Hormozi Teaches Me Everything He Knows in 90 Minutes

probably recognize recognized this guy alex for mo he's known as the hundred million dollar man and he's probably the most popular business teacher on youtube so last week at food vegas and i asked alex to teach me the things in his new book money models how to make money thinking you yeah he says that this one concept has made it more money than anything else that his career how would we improve our business by thinking in money models so let me walk you through the actual economics of this if ten percent of people buy something that's ten times expensive you double your revenue so the classic upsell you can't have x extra that why right you can't burn with that fries or whatever it's like what you can't have x with that why i recorded the whole session and i wanna share that with you here today alright if i reset your bank account and your followers change your name and face i resent you to zero how long do you think it would take you to get a million bucks in your bank now well having lost everything twice i'll tell you what i did what do your haters get right i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from at all in and like a days off on a road let's truck you gotta look i read this book and it's gonna start start a little campfire fire in my head what's gonna happen from money models you will love this book if you liked offers and so a money model is a deliberate sequence of offers many businesses have more than one offer and so it's how do we sequence those in the right way that accomplishes a financial objective and so the financial objective for this book and what i try to go for every business i have is something that i've always called client acquisition and so the reason that we've been able to user pays for the next user yes and a slight tweak on that okay which is so it's 2x x c plus cogs k so this is our this is the big thing that we want so it's basically gross profit in thirty days so i guess i could can move this over here but doesn't matter gross profit in thirty days is is greater than two times c plus cogs let's just explain the terms people don't know yeah gross profit you're not talking about overheads in in in this right so gross profit c cost customer acquisition cogs what it cost you to deliver the product or service that you deliver yep and what you're saying is my bar my golden rate my golden number i'm trying to hit is i wanna take the cost to deliver the service and get the customer double it and in in thirty days i need to hit you hitting that number that's my goal whether that came on the first offer or what you're saying now is the second third fourth thing i sell them along the way along their their customer journey it's exactly that and can you do like a example stupid tangible example yeah yeah so the the first business i did this in was the gym business and so it's a really simple example everyone gets it too so when i came into the gym business what the vast majority business did is they would run low ticket like twenty one dollar twenty one days that they run a free month or free fourteen day trial or whatever that was they're the the the primary way of getting people in and so let me walk you through the actual economics of this and so if you have a business let's say old way right someone comes in let's say you pay whatever ten bucks a lead that's your cp cost per lead and then you can convert let's say you're getting you know twenty percent of these people to to start a trial so that means that it cost you fifty bucks to start a trial and then one out of three of those trials which is the industry average convert and typically the conversion for like a boot camp or something like that is gonna be on the ninety nine dollars a month right that's that's what it costs and instead hack yeah exactly the first thirty days exactly and so you're you're upside down here now not only that it probably took you two weeks to like before between when you like got the lead but before you got the trials and then twenty one days i you're five weeks and so by the second month now you're like okay i got ninety nine times too now that doesn't even take into account that like that ninety nine's is not all free like there's costs involved there but let's just say that these guys are amazing and they're running a hundred percent you know margins and so it's like okay so this is gonna take sixty days for this business to basically recoup the money now the problem is that in the gym industry especially many customers leave within four months and so it's a very tough way to make a buck and so what i kinda came in and started doing was we'd run these challenges and i'd i'd spend the same amount of ten dollar had the same you were here when you started you did the same model initially no i saw people doing it i saw people doing it and so then it was like a three step perm mutation i like i even wanna tell the backstory story but basically figured it out tried it out at a gym it worked at that gym and then i started my that's basically we have so same same cost per lead i would close the same i get twenty percent of these businesses so it would cost me let's call it fifty bucks whatever to for me though i would off of that fifty dollar i would sell it upfront and i would make five hundred because you're five hundred dollar offer was yes a challenge so you win your money back so if you lose x amount of weight in next time of time we you get your money back now that was the beginning of the offer that's an attraction offer so it's one of the offer types i talk about around the book and so it's like okay i got five hundred dollars but we didn't stop there because what are gonna do after you have your your thing well you're need some supplements it's like alright so then we'd forty eight hours later we'd sell two hundred dollars of supplements call it you know eighty percent gross margins whatever it's like okay so i get one sixty plus plus five hundred now at six sixty alright great now on top of that it's like alright three weeks in it's six weeks six week deal i would then say hey i'm gonna roll this towards a one year membership and so boom we'd roll that over which is another mechanism that we use and so then i get the one year one year member great now at week six or between week three and week six we'd make a second offer and say hey you're already a member can i just save you some money and they say sure and we say hey if you want what we can do is if you just prep for the whole year we'll knock knock two months off and so then all of a sudden i'd get about twenty percent of people to prep for the whole year which is the two thousand dollar two thousand dollar cash upfront which if it's twenty percent and we add all these together i'm getting about a thousand bucks upfront in the first same period of time that these guys are getting ninety nine or one ninety nine and so my ability to out spend them in a in a an auction based based on attention on like facebook or google search or whatever was like unparalleled right and so because of that i was able to not only outs spend my competition but because it cost me like if you're actually doing an beauty calculus on this cost me fifty dollars to make a thousand i'm getting twenty to one thirty to one up upfront and so i was actually able to finance the opening of all my locations that way so i could spend five thousand dollars in ads and make a hundred grand back and literally paint the walls put the lobby in buy the equipment and by the time i actually open the gym because i do pre sales for a month or whatever i would actually already be cash flow positive day one without actually have a new invest capital and so fundamentally i will continue to tinker and that this is where i got spoiled or whatever maybe my belief set changes is that this was the first model i ever had and so every business i've had since then i was like i know there's a way if i just keep tweaking it until eventually this thing will print and then when that happens you don't need the outside investors because you cash flow getting customers and so you basically almost like every business i've had has been supply because i can blow the doors off from the front because i can acquire customers and so like this has been the skill that's probably been the largest you know contributor to my material success and like alan went from zero to you know one point seven million a month within six months gym launch went from zero to two point two million a month of twenty months prestige labs zero to zero to one one and a half ish and six and so like each of them just very quickly just ramped because i could get customers at a profit and when you look at the actual like where the mechanics of the money happened as soon as one customer comes in right one guy comes in now if he gives you that two x capitalist cogs then it's like okay well i've paid for him and i pay for the delivery right but he comes loaded he's holding this guy by the throat he loaded with my next customer right and so but then this guy brings me to you more and so basically you keep doubling he comes loaded yeah exactly and so then at that point you literally only have to acquire you have to have the cash or the wherewithal acquire the first customer right and then everything after that is is fine as by the by the customers and the greater that discrepancy the more you don't have to even put more capital into the business at all and so that was a very long as as fast as i can say it that's that's the that's the that's what we hope to accomplish the good money about this alright so a lot of people will talk about how you need a million dollars and three years of experience to start a business nonsense if you listen to at least one episode on this podcast you know that is completely not true my last company the hustle we grew it to something like seventeen dollars or eighteen million dollars in revenue i started it with like three hundred dollars my current company hampton does over ten million dollars in revenue started it with actually no money maybe twenty nine dollars or something like that nothing and so you don't actually need investors to start a company you don't need a fancy business plan but what you do need is systems that actually work and so my old company the hustle they put together five proven business models that you could start right now today with under a thousand dollars these are models that if you do it correctly it can make money this week you can get it right now you can scan the qr code or click the link in the description now back to the show i wanna break down a couple of things in here just to because i can first of all this is great you know in i come from silicon valley in silicon valley viral vitality rules all yeah and and they you know the early growth hackers in fact there's a book called the viral loop the guy my mentor the guy who who kinda plucked me when i got to silicon valley he's featured that book because early on he was like scraping hotmail realized wait i have no marketing budget but one user can get me the next user through this thing called the k factor and maybe you measure the k factor becomes like this how facebook and other other businesses grew you've created a version of the k factor for non tech yeah businesses that are not gonna grow viral but you can grow you could finance the next customer through through the existing customers i wanna point out a couple of important things so the first one was this is what this is kind of book one so this is you know your hundred million dollar offers book yeah and i would a key difference here for any entrepreneur is that you're able to charge five hundred dollars when this guy probably honestly struggling to even charge ninety nine dollars a month i drove by a place that here there was like five dollar entry offer the las vegas fitness club or whatever because you were not selling a a gym membership which is a cost to the customer you were selling a transformation promise yep right so you're selling customer transformation the happy ending so first of all what what are you actually selling that was a key thing the second was you were then up upsell up upsell one of your money model yep and you had a good insight here in the preview your team sent me which was basically that you wanna sell where the customer paying is highest can you talk about that yeah i i'd love talking about this so basically i think so many people at businesses etcetera get they think about the what especially services because seventy eight percent of businesses are they think about they have a term that they deliver for a customer they typically wanna renew when they're about to stop getting paid right which is typically the absolute worst time to try and run like the next boyfriend hey yeah right but i'm gonna tap it's like hey you i guess i'm on month eleven of my your trial no exactly and so there's there's basically five five five times that you that you wanna sell sell a customer so number one i'm just gonna move a search okay number one is immediately right so that's like in the same conversation the second one is after basically some sort of activation point next you have your halfway would just because like you're like why halfway because it's halfway and that's why it works because half yeah you have your last chance at the end and then you have milestone which is which can happen kind of anywhere in here but basically they have something occurs so this is something they do this is something that happens but the action item for a company here is yeah map this for yourself you but if you're like okay well what of the five do i do you wanna sell the point of greatest deprivation not the point of greatest value sometimes the point of greatest value and the point of greatest deprivation occur at the same time not always though i'll give you my simple example which is like if i go to the best steak steakhouse in the world and i have a stake and i'm like this is amazing and the waiter comes back and says hey would you like another steak stake i'd be like i'm i'm good they're like you didn't like the steak and i'm like no the steak was great they're like why don't you get another i was like i'm they're like if you if you like the steak you get more steak and the thing is that so many businesses are trying to sell and upsell that and they're like wow my customer suck they're so cheap it's like no so at that point i might have a i might have deprivation around something that's sweeter and lighter right and that might be the right time to offer dessert right versus more of that other thing now the deprivation occurs the same time as value creation when the first loop of value that gets created creates the next problem so if i help you get leads and you get leads and then you're like oh shit them overwhelmed if i say hey would you like me to help you work those leads then it's a very natural upsell where greatest value and greatest deprivation at the same time if you are a business that doesn't have that type of i'll just i'll just speak broadly if that doesn't occur in your business or on a short enough timeline then that you you don't wanna sell that time right and so that's basically what we we strive for and that's why i've always been of the belief like when someone comes in with red hot pain that's when you sell not when you offer your trial right and so for let's take you can use the gym we can use a different business if that maybe maybe that'd be nice sure if you can what would you either you know either or a money model well you know you can either walk through a money model or you could walk through this for another business let's do another example sure let's say you have a an seo agency whatever so if you can actually we can use one of my real businesses okay so we have this business somewhere dot com we basically help you find talent that is over overseas so we help businesses where you're like i really wanna developer but i'm not trying to place you we're invest in that too yeah okay it i thought okay so we we own this business somewhere dot com so for example i got my assistant through this you know a hire developers graphic designers data analyst whatever you need there's talent is everywhere in the world okay hard to find they put boots on the ground in different locations so south africa philippines and they have hundreds of recruiters in each of those areas to find who's the best one percent in each of those locations to come work for this season right great business great margins above it happy pebble for happy owner yeah exactly okay so now what's the problem so today the way our money model works mh is customer basically listens to sean's podcast so we'll just do this or they follow nick on twitter yeah so we get leads from one place exactly not not exactly fully but that's a a bulk of it and they come in they book a call and on that call we try to sell them a contingency based thing which says if we find someone pay us a fraction of their salary now they're so low salary typically because you're getting talent from different regions of the world that will come out to let's say you know maybe six k per customer and what we do is that happens and then we stop and we go fishing again for the next one yeah okay help us with our money model how would you if i if i read this book i wanna go help nick improve this business yeah how would we improve our business by thinking in money models yeah so the question would be like do we need so if i'm looking at this right we have traction offers so it's like do we have a big demand issue and or do we have an lt tv issue which might be up upsell do we have a conversion issue which might be down sells all of the above everything can be improved or do we have a continuity right and so there are different structures that lend themselves more to one versus the other type of type of problem right they we're trying to solve and so like for an attraction offer if you're like you know what let's get a shit load more you know phone calls in the door i would say hey i just got this absolute savage and i would be like this is the dude alright this guy is a fucking guy whatever now who here wants him and i would say the the business that like we're gonna do a raffle and everybody who who submits to win this guy now obviously you gotta be ethical the illinois but assuming that you're not a fucking idiot right this is this is the guy that you're gonna get and you have to be a business that's like this in order to qualify cool so they're gonna enter their information in order to get into the raffle so they get the sky now you're gonna say we will pay for this guy for a year as are as the deal as the big giveaway not only is the amazing we're also pay for them for a year and so that makes a hugh you'll get a gigantic amount of demand but what's beautiful about it is that the demand is for your most expensive or ideal product and so that at that point the person like every single other person who opt in is a qualified lead who say you know we can't give you carlos but we can give you so and so and you will give you a partial scholarship we'll give you a partial win whatever and you knock whatever off ten percent twenty percent off and then you roll that right into the continuity so that would be an example of an attraction offer you could attached to that existing thing from an upsell down perspective it'd be like and there's five different ones that's just one that i pulled out that's a giveaway right giveaway yeah and we'll rank carlos yeah and so like the just for everyone's just listening the the the weight loss version i had was something called win your money back which is a different was a different mechanism right and so there's there's five different ones that i think that work exceptionally well for bringing people depends on the type of business and so for yours there's bikes go free there's a bunch of different versions but like think this makes the most sense cool we use a giveaway alright so then up upsell and so with down so i'll i'll start from down sells so you can have feature down sells you can have free trials you can have payment plans now for your particular business payment plans doesn't will probably that doesn't really make sense because it's a continuity thing anyways and so it's like okay we have free trials would you kind of have with contingency so it's like that parts that risk is kind of avert but from a downside perspective they might think okay why i can't afford six now that's a business decision where there anything i like to think of feature down so and i can get you somebody who's maybe not as phd level whatever but we can do it for three k a month and that person might give you more opportunities to say yes that would be the downside component it from the upsell perspective there's there's four different upsell structures that i like the classic upsell you can't have x extra that why right which is like you can't have fry you can't have a coke without a fries you can't burger that fries or whatever it's like what you can't have x extra that why and so it's like you don't wanna buy this big you know this big framed art without insurance yep right so there's always a you can't have x to that y and so the so for here because they said yes naturally yeah say is next thing exactly in order to make your first decision and even more sound and this is why the whole deprivation thing that i saying earlier so important where like like supplements and because some people are like why don't wanna sell them something else it's like well you just created this new problem that they weren't aware of which you will now make them aware of right which is oh sometimes these guys flake out whatever and so we have insurance that we can offer for for this type of thing so me just shooting from the hip here i was i'm running these one here in this situation is payroll so great they but a lot of companies are not set up to pay people all around the world we can manage that for you yeah and we'll do it for you for five hundred bucks a month yeah we'll take care of this because you're gonna you're gonna build out a remote team here all around the world you don't wanna be doing compliance and pay foreign an exchange exactly reporting yep we take care of all that for you for we have we have an accounts team that does that perfect and so that would be the natural upsell that you do you tack on and so some people and i'll i'll just make this point a lot of business owners will will think well why don't i just include that in the main offer so i'll just say in my experience it's a lot of times as you know as as bad as this may sound it's easier to get the second yes after you get the first yes right and so like it's like well maybe if i included that they'd buy at six a seven thousand a month like yeah but do you might also just raise your price to seven thousand dollars a month and then do it again right then still have it and so because i mean i the amount james were like you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna take the challenge system and then just to include the supplements i was like or you could just do it the way that i've already tried a hundred times like believe me if i could sell them on front i would it works better this way and i had this whole psychology around it which is like you have these different wallets in my mind it doesn't work this way but like it's like my grandmother just say this thing like i would go there and probably like your family like over feet she'd had have she'd having enough food for ten people when i go and sierra her on my own and i would just shoot stuff me to the gills and one time went there with my dad and she she and i have different languages so she's tough to talk to but she said something under her breath after she walked away after i was like dying and he cracked i was what did she say and he said well you said you were full and she said well you're your your main stomach full but your deserve something is yeah and so it's the same idea here where it's like well their person while it has been spent but their their tax avoidance operation paint what a pain ass isn't and that one's still full so we can still tap that one and so if we're if we're drawing this it's like okay so we've got payroll as our upsell cool and you'll know your service is better than i do but it's like okay so we have one or two things that we can include in the up upsell but the mechanism of doing it is part of like part of the money models book and so the x without y the way that we probably present it so each of that whole section is a lot more on the scripting of it okay so it's like hey what a lot of people do is they do this do you know anything else do you and so when we say that everyone says yes by saying no and by that it's like you get eighty percent ninety percent take rates on upsell rather than saying hey do you want it's a it's a it's a binary area it's a different question right now they have to just consider a purchase and so all of them have like tiny little little repositioning that work really well but that i think would make sense like you'd say that's that's the classic upsell there's rollover upsell there's which is one of my favorites is anchor upsell which in bankruptcy so would be like let's say you're like okay if you want nick will go find the person for i'm just making it up right and he'll do it for fifteen thousand dollars upfront and you know ten thousand dollars a month now at that point they're like shit it's like that's a like or if you're good with the exact same work being done by someone that nick train we can do it for one third the price and it's like oh yeah that's fine this is the a key part is that you anchor them to the anchor is is part of it but there's also like what you wanna anchor enter so the way i learned this was actually at a salt lake city suit place so i go in a friend of mine sets up a private suit appointment with me now i'm not ball and i have like ten thousand my name so i was like he's like you gotta have a boss if you want people to take you seriously this is many years obviously i've really listened to this advice and so i go in there and the guy was like hey i'll get he he asked me what do you i said a boss suit and so i'm twenty three or twenty four something like that and so he puts this suit on me and he was like do think i was like oh look awesome and then i i looked at the tag and he was sixteen grand and i was like i i think i turned white right and i was like oh and i think he saw me like just like freak out and he's like hey he's like do you care about the brand and i was like no not at all and he was like i got you and so he the thing is is that he had his lineup already picked for me and he just pulled the second and put it on me and he's like what do you think i'd didn't even look in the mirror i just looked straight at the tag and he was too grand and i was like thank god i was like okay i can like my friends not gonna be embarrassed that he senses his poor you know his his mug his non match folks over peasant and so anyways i ended up checking out and he was like well you can't have this without that was like well you wanna make sure that you have the little pocket thing and you want the socks or whatever ended leaving for twenty five hundred bucks and i remember after i left i was like i spent five times more than i had budgeted for this thing and i realized i was like oh but the key part wasn't just that there was something expensive number one is that you actually have to sell it and because sometimes people put anchors but they don't really like commit to the anchor if you just say it and then immediately like don't even acknowledge it then it's just like this is this thing we put in the sales process i don't know why it's there that's dumb you have to commit to it because the thing is just ten percent a time you have a whale and they'll fucking buy it you're like holy shit but the other ninety percent of the time the key is that the thing that differentiates the anchor from the core offer is a very negligible thing and so for me the brand didn't matter or like you might be like do you care what kind of wool this is i'd be like i now somebody might and the reality is they probably don't actually they just always buy the most expensive thing right like leila just always ask what's the most expensive thing and then she just buys that's how she rolls that's right she just always wants the best shit you know whatever but the thing is you wanna have a model that allows for that and if ten percent of people buy something that's ten times expensive you double your revenue so it's still worth it and that that's why the anchor should be super fucking high that's and so that's an example of a different type one but this one is a is a classic upsell which would be positioned the way i which is a a no based a no based yes we cover the downside with a feature down and then continuity now you already have a continuity business so there's no real point to like saying how do we how do we do that but one of the like there's a different mechanisms that i use in that on that side but one of my favorites is like something called a waive fee so this works really well with expensive stuff yeah so we would say hey for us to go find this person it's it's ten grand up upfront or i can waive it if you come commit to a year and so you just waive the fee but you get the commitment and you and the thing is like oh if you're not sure then just pay the ten you get month to month no sweat and so with that also you say and we would stack it so we'd be like okay we're gonna waive the fee you commit to a year and if for some reason doesn't work out with carlos we'll get you we'll get you another carlos within ninety days or whatever no no cost and so then it's like the inch so you you decrease cost and you decrease risk with the continuity commitment and we create artificial pain in the moment now what happens if they're like hey six months in i wanna cancel like no worries just pay the fee right that i waived for the commitment so it actually creates a very simple contract which is like you just gotta pay that on the way out the door so also increases stick so that's like it has like three prongs to it that makes but it's very easy to understand a very elegant and so that's one of the continuity mechanisms that i use hey let's take a quick break you know hubspot help tumblr solve a big problem tumblr needed to move fast they were trying to produce trending content but their marketing department was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign but now they use hubspot customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds and the result was huge three times more engagement and double the content creation if you wanna move faster like tumblr visit hubspot dot com alright back to the show when i'm looking at a business i'm running through the different mechanisms that we use do like okay we're having issues grabbing a lot of friction here right now i'm guessing because you're selling continuity on the front is probably not a huge deal right or but maybe churn is i don't know but here it's like okay which part of this process needs to get lu is that we need to lu people coming in the door right and that's where you'd use a raffle or giving away or sweep steaks or something on the front end or it's like you know i like the thing is they're signing in for six but we need them at ten it's like okay well then we need to put more lu duplication here or you know what we're getting all these own cloth like eighty percent of leads that are coming in our own qualify we make the business decision we still we wanna sell to these people okay we have a gross product a gross margin product gets sufficient that still makes sense show eighty percent gross margins on this inferior product okay how do we present it and that's where the downside would actually become really key so i had a business that i close right to my head and what we did was for the down he we basically the super high ticket thing that we were selling he's a a phd for health stuff and he does all this like really weird health stuff for people i'll just i'll just you have a problem he's the last person you go to and then he fixes it that's his whole thing okay and so what we did though is we created a down that re upsell people and so they'd they'd get sticker shock and he would say no worries if you want i can do it for you know two thousand dollars less if but i just won't include a guarantee and so then people were like i kinda want the guarantee and then they'd re upsell themselves right and so the guarantee is worth that two thousand me which actually gets to show you so then there there's becomes the art i talk about this in the book of how much do i decrease price versus how much decrease the value and so the play between those two if you if the more you study the customer the more you understand which components they value the most and so typically when i'll create a a down structure i'm gonna think okay the first down i'm gonna give is actually to re sell the main thing first now if they really can't because they they clearly said no even though it's a big a big issue then i see the next one i'm gonna do is gonna be a tiny thing with a large decrease in price right and so the first one it's like small decrease big drop in value you know what i'd rather have the main thing right the next one though i'm gonna have a bigger drop in price with a smaller change in value at that point price is actually to the stock and so then it then i'd basically how do ethically lower my price without saying i'm selling different things to different people that way i can change the terms rather than chance saying because i i never discount but i will change terms it's like oh no they got something different than you which is why they pay less if you want i can give you that that's fine but you just won't get what their you're getting now and so that's so that's a little bit of a brief overview in terms of how i think through creating these but you can see right now like if you were to do just even like a raffle once a quarter it's like that would probably feed all your leads for the next whatever yeah it it and i think one of the best parts about this is every business has some version of right this is a different way of looking at a funnel yeah but the cool part of what you what i think you're you're doing with your books is you're basically taking the parts of the funnel yeah offer getting leads through the core being able to actually sell the first thing have sell the first name to them sell and how do you string together things to maximize the value you're getting for every that harder earned lead that you already you know paid for and message your asking for yeah and one of the things i like about this is that you've basically cod a lot of what the best people do but they do it in their business then they get rich and then they sort of relaxed yeah right like i don't need to go back i don't need to even label what each of these things were but you've sort of looked at it and said okay let's call that an attraction offer what are five examples of those that i've seen and then and then you're on the lookout forum you see it in this business and that business and you sure put it together so i think that's very very valuable even as a a structured way of brainstorming but because i think most people in their most most founders will understand yeah i got it i i wanna get more demand and i wanna make more money per customer yeah but he's vague wishes yeah and i think the the key is to sort of not be most people i have this like rant about most people i'm like you know we try to fit in that's our nature yeah but it's like most people in america overweight to obese most people don't like their job most people get divorced most people don't have enough money to you know to pay for an emergency at a procedure you don't wanna be most people yet you wanna fit in it doesn't really make sense and so i'd love to understand from you where you see a lot of entrepreneurs yeah when it comes to money models what do you see is like what are your most peoples that you're seeing if we just drew kinda like here's how most people are doing this and if you just made these sort of one or two tweaks you're now not in the most people bucket anymore you're operating in a different way your business is gonna have a higher chance of success or be worth more i would say not enough entrepreneurs or students of business and their students of the thing and so i'll give i'll give an example so like i will never claim to know more about remote work business or hvac or plumbing or whatever but like people fly out here not for that but because a very good understanding of the variable create money and so it's like okay how can we arrange these variables and then we will fit like you said the payroll and i was okay great like do you have a thing i'm not gonna be the one who immediately knows that right but i'll be like there's a slot here now they're missed it right and so one is they're not big enough students of business number two is a lot of times it's like this is what everyone else does to your point of and so like well i'll give you an example i had a a guy who did guard services right and so they they staff like buildings like this right with with guards and so he had huge cash flow issues because he's paper thin margins but it's super sticky people say forever and it's very comm in terms of competing for bids and so you know after talking for know extending period your time i was like okay well why don't we just say that people pay quarter to time and pay upfront it's just oh yeah and he's like well no one does that and i was let me give you the best overcome in the world someone's gonna ask you and then gonna say well everyone else this sit you're like we've just always done it this way that's all you have to say back all you have to say we just it's always that's always always always done it right and as crazy as that is that is still the number one excuse yeah is what still the number wanna overcome like when i used to ask for credit cards on the phone for someone to show up for you know restraining or trial or something like most places do not do that but they'd be like why do you need my car like this is how we've always done it and then they're like oh okay and so there's all this like it's so funny how some these little lines just make huge differences your like weaponized the the the the you the useless of of most processes it's like we're also used to process stupid positive stupid hundred percent we're just like oh it's one of those got it from management they're like oh yeah retarded got it in and so so one is but like when i i had to spend probably thirty minutes with him to just like just get him to just be okay with asking for the money getting paid quarterly number one and getting paid before you do service rather than after you do service and so i mean everyone's throws around the word first principles but it's like very few people actually think from first principles like what prevents us from doing this and i think that's that's like this is the constraint cash flow then like what are all the things we can do can we change payment terms which is the first thing you're gonna do if you have cash flow issues can we push our stuff out in at thirty always right like how can we change this this cash flow balance in our business what's the money model of acquisition dot com so this is really interesting so it's so hard for me because what i have to write about is not the rules that i have to live by and so my favorite movie in the world is is the matrix like many people's but there's the line in the matrix when neo is looking at morph and he says so are you telling me that i'll i can dodge bullets and he says i'm telling that when you're ready you won't have to and so all of the things that i write about like even like selling tactics and things like that they assume you have no brand and so like when you have a brand you have so much demand and so little supply that you can set your own terms i can have zero attraction offer and make the the absolute worst offer the way i don't have to make a grandson offer at all because i might say i don't wanna deliver much at all i will promise zero i will guarantee nothing and like but because then that'll still give me less operational to trace on the back end and so at the end of the day like the reason i have the the two parts of my logo are this is a lever and this is supply and demand and to me those are the two biggest the two biggest forces in business and so like if you have i always thought it was a whale tail that's exactly yeah but like those are the two of the strongest forces in business and so all of these things are to help lu or create or channel demand when you have little when you have an ocean of demand it's hard to lose and so the model that we have is very different it's almost like a word away model of like we you know we invite entrepreneurs out here who we think are interesting we look at the business and then we say hey change these things call center a year and that's that's basically what we did we took our diligence process that we were doing for multiple years and i was like what the the the catalyst for was that we had we're getting all these thank you emails so all these founders come in from my content or whatever and they'd be like you know they took we my deal took six calls with them and was like at the end was like listen these two metrics suck do these things see how it works for a year give us a call and they were like this was the most valuable process i've ever gone through and then i was thinking like that cost me a lot of money right and so was like what if i just charged for diligence functionally and then i got then i could actually staff it better and all these other things and so that's functionally what we do from the advisory practice then then feeds the deal size you have the content mh which creates the brand yep what you did is you turned your cost mh into whether it's a profit center or breakeven even i don't know but yeah you know something like this this is your workshops what you call you called it something else just now you advisory your practice advisory okay yeah so there's your advisory yeah and you you say okay pay us five grand come over here yeah but then you do able to upsell here to like more advice just yeah so we just do so basically from there it's this is how we basically how we see value creation and so we say like this is our framework for hitting value if you like this happy to help you if you're like this is cool i'll go do this awesome but the the consulting side true consulting it's it's one thing like and they come we identify the constraint we say okay okay well we're gonna go look at cops we're gonna look at the different as ad strategies of people who are bigger we're gonna say this is the funnel and this is the offer we think you should do and we say this is all you have to do when you do that call us and so it's it's a hundred percent from point to point it's not like a ongoing thing it's literally one time consulting mh and that's the quote that's the quote upsell and then at the bottom here you have the equity side yep where you're like great yep the private equity side right yep gonna buy the businesses that yeah in the venture i know which we do a lot of and okay gotcha interesting when you started how much of this was figured out as you go hundred percent of it grand master plan visionary well there's turtleneck next some things from master right some things i would say the the big goals for master plan the all of this mechanics was absolutely like figured out as you go like the books and how they've all been structured has been a five plus year plan and you'll you'll see what what i do with the launch and and why yeah it's gonna be awesome but it will it will it all be revealed but like the mechanics of like the prices and like how we do that like that was very much born from like i am currently spending money on this team we have way more demand than we have supply maybe if i can generate more revenue here i can staff it better i can get more luck surface eric so i can look at more of these deals because you probably did seen this like some companies look terrible on paper and then you meet them and oh these guys are awesome right and so we had to do so many like i mean we we probably talked to one percent of the papers that we that would come in and i was like i know we're missing stuff right and so that was that was basically the thesis behind this i mean i think it was brilliant i like wait a so he basically gets paid for people to come and open up the they get value too otherwise they wouldn't be doing it these it's not dummies these are business owners like they shouldn't be you know making good decisions but i like wow that's a you the median size is is four million so it's not like they're not small business this median so like there's plenty of like tons of good businesses every every every time we've workshop top ones usually between thirty thirteen and a hundred you know and there's plenty in the eight like every i don't think we've ever had one that doesn't have multiple eight figure companies i wanna play a game with you do we have the the game here oh what is what is the game so the game was this pro okay so so this is gonna be a game that we're calling eight make it or take it alright so you're gonna have to shoot i don't i know i know you're not big a battle we're gonna have to get up for this yeah okay so you're gonna take a shot okay gonna see how far back we're gonna go here but i think we'll set that as the benchmark here okay you make it you're off the hook okay you miss it you have to take it with one of the tough questions that we spin the my sw we spend i was like i really like alex and i was like what do people so i ask people we do wanna i puts out a ton of content yeah you know i'm not just going here to get yeah let's do something new let's do something fun and so they were like ask some tough questions so i said okay let me think of some tough questions but let's make a fun how we do guys alright so first shot go for it and then you get and then if you missed it you guys you the question if you make yeah you can ask me the question that's fair or i burned the question that's up you this is the question i have okay awesome the question perfect so the question is what do your haters get right what do i haters get right meaning you know you get criticism as anyone does but there's you know criticism is fair or there's components of it that's fair so what do the haters get right steroids is one you know he's just you know he's here for the money i would say from like the the philosophical angle you know i'll say there are people who are like you know the say that like alex of life and i'm like we yeah i'm pretty open about that too you know so it's like they will use a fact as an insult and i'll be like i agree right so that's i think that qualifies i think that's right like yeah i mean they're sending it as a hate comment yeah but you're like yes and i agree i agree yeah and if you if only you know and i'm with that yeah no like because you guys he said like i'm here seven days a week like i work all the days until i cannot work and then i take a day and then i continue to work again and i i work twelve out hours most days i'm usually you're five to five for six and so it's is that a temporary thing are you like yeah i'm in an era of my life where that's what i wanna do or you're like that's who i wanna be it doesn't feel this doesn't feel like a push like if i if when i'm pushing i work third shift which is i work eighteen if i do that for an extended period of time that starts to grid me be like twelve it's like that doesn't yeah like five to five five i'm like i still feel like i've got plenty of time so like chill out do that alright this episode is brought to you by mercury they are the finance platform of choice for over two hundred thousand companies shouldn't be surprised because i use it myself for not one not two i have eight different mercury accounts i have seven for different companies that i have a part of and then i have my own personal account because now they have personal banking which is really cool feature i highly highly recommend it like i said i use it myself the reason why is because the way that mercury work is beautiful it's very intuitive and you could tell that it's actually made by a starter founder it's an entrepreneur you could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and and annoy and decided to you know actually fix it themselves and really any type of entrepreneur you are let's say you're an agency well one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices easily create them send them to customers and stay current on your balances with all your customers well you can do that inside mercury and so i think that mercury is great highly recommend you check it out and thank you for sponsoring the show for more information check out mercury dot com mercury is a financial technology company not a bank check show notes for details so do another question yeah okay yeah be happy to take it alright thanks question alright alright what i got i love it alright if i reset your bank account and your followers change your name face so i reset you to zero basically drop you in another drop you in another life not another country how long do you think it would take you to get rich again and what rich rich would be let's say the name of this podcast my first million to make a million bucks get a million bucks in your bank a you're and what would be the approach so you're you're back to to name was face alex alex yeah well having lost everything twice i'll tell you what i did which was i find a local business that's typically a service that i think i can sell for a lot of money and they're typically under charging and so i will say hey how cheaply will you let me sell basically if i if i send you a hundred customers how cheaply would you do it that would you charge me to do that and so i get an agreement on price from them and then i sell for whatever they brought you volume yeah lowest you could deliver the service for that volume yeah and so let's say it's a back cracker let's a chiropractor or whatever and i say okay how much will you crack back read the absolute chiefs and he says twenty five bucks a session i say okay cool so i can sell packages of ten for two fifty and you're cool with it and he says yes so i'm gonna go and sell packages for three grand right and i'm gonna make the spread and it's because i know how to sell and know how to get leads right and so i mean this is what i did i mean obviously i did in the gym space but it that's that's what i did wanna lost everything i just went to gyms and said hey but for i could i negotiated zero so like you already have all your cost basis i'll just add you customers and then after the first month exactly so i i would take the first the five hundred bucks i say like i get to keep that and then after six weeks you confirm memberships are all yours so zero a c for you i take all the risk i do all work right and that's and then i would i did about a hundred grand every twenty one days doing that is there a better or worse type of service business that you go for like knowing what you know now i can get i gym i for sure to do health care health care oh my god health care means what white lab coat anything any serves suit like pseudo i call pseudo medical okay so that's where like mean why like keith whitening that's we have a chain of twenty eight twenty eight stores like i love pseudo medical stuff so laser you know laser laser skin stuff laser hair removal you know the the chemical peels i love all that stuff like the the beauty medical like intersection you you can just sell your eyes out it's what's the why you love it because of the demand because it's huge supply demand inequality so there's if you if feel look at stats there it's insane like the amount of demand if like boomers and all the stuff you like wanna stay young and the supply side on is so low and the reason i this is because every single med spot that walks in these doors is killing it and i talk to the founders and i'm like whoa and i'm like so how do you mark they're like we just kinda like open up we just we just announced that we're there website no they're like we have a phone number people just kinda come in i was like they don't know that's not that's not how it works that's not how most that's how that that's how crazy the supply demand differences and they don't think about pricing they like they think about nothing they just and they make you know forty percent or they have no idea right and so that's why i like i can't signal for you yeah that's yeah a hundred percent when i a of people who don't know what they're doing all making money i'm like okay there's something there that's good and so that's what i would do because that's what i did do right i alright i'm away wait let me get another question here that i wanna dig because i got a couple yeah because it's like if you need to make a hundred grand a million bucks you could do that like if you just if you know how to generate leads locally and sell you just get a service business that grease dictate customers for a price and then you just sell as much as you can alright go ahead maybe moment me to burn you can ask what you're doing what did you get most wrong in the past three years okay i'll tell you this i started with a bit of a portfolio approach mh so i kinda had this thing where i was like i don't wanna operate but these guys were operating well i can add a bunch of value similar to what you guys do private equity whatever and i took minority stakes yep in a several companies that have done well but basically when they do well and i out of value i just sit there wondering why the hell i own more of this company and i realized that i could have made more and really simplified my life with one great business like it doesn't take many great businesses to get to the next levels of wealth you business can be worth a hundred million five hundred million like they can get very big and so i would have been better served doing less here and i got it wrong i thought that i was being i thought i was playing the game at a bit of a higher level win in actuality if i just kept it simple yeah picked one of those business or built one one great business i could've done better than i did spreading my focus with less work i made the same mistake alright yeah we did we did twenty four deals in twenty four months then we consolidate down to five yeah like you it's it's i means eighty twenty you're like why i was going power law applies yeah basically all well it still rules yeah alright let's do the next one alright alright now i've got now i've got my money i've move through the that's yeah whatever alright i was gonna ask you this one's funny should entrepreneurs should successful entrepreneurs get a pre shit's it's tough as a as a frame if it's your kid miss my kid well if they're mike they're gonna have my money so i'd yeah get it i mean for me i i ask leila basically it's like when you you wanna you wanna have a pre in the when you have somebody who doesn't wanna sign a pre like that's like that's the only that's the only way i can say yeah it's it's actually just so like leila and i i thought i was like rich when i met leila rich i wasn't but like i thought i was rich and i said we you signed a pre and she was like sure like i don't care i don't want your shit and so we were on the way to the courthouse to get it the not or whatever and in a dramatic flare i tore i tore it i i tore and throw it out the window because i like it was so not a thing she was like i don't want your shit like it's fine and i believed her and like we've pulled everything together so but i think that is very risky advice and so i'd say the vast majority people should have like should strongly consider it romantic i like it alright here we go i'm gonna give be one okay i like this question i'll i'll do this one oh perfect bumped in and out don't know this is easy one this is actually not that tough question if you could only follow three people on x meaning if you end into slim your content diet now that's a really good builder mode where it's like a chicken broccoli or whatever mh who's your chicken and broccoli of your content diet people you genuinely you genuinely value what they're putting out there on i think maybe twitter's twitter one of your big platforms on x it is i mean elon will be one so i have two more two more people to to to use oh you know it's weird i've actually i've totally like used twitter like a like i just like let it serve me whatever right and so i just like love all the spread yeah i just like kinda like just let it feed me whatever trying to think about the other accounts that i would be like oh i i would i'd miss them if i didn't see them right it's actually actually hard it feels like a years we're two years neville would be one okay naval is a good one you know the others i mean i would cheat and be like the news ag so it's like at least i get all that but i wouldn't actually pick that you know who who actually i think this really good cuts to anchor from carrie okay yeah i actually like his stuff a lot interesting yeah i like his stuff that's probably my second one just very tactical oh you know i i love george back stuff yep george mack although i'd i'd cheat i'd be like just text me the thing yeah george is really good i actually really like george yeah now i'm thinking it's like say help with good stuff out obviously williamson puts good stuff out so like yeah now that i'm i'm thinking through it's like i have like this blank but no i like i think george george has some of the most unique takes right and i think that's why i like a stuff a lot but yeah alright well thank you for yeah thank take take it you took the tough questions mo hot hands hard questions yeah the the three you know the biggest errors man that's because it's like which ones cost me the most and then which ones did i miss the opportunity the most so it's like i have i it's like i it because like just based on the like i i i thought i've really beat myself on this i have missed more hundred million dollar net gains and multiple hundred million dollar net gains than i have made right which makes me really angry but then i thought about it and i was like you always say no to more deals than you say yes to so as a number always going to miss you're literally gonna miss more winners than you have right but like but like ever could tell you all like it's like i say their names before i go to sleep at night like i like one of them our stark and some of them i'm like i should like this one was in the like either there's no like there was a gym franchise like buddy of mind i've known him for years he's been in the business for thirty years he finally went on and to start a franchise and then i i was like we need to do the business this way and he's like i just i just wanna run it i was like just privately own a all it's a great model and i was like i'll fund the whole expansion and he's like i've already sold forty units like you i don't wanna foot back and and so i ended up like not doing the deal and he'll exit for probably a hundred and twenty million and this is in three years and i i was gonna it was for fifty percent of the company and i was just was like he was a friend it was fitness for i was like there's i should not have missed this deal you know what i mean there's was a content creator that i that i love and have followed for more than ten years talk to them you know we had a we were gonna get a thirty three percent stake in the company and from the time that i we said no to the deal i'd say twenty four months later they're now probably a hundred and fifty million dollar company and it's just like i have a i have like four or five of these ones that i'm just like i shit like that was like that one i said no because i knew the amount that he he slash day wanted from me was gonna be more than i wanted to commit to like i could they it was like i think they thought as was an aqua hire and i was like i'm not gonna like i will do this but i'm not gonna dive it i at a moment like this and it's in silicon valley yeah i thought i was saying my big miss yeah i was like i forgot what you wanna was it's maybe it's like calm or something you i buddy with alex and you know who's like raising it probably like a four or five million dollar it's now two billion right so i i could've have easily written a check to intercom disregard the fact that at the time i had no money there's not angel invested there's many reasons i missed that in addition to just not thinking it was gonna be a winner yeah but besides that i i was telling some story about one of these one of these misses and i thought i was like sounding cool because i missed it and literally i just got big dog by this guy to at he was just like he's like okay welcome to silicon about he's like what are you talking about everybody anybody has yeah baskets of these are you kidding you wanna start like yeah i could how much your time do you guys facebook number one uber first and second exactly he's like i wrote the check i missed did the date you know what how many different versions of this and he but he sits on smart you know he was first he was like shut up basically he's like shut up you think this is like a really cool unique story yeah not only is this not cool and unique it's actually just a standard cost of if you're gonna play this game totally so like what are you talking about yeah but the second thing said was is like i think you're taking the wrong lesson from this because i was focusing so much on what i missed out on yeah versus what the root cause analysis of why didn't i do this yeah okay i'm and if actually since then changes where it's like actually a lot of these misses were like deals i liked i wanted to do they wanted to do which didn't chase kind follow yeah enough to like make sure a transaction goes through because doing a deal sure takes a sprint at the end and we actually like operationalize a bunch of those once we once we got over ourselves and the the kind of weird ego of missing you know life got a lot better for us but it i had to had to learn that the hard way but that's that was probably a big one i am and then a lot of my big misses have been like strategic mess ups like one of the big like one of the biggest areas i ever made jim launch was i started allan the software company right and i should've have built a crm for gyms and that was like i had the right idea what did alan do if it wasn't it just it worked late because the biggest pain point they had was working leads serum wasn't a pain point from a monetization perspective if i had put them all on the platform that i thought all their metrics i would control revenue there were so many things i would have been able to use the pain to get them into like still forever product percent and so like that was like that was probably a three hundred million dollars miss and so like that sucks like i've it that that's probably like my biggest strategic miss i've made we're i'm like i literally allocate a capital to build technology and i built the wrong one right like but i didn't know it i mean i was twenty seven you know on the other side of the coin one of the biggest hits that have happened post the gym launch and whatever this building so this was like an unexpected like wow this was way way more alpha than note of it that like the literally the real estate value or you mean a serendipity the so i got this building before we did any like it was just like i just wanted to place have a gym so like i was like i'm gonna i'm gonna buy the building and leila was like we don't like what we're all remote and we have like you know with the on on the just the pure hold i think at the time with like fifteen employees just on the investment side and was like and so and so anyways i was like i really want this building because it was the it was old building it's just kinda cool i was like i will figure out a way that it will pay for itself right and so the only reason the advisory practice got stood up was because i was like well we have this space i was like let's just i'll make a post to see if anyone wants to come out and then that's what sprung like there's huge demand for that in person versus remote stuff and so then it was like great so we meet all these businesses and we generate cash flow so it's like both things but like this for shirt like that that whole thing would not have happened if we didn't ever book like zero chance i wouldn't have done it because i it was just like i have the space let's try i just would never have taken that leap right so that was probably a huge like didn't guess it was gonna be a win win that's probably like the biggest the biggest one that's like that plus i mean you got like you know michael and a bunch of we're here all the time now which i think it was very tempting and very easy to be fully remote yeah and i think remote works remote works yeah but in like the business olympics the people who are serious about it they're gonna be together they're gonna be c located yeah you know like i paid diego i was like move across the country i'll pay you more just live as like the rule is here's a five minute radius from like we where i live yeah pick a place you know that that's the only rule of coming out here because there's you you can't really replace that oh totally we're eighty so now we're eighty percent in person and so i think we're at like ninety ish employees something like that and so the only thing that we allow as remote is infrastructure right so hr actually hr here so like but finance can be remote certain tech roles can be remote legal can be remote actually become my favorite podcast question i don't know if you have good answer to this because i think you're so locked in and focused on what you do but i just what are you what are you like really interested in lately like what are you very obsessed with lately that's not your core day to day work meaning not like a hobby but just like just i'm kinda of fascinated by this or just like keep reading about this or i keep wanting to meet people in this this thing what what's that thing i only have two and they will not be well once the trident answer is just like i'm reading up on ai just like you are and i spend a ton of hours looking into it the other thing is completely unsurprisingly is that i'm actually really into gym equipment like i i like my instagram is gym equipment as gym equipment are we talking like novelty gym equipment or what do we like like kind of like i get all these like your nut cracker killing like commercial like giant industrial yeah yeah like like the stuff that you see at jim like and why are you so interested that what's what's get me interested in it well if you like if you train hard like you start to notice like some machines are better than others and like why are they better and then you start looking like forced curves for like okay where it is the you know where's tension the highest and then it's like does it correspond with where hypertrophy maxed out for like the range motion for the muscle and like just the like what's the feel of the of the of the equipment and the range of motion and the adjust ability and and like what like what kind of bearings are that you like you can get you can go like pretty far into this yeah and so i'll say this there's the there's this a new thing that came out it's called the volta i'm not sponsored by beyond power and i think that i think in i think ten or fifteen years gym equipment will look very different and it has not changed for a very long time and it's because basically magnetic resistance hasn't wasn't a thing and now it is so like a vulture for example is it's like a brick it's literally the size of a brick it's this big it can get to two hundred pounds of resistance right but not only that you can do single pound increments which is amazing for strength work because like most people the like side up for anybody a lot of reasons you get stuck at a at a at a machine or on dumbbells is because the percentage jump is too big like girls with dumbbells it's like the worst they go from twenty to twenty five pounds for a girl it's a twenty percent jump in in in in weight and so they just can't make the jump they just get stuck whereas like the perfect gym would have literally a hundred dumbbells that are one pound two pound three pound four point all the way up and then you can make this progressions much easier so anyways it goes single pound increments you can also change the eccentric so you can have a be way harder on the way in versus the way out number the next thing is you can change the curve so you can make it like really hard at the front for any kind of pulling moving when heavier here because you're stronger here lighter here on the flip side if you're doing pushing movements you wanna be lighter here have your here you do that by just telling it the movement you can the first you can change the girl you can you change the curve and the so because of the european company by way i don't know i i somebody sent me this they were like because i was buying the the both likes like adjustable like movement two dumbbells but do all these weights he's like really wanna get it get these and i think i probably new bell one that's totally new bell okay maybe that was the one that's probably what it is but yeah the the best ones right now are the rep slash pep in adjustable they go to one twenty and they're all metal there's no plastic was i mean i can talk him but that is probably my i'll i'll circle i'll close the loop on the on the vulture thing the reason i think it's so interesting is that like all the select pieces you see stacks of weight right you put a pin in it there's the stack and those they take up so much room because you have to have room you have to bounce the the piece of equipment from when people are moving it and the stack takes a huge amount of space and from a shipping perspective it's so expensive to ship four hundred pounds right plus the machine right and so it takes more square footage it's more expensive it has smaller increments you can't change the strength curve there's all these reasons and so they find like the tech is finally there where i think that there will be a next generation of machines where they will only have the electronic yeah exactly and you just literally plug it into the wall and the thing the square footage will be smaller the actual machines will be cheaper because the this is v was is gen one as to like the like in five generations it'll be two hundred dollars right now two thousand for the brick but it'll be cheaper than weight as soon as it's cheaper than than mass based yeah yeah as soon as it's cheaper than mass based iron there's there's basically no point right to having mass based resistance so i i get a very excited about that stuff because i think it's gonna be really cool for gyms because i i mean i obviously come from that space but the amount of things that you can now be able to do as a gym owner now i don't own a gym run no i do own a gym it's just not commercial there's so many more things you can do with customers right that like your ability to do like true hypertrophy training in a large group setting when you have that type of resistance it's safer you can't get hurt on it like there's all these things that are beneficial for it so i think that that's my that's my ten year call yeah that people are expecting i think it'll all i think a huge amount will be magnetic could be cheaper for gym owners they don't break as off in incremental all the reasons i said and it's less space dude that sick answer like and that was the one i was like i don't even know if gonna ask if i feel you can totally like i really like writing this book and i'm like i great that's no that's jim equipment you see my gym no i'll show yeah yeah that's cool yeah you'll you'll see it and be like oh chris you're taking out on ai anything like what's you you use it over the tom what do you use for i use it a lot i use it i mean i feel like i i feel i just say ashamed i use it all the time and i am i'm ashamed it i'm my use cases i know i should be using it better which i think many people feel that way but i feel like at all levels everyone feels like they should be using it more but this should be a word for like ai guilt yeah yeah just like overwhelming sense of ai guilt yeah the el elon has ai guilt you what so i would say like i'm the the most interested part that i'm in for like where i'm folk on ai is actually phones because obviously they come from the sales background and so that use case like i want phone call like what do you phones like salesforce calls calls customer support calls like right now we have we have fully implemented ai support just and it's crushing it's doing so it's like it's amazing so right now over ninety percent of all tickets are being resolved entirely with ai mh which is i mean you have any commerce there that are multiple right like it's so it's amazing and like the like i'm getting i'm getting these thinking emails like you guys rock like this was two minute response like you guys are on and then like the whole thing's ai right and so i'm like that it's obviously the text based side is there but like it's weird because the if you look you like rock for i'm sure you got the upgrade or whatever the voice keeps getting yeah certainly better so like i g the one i use for voice right so it's the only one that i do voice stuff with i do all the other stuff with the other ones but i'm like why like it's so close like the latency is so close that i just i that's the use case that i'm waiting to crack like we've been working on one for a year now and the latency but it's it's still like it's it's like not it's not good enough that i'd be like i wanna waste money on you know leads for it to call but it's like maybe it's six months but that's the one that's the one that i had finger like on the pulse yeah that's great yeah i dude i heard a ai tutor like say every week because i'm like it take it's a full time job to keep up with no do van cases i said i'm gonna sit down i was like pay five hundred dollars an hour yeah what you're gonna do is you're gonna come with a list of like blow my mind point one blow my mind point too but i get to drive yeah right because like you you set it all up so then like i get to be behave man that's how i learned everything so you like yeah that's how i learned how to learn facebook ads i said fifteen hour and i said just explain to me how you're doing this and then i'll learn it i think i learned literally coaches are like coaches for adults now is like i don't know why this made an embarrassment factor or like the lack of imagination or creativity i think this like massively underrated highest roi money also far the difference it's such like engineering right like they like ten x engineers there's really like average coach a good coach and like the best coaches factor is these orders of magnitude jumps and how good they are so the other thing people do get wrong is they just take the first coach that they have versus like be really prom precarious and like you know go date around and like go find a coach that will just like rock your world because whether it's fitness or food or what like i have like probably a six or seven coaches like in rotation for now in my life ai or in general i have ai no just general okay like i ai i have a like a my food girlfriend she calls me every morning helps me think about like okay how am i gonna eat today yeah and helping me like all my bad habits through that my personal trainer does like this a very specific like functional training thing that i i i like and i i do you a basketball coach yeah there's people like are you going you know i go to the nba what are you doing it's like i love playing basketball and i decided like being better at basketball not sucking not yeah like this is more fun it's like i can go to cardio or i can have like an nba trainer or train me oh so it's way better than just doing cardio and you know so why am might why would i not do that i just have a bunch but like it's it's become to the like comic it's like yeah i'm just like looking for an excuse like but i mean what other coach is gonna add to mouth piano teachers everything i'm such an advocate of this for anyone who if we're still even rolling but so they've all left they all left we're just out of it no but like i think the some of the highest roi money you can spend is one on one tutoring like just like like every time i really need to learn something what you set like i just like i will pay you a huge amount of money to just sit with me which by the way the killer ai use case right it's like that's gonna be the thing where once we get forgot forget forgot what it's called if you heard like the bloom to sigma thing basically there's this long term search people wanna fix education so if rich people fund like how do we do it and then they go do the research and they're basically like the number one way to get like an actual two sigma which is like standard deviation jump in outcome is one on one tutoring problem is it does a scale so we they wrote it off yeah so for last thirty years we've just been like well we know the thing that works yeah it doesn't really scale and it doesn't you know it can't be affordable so we'll try all these other things yeah but it's like hey wait a minute it's bad that's now that's now viable and so let's see what happens you know you austin well no i barry here's a bear alpha school joe yeah so i talked to i talked to joe about alpha school and yeah i mean the the stuff they're doing is wild but the the issues that they're encountering has nothing to do with education yeah is everything to do with policy right it's such a pain but it's like okay two hours a day we're moving at twice the speed so that's that's so one fourth the time twice the speed they're moving at eight times the speed of a normal school and their scores are top ninety eight percentile so like eight times the speed and the quality metrics there and then the other six hours of the days the kid just learns whatever they like they code apps they do public speaking and they do budgeting they learn all these other life skills and this is like god did you hear did you see that clip by alexander wang hopefully i didn't yeah scale yeah yeah which clip was well he's like i wanna get into until until it's native and i was like man that was one of the more insane statements i've ever heard yeah in in the good like that's the good weird of silicon valley you're run into peep very easily edge we'll say bats shit insane stuff with a straight face and then you're like wait to mind saying yeah or is he insane i can know yeah he's he's probably right yeah what he's crazy it is way more context on that which is what scares it's like when you have one of those it's like well you have to know some like if we have the the same information you might be crazy by my standards right but if i assume that you are intelligent and can make good decisions that it means you know something i don't know and so that's what that's what fred me from the ai of different values but yeah yeah exactly like the peter till had a great one of his the great peter till like sort of insights was when he was went around and he was like university as a bubble and he was basically saying like you have to look at university as a bundle yeah education great sure ten percent yeah you know babysitting you know you know maturation maturation of eighteen to twenty two year olds old this what what's their social there's a insurance policy for parents where you're like i don't know just go to college because feel like that's what i needed to do for yeah and there's like a filtering thing which is like well we trust that harvard filters you so we've yeah yeah we'll just trust their filtering process yeah so like college just all these different jobs yeah and his take was basically like if you wanna disrupt it you don't just disrupt the whole thing you have to un bundle the bundle and figure out what to do and so like i feel like this is just such a common business thing which is like oh health care sucks or this sucks to get sucks cool but until you've realized that that thing is actually a bundle yeah you really have no shot at like ending it in any way right you gotta take one part of that bundle and just ten x that yeah and figure out a way where the other stuff doesn't apply to you because you didn't promise that and if you could do all that like it works you know yeah like you know the way i think about what you do is you're a teacher on youtube which not surprise to you but like people think of youtube is like either a social media okay maybe mh another is just content it's entertainment right but like did i get a little kids miss rachel is the best preschool teacher in the world yeah she has thirty four million preschool students yeah who watched her on her app great like that she is the best teacher therefore she should get this huge outs size number of students so and like khan academy was great teacher you you're a great business teacher like i literally look at youtube like it's a high school there's just cut classes to offer like yeah i can go to david turner and get the history of entrepreneurship that's a an elective i designer totally and like you're basically like business one and one or business or whatever you know business fundamentals a yeah and it's like great i can go take business fundamentals with my professor you know rosie and like i think when you start to look at youtube is also a bundle yeah of music and entertainment and education then you start to think about how i might use it differently than the average person right because like yeah both of you and i probably wish you started on youtube ten years earlier yeah and it was the people who saw youtube as more than what others saw it mh that actually got that advantage yeah no i think that's really good yeah i think that it reminds me that a all quit that i like a lot which is technology democrat consumption and consolidate production and so it's like which means if you're the best in the world you get to do it for everybody right and so yeah i actually i think about that a lot when we talk about our channel which is like how do we how do we just make this the best business content you know possible and that's i mean that's the whole i we just keep doing that then we'll be okay yeah i think it driven him alright pretty a damn a good job of it i appreciate it our the hard part is i'm curious how you do this because at one point in time i think even talked about some podcast i was like i think he's great and smart but then the problem with youtube yeah because the goddamn views public yeah is they gave you an outer scorecard to use yeah that may not be the one you want right and it was like i remember once i looked at your channel and it was like if you're broke do this yeah if you don't have enough money for chipotle do this i was like dude just gonna attract broke people yeah that's the opposite of what kind of like hundred percent once you know or like it's easy to optimize guess what there's more broke people who are more desperate that are on youtube with bunch time to kill you're gonna get two million views on the broke guy video yeah but like i'm never gonna click that and you probably want some people like me clicking some of your content totally and so like i think that's the challenge with youtube overall is like oh if you take their metrics yeah as your metrics you might have a big problem it's a hundred percent it's a so yeah it's it's a thousand percent of problem and we i'd it's like we just we'd put as many controls in place as we can and it's still tough and so right now here's where it gets like let's let let's peel layer back yeah so work gets really interesting is that if i make six videos this our actual cadence five of them i want to be business first business deep whatever we wanna call it and then one out of six i say i'm okay to just like make it wide brutally on truth about whatever right that one video we'll get more views than the other five together and so then how much does that actually weight the brand so even if i actually think about my production versus consumption right so if i actually put my like i might have a fifty percent philosophy brand and fifty percent or you know motivate whatever you gonna call it right like mindset etcetera and then fifty percent business e but in terms of my production it's ninety percent of my time is business it's just like doesn't get the reach and so it's actually one of the things that frustrate me in some ways because like if i like if i get off from the street i'm always curious like what was the you know what was the thing and so but like business owners for me because like i see to be walking in the door and you have to be at a certain level to walk in there anyways is like they're are more more listening and reading in general and like we have the we have a whole series we do call called cash cows which is kinda like what we did with the hotline but i have them in person and then i do the whole the whole thing and it's like an hour and those ones right now average like a hundred and fifty thousand maybe two hundred thousand views per video but like a really honest mill like it's just like i could do like we can get like we doing right now and like i know what like i know exactly what we're gonna say it but the but when i ask who here likes those who shows up they're like please keep making those right and so i have i i keep asking them just because i need to reinforce yeah of course no you need an i need something outer scorecard as long gonna tell you one so you have to like instrument like an antenna yourself to get the signal that you're actually leave for in a way that's not necessarily biased but yeah if i don't put up an antenna there is no generic antenna for you like also a little a little tiny thing that maybe maybe how useful but we actually just this quarter switched our metric so we used views as basically the way that i did it before was like we will make content about these topics and then as long as they're within these topics then we will maximize views so that's the that's the constraint and then maximize within that constraint we have now switched to subscriber count subscriber growth even though the subscribers matter zero right it's just yeah it doesn't matter for distribution but it's a great quality loyalty exactly it's a quality score of like i thought this was valuable enough that so now i could still do the same constraints on on the content but then use the subscriber because that gives us the because subscribers still has baked into it some element of reach but if you if i make a brew honest this video i'm not gonna get the same amount of subscribers i am as like thirteen years of business advice like one of my best videos ever that's but hardcore for business yeah so they was just something that we've switched to just this quarter i i have i can't figure it so i i i basically figured out what do i want which i can't measure so first was what do i want i was basically like i created it but like you know you know in popularity you the q score okay so i basically was like give me the z score what's the z score does z score me as a trust score so i was like alright pro about t score okay i think about but yeah it was the z score which is basically i realized that all content what you actually want is number of people reached times the quality of the person reached sure times the depth of their trust in you sure and basically that's the equation you ultimately care like you can reach a lot of people on tiktok but if they're just like you know if they're not the people you're trying to do like to yeah yeah exactly you know it's you have to discount factor because you're not your second variable is not very good and then the third which is like how much do they actually trust you not like they watched that piece of content or they like that thing or they hate watched it like yeah i got views but like actually they're like this is an idiot or like i hate this guy right so that's that's why i wish this now that's never gonna exist so had to back channel it and there's a shame metric so i said if if i make a thing do i wanna go put it in my favorite group chats me myself being like i made this guys because there's a lot of shit i make that can get pop that's popular that i be i would cringe putting it there yeah because they'd be like bro what the fuck is a great we don't bar we don't need this or care about this is like what is this for well i did you put this here versus other things like i did this one thing that went nowhere viral viral i did this like i spent like two months just studying the process of creativity yeah i really to realized with ai is like productivity values going down and creativity values going it's was like how do the most creative people in the world world work i've studied elon and all those guys but i actually have no idea how you know sign whatever at all all these other guys how they operate so i studied that i put it together and i put it out there again with nowhere it could put but i like internalize these lessons deeply so still a win but that was the one where if i put it in my group chats yeah my most successful peers were actually like dude this is actually sick like i actually have i didn't know this i took this i needed this blah yeah so i've had to use basically like my own cringe factor of like yeah do i wanna put this in there or would i feel like kinda stupid doing that i what i feel like i need to soften it with some context in some excuses to put it in yeah that's i think i mean i think what you hit on is like such a painful part of of creating content is that the entire the reinforcement system leads you away from the actual business goal i mean if you if you do this for business which i do like it leads you away from your business goal which makes it vary you just have to have a lot of discipline of like right this is the stuff i'm gonna make and it will under perform and that is okay and it gets harder when you when you get when you know how to make the stuff that really hits from of views and all that stuff perspective the more you know yeah yeah i mean but you know it's i mean this has been a it's probably one of the largest focal points that we have as for our brand and i i i feel it's an accordion it's like you know if we we do just hardcore hardcore business content and then we'll be like alright let's let's make a little bit of personality stuff like show a little bit and then it's like oh that did great and when i they're were like oh fuck we're way too wide and and then like i think we just kinda os one thing i wish you did more of just my personal request was that you did something is like a short or something you i know who made this somebody this room might have made this but it was like you were just talking about your figure gear you're talking about your shoes right and bought the door and a and so yeah so yeah you hold her your darwin out here you're like i can wear this in the rain it will pool and then i can get out the pool go to a restaurant and it works i can go for hopefully works tomorrow and you know i think that's great because first of all and first of all i didn't feel like i'm trying to be the kardashian kardashians so it didn't feel like you were trying to show me something it was just like oh you wanna know like something i do in my life here here's something i do in my life yeah what i thought was interesting about that was a those it was good find you actually put real like your own nerd into like something for your own lifestyle so i was like it meant something but b every time i wear those shoes yeah i think if you and there's something to physical anchor totally in additional world that like actually matters i'm a huge believer in yeah side note a huge so i think this is like a little sauce there and i think the other part of it was i saw said my i like made a a mission for the year like a for the year and like i thought it was like it should have been about you know business or like getting in great shape or whatever but when it was like oh i know i wanna do i was like i wanna learn to jam out on the piano i was like and so i just made that my mission and i took it incredibly seriously and like had a great time doing in and so just yesterday i just turned i've just turned on a live stream on twitter i was like mh i they have this feature i live was up doing like a piano practice not even like a performance i was just like fucking around like trying to learn these songs i'm not good i've been doing this month dude i got so many dms from like again the same thing like the people who i don't wanna send my content to because i'm like you're a billionaire what do you how to get rich right from a guy who ten times less rich than you yeah but i got them be like dude i've been wanting to brad i love love how you made time for this is that what you which one did you get what who's that teacher how'd you find or do you get teacher's better than the apps and i got so many of those that was like there's something to the lifestyle content when it's really jen i gym for example like you could probably see that i like i'll light up when i talk about it exactly it if it if it genuinely lights you up and it shows it's like four other to of people who i don't like i've read all the books now i don't really need a lot of like like how to grow my business i'm actually pretty good at that sure and so like one cool way i thought your lifestyle stuff worked was it attracted me to that i probably wouldn't watch like ten of the other videos but that one i was like kinda interested in really interest from a different angle and i think you you kinda turned this spigot it off on that i noticed this but like my referral request is you give me ten percent of that back yeah so this is the the doc dichotomy that has to be managed which is the the the thumb print of the creator in my opinion should be the representation of their current life which means it can change right and so it's like i spend maybe it's like ten percent of my time is finnish oriented and so like maybe ten percent of my conscious be fitness oriented and then probably eighty percent of my time is business oriented then maybe ten percent my time is philosophical and maybe five and this is now a hundred and five but is is relationship whatever right and so it's like that that's my mix and maybe in a different season and it'll change and so the content should be i i was thinking it was like should be glass it should be like when someone meets me it's exactly as the expectation yeah the only thing that fucks that whole thing up is the algorithm yeah because i can absolutely make that that that thumb it's just that this one will get ten times the views and so then if you're trying to manage the mosaic of your brand and with all the little all little shorts as tiny little squares it's just that you can't control how big the square is in the middle of the fucking face that you're trying to build so that makes sense but that's what i'm saying like those that thing about your shoes didn't get a lot of views but it made an imprint on me yeah i would say like i would carry more weight than like i say a thousand random views tim ferris at this month he's like do i want ten thousand random people are selected at random i'm somewhere in the world yeah you like my stuff or half of da to be like to really respect what i do it's like one's a big number one's big that one's big value right like which one do i want yeah i think there's something similar there and also like you know you were talking about like they have different wallets or different stomachs oh yeah it's like i leave a certain wallet or stomach for like mh educational business concert me reminding myself i need to do more at work yeah right yeah i actually have other wallet share to give you interesting on another area my fitness wallet share you can get some of that yeah you can get some of my outfit wallet share on my relationship wallet share as an entrepreneur dealing with you know busy but relationships right like so think of it maybe with your own analogy yeah i really like that that's i mean it's always i we need to be reminded more than we need be taught yeah so i'm with it good alright we should we should appreciate you fun thanks for thanks for having thanks dudes i feel like i could rude to where to know why i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looking back my friends if you like m then you're gonna like the following podcast it's called a billion dollar moves and of course it's brought to you by the hubs spot podcast network the number one audio destination for business professionals billion dollar moves it's hosted by sarah chen spelling sarah is a venture capitalist and strategist and with billion dollar moves she wants to look at unicorn founders and fund and she looks for what she calls the unexpected leader many of them were underestimated long before they became huge and successful and iconic she does it with unfiltered conversations about success failure fear courage and all that great stuff so again if you like my first million check out billion dollar moves it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network again billion dollar moves alright back to the episode