a crash course there, but that’s what allows you to scale from 10 to 30 and beyond.
At 30-ish, the founders typically will start feeling constrained because they are the juju behind the entire business, and please cut me off if I’m starting to bore you guys, but at 30-ish is when it stops being about the founder. Not that it was about the founder to begin with, but you can wheel your way to 30, but at some point, right around there, you get spread too thin, and this was a… Okay, I’ll stop.
The point is that you need more stallions. Right? And so, you have to find more people who can drive things like you do, and so this is where employee compensation and recruiting become paramount to getting to the next level because you need to bring people in who’ve already won the Olympic gold, who’ve already run this race multiple times at companies just like yours, but bigger and better, and then have them come and run the playbook for you so that you’re not driving it, but someone else is, and so that’s where compensation and recruiting becomes really important so you can incentivize people who deserve to have that level of compensation and then that’s you get to nine figures plus.

Rob:
Okay. All right. Well, I think we could probably just end the podcast there. Right? I’m just kidding. We’ve got a lot to cover on this. So, let’s talk about the first million because that seems to be where a lot of people are in all of this. So, you talked about in your first million, you’re kind of identifying a few things. It’s going to be your avatar which is going to be your customer profile, who is your customer profile, but then you also mentioned your one channel. Can you explain that? Do you mean the one channel that you’re marketing or the one channel that you’re… Yeah, explain that. Do you mean like YouTube, like social channel? Give us a little bit more on that.

Alex:
Yeah. There’s three variables. Right? So, you’ve got platform, you’ve got media, and then you’ve got the content, right, of whatever you’re marketing. So, you just have to pick one of those three things together. So, I told you about six ways to get new customers just now. Right? S, there’s six ways of getting customers. You pick one, you double-click on that, and it’s like, “Okay, within there, if I do cold outbound, am I going to do cold call, am I going to do cold text, cold DMs, cold emails?” All of those would be one platform. Right?
So, one method, and then you’ve got the platform that you’re doing it on. And then you pick the type of media that you want to send. Do I want to send a voice memo? Do I want to send a text? Do I want to send a handwritten card? You know what I mean? Depends on the platform because some platforms you can send multiple types of media. Some of them, you can only send one. And so, you pick one channel which is all those things together which is just a fancy word for a pathway for a stranger to become a customer. Right? So, we pick a pathway for a stranger to become a customer, and we focus on that one thing.

Rob:
And do you feel that for breaking your first million, the entrepreneur that’s in this journey, is that kind of the loneliest phase of the company? Because I feel like for me, I was alone for a lot of it in terms of just in the weeds of my own businesses, and I really didn’t start hiring until breaking the threshold of that in my businesses. Is that a pretty common sentiment you think? Do people have well-established teams and that’s how they get to a million?

Alex:
No. I mean, at a million, it’s usually a few hires, a few contractors. It depends again on the number of units sold to get to a million because you got to make 83k a month, you got to make 20k a week. Right?. So, 20k a week, if you’re selling 20k things, it’s like you’re selling four clients a month. That’s pretty easy to manage. If you’re selling $100 things, you got to sell 200 clients a week. So, it’s a little bit harder. Again, if it’s a physical products business, then it’s going to be mostly support, and if you’re the media buyer/marketer, then you can probably manage an e-commerce. But again, it just depends on the type of business.
But I would say from a zoom out perspective, I think all seasons of entrepreneurship have elements of loneliness, and I think that it changes. I think in the beginning, it’s a lot harder because you’re really competitive. You’re really competitive against other people rather than being competitive against yourself, and so, in the beginning, you’re like, “This guy ripped off (beep). This guy’s blah, blah, blah.” You have all this finger pointing. I was just on a podcast with Ed Mylett, and we had a really good conversation about it, but the 20-year-club, you know what I mean? I’m only in the decade club. Right? But five years in, 80% of people are gone. Right? So, it’s like, okay, it’s a little bit friendlier. At 10 years, at least for me, I just know how big the world is.
I remember when I was starting out with Gym Launch, I thought about doing a weight-loss business because we were good at weight loss, and that was actually what ended up… We decided to do the weight-loss business, and that’s when I pivoted and I told the guys, the gyms that we’re were going to do their turnarounds the next month that we weren’t going to do it. And the guys were like, “Well, can you just show me how to do it?” And I was like, “Fine, I’ll show you how to do it,” and I sold them just kind of like a licensing of all my ads and all my pages and everything that I’d already built out and tested, and then that ended up being… Yeah, that became Gym Launch and became way bigger than the little weight loss thing that we had.
But when I started doing weight loss just for a few weeks, a buddy of mine who was in weight loss came up to me, he said, “Yo, if you do weight loss, we can’t be friends.” He was doing like 150 grand a month. I was like, “Dude, it’s a $60 billion industry. We can’t both do weight loss? He’s like, “Dude, I was doing weight loss first.” I was like, “Bro, I had six gyms. I’ve been doing weight loss when you were 17.” You know what I mean?

Rob:
That’s crazy. That’s crazy that he invented the concept of weight loss. You know that guy. That’s so cool.

Alex:
Right. And so, I say that because it sounds ridiculous and that guy ended up becoming very, very successful too, and he later on was like, “Dude, I was just, I don’t know, sorry,” because you’re so afraid. It’s just fear. You’re just so afraid that something’s going to go wrong that you just want to hold on and clench and just point at everybody else when it just isn’t about you. You know what I mean? It’s just like if you can serve your customers, you’ll have business. It doesn’t matter what the competition’s doing. And the market’s so big. You know what I mean? So, anyways, I think that’s why it’s lonely, but it’s lonely at my point too, just in a different way. It’s lonely because there’s just not that many people that I can talk to who are dealing with the same things.

Rob:
Right. That makes sense for me. I’ve been in a lot of moments like that where it’s rare to connect with someone that’s going through the exact kind of very nuanced thing that you’re going through. Have you found people in your journey that you have connected in that way? How does one even find that? Because I think that is really tough for a lot of people to find someone that really grasps what they’re saying on a personal level.

Alex:
So, to talk on one of the points that we were talking about in the game show earlier, I’m a huge, huge, huge, huge proponent of alternative education. I love the education businesses. I love guru businesses. I mean, I love them, as long as they’re being done well and promising the correct thing and really focused on the product and the customer. I love that. And fundamentally, guru businesses are just education businesses, and they are sprouting all over the place because the demand is unmet by the formal education system, and the demand is for skills that make money, and people are not getting them, but the demand is not going away. If anything, it’s grown because people are seeing on social media all these other people making money and they’re like, “(beep) this is possible.”, And so in one good way, I think Instagram and all that stuff has made more people believe that they can do it.
The downside is obviously whenever you have upside, you’ve got an equal opposite reaction of people who are scamming people and things like that, and I think that the difference between a scam and somebody who is trying to deliver is intention. I think there are many well hearted or well-intentioned educators who are really trying to do a good job, but they are poor teachers. Just like there are people who love to teach who are teachers and were terrible at teaching math, and you probably had them, but they really wanted to help, and they just weren’t that good at it.
And so, I have a little bit more of a heart for both sides of the equation here, but I do think that education is the way and how did I find people? I asked and I was willing to have people say no, and real, real, very few people said no to me my whole journey, and I think it was because the way that I asked was I didn’t ask. I went and said, “Hey, this is all the stuff I’m good at,” and then I would just prepare stuff and I would do work ahead of time to help them with their business, and I would just get on a call and be like, “Here’s all the value I could possibly deliver to you.” And then if it was anybody worth anything, because winners give back, they were like, “Dude, I was not expecting this. Dude, what can I do for you?” And I’d be like, “Okay, I really have this question. Do you know how to do this thing?” And they’re like, “No, but I know a guy and I’ll put you guys together.”
And so, my first mastermind I was a part of, I got voted member of the year with like a hundred internet marketers, and I wasn’t an internet marketer because I didn’t know anything about internet marketing which is ridiculous. I joined it because I wanted to learn. And so, only thing I knew then was sales. I rewrote so many scripts for guys in that community because it was the only thing I was good at. And so, they’re like, “Wow, this is awesome,” and then they would help me out. And I was like, “How do I fucking connect a landing page to a opt-in thing?” And they would sit there and they would show me how to do it, and that’s how I learned. I learned like this, you and me on the phone right here. This is how I learned, and I paid dearly for that because I didn’t buy that many courses. I actually bought way more one on one, and I bought a lot of my one on one by doing work for other people for free.

Rob:
Yeah. I can definitely relate with the opt-in form and connecting into the landing page. When I first launched my very first program, that was the hardest week of my life because I did all the tech and all the marketing-

Alex:
Of course.

Rob:
… and all the content and all the editing and all the copywriting, and it hurt my brain, but at the end of it, I was like, “Okay.” And so, I’m a really big proponent of learning all this stuff and mastering it before I can delegate it out to somebody else because I just want to know that they are good at what they’re doing. But I feel like that’s not necessarily super sustainable as the organization grows, and I think you kind of mentioned this earlier where you said once you start scaling up, you have to start hiring these stallions or people that are better than you at certain functions. I struggle with that, not because I think I’m smarter than everybody, but I’m just always like, “No one knows it the way I know it.” Is that a limiting belief that is difficult to shake your entire journey, or are you pretty good at breaking free from that limiting belief?

Alex:
Yeah, a hundred percent, limiting belief. I mean, it’s prideful to think that no one can do something better than you. So, a lot of times what happens is people hire people who’ve never done the thing and then are like, “Oh my god, I’m better than this person.” It’s like, well, obviously. They’ve never done it before. Hire someone who’s significantly better than you who’s done that thing for a very long time, who’s not also running every other department of the business, and you’ll be amazed at how much somebody can do. And so, in the beginning though, just to be clear, it is normal for people to have to learn all the basics. Right? Entrepreneurship in the beginning is very much master of all trades, what is it, jack of all trades. Master of none. That’s very much the beginning. You have to just be good enough at everything. You don’t have to be great. You just have to be good enough to get it done and get the first dollar across the bridge. From there, you start to begin to get more leverage.
And so, the entire conversation of scaling an entrepreneurship are two things, control and leverage. And so, the control component is that you have… It’s a consistent relinquishing of control as you move up the leverage ladder, right, because you can’t see every email that goes out. You can’t approve every post. You can’t review every sales call. You can’t make every video that’s going to be in your course from what you’re saying. Right? You can’t make every one of those things, and the person who’s making it in the beginning might not be as good as you, but the question is are they good enough?
That’s why organizations improve over time because you have to scale with good enough until you can replace it with better because you have more leverage, because you have more cash flow, you can attract better people, you can fix the culture, et cetera, et cetera. And so, the whole concept of moving up in entrepreneurship is trading your time for increasing amounts of money. If we’re defining leverage as getting more for what you put in, right, inputs and outputs in the systems, the discrepancy between the two is the leverage, if that’s the leverage in the system, we try and use more and more leverage, and the first version of that is labor. Right? And so, that’s the lowest form of leverage that we can use, and so we hire people to do things for us so that we can have time back to do more valuable things.

David:
In your experience, Alex, do you feel that the skill of hiring well is a really big hurdle that people have to overcome? Is this one of the bigger problems, or is it not as big as I’m thinking in my mind?

Alex:
It is the problem. It is the biggest problem. So, think about this from a purely theoretical standpoint. If you understood what was required in a business, what has to happen for a business to succeed, and then all you did was put the people in place to have that happen, then you would not need to work. And so, the reason that things are not happening is because the people are not doing the things. Our ability as entrepreneurs to select, so first attract, recruit, hire, manage, and ascend/keep talent. The higher up you go in the business, the more leverage you have on how much money and your time you make, it all becomes about recruiting.
And so, you might like this from a real estate perspective, but you can buy or you can build. That’s kind of an M & A thing. Right? If we have a new division that we want to get into, we can either build the thing from scratch or we can buy it. But if you zero down at a micro level, you can either build talent or you can buy it, and so it’s much faster to buy talent. And so, I think one of the things that people overestimate, this is a quote from my wife, but she says, “Everyone thinks they’re a good judge of character until they get judged by the people they hire.” And so it’s a Leila mic drop for you, but it’s true. Right? Yeah, it’s true. If we’re being judged based on the people we hire, I would say that in my experience, the objective facts have worked better. And so, track record and case study analysis before they start. So, it’s like if I want to hire a video editor, for example, to cut content, then I want to look at their track record, show me the stuff that you’ve already done and that you’ve been doing this for a long time for people just like me trying to get to where I want to go. Those are all nuances in what I just said.
The second piece is, hey, here’s some raws, this is what I want, go make stuff, and then I can have 10 guys compete. And the thing is that there’s so much psychological bias of I like this guy, he looks the way I look, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that we don’t let the work do the talking. And so, the more objective we can be about it. So, in that way, I really do believe in being colorblind and all that kind of stuff when it comes to recruiting talent because talent comes in all forms. And so, all I really care about is the productivity, the output of the person. And so I think for me, that’s been the easiest thing. This is much more Leila’s department, but in terms of how we scale businesses in Acquisition.com, we consider recruiting to be our core and number one competency because at 3 million, what the business lacks is talent.
And so, what we do because it’s usually one founder that’s breathing life into this thing with lots of little helpers, it’s a genius with a thousand hands, and of course, if you remove the genius, there’s nothing, right, and that’s most businesses, and most businesses aren’t worth anything because they’re not businesses, they’re leveraged jobs. And so, what we do is we look at the needs of the business and then we recruit people who’ve done the thing already and can demonstrate that they can solve the specific problem that we’re facing, and the nice thing is that if you are hiring somebody, you should have a problem that they should be solving.
And so the problem’s sitting in front of you and you’re like, “Hey, head of marketing, fix my marketing,” on the job interview, and two things happen either. They don’t know how to do it, or they do know how to do it and they teach you stuff. And so, during the interview process, if you’re not learning (beep) from the person that you’re supposed to hire to take the job from you, then they’re going to work as a subset of your knowledge because you know more than them which means you need to train them, and so you’re not buying talent, you’re building it again. But you might be paying buying-it price for building-it work which is not the trade we want to make. So, anyways, I could talk about that longer, but fundamentally, that’s how you scale.

David:
You’re making me very uncomfortable because I’m realizing as you’re talking here that I tend to lean towards the I want to coach this person up, they have a great attitude, they want to learn, they’re like, “Whatever you want, I’ll go do it.” And then I actually, not only am I paying you, but I’m losing money because I’m taking time away from revenue-generating activities to train you to do the thing that I’m also paying you to do, and I’m just stuck in sort of this treadmill that I can’t get out of right now.

Rob:
But I mean, certainly, Alex, there has to be some people in your umbrella, in your company that you do train up, and those are kind of the people that they’re like the foundation of your company, right, or is it completely objective? You can just buy all talent when you’re starting a company.

Alex:
Depends on the nature of the work and what you’re able to pay. So, for example, frontline work in general, you’re going to get lower skilled labor, and so it becomes a competitive advantage to have a very good training program because then you’re getting the work done for less than the market. Right? So, if someone comes equipped with the skill, you have to pay the premium of them having already acquired the skill. If we have a really robust training system, like if you’re a door to door business, door to door sales business, like solar or pest control, whatever, then a really big business will pride itself on the fact that it can take somebody off the street, run them through their gauntlet of training, and then on the other side, they’ve got a $400,000 a year producer. And so, it depends on the nature of the thing that you’re selling and what your competitive advantages are.

Rob:
Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. I think I’ve been so slow to hire simply because I feel like I want to have a few people that I build up and train simply because I want them to speak Rob and know Rob and write Rob, right, and think the way that I think so that when we start hiring externally, they can then train all those people because they’ve been trained by me. But it’s harder than you think. I mean, I just hired a COO for my education brand, and that was a really big… That was a really pride-busting moment for me to really finally sit down and say, “Okay.” It’s not that I was failing, but I was failing myself from a personal standpoint of being able to be sane and not stressed and fulfilling family needs and everything like that.
Just the moment that they accepted the offer, I was like, “Oh, I can finally stop saying no to everything,” because anytime I have a new idea or something new that I want to do with my program, I would immediately say, “Oh yeah, but the logistics on that are a headache. I would never do it, but it’s a really cool thing.” I was in the meeting with my COO yesterday, and there was like three ideas that came up, and I stopped him from riffing on it because I was like, “No, the logistics on that are a nightmare,” and then I was like, “Wait a minute. I don’t have to worry about the logistics. It’s literally your job to do that.” And he’s like, “That’s right, man. You tell me what you want me to do, and I will make it happen.” And I was like, “Wow. Now I understand why people hire people.”
So, I think a lot of this came down to one of the reasons I chose him is he came from my organization. He paid me for a consultation. I didn’t charge him 120,000 though. I think I charged him like 150 bucks like a year ago. Then he joined my program. Then he joined my mastermind. Then he joined my sales team, and then he quit because he was too busy working his full-time job, and I said, “No, wait, don’t quit. I like you too much. Come back.” And I was able to bring him on and integrate him, but one of the reasons I think I saw him early on was actually something that you said, and it’s your philosophy on superstars. I’d like to talk about that for a second. When you see a superstar, you know it. Can you tell us, expand on this a little bit?

Alex:
It’s not common, and I think you get better at recognizing it over time. I think the amount of people who hear me talk about superstars and they’re like, “Oh yeah. So, it says [inaudible 00:44:15], they’re superstar.” I’d be like, “I don’t know if that’s a superstar,” because I had a mentor who sold his business for multiple Bs, and he said, “You know, Alex, you have to remember that the best talent has yet to come.” He’s like, “The best hire you’ve ever made is in the future.”
And so, it’s always this constant raising bar, but superstars, when you find them, you have to hold onto them, and you have to find a way to… Now, mind you, the big comma here is that as long as they do not break the culture and you’re not making exceptions for them from a cultural basis because that’s one of the biggest issues is that you’ve got this super high individual contributor who actually detracts and is a cancer for the overall company. That’s the hardest fire to make, but it’s the one you have to make, but superstars who fit within the culture. I mean, you want to give them as much opportunities as you can and support them in their growth so that they can grow. But even then with like the salesman to COO move, I would’ve been like, “Huh, that’s interesting.” That’s a very different character trait and very different skill set. So, I’m like, “Huh. Interesting.’ That wouldn’t have been my first guess.

Rob:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the salesman thing, that was definitely part of his… I think he just wanted to be a part of the organization. And so, he was willing to do sales for me just to be like, “Hey, I just want you to know I’m in.” I had seen him throughout the whole journey. He was kind of not the ground level of like the Rob-built channel, but pretty close to the beginning of everything. And so, I was like, “All right, well, this guy has been around since the beginning. He’s had faith in me. So, I’m going to have a little bit of faith into him.”
And honestly, I mean, just in the one week that we’ve started, I’m already like, “Ah.” Really, I needed someone that was complimentary to me, right, because the phrase for me that I always think about is if we’re both the same, one of us is unnecessary. And so, for me, I can’t work with someone who’s a visionary and has big strategy, big ideas because that’s what I have. I don’t need that. I need someone to actually go and run with it.

Alex:
Yeah.

Rob:
So, I want to kind of talk it about a little bit here. Can you give me your opinion on when you’re talking about scaling, what is the more difficult stage? Is it that first reaching the million dollars? Is it the reaching the three or the 30 or even any numbers past that?

Alex:
It’s so difficult to say which one’s the hardest. I would say the hard feels different. The first stage, zero to six, zero to seven, the hard is that you don’t know what the (beep) you’re doing. I don’t know if I’m allowed to cuss. If I’m not, then bleep me.

Rob:
We’ll bleep you out. It’s all good.

Alex:
Yeah. You have no idea what you’re doing. The biggest threat you have in your business is ignorance. It’s just not knowing what the hell you’re doing. That’s the threat. Right? And that is hard because you feel like you’re just flying through space and you have no idea. You’re disoriented. Getting from a million to 3 million is very difficult because you have to learn an entirely new skill set which is you have to hire your first team. Right? That’s very difficult for a lot of people. Three to 10 is difficult because you have to unlearn the thing that made you successful up to this point which is you’re focusing on front end rather than on product and back end. It’s very difficult. It’s like spiritually difficult at that point. You know what I mean?
Once you’re at three to 10, you’re already out of the like I have to work, I have to cry my face off in terms of hours in because at some point the amount of work that has to get done surpasses your ability to work which means you have to work through other people. At 10 million, the difficulty is you have to give up even more control. And so, at each of these levels, you’re giving up different types of control. In the beginning, you’re giving up control of fulfillment. The next level you’re giving up control of sales. Then you’re giving up control of finances, things like that. Then you’re giving up control of marketing. Then you’re giving up control of managing all those things. Then you’re giving up control of leading the company and so on and so forth.
There’s always this relinquishing of control which is I would say spiritually very difficult, and it’s easy to say, very hard to do, and that’s what we look for in the portfolio companies that we’re thinking about taking on. We look at the CEOs and we’re like, “Do I think this person has the humility to give up control when it is required?”

Rob:
Yeah. David, I think you’re pretty good at this. I think you’re really good at finding people that you can, as you say, develop them and help run the different companies that you’ve created. What’s been the toughest, I guess, phase for you when it came to scaling?

David:
I’m having a whole psychological session with myself as I’m listening to Alex talking to you.

Rob:
I see you breaking out into hives over there.

David:
Yeah. It keeps on coming back that every issue I’m having in business is a reflection or a symptom of an issue I have with myself. As I’m thinking about why, what he’s saying makes perfect sense, why don’t I do that, there’s this big arrow that comes pointing at some character flaw that I have, or a fear that I would have, or maybe I don’t want to commit to being there every single day at eight o’clock, and if I’m going to hire this person and pay them $300,000, I have to be just as committed as I want them to be. So, maybe, Alex, at some point we could talk more about what your advice would be. But Rob, I’m sorry, what was your question there? This is how deep I am in psychological [inaudible 00:49:17].

Rob:
I know. Well, I can already see the YouTube title is Alex Hormozi Exposes David Greene. Nice clickbait title. I want to know from your standpoint, what’s been the most difficult stage for you to scale in any of your companies? Was it getting to the zero to 1 million mark, or was it any stage after that?

David:
I think by Alex’s definition here, the three to 30 is where I keep getting stuck. So, I am very good at what you said, a business is just a leverage job. You have one person, a bunch of support pieces. Right? And I get to where I max. I cannot get any higher than this. I am doing as much as I possibly can. And then I pick the person and I hand over a lot of my responsibilities, and then I go off and I crush it in another thing, and when I come back, I’m like, “Ugh, what happened?” And then I have to take that person out and put a new person in, and I just get stuck in that leap off cycle, and then I fall right back down, and it’s definitely a problem with hiring. I’m sure someone who’s good at this would look at it right away and say, “You’re doing it wrong,” but I’ve been probably three years on that treadmill.

Alex:
Yeah. It’s an interesting concept to think about. Leila and I discuss this all publicly, but it’s called the hidden funnel or the missing funnel. But if you think about what has to happen to acquire a customer. Right? So, you have to do some sort of lead generation. There’s some sort of lead nurture. There’s some sort of sales, there’s some sort of delivery, and then there’s some sort of retention, and then some sort of ascension. Right? So, those are kind of the steps that you take for a customer. Well, the same funnel exists on the other side of the business which is as the business grows, you need to have a funnel to acquire talent, acquire employees. Instead of lead generation, you have application generation. Instead of lead nurture, you have application nurture.
So, it’s like how quickly are we getting these people booked for interviews? The best talent finds a job in eight days, eight days, from the day they start searching. If your entire job hunting process takes longer than eight days, you’ve already lost all the good people. Right? And then from there, the sale is the interview. Right? And with good talent, it should be a sale, right, because they should be able to be picky. If the person that you’re trying to hire doesn’t have any other opportunities, do you really want to hire them? Right?

Rob:
Yeah.

Alex:
And then from there, you have the delivery which within the context of an employee is going to be the onboarding process of how am I going to acclimate you to this business, what are our culture, what are our values, how do you get paid, how do we do with time off, what’s our compensation philosophy, what is your career path, what is your Ascension, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? All these things that have to get covered, and it takes time. Right? We onboard a new senior executive, it’s going to be a month of one to two hours a day with the executive. And then finally, we have retention and ascension. Right? So, it’s like, okay, now that we have this person, they’re onboarding, they’re productive. It’s like how do we retain them and continue to get them motivated, and then is there the opportunity for ascension, the same way we have that with a customer?
And so, you really have this mere funnel that exists in the middle of the business that’s external versus internal, but the promotion process is the same. And most people build this front end and they don’t have a concurrent funnel that funnels into the business to build the infrastructure of the business to support the leads and customers that are coming in. And ultimately, that’s how you were able to scale it by having… If you remember what I said earlier, there’s one avatar, one product, one channel, we can have the same process on the back end which is we have a specific avatar that we’re searching for, and we have a specific job that we have, and then we have a channel that we’re looking to get them on, on a consistent basis. Getting the consistency down is really what gets you from one-off hires to having a consistent hiring process.

David:
Just like your lead generation process, right?

Alex:
[inaudible 00:52:28].

David:
In order get to that point, you get comfortable with the process. I always have to be lead generating, and then you need to sort of take that same pattern and apply it to, well, I’m lead generating for talent at this point.

Alex:
Yes.

David:
Yep. So, that’s where I’ve been stuck and that’s just the challenge. Until I can figure out what it is in me or find the right person that can do that for me… Right? There’s probably a person that is good at hiring people that if I had someone like that, man, I think I would 10 X pretty quickly.

Alex:
That’s and just to-

David:
Any last advice there.

Alex:
Oh yeah. No, I was just going to say and that’s why for us within our firm, the only thing that we keep in-house is recruiting because at least for me, I think about the highest leverage ways because if I were to do anything, us as a hold code, do anything for the portfolio company is actually doing this rather than advice, in addition to recruiting, that means that that company becomes less sellable in the future because then hold code has to go with it. Right? It has to sit within the enterprise for the value to be created, right, in the enterprise value itself. And so, the most efficient way of us doing that is for us to hire and find that talent which is what we can do with our reputation, our reach, et cetera, that’s our competitive advantage, and we can bring the all-star into the business, and then now the value’s being created on a consistent basis. The problem’s been solved for good, and then that value sits inside of the enterprise which then makes everybody more money later.

David:
I want to take a slightly different approach to what we’re talking about and get your opinion on something. I’m writing a book for BiggerPockets right now, and I think it’s going to be called pillars, but the basic concept is instead of trying to find out how to buy a bunch of real estate without acquiring any skills or without having any money, why don’t you just solve the problem of why you’re broke. Right? Get your spending under control. Get a budget. Right? Here’s some tools to do that. Get good at making money because that’s actually something that is possible to do, especially in America. So, there’s defense, offense, and then you invest the difference, and that will be the part on investing. In this book, I’m-

Alex:
Good luck.

David:
Thank you. I’m trying to come up with advice for people who are not making enough money in their job because what I noticed is as we talk to people like you, the constant problem is how do I get talent, how do I get someone to do a good job. It’s not like we’re holding people down saying, “I don’t want to pay you more money.” We’re desperately looking for these leads of people that can help our business. And then you’ve got a whole population of people that are saying, “I want to make more money.” There is a huge disconnect that’s happening here. So, do you have any advice either for me that I can put in the book, or for the people who are listening who are not happy with how well they’re doing for what they can do to actually bring more value to their employer and make more money?

Alex:
Yeah. So, I think everyone needs to turn off their 19-year-old finance expert guru and stop trying to invest in the S&P 500 and invest in the S & Me 500. Right? They should be putting every dollar they have into themselves rather than an index because I can promise you, if they put a thousand dollars into themselves, they’re going to make more than a hundred dollars a year off that increase in skills. And so, the biggest issue that most people have is they don’t have the ability to discern what their missing link is or what their next step is. If you think about the theory of constraints which is that a system will grow until it’s constrained, and so what happens is most people add potential to a system, but they don’t actually increase the throughput of the system.
So, for example, if I had a bridge, right, and it has a weak link in the bridge, or let’s say a chain. It’s probably simpler. So, if you have a chain and you have to pull two things, the amount of force that you can put on the chain is just predicated based on the weakest link. And so, what happens is that people will reinforce a strong link and not the weak link in the chain, and so they add potential to the chain, but they don’t actually add any more strength that can be pulled. And so, if you think about the amount of money that you’re trying to make as the amount of money that you’re literally trying to pull towards you, that weak link is going to be the skill deficiency that you have, and so most people solve problems that aren’t really there, and they spend a lot of their time reinforcing skills that they enjoy, but that’s not their deficiency.
And so, that’s why the entrepreneurship thing is you have to be a jack of all trades, master of none. You have to be good enough to get the thing across the finish line to pull the money towards you. You don’t have to have the strongest link. You just need all of the links to be strong enough. And so, I think most people aren’t good at assessing their own deficiencies. And so, if the follow-up question is how do you assess efficiencies, right, how do you know what’s missing, the question is what are the revenue generating activities within a business? How can I get myself closer to those revenue-generating activities? And so, you can look at product as revenue-generating activity. You can look at sales as revenue-generating activity. You can look at marketing as revenue-generating activity.
And so, if you think about those as kind of the three core pillars of what businessing is, and then you have back of house. Right? You’ve got finance. You’ve got It. You’ve got the other pieces, but the people who ascend even in the back office know how to generate revenue and bottom line for their division. So, for example, my CFO, Suzanne Shifflet, she led a $15 billion acquisition, 5 billion, a 1 billion. The last company she was at was 750 million. She’s been dollar one to a hundred million two times. She’s been there. And the first thing she did on our first interview, she was like, “Oh, you won’t have to pay for me,” and she’s paid very well. And she’s like, “You don’t have to pay for me.” She’s like, “I’ll save more than what you’re ever going to pay me. Just first six months, I’ll save you that.” And I was like, “Ah. Cool.”
And so, smart people know how to do that. An intelligent video editor is going to come and say, “Dude, I can 10 X the amount of views that you’re getting on this thing,” because he’s going to time himself to marketing. A good product person’s going to say, “I can decrease our churn which is going to increase your LTV. I’m going to be able to get more people to ascend because they can have a higher NPS score and they’re more likely to want to keep buying from us.” They have to just figure out a way to tie whatever the thing… If they’re really passionate about something, by all means, go all in on it.
If you’re IT, then you’re thinking, “How can I decrease page load times? How can I get conversion rates up?” You start getting into the CRO side. How can I organize the data in such a way that the CEO can make better decisions and we have real-time reporting against all the sales guys so we can optimize our funnels towards the best converting guys. Right? All aspects of the business can make more money, but people don’t think about it through that lens. So, the first thing is how do I tie what I do every day to making more money in the business? You connect that dot and then you improve that connection.

David:
Let me ask if I understand your chain link analogy there because I thought that was really good. And I also love what you said is solve a problem for somebody, bring value to them, and you’re paying your own salary. You can name your own price if you’re making or saving the company that money. I did a TED Talk about building skills and in it I described how when I was, you wouldn’t think it from looking at me now, but I used to be incredibly skinny. I was very insecure. I was a bean pole, 6’1 and like 150 pounds. It was terrible. And so, it was just a challenge for me to get to the gym at all. I just was working out next to meatheads and I hated how it felt, and I was trying to work out my arms.

Rob:
You needed Gym Launch, man.

David:
Exactly, exactly. We didn’t have that back then, Alex. I was trying to work out my arms because that was the biggest area of insecurity that I would have. I would wear like extra long T-shirts because I didn’t want people to see how skinny my arms were. So, I’m doing these curls, and I realized I can’t even get a bicep workout because my wrist would get tired before that muscle would. The muscles in my wrist were not strong enough to do it. And then I finally got my wrist strong and I had that same problem with my forearms. They would burn too much and I couldn’t get to the bicep. So, I had this process where I had had to strengthen individual links in that chain before I got to the actual freaking bicep so I could work it out. Is that close to what you’re describing that people have with their own personal skills that they’re maybe they want to get to this part in bringing value, but they’ve got these weak links they have to strengthen before they get there?

Alex:
It’s perfect analogy. The one that you had, it’s a perfect analogy. As a total side note because you’re in the education space, one of the big things that people… There’s a big misconception which is that one product or one course or one coaching thing or one mastermind is going to be their messiah. It’s going to be the one thing that sets them off, and the thing is that the testimonials that anybody receives is not purely because of the program that they have, and that’s hard for a lot of educators to take on because they want to take responsibility for everyone’s success. But the thing is, if you take responsibility for everyone’s success, you have to also take responsibility for everyone’s failures.
And so, I think that a realistic approach is probably better. You didn’t teach the person how to read. You didn’t teach the person arithmetic. You didn’t teach them multiplication. And so, education sits atop foundations. And so, a lot of times, and this is for everyone who’s listening to this who’s going through educational programs and they haven’t made money yet, the point is to make progress, and the hardest part in the beginning of entrepreneurship is ignorance, and you have to pay down the time tax of ignorance as fast as you can.
And so, you pay down that time tax of ignorance through education, and the thing is that if you are fortifying different aspects of the chain, if there is a link that is literally missing until… Let’s say there’s 30 pieces of the chain that have to get built for us to pull a certain amount of money towards us, all right, just to keep the analogy parallel. If there’s 30 links, the first course you take might give you 20 of them. Right? But you didn’t make money. And so, that person then said, they shake their fist at the guy and say, “Screw that guy. He took my money.” But you’re 20 links out of 30. Right? And then you take another thing because you at least accurately identify what was wrong and you get another eight links. Now, you get two links, and then you go to this next final guy, and he gives you the last two links that you need, and then you’re like, “This guy’s the messiah. This guy’s the stuff. I did two other programs. I didn’t get any results.”
The thing is that you were measuring based on outputs, not on inputs, and you were measuring based on how much money you would making rather than how much work you were doing on you. And so, I think if people can make that shift based on them being the investment that they are making, then they will always see the return, and then it obviously focuses more on the process and the outcome, and if you can do that because I can tell you for me personally because I get asked a lot, and hopefully it comes off the right way, “How did you move so quickly?” Because we’re 32 years old, crossed a hundred millions net worth last year, and we get asked this question all the time. And it was because we always took 100% as much of the access cash that we had and just plowed it into education. It was all about how can I have more.
I mean, my goal in life was to be wise. When I was really young, I was like, “I want to be wise.” And wisdom is seeing what other people cannot see. Right? And so, it’s understanding the circumstance and having the discernment to see what is true and what is not. And so, if we look at why you’re not doing well in business, it’s being able to properly discern and identify what those problems are, and you only get that through repetition, you get that through experience, you get that through mentors, and people who have more context than you who can breathe into your life. And so, anyways, I’m very passionate about that. And so, I just think that a lot of people do the education industry a disservice because they go to college and four years later with a Spanish degree, they can barely speak Spanish, and then they take one course and they’re like, “I’m not a millionaire.” If it’s hard, then that’s what makes it worth doing. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing. You wouldn’t even want it if it were easy.

Rob:
Dude, that is so true. I feel like the education space gets poo-pooed on a little too much, especially for all the legitimate people out there teaching stuff. The way I say it is I’ve learned it the hard way, so you can learn it the easy way, but the bad news is, is that you still have to put in a lot of hard work for it to work out. It’s not hard, but it is hard work, a lot of the time in real estate. It is hard too if you’re really getting started. But I like that you said ignore the 19-year-old finance bros because I do feel like that is the thing. I actually got interviewed for a YouTube video about a month ago, and it was a buddy of mine and he was asking a bunch of millionaires, “Hey, if you were talking to someone just getting started, how would you recommend investing a thousand dollars?”
And every single one was like, “S&P 500, I would think Solana or Bitcoin.”

Alex:
Really?

Rob:
I was like, “Um, yeah.” And I was like, “You’re not going to make any money on…” Sorry. “You’re not going to make any money really that’s life-changing with a thousand dollars in a stock investment. Invest in education. Buy a thousand dollar course or two $500 course and learn a skill that allows you to make more money.” Maybe it’s video editing. Maybe it’s, I don’t know, Amazon, real estate. Whatever it is, I don’t really care, but learn, empower yourself, give yourself knowledge, and use that to make more money because at the end of the day, starting out with a thousand dollars, I mean, while some people have done it and become billionaires from it, I’m sure it’s not something… I mean, you got to get real lucky with a thousand dollars on a Bitcoin call or something like that to make a ton of money. So, I always say go learn and that is what’s going to make you the money, not necessarily a tiny little investment.

Alex:
In my opinion, 100% of anyone’s money, especially sub 30, should be invested in only one thing which is increasing their earning capacity. That’s it. It’s increasing your earning capacity so much so that you cannot spend the money that is coming in, and then, and only then, when you literally can’t find places to spend the money on education which is why I get so excited to spend 130 grand for the calls with Grant or anything. I’ve done that a number of times, $25,000 a call. I’ve paid plenty of those types of calls, and they’ve always returned, and the constant is that you have to be willing to work, and if you have the belief which I do which is that I always want to be the best student. So, if I go into somebody’s program, I will say, “If someone else can then so can I,” and then I will do whatever they did and do a little bit more or a lot more, and that way I can always… Because if it worked for one other person, then it means it can work for me.
And so, I’ve always had that as a deep-seated belief. At least it served me well and maybe it’ll serve the audience. I know I went on a quick tangent with that.

Rob:
No, no. That’s great.

Alex:
This stuff really lights me up because it’s what I care a lot about. I’ll give you a quick example because I think it’ll drive this home. So, a friend of mine has a daughter. She’s 17 years old. She got a job at a bowling alley, and she was making minimum wage. I think it was like 7.50, whatever. And he’s like, “Why don’t you just get a phlebotomy certification? It’s a weekend and you immediately make $25 an hour.” Right? And so, people think about that. I’m like, “Guys, it’s $500 and two days.” It’s a weekend to get a phlebotomy certification, and forever, she will have three and a half extra earning capacity for the rest of her life.
And so, if you take that same thousand dollars and put it in the S&P, maybe it goes up 10%. Maybe it goes up 25% because it’s crazy year. Right? Well, cool. You have $250 extra. You could have $250 extra per week just by investing in that one thing where you get a 50 X return or 100X return. Right? And then you take that excess, to your point, David, right, and you say, “Okay, phlebotomy is this skill. Is there another skill I can stack on top of this? Maybe it’s project managements or management skills in general and I can manage 50 phlebotomists.” Right? It’s just, it’s leveling up the skill set and the opportunity vehicle that we’re pursuing.
So, I could be a blender tender, you know what I mean, at a smoothie shop, right, or I could be a manager, a little bit better, probably still not a good vehicle, or I could own a smoothie shop or I could own the franchise of all the smoothie shops. It’s all just degrees of leverage and acquiring the skill set required. As long as you know what the path looks like, then you can ask the question, “What do I lack that person has?” I think that’s usually one of the more valuable questions, rather than envy and casting stones about why someone’s ahead of you and they were cheap, and you’re actually a really virtuous person, and they must be doing something negative to be ahead of you. Maybe they’re just better than you, and if you can at least admit that and have the humility to do so, then you can create the deficit that you can then solve.

David:
I love it, man. I think what you’re saying right now has the ability to change lives more than almost anything else that could be said, and it hits right at the core of you are actually in charge of your own success if you take the responsibility for building skills. You just don’t hear people talk about how important it is to have skills. You get that in Napoleon dynamite complex. Right? Girls like guys that have skills. I don’t have any skills. But that’s what will put you in the position of empowerment. It’s not the next get rich quick scheme. It’s not some clever marketer telling you could have a Ferrari like me, if you do this type of a thing.
What you’re trying to do when you’re taking these courses or educating yourself really is building skills, and I think you take anyone, you put them in a Jamba Juice and they’re the blender tender and they take the right approach, and then they learn how to become a shift manager, and then from there they learn how to manage the other people, and then they get put in charge of hiring, and then they’re looking at company books, and well, we can increase revenue if we sell a cinnamon bun with every smoothie or whatever. You’re actually building skills that then they say, “Let me put you in charge of the whole Jamba Juice. Let me put you in charge of my other five Jamba Juices.” Now you learn how to franchise and you could buy a Jamba. I mean, that’s literally kind of what you did, and this is the key to making it.

Alex:
And for everyone who’s always like, “I don’t know where to start,” start with the money. Watch where the money goes. How does the money come in the door? You just have to watch the path of the money, from click to close, cradle to grave. So, how does this person find out about whatever business you’re working in? Ask those questions. That is fundamentally what the understanding of business is understanding how do I monetize raw attention, how do I get raw attention, how do I attract it towards me, how do I convert that attention and exchange goods and services for dollars. Right? How do I get that good in service person to come back and spend more money? Right? If you know what that path of the money looks like, and that’s where you can ask.
I remember when I actually was a smoothie blender tender because that’s why I use the example because I was one, and if you’re like, “Man, I haven’t thought about that.” It’s okay. Neither did I. You know what I mean? I worked for two years at a smoothie store, and every day, I would look at the total sales, I would add it up, and I never actually thought about… I never once multiplied it out to see what the monthly revenue was. It was just numbers to me. I didn’t care. It just didn’t matter. I just came in and clocked out. I’m telling you now sitting where I’m at, if I can save you that time, follow the money. If you can follow the money and get yourself closer to the money, you’ll become more valuable. And if you don’t know how to get closer to the money, ask, and most business owners, even if they’re not… Most business owners, even if they’re small business owners will know a little bit more than you, and in that you can learn about it.

Rob:
Yeah. Do you think the owner of Smoothie King told the owner of Jamba Juice, “Hey man, you can’t do smoothies or else we can’t be friends.”

Alex:
They probably aren’t friends. But probably when they were starting out. Both those companies are multiple decades old. Who knows? But yeah. I mean, it’s funny though because like Ed said, it’s like 20 year, I can’t wait to get into like the 30 or 40-year-club because I mean, you think about a guy, you’re 65-plus years old. Do you see that guy shaking his fist at the other? No, of course not. He’s old. Right? And so, if you’re going to be that way eventually, why not be that way now?

Rob:
I agree. I’m competitive in my own respect, but I’ve had friends that have started similar things in me, and they’ve come to me and they’re like, “Hey, I wanted to bring it up. Is it okay if I do this.” I’m like, “Dude, I didn’t invent Airbnb or short-term rental. I didn’t invent investing in this city. I didn’t invent this concept. You can do whatever you want because I got nothing to gain from being competitive with friends in this space. Right? We can only help each other grow.”

Alex:
There’s a lot of people.

David:
Right on.

Alex:
And you also get into psychographics which is kind of interesting if you’re a mass market thing. Anyone can do Airbnb, short-term rentals. Right? So, somebody might be attracted to you. Someone might be attracted to me. Someone might be attracted to David. Some people might be attracted to Leila. Not only do you have demographic differences in terms of who’s the avatar that we’re marketing to, but psychographic. We have different values. We stand for different things. And so, people are just naturally going to just say like, “I want this flavor of Airbnb,” even though the actual mechanics might be the same. It’s just I want this flavor because I just prefer this community. I prefer these values. This is more my vibe which is fine.

David:
Really appreciate you sharing your experience here, Alex. This is legit really gold information that I think can change lives. For those that have ears to hear, please listen to this one again. Let it sink into your heart. Ask yourself those tough questions because this will get you more money than you would need, and investing in real estate becomes a lot easier when you have a lot of capital to go do it. All right. We’re going to move on to the last segment of the show. This is the world famous-

Speaker 4:
Famous four.

David:
In this segment of the show we ask every guest the same four questions. We will take turns. Firing them off at you. Question number one, Alex, what is your favorite real estate related book?

Alex:
Crushing it with Real Estate Apartments.

David:
Wow. I’m impressed you had a book to say there. I was thinking you might be like, “I don’t do real estate. I do business.”

Rob:
I thought you were going to say the BRRRR book since you’ve read it before.

Alex:
Yeah, I’ve read probably five real estate books and that one is really good. It was really well written. The guy didn’t sell anything. I like he had a really cool story.

David:
It’s Brian Murray, right?

Alex:
I can’t remember the author name.

David:
I think it was Brian Murray.

Alex:
It’s black with a red… Yeah, it’s black with a red thing.

David:
That’s him. Yeah, he partnered with my former cohost of this, Brandon Turner.

Alex:
Oh, no way.

David:
Brian is now the partner with him in his company, ODC. They buy mobile home parks.

Alex:
Super cool. Yeah, yeah. Anyways, it was a good book.

Rob:
Okay. Question number two, what is your favorite business book?

Alex:
For what stage in business?

Rob:
For someone just struggling with scaling. How about that?

Alex:
Struggling with scaling, I think Ready, Fire, Aim by what’s his pen name? Mike Masterson. It’s Mark Ford who’s the co-founder of Agora which is a direct response giant. They do I think a billion a year. He has a book that goes all the way up.

Rob:
You said it was-

Alex:
Ready, Fire, Aim.

Rob:
Ready, Fire, Aim, okay.

Alex:
Yeah, he talks about the transitions in business between each of those levels too.

Rob:
Okay, great. I always write down these books whenever people say it with the aspirations to read them one day. So, got it on the list.

Alex:
I’ll give you a flip side one. Any of the books by Patrick Lencioni. He talks about operations and fundamentally that’s why most people, if you’re talking scaling, right, it’s people, and so that those books are fables. So, they’re really light reads. You can read them in one sitting and they really teach really important lessons. The book called The Motive changed my life and is what got me to break through the… That plus I was in a big reading mode because I’ve just felt stuck at in the mid-thirties and I couldn’t get through, and that was among the books that most deeply, most profoundly shifted how I acted as an entrepreneur.

Rob:
Awesome man. Question number three, when you’re not out there building a hundred million-dollar gym empires, what are some of your hobbies?

Alex:
I don’t have any. I work out, I work, and I eat. That’s most of what I do.

Rob:
Actually, this is very topical because I am somewhat known in on the internet as the Chipotle guy, and then I recently saw that you posted you ate at Chipotle 500 times in a year one time. That actually does put me to shame and embarrassed me that I haven’t done that before. We got some beef.

Alex:
Yeah I did because I was a single guy. It was way more efficient for me. The amount of time it takes to grocery shop, prep, cook, clean, et cetera, it was way easier for me to just get Chipotle twice a day, and the end of the day Chipotle was easy because it didn’t detract from work. So, the only thing I really had to do was the lunch Chipotle and I didn’t eat breakfast. So, I would just go nothing, bowl, nothing, bowl, and that was all I ate. I didn’t even have anything in my fridge besides egg whites, Coke Zero, Red Bull, and Johnnie Walker Black Label.

David:
It makes sense though because when you’re making a certain amount of money, it might be a $20,000 lunch that you just ate if you had to go to the grocery store and you had to shop and you had to come cook your food. So, that just makes a lot of sense.

Rob:
All right. Last question from me, in your opinion, what sets apart successful entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail, or never get started?

Alex:
The ability to deal with short-term discomfort for long-term achievement. That comes through everything. It’s like if you literally boil success down in any field, it’s just the ability to endure short-term discomfort for long-term achievement. Whether you want to lose weight, whether you want to have a good marriage, whether you want to be a good leader, whether you want to have a six-pack, whether you want to make money, it’s like you have to be willing to endure short-term sacrifice for long-term achievement.

Rob:
Okay. That is very good because me and David are currently both working on our six-pack. So, really took this one to heart. I mean, I’m starting with the four-pack first. Got a way to go there. Okay. And then last one for you, Alex, where can people find out more about you or what you’re doing, all on the internet?

Alex:
I have a podcast called The Game so you can just search The game on any place that you listen to podcasts, Spotify, Apple, all that jazz, Stitcher, all the weird ones, we’re on all of them now. That’s the best thing. And if you like videos, we have a pretty big YouTube channel, and we’re on all the social medias. So, just search my name, Alex Hormozi, you should find me.

Rob:
Go do it everybody. Go subscribe to his YouTube channel. I don’t know. I’ve said this. I watch your channel. It’s been really cool to see you blow up, man. You’re like the YouTube poster child for all entrepreneurs out there. So, very much appreciate all the content that you put out there. David, what about you, man? Where can people find you?

David:
Online at davidgreene24, on YouTube at David Green Real Estate, and on BiggerPockets everywhere. So, you can message me on there if you have any questions for me. Rob, how about you?

Rob:
You can find me on the YouTubes at Robuilt, on Instagram at robuilt, and then if you want to see me do crazy little cute dances on TikTok, you find me at robuilto. No, I’m just kidding. [inaudible 01:16:30]

David:
Alex, I lied. I have one more question for you. How long do you anticipate we have to endure before we stop having to look at the little TikTok pointing at bubbles thing? I’m losing my mind every time I see these now.

Alex:
Yeah, it’s really interesting because we’ve grown a decent amount. I think we started September of last year so we’re almost coming in on a year. I think we’ve grown 400,000 or something like that as of today in that period of time from zero, and I didn’t do any dances ever. And so, I think people look at… Because it was musically before this so it made sense that there was a little bit more dancing kind of embedded in the culture of it, but fundamentally it’s not a dancing app. It’s a short-form video app. And so, I think it’s just about whether you can deliver value in an entertaining way in 60 seconds or less. And so, the dancing is just like a non… When I see business people or lawyers doing dances of five things you need before you do a deal, it’s due diligence, and I just… You know what I mean? You don’t need to dance in point, just talk to like about the five things, and how you do it, and keep it under 60 seconds, and you’ve got a TikTok. You know what I mean?
And so, I think it’s people misunderstanding the platform, and this is by no means me being some social media expert, but just at least my understanding of as it currently is it’s just short-form video, and then you just know that there’s a slightly different demo there and trying to cater it a little bit more. My general things about marriage and food and fitness tend to do better than my business stuff, but it’s also probably because the audience in general is a little bit younger probably, but it’ll age up. In five years, they’ll all be starting their businesses and hopefully they’ll be able to get some value from it.

David:
Did you hear that people? You don’t have to dance and point at bubbles that have a little piece of please share this video, make it go viral, get the word out. Collectively, we can end this horrible trend that makes me want to poke my own eye out every single time I see these things. I think it might be a realtor thing. I follow a lot of realtors in there.

Alex:
A lot of realtors love it.

Rob:
Oh, that’s what I’m supposed to do? Ugh. I’m going to start making exclusively that content and then tagging both of you in it.

David:
You will too. All right, Alex. Thank you very much, man. We really appreciate you. We’re going to let you get out of here. Rob, I know you love when I do this. Any last words before we go?

Rob:
No man. No, no final words other than thanks for coming on, and I watch all your TikToks. There you go.

Alex:
Appreciate you guys. Thank you so much for having me, and to the audience, I hope you were able to get some return on your attention. I know that’s all of our hopes. So, thank you so much.

David:
Thank you, Alex. This is David for Rob, the dancing TikTok machine Abasolo signing off.