How Entrepreneurs F*ck themselves with Alex Hormozi

hey everyone dan henry here and i am super excited to present to you this episode where we interview alex harmozy on the show alex and his wife leila are the founders of acquisition.com where they have a hundred million dollars per year in revenue from the companies they own including their own companies their portfolio companies and uh of course just the wealth of knowledge that alex has in building multiple multiple multiple eight-figure businesses we talked a lot about both the high level view and and fundamental mindset that entrepreneurs need to have to grow to the next phase as well as a lot of super tactical things that you can do to grow your business increase word of mouth increase sales dramatically make more from less customers all kinds of awesome goodies we started the podcast immediately talking about growing our calves because we're both into weightlifting obviously alex a lot more so we're going to go ahead and jump into the interview it's gonna literally start mid-sentence uh but you're really really going to enjoy this episode alex dropped a ton of value so with no further ado enjoy this is how to think so you know what's funny i watched your video on um on on training your calves because my calves and my traps weren't growing and i watched the video and i was like well this makes sense so i started doing it i started like literally doing calves 10 sets of calves every single day as well as shrugs and lo and behold it's only been like a week and a half and i can literally see them growing i was like this dude was right yeah everyone works out like three sets a week and they're like my gosh i'm growing i'm like no [ __ ] like you walk around all day long your calves can take a lot more than three sats like right right well i saw another older video you did or or it wasn't a video as a post and you were i think you said you did like 30 sets every workout full body every single day that was your that was your workout i was like holy crap that's a lot of sex i've been doing it for a decade i've been training that way for a decade i've been training for almost 20. yeah and that makes sense like a lot of times people and and it's sort of like business because a lot of times people like well why aren't i bigger why why i'm not why am i not a bigger person why i don't have bigger muscles and it's like because this guy over here is doing 30 sets a day and you're doing three and then it's the same thing with business like why am i not making more money and you're just doing one-tenth of the work or one-tenth of the effort that the people who are not even a tenth a lot of the times it's like a hundredth like you know i mean like that's one of the things i tell this story all the time because i think it drives it home so hopefully the audience will appreciate it so i was really early in business and i had my gym so i like you had like a brick and mortar that i kind of started out with um this is my first gym and i was told to put flyers out right and i was like okay i'll put some flyers out so i put some flyers out from a guy who was a really successful business owner and uh i ended up meeting up with him you know a few months later or something and he was like uh how did the how did those fires work out and uh i was like ah they didn't really uh you know we got like i got one call from a guy who said i dinged his car and uh and he was gonna sue me and that was it that's all i got from the flyers he's like well uh you know what was your test size and i was like uh what do you mean he was like like what was your test side like what did you test before you did you know the main amount i was like i didn't do a test size he's like well how much you put out i was like 300. and uh he's like 300 he's like i don't even test with less than with less than a thousand i was like what he's like yeah and then when we start doing it we do five thousand a day and i was like [ __ ] i and so like and he was doing 5000 so he's doing 150 000 flyers a month to drive business into his small business and i was here jerking off about 300 you know what i mean and so like he did 45 times i think the effort that i did to get the outcome and it's the same thing with like dms and phone calls and it's like well how many you know i know you had your rule of 100 and so over the last i literally got a message and said so over the last uh eight weeks i sent 100 dms and i was like bro it's 100 a day 100 a day you took you did 100 over eight weeks that's 156 the amount of effort that is required so it's just like there's usually this massive gap between what people think is required to to get the outcome versus what is and they're like what if i double it's like dude it's not even 10x a lot of times it's like 50x the amount of volume or same thing with phone calls like i make 10 phone calls a day i'm like bro our guys minimum quota is 200 a day for the for the call team you know what i mean so people just don't get i'll i'll give you a different story because this happens all the [ __ ] time i had one of our portfolio companies we're trying to we're scaling up the traffic and um i was like bro you need to make more creative and you need to do it on a more consistent basis and he was like okay that's fine and i was like dude we made creative every i was like you need to start every 14 days you need to make have a full creative day and like run you know create new ads all that kind of stuff and so i got an end of day thing and he was like hey man the first creative day went awesome recorded four ads um really excited and i was like what the [ __ ] did you do all day four i was like dude we would do like 40. you know what i mean like minimum and when we were at like you know full swing because right now for us uh cold calls on the gym on side was is now like 75 of the business um but when when ads were the vast majority of the business we did we were running like 30 to 40 new ads every three days you know what i mean and uh he was like what i was like yeah bro like i don't know it's like it's just there's just a massive difference and he thought four was a lot and doing four every two weeks he thought was a lot and so i'm like what was he doing before right and so you know what i mean but like that's the thing is just like people just have this massive discrepancy between what what is required and what they think will make them successful do you think a lot of that is you think that's always been that way or it's being further uh perpetuated by society because you know when i i used to work for like directv and i remember we were expected to make 200 dials a day and if the phones went out or something like that there was a tech issue and we called up and we were like hey the phones are out our boss would be like why aren't you already on the phone with the cable company getting it fixed why are you calling me you know and the expectation was so much higher and nobody was sitting there saying well you know you got to pander to people's emotions and feelings you just did your job and i i recall you know in today's world i've you know i've had a conversation with like a sales rep who wants to make all this money being a sales rep and i'm like how many dials did you do today and they're like oh i didn't and i'm like well i need to do at least 30 by lunchtime and they're like 30 by lunchtime you know there's not enough hours in a day and i'm like dude not everyone's going to answer you could do 30 in the next hour what are you talking about like just the fundamental lack of understanding and acceptance around that do you think that it's worse today because of like society and culture or do you think it's just always been that way no i mean i think there's a slight you know degradation over time but i think it's i think it's cyclical um so i mean like there's lots of like macro stuff but i think it's like every 80 years or so there's like the big pendulum that swings and so it's like you know like hard times build hard people hard people build good times good times build soft people soft people build hard times right and so i think that we're in the hard people built you know we're soft times built soft people stage right now and i think that you know we will have a another hard time and it will build more hard people so i mean i think a lot i think it's very likely that we will be the like our generation will be the one that will have to step up in the next decade or so um and become a harder generation which i think i think will rise to it i mean i think people are amazingly resilient when they have no choice like if we think about like human capacity versus like what is societally accepted like i think a lot about like really dark times i think a lot about like auschwitz and slavery and things that were really horrific kind of human experiences and huge populations were able to go through it and those same people prior to well obviously slavery would that wouldn't that wouldn't work but like prior to that experience you might have people who were uh you know softer and then they go through things like that and it really fundamentally changes them and to the same degree if i were to think to myself like the difficulty of my life compared to a lifetime of slavery uh is different right it's a different level of of difficulty and so i think like knowing that that is possible gives us a lot more potential for effort because this is like we're so untapped in what we you know in the amount of effort that we put forth into the endeavors that we pursue awesome awesome that makes a lot of sense um so let me ask you this kind of feeding off that because it's one thing that i've noticed is there is effort there's lack of acceptance around how much effort but then i've seen a lot of people including myself we put effort into the wrong places you know like we started talking before uh we we began recording and your companies you know you're you got you and your wife are doing a million a hundred million dollars a year and you're in a hallway right now with no art on the wall you i i thought it was the camera angle but do the thing with your hands like like literally literally you can touch both sides of the wall you're in this this hallway and your uh obviously beautiful condo in in vegas but like dude like you know most people they have this big office with this nice views and this over-the-top stuff and these and maybe they have like crazy lighting and stuff and they just go overboard but you're just like screw it i'm in this hallway and i'm just building this you know billion-dollar play um would you say that part of your success is the fact that you're basically just the ultimate minimalist like i mean everything that i see from you is ultimate minimal right it's like iphone videos for youtube it's your logo is just acquisition.com it's just and your website is just like blah like you know you just intentionally don't give a [ __ ] about any of the stuff that most entrepreneurs obsess over do you think that's part of your success rather than minimalism i would say it's form over function so it's not just because i think i think it can look similar but i think it's it's somewhat it's the there's it's a shade different um you know i mean like for like this tank top this particular like white tank top that i wear like i bought 40 different brands and i tried different sizes on so that i could find the right white tank top for me and like i i bought i bought all the highest rated barefoot shoes on amazon because i was trying to do a link because i realized i don't wear t-shirts it was something i was like i wonder if i could eliminate t-shirts in my life so i don't wear t-shirts i either wear i have a beater or i put like a flannel if it's cold or i put a hawaiian if it's hot and that's it and so that's just like what i wear up top most the time and then like with shoes i was like can i eliminate socks so i tried all the barefoot shoes on and then i ended up realizing that i liked my crocs the best but now i'm just informed on it so i like got rid of all those and like i work rocks just about everywhere i figured out i can work out in them so i was like great i don't have to have workout shoes so anyways all that to say i think it's it's just like what's the function that's required um and i think a lot of times people miss the force for the trees you know i mean like i think the youtube video stuff works even though the quality is poor because uh you know the stuff is useful for people um and then also for me from a form over function standpoint if i if it takes me more effort to do the other thing and i become less likely to do it as a result then the overall function goes down so it's like if i do one-third the videos and they're prettier will i get the same output as three times the videos that are kind of quick and dirty and for me at this point i do that i'm not to say that i wouldn't like if i can figure out a way to get the function down where it's like really effortless for me uh to do nicer ones i'll do nicer ones it's just that right now it's not like my i don't make my money from from influen you know like being an influencer or whatever right well i mean the quality quality you got to look at the categorization of quality because from a content perspective your videos and the content you put out is better than like virtually everybody else like you know most people are like quoting uh the four-hour work week and stupid [ __ ] and you're like literally giving actual hardcore advice that makes sense and that is stuff that most people charge for and it isn't even that good and and you know so in that case would you say that the ability to focus solely or at least focus the most on the content is just any any view of like fancy cameras and all that stuff is just a distraction from creating amazing content and ultimately that's what people care about i think it comes second it's exactly that it's like it comes like it's it i think there's some benefit to it i just think it is less benefit than people give proportional to their focus so it's like let's say it's 80 20 you know 80 comes from the content 20 comes from the touch i think people put 80 on the touch and 20 on the content and so it's like i think if we if you allocate the attention or the focus appropriately then you'll get the outsized outcomes and i think fundamentally like the people that move fastest in life are the ones who employ the most leverage and so a lot of employing leverage in business and whatever relationships is understanding where the points of leverage are and that means that being able to look at a lot of variables and identify which of these ones has the most influence over the outcome and then ruthlessly focusing on that one variable and and driving it and i think most people will focus on a lot of other variables that they don't see don't have a huge effect on output and the easiest litmus test for this and this is for anybody in the audience is if right now you're working you know most of your hours of the day for example it's not that you need to work more it's that fundamentally what you are working on is not effective like you might be doing stuff and you might be producing things like you might actually be getting things done it's just that the things that you were getting done are literally irrelevant so like you're i mean it's kind of like cutting grass with scissors like you can do it it just doesn't make it meaningful which is really disheartening for some people but it's also the truth so then let me just dig a little deeper there what are what would you say are two things that most entrepreneurs and especially you know online entrepreneurs uh do that they don't need to do and what's two things that they're not doing that they absolutely need to do i can answer the second one better than the first one because like my answer for the first two would be anything you're doing that's not these things like you know i mean like right like people do a zillion crazy things um and so with regards to the things that people need to be doing more like there's i think if you if you boil everything down like to what are the what are the again what are the points of leverage like what are the things that actually grow business right like number one is you can get more customers number twos you can make them worth more it's literally it so everything flows down from that equation at the top and every time we have quarterlies with the you know the portfolio companies and things like that like i always write it on the board as a reminder to just be like guys we're either making this number go up we're making this number go up what is all of these you know these quarterly objectives that we're doing how is it going to drive that versus how is it going to drive that right and so like the two most important things are getting more customers and making them worth more and so then it just depends on which of these things is the bottleneck within the business and in the beginning and this is where a lot of people [ __ ] up is that like zero to one million one to three million ish in that in that range is you have to learn how to sell something to someone right it's one product one avatar one channel very simple process right which is really just finding product market fit which is what they call from the software world is do people want the thing you're selling that's it right and can you get them to give you money that's all it is right but going from like three to ten for example um you can guess like you can gas marketing all you can just keep acquiring customers the thing is is that like in order to keep doubling down on that you have to start you have to double your sales velocity every time you want to double the business so it's like i go from selling 50 customers a month to 100 customers a month and i sell from 100 customers a month to 200 customers a month and i go from 200 to 400 and then becomes really untenable at a certain point to keep selling more people and then that's where the business will plateau and so instead the better way of growing the big business is as soon as you have product market fit which is selling [ __ ] that people want and they're actually buying from which usually you're making one to three million ish right at that point you pause an acquisition and then you focus all of your effort on how do i retain these people how do i get them to never leave how do i extend the ltv per customer so that even if i sold the same amount my business continues to grow right and so usually if you fix that properly during that period of time you can keep the same acquisition numbers and then expand the business from 3 to 10 million with a lot less effort i think leverage and then then when you go and jam more marketing into the business then it just boom you're at 30. boom you're at 50. you know what i mean and it's just that most people just think oh i started marketing that made me some money so i'm going to market more to make me more money and it's it's not that i mean you will make what i would consider like you will become rich doing that if you just want to market a lot but you will not become wealthy because you will not build assets that are valuable because people will not want to buy a thing that's purely built on just front end and not tons of like word of mouth and other you know and higher ltv metrics and then what happens is the media arbitrage that most people figure out in order to acquire the customers usually shuts down and then all of a sudden their margins compress and then it becomes untenable for them to acquire the amount of customers that they were and then overnight they disappear you know what i mean and that's what usually happens whereas if you have a stable base of customers uh that continue to pay you because they like the thing that you're doing it gives you the gross profit margin to then weather those storms and then build other channels got it got it so then let me ask you this you probably have a lot of data on this next question already how many portfolio companies you have currently we have if you don't include the three that layla and i still have big chunks of that we sold majority of but we're still uh 25 to 40 owners in those companies um we have uh seven eight so eight so so eight companies so i would i would say that that's not one or two that's a that's a pretty fair amount to be 11 between all of them well okay so 11. so then let me ask you this when you start working with the portfolio company i imagine that and you've probably helped or coached or somehow interacted with a lot of a lot more companies than that my question is you probably are seeing patterns right like as soon as you start working with a company you probably see the same mistakes over and over again or you start changing the same things over and over again and they repeat can you expand on what what are those repeated patterns or what's the first thing you usually change that you just consistently see i would say that there are there are different archetypes of entrepreneurs so just as a as a hair to that like as a shade of gray or nuance is that there are product driven entrepreneurs and there are promotion driven entrepreneurs and so like and then you know the best ones can do both but most of them tend to have a a leaning one way or the other right and so if we have a product driven entrepreneur usually we have to focus on acquisition stuff right and that's i would say that's probably the minority of the time i'd say that's maybe like 25 percent of the time the other 75 percent of time it's usually promotion driven entrepreneurs at least the ones who come to me are maybe attracted to my stuff and to be fair my company's called acquisition.com so like maybe the promotion guys are more attracted to the stuff that i talk about right um and so with the promotion guys it's usually we have to fix background stuff and so it really depends on what they're presenting with because like the way i see it it's like imagine you have a mona lisa painting that's you know what is the embodiment of like a 50 or 100 million dollar business and then we've got whatever their current business looks like which is a mona lisa that has like gunshot and bullet holes all over it it's like okay how do we look at this and then just systematically fill in the holes and so two different businesses might have like gunshot holes in different areas of the painting that they currently have that has potential to be a mona lisa but it's not there yet and so we just kind of fill in the holes based on that but big big picture most companies at that size they have really really [ __ ] data tracking so usually they don't have consolidated metrics and that's a big one because it affects everything that you're trying to improve like if you don't have all the metrics and tracking around like customer lifetime value and your acquisition metrics from click to close it becomes really difficult to make decisions and so then you're just shooting from the hip which is just not that effective so getting the right data in place second one and this is probably pretty universal is that the talent at that stage is low so usually it's the genius of the thousand hands model you've got one guy who's kind of like really pushing and driving everything and then a lot of people just like help him out or her out right and so what what's what's required at that point is that we need to have like the first like true mid-level leaders uh that's kind of like directors and managers that need to get put into place and sometimes those directors and managers can can level up even beyond that to go from 10 to 30 and sometimes we have to replace them and it just depends on whether they're willing or able to grow and so it's a it's a data problem it's a people problem um and then there's usually some sort of uh i don't want to say this is one that's not like necessarily a problem but like what we're really good at is figuring out the best ways to monetize businesses and so it's like how can we reconfigure how we price how can we reconfigure the thing that we're selling or create some sort of ascension or some sort of tied in continuity um to increase the lifetime value uh per customer and so that's kind of the those are like the i would say the three bigger buckets that we look at is like we got to get the data right so that we can make the strategic decisions and then once we have the strategic decisions we need to do to build the beautiful mona lisa painting that we want to paint then who do we need on the bus uh who is either there and then who would need to get off the bus because i would say i'd say either probably it's more than a third and less than half the time so in that range we also have to fire a bunch of key people um or i would say like they're key roles in the business but they are actually sabotaging the business and so we've had two instances or three instances and not necessarily even uh fire is a strong word but like we have to fundamentally move the org chart a lot right sometimes we have to let somebody go but sometimes it's like it has to be a major move like you know maybe the ceo is actually a really good cmo and he's not really a ceo right like he just he's a founder but like if you look at shopify um the founder i can't remember his name i know i feel like an idiot um but anyways the founder uh he's a product guy and so he's not ceo of shopify even though he's the founder he's just chief product officer because that's what he loves doing and that's what he's really good at right he found a ceo to run the business he recognizes his own deficiencies but a lot of times people's egos cannot take that um and it's the thing is it's always like what does the business require period and then like that's what it requires so whether it's you or something like that is what is required and then it's just having a conversation of like do you want to become that person or do you want to find that person so what do you mean by their ego gets in the way a lot of people don't like people have attachments to the title of ceo they're like i want to be ceo it's my company like well i mean it's a business that requires a ceo like you do not need to be that person like warren buffett's not ceo of any of his companies you know what i mean yeah and i i could and is that does that lead into playing to your strengths a lot because you know for me i've always thought if i was going to be a c anything it would be a cmo not not a ceo because the operational aspect of business is the part i like the least i mean it needs to be done but it's the part i like the least i i like you know i i grew up watching mad men and thinking that was the greatest show in the planet and just coming up with the best ad campaign it was to me that's like art you know it's like painting but you're painting with products totally yeah so the best people see whatever they do is art so the best product guys talk about product like it's art the best operators talk about culture and meeting and onboarding and leading like it's art i'm so glad to hear you say that because i have always my entire career said that you know i grew up an artist right i was a poor musician played guitar and i never could get that to be successful and so when i started learning sales and marketing and building a business i didn't really view it as a business you know because i was that i was that like anti-corporate uh guitar player and i was like you know [ __ ] these guys like so but then i realized that that is it's just a different canvas it's a different stage and i always viewed building the business and ads and marketing and creating products as art not as you know i mean obviously it's a business but i viewed it as art and i've said that a lot so to hear you say that uh it just lets me know i'm on the right track with that thinking i think it has to be art i mean because like you don't you don't need more money you know what i mean and so it has to be something that you would do like if you would play music all day long if you didn't need anything ever then it's just and this is a lot of people won't like what i'm about to say but i'll say it anyways um like to compete against the people if you're like i really want to make money but you don't really like business i think it's like i started in fitness and then i realized i had a deeper passion for business like i liked it more than i liked fitness and i i was obsessed with fitness for a long time but like when i like the day i started my gym was the day fitness became number two and then business became my first love um and i'm still you know in my love affair you know with business my long-term relationship with business and it's because like like the only way you're gonna beat everybody else is is to truly love it and if you don't i think it's very difficult to do that and i think it's just like maybe picking another metric or a different bone to gnaw on um but i had one quick thing i was pulling it up while you were um we were talking about the art thing earlier so like a lot of marketers will talk about how their products are amazing right like how many times have you heard people like no no our course is awesome our program's awesome or whatever right they say that but the thing is is like and i've i've done this at like a couple of like workshops i've been invited to and i'm like all right who here knows what their you know their cpm their ctr their you know their their cpl like their set percentage their close rate their cpa their cac like what who who knows all those numbers everyone's like oh yeah uh 100 i'm like cool i'm like what's your what's your ttv what's your chs what's your nps what's your churn with your activation points what are crc and they're like what i'm like right so how can you set you a [ __ ] good product and you don't even know what the [ __ ] metrics are to track good product hmm well i mean i think that just goes into the fact that most entrepreneurs are kind of full of [ __ ] silence in the room right yeah wow i mean i mean and that makes sense because you know if you think about it most entrepreneurs are full of [ __ ] and even if they're like no i mean look i'm just gonna look i i'll just say this okay i've you know i've personally worked with and you've worked with a lot i've worked with tons of entrepreneurs one of the biggest things is online coaches course creators even agencies and i've always given blunt direct advice and i can't tell you if i had to sum up my experience with most people and i was probably this way too when i came up so i'm not like judging but it's really like hey you are currently full of [ __ ] and you need to understand how to not be full of [ __ ] and now you can sort of really see the forest through the trees and see what needs to be done because you you've you have this cloud over this lens your your glasses are dirty you can't see the real world because you're stuck in this alternate reality that you've created and it's and i like it i like how you just broke it down you're like listen do you you feel that you have a good product but that is a feeling that's an emotion that's some [ __ ] you need to talk to your therapist about what are the metrics what is the data telling you is the data telling you it's good or do you just feel it's good because you just want to wake up and think life's great so i i think that that's a great point because as an entrepreneur isn't it about that isn't it about the data and analyzing the situation and and making decisions and not about just feeling a certain way you know when you wouldn't you say that that ultimately is that next level is detaching yourself from that and just looking at it as it is yeah and most people just don't know what ideal scene looks like and so that i mean the biggest threat that most people not i mean i would say the biggest threat to all entrepreneurs is that they are ignorant is that we are ignorant of what it takes to be successful at whatever the next level is for us and so like i this concept is one that has just like frightened me and like to my for my whole life which is i heard i think i heard myron say this on stage and it was like really impactful for me he said it was a close for him but i just think it's a it's a it's a great concept he said it's costing you a million dollars a year every year you don't know how to make a million dollars and to me that's the tax of ignorance so like everyone who's listening to this who's not making a billion dollars a year is getting taxed by life far more than the government is for just the ignorance that you have to not knowing how to do it and so that's always been the biggest tax i've tried to pay down as fast as possible which is like every person who makes more than me knows more than me in some way and i just have to try and figure out what am i ignorant of that they are not ignorant of and a lot of people will throw stones and be like well that guy doesn't have ethics or that guy doesn't have morals like i i interviewed grant cardone um on my channel and i got so many people were like oh now i don't trust you and i'm like what is wrong with you i'm like the man went from zero to a billion in 10 years i'm like i was alive 10 years ago and i am not a billionaire and you were alive 10 years ago mr youtube uh commenter and you are also not a billionaire i'm like so what what what happened that was different and sure the one of the big pieces is that there's always the compounding effect of time right is that like you might be on the right path as long as you are making progress and that's a big one right as long as you're making you might be on the right path to a billion because like warren buffett at my age i think was worth 10 million in those days dollars i have to figure out that isn't today's dollars but like you know he was worth 10 million at my age and i'm like so maybe it is the right path i don't know you know what i mean but also the world's changed so anyways not to get too far into tangent about that but um to answer do you think that do you think one of the big things is like it's just to just expand on that like people assume they need to like someone to learn from them and i've always i've never understood why someone sets a requirement to personally like someone to gain value or knowledge from them oh yeah i wrote that down because it's a really good tweet you don't need to like someone to learn from them that's great well i'm glad i could contribute to your twitter somehow amen i love that it's great it's a great statement but you know naval said something that i thought was really impactful and it's like this is something that took me a very very very very very long time to understand so before i explain what that that quote is most small business owners suck and that is why they are small business owners because they are so bad at virtually all aspects of business that that's why they are small right like the thing that separates small business from big business is skill right and you know market opportunity etc but like you can even get into like well picking an opportunity is a skill right because we were like well that's easy he's selling b2b it's like why don't you sell me to be or whatever i mean i don't think it's that easy but you get the understanding right and so naval said you only do sales are good at selling because you don't know how to market and you only market because you don't know how to build product and so i i think there's a tremendous amount of truth to that which is like if you build the product good enough and it takes a tremendous amount of effort to build an exceptional product that grows on its own via word of mouth because of all acquisition channels only one of them is quadratic in nature right only one of them can multiply and compound on its own every other acquisition channel you get an affiliate it's a one-to-one relationship you get you know your dollar end dollar out same thing with you know ads it's like you put a dollar in you get a fixed amount out maybe it's ten to one but it's fixed so i put another dollar in i get another ten dollars out but for something to be quadratic it's like i put 10 in i get 100 and then i get a thousand and then i get 10 000 right and like in it and it multiplies and the only thing that does that is word of mouth right and one of the things that's really interesting about the the internet space specifically is a lot of people will start their business they'll shoot up because they'll figure out how to get ads to work or whatever whatever their acquisition channel is they'll figure out how to do that and they'll shoot up in revenue right and this is particularly for paid ad people right and you know within six months or 12 months all of a sudden they're like man my my cpms are out of control my cost of acquisition is way you know above kpi like you know google's changed youtube's change facebook's changed right they you know they throw that out there and the thing is is like it may have gone up by like 10 it may have gone up by 15 but your cost of acquisition is quadrupled and so the thing is is what is the invisible hand behind the scenes pulling the strings against you and it's the same people are like word of mouth doesn't exist it doesn't work anymore and that's horseshit word of mouth 100 completely exists it's social media for god's sake of course of course word of mouth works it's just working against you and so right now everyone has word of mouth that is about their business the question is is it neutral is it positive or is it negative and then actively destroying your business the way positive word of mouth can grow your business and so the guys who have positive word of mouth they see their cost of acquisition to continue to decline even if their cost per impression remains the same or even goes up slightly because they have that quadratic compounding that's happened behind the scene whereas the other guys are having that that compounding that's happening behind the scenes which is like oh i saw this ad from you know johnny so and so i think it looks cool and then they they message your friend they're like oh dude heard that guy's a complete you know like his product [ __ ] he doesn't respond to you the team sucks he just has a bunch of va's in the philippines who are who are like your support and it's it's terrible and they're like oh wow and then that person the person who said the negative thing gets asked a question again about johnny another situation tells people he prevented that sale no one knows why he prevented that sale but that sale was prevented and then the guy he tells it to gets another message like hey are you going to do that johnny thing and he's like oh no i actually heard from frank that it's it's actually a really bad product and they're like oh okay and that's enough like it doesn't take a lot to get people to not buy right yeah and so it's just like you have this machine that compounds and the the easiest way to prove it is like if your cost of acquisition has gone up 3x but the cost per impression has only gone up 30 percent you have another thing that's working against you which is like how is jammon still here six years later seven years later right and still growing right it's only there because it has at least neutral or positive word of mouth behind it otherwise it wouldn't exist we wouldn't be able to require customers you know i i don't know if i ever told you this i might have told you this but you a conversation me and you had i believe it was the first time we met it was backstage at fhl right and i had this course that at the time was like the hot facebook ads course right and we're standing back there and um i'm you know back then i was this little you know pudgy skinny fat dude sitting there all with a stupid bunny ear hat on on my head and stuff and i could just i could sense your disapproval like through your through your pores um and i said to you i was like hey man like how's it going with facebook ads or whatever you're like oh like yeah um at the time you were like yeah i don't know how to do facebook ads i suck at them you just were like just i don't even know and i'm like well what is your roi and you're like i don't know it's like 20x i'm like wait a minute what i'm like what do you mean 20 exit i'm like i'm at like 5x at you know spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month how are you doing this you know and you're like oh like uh our cheapest product is 16 grand so i don't give a [ __ ] what our facebook ads cost and when you said that my entire world world changed because at the time we were pushing anywhere from six to a million six hundred million a month on a thousand dollar product and when you said that immediately i realized that and this is something that i see other entrepreneurs just don't get they believe everything revolves around what button you push in the dashboard and this is life right this is reality in entrepreneur world is you got to push this button you got to know how to do this thing with this look like none of that [ __ ] matters if you have if you don't have good creative and you don't have a good product that you're going to and the margins don't make sense so when you said that i was like wait a minute there are far more important things in this world than these little tech things and so i fundamentally changed my business model and i me i went all in on high ticket and since then we were just able to we went from spending like you know seven hundred thousand to make a million to spending uh like eighty thousand to make like 600 that it was just nuts and you're just revolving around that and so i don't know if i ever told you that but that that that one conversation because i'm the type of person when i hear something that makes sense to me i'm like all in like i'll i'll burn the walls around me and build something new you know um just to make sure that i i i understand at a higher level and so i read your book last week uh jim lott's secret secrets and what i thought was yeah of course i did yeah well what i thought was interesting about it if you do control h on like a digital copy and you replace jim with just a product i thought about it i like really considered just literally relaunching it and just call it like coaching secrets because because gyms are coaching businesses they're brick and mortar so i think that's why we were able to actually build our licensing business with gym launch so quickly was because like i had already spent five years i didn't know as a coaching business but like when people come into the gym to work out and lose weight like you're coaching them like it's what it is and i had a staff of like i already knew all this stuff but i didn't know i knew it so anyway so yes that that book is 100 a playbook on how to build a coaching business i know and i was reading it and i'm like i'm like nobody's reading this [ __ ] book like i'm like i mean for for coaching there the gym people are but the coaches are like oh it's jim it's gym stuff i don't need that and i'm reading and i'm like what you know it was just crazy to me so let me do this let me ask you a couple of rapid fire tactical questions because i always like to get some super i mean i love the high level stuff it's it's it's the most important stuff but from a tactical perspective right you mentioned word of mouth tactically and i'll just just to kind of like set the stage i'll give you i'll give you one tactic that i've used for word of mouth i'd love to know how you engineer word of mouth because i'll give you an example we used to do webinars when i would do i would have like a free facebook group or some sort of free community i would do a live webinar and then what i would do is i i remember hearing about this thing called shrilling or shilling it's where you hire people to come into a room and you pay them to buy the product and say hey i'm buying the product it creates crowd psychology or mob mentality and everybody buys well i don't like and it's illegal it works so good it's illegal i don't like to do anything illegal go to jail or get any trouble so i thought how can i get that same effect but do it ethically so i made this little technique called the ethical shrill and what i would do is at the webinar and say hey listen you're in the free group right now that's how you got on this webinar once you buy i want you to go into the free group and post hey dan i just bought the program please add me to the student group and we'd sell 50 people on the webinar 50 people in the group would go and post that and then people who weren't even on the webinar they would just freak out and start buying the product they'd be like what are you buying where is it and they'd send them the order page and we'd do a hundred we double the conversion on the webinar and there was a huge chunk of people that weren't even on the webinar and i know that that's a very like specific sort of short term word of mouth sort of hack but tactically since you believe that word of mouth is like one of the best things like if you were to go to a company and say hey listen here's how you hear specifically how you're going to increase your word of mouth what would you tell them so this is a good question so there's two there's two kind of components to this so the first one is like there is what i would consider a linear way of doing word of mouth which is kind of what you outlined and there's a lot of different tactics around that and when i say linear it's kind of what i'm saying earlier where you get a one-to-one relationship where you say every time we do this we get an additional 20 or whatever it is right and so those ones are you know like when the sales guy closes somebody's like hey do you have any other you know gym owner friends or even any other other people who might benefit from the same thing like just asking that question we just get referrals and we can bring it in right and so like little things like that people were like well obviously but then no one does it right like that's that's the thing is that like no one does it right um and so in terms of like engineering uh the customer experience like for us um the thing that gives you the quadratic returns and like i was saying earlier there's a million ways you can do like we call it the hinge method where it's like you the person that is your customer and then their friend and you a three-way message we call it the hinge and then that's how you bring them in if you're in an in-person business you're like hey sandy do you have any friends who would like this kind of thing and if they say yes then you're like awesome so how about this um you take their phone from them and then you take a picture of you and her and then you text it to a thread with the three of you and then that way it comes initiated from the friend with you already being the rapport kind of being shown as you in person with this other person so then they can't ghost you they can't be rude to you and then you already have so much more light you know no like and trust just from that little exchange right so like that's like there's tons of little tactical weed stuff that's like that and you know we could spend probably the next hour just going over little things like that but the the big ones are the the metrics that i was saying earlier right it's how can we drive time to value how can we increase the emotional win the the speed with which someone experience an emotional win in the product right so like one of the companies we have has a really long like the the way that their their business model works is that it takes like 90 days for someone from the day they start to the day they basically make their first dollar doing this thing right and a lot of times it's like real estate deals like something like it might just take a long time before someone you know can can make money and so rather than just say like up life sucks i guess that's just what it is we think okay well how can we how can we give someone a win in seven days right how can we how can we get as material of a win as humanly possible and then how can we string them along with emotional victories in shorter time periods and then of these emotional victories which of these are activation points and so the way that we find out activation points is we look at what are the customers and this works better when you already have some business that's been going on for a meaningful amount of time you say what are my favorite customers right and so then we say okay well these are the people that i love working with these are the ones that crushed it for me etc and we said okay what experience did they have that or and what steps did they go through that other people didn't go through and so usually we can find a few a few key points that along their life cycle that if we can just then reorient everyone towards those activation points it's like hey like funnels figured out that if someone makes their url with the landing page they're like they stick five times longer right so then all of a sudden they had to they created that as part of the onboarding and then they started paying for the domains because they just wanted everyone to do because they knew they got five times a stick right and so it's what are these uh non-traditional kpis we call metrics that matter right mtms um that that we can drive that are activity-based which is like okay if someone and i like you know for for gym lunch for example it was like i just i don't talk about the portfolio because it's their companies and i don't want to share their stuff but um like for gym lunch for example uh we knew that if if we could get someone to close a 2 000 sale in their first seven days and this is people who are using 99 things it's like we can get them to close a 2 000 high ticket sale in the first seven days we we massively extend the lifetime value of the customer and then secondarily if we can get them to collect 20 000 in their first month with us that like they're in yeah i mean like they're in for a year you know i mean no no questions asked we are roi the entire program in the first month in cash collected so it's how can we engineer these handful of events in in a b2c business it might be like weight loss driven so it doesn't have to be money right it's just like what is what is the the closest or a chunk down outcome that we can express to them prompts them would be meaningful them that they would then and for like click funnels if you have your own site and you see your domain there's like this feeling of ownership feeling of accomplishment that's associated that's not about making money but it's just what are these micro events and so you do is you take the best guys you map their customer journey and a lot of times you can do that qualitatively too you interview all your best guys and you say hey what was like really meaningful what were some of the big magical moments you've had when you're working with us and you get this big list of them and you're like all right well these ones we can't engineer this one we can totally engineer and then you start building that into the customer journey to increase the lifetime value and then that's what ultimately drives the word of mouth so all of that to go back to like what is what drives word of mouth exceptional product and if you get exceptional product how do you build exceptional product you build experiences that drive the results that people want in a choreographed way so to to to sort of put a different perspective on that for these these online coaches you almost it's almost like you funnel hack yourself yes yeah so i've always i've always said you know the the the only person you should funnel hack is yourself because you know if you got some 80 year old dude with white hair selling the same product that you sell they're going to have a different audience they're going to have different objections they're going to have a completely different experience you know than than you and i remember you saying i was a youtube video or something you were like hey the easiest way to increase uh the amount of customers you get is just hire a spokesman have them say the same stuff you're saying and you'll attract new people like you you're like this big hulkamania dude right and maybe some like you know timid soccer dad is just going to automatically not like you because you have muscles and he doesn't and he just gets it in his head right or maybe somebody who i it could be anything right an old asian lady you know i mean like even just going you know i mean like more the other direction yeah or maybe somebody dated a bodybuilder and he was an [ __ ] and they've developed this this idea what it could be dumb stuff but you put somebody else on there they say the same exact thing boom you got a customer and that leads me to my to my next question so this is one of the things that we i'm this presentation i'm building right now um but you can see each of these people are people that uh are now like faces of the company which is what allowed us to sell it and also attract different demographics it's like all right we've got to see the diversity yeah exactly 100 and so it's like we have to attract you can just email me that slide deck to uh dan but let me ask you this a lot of people that listen to my stuff and and and you know my just anything my youtube whatever they're they're either online coaches course creators or they have some sort of business that revolves almost entirely around their personal brand meaning it's them right so so when people buy from them especially if they buy high ticket they want them they want to interact with them they want to talk to them if they say something it's it's they need to hear it from them et cetera et cetera et cetera you know their staff or this is not good enough and so for somebody who is inherently the bottleneck of their business because it's pretty much based on their brand like i noticed that when you run ads it says gym launch doesn't say alex harmozy but most of these personal brand-based businesses they run it with their name what is the biggest piece of advice or the thing that they could do now to start thinking about how they can remove them and still make the same amount of money still grow their business but remove themselves as that that bottleneck like if they got hit by a bus would the company still run type of thing yeah so i mean it's easier it's easier to transition to customer facing uh first like it's a good intermediary is that instead of marketing your face you market all your customers results right and you can do that from a brand and so that slowly starts to build the brand and then people are like and they associate these successes with the brand you start building brand equity right um and so like that's and then i have a big uh slant or penchant for database marketing and so it's something that i i've never heard anybody else talk about i still haven't made a training on it because i it's like so secret sauce and so [ __ ] good um but i'll i'll share it with the audience um yeah the reason most people don't market with data is because a they don't collect it right and they usually don't collect it because it's probably not that good and so it's usually like fix the like start collecting it realize how bad it is and then now you can start driving to fix it and then once you get good data back from like like i can tell you all the the metric and it's it's in every video it's in every piece of copy it's on every landing page it's like we on average triple the profit of a brick and mortar uh a brick and mortar gym in 12 months that's it i've seen that in your ads you always go back to that that's true right because that's the that's the logic and i actually tend to have probably i'd say a relatively contrarian view on persuasion and i think that it's the higher up the ticket amount the more logic is employed in the purchase because like if you're you know i mean like if you're closing a 10 million deal it's not like let me tell you this epiphany bridge story when i was like you and i didn't have a 10 million you know i mean it's just like it it's a different buyer and so the higher the ticker price the more i think logical reasoning you have to employ to get the yes because this is my belief they're there because they want it already emotionally they they want the promise right and what we're doing is giving them the logical reasons to justify the decision and so most people if you make the promise they just immediately don't believe you and so then it's how can i they want the thing they just don't believe it and so it's like how can i help you believe and a lot of that for me is giving them logical reasoning around that and if you've noticed any in any of the ads that gym on trends in general a lot of it is data driven it's just like guys like this is the average you know amount of leads that our guys get this is the amount of sales that they're able to generate this is the amount of extra cash they're able to add this is how much we cut their turn that's how much we like this is the data i'm like and if you're below these benchmarks we can help you get to these benchmarks and if you're above it awesome then you don't need us you know what i mean like cool and if you expect that you're going to learn the same amount just iterating on your one gym spending your whole life trying to fix it where we can iterate across a thousand gyms and learn every month so much faster to create the best model then power to you you know what i mean but i don't think that's reasonable but if you want to believe that also right it just makes these very very logical conclusions and the thing is is that the point i'm making here is that when you have database or logical arguments anyone can say them right some of the more charismatic emotional driven maybe story driven like if you have an origin story a lot of people resonate with etc those will be things that will build the founders business in the face-based business earlier right but if we can transition to customer stories we can transition to more database marketing then you level up and the the problem that most people experience is that they create unsubstantiated claims right and so the first reason that we collect the data is so that we can substantiate our claims so we can be compliant marketers right the thing is a lot of people don't like the data that they collect right because it's right because it turns out only 20 of their people even log in you know what i mean like stuff like that um but you can still always figure out a way to show hey of people who a logged in showed up to four four coaching calls or whatever it is right um and sent the emails that we told them to send this is the this is the average return so then all of a sudden it's like i didn't say everybody but i'm saying of the people who did these five things and here's where it gets cool when you have the data that you can you can substantiate the marketing you also use the the activities that generate that outcome that you slice the data with as the guarantee points right and that's where your customer experience starts driving towards and then all of a sudden you have this harmony between high marketing that gets the best outcomes the client experience that someone go through because they're like well [ __ ] i i mean if i have to attend for coaching calls send this email on xyz to get that guarantee and that outcome then i'll do it and then all of a sudden the client outcomes improve even more and so it becomes this virtuous cycle of like you said funnel hacking yourself and saying like what are the best guys doing what are the key activities great i can slice the data and show that because i just looked at it that becomes my front end that's that's data driven rather than face driven and then the client experience is identical to what i told them it was going to be so you have this this parallelism which is one of the biggest issues that happens in a lot of businesses is they promised this thing and then their onboarding their product was totally different because they've been changing their hooks changing their offers changing their funnel but then they sell the same product and so there's this disconnect between what i bought and what i got right and so it's really you can improve a business just by like being consistent this is what you said this is what you saw this is what you get right a lot of times it's one of the easiest ways to increase the value of a business right and so it's it's doing that across the board over and over and over again and it creates a virtuous cycle that improves the company awesome awesome that there's a lot that you can unpack from there and i think that if if anybody listening is really listening they can implement things you know like as you were saying it i was thinking okay google form and then i had this insane thing i was like uh one of the questions would be like if there was a magical uh uh telepathic fairy that asked you if you did everything we told you to do and if you lied you would lose an appendage would you say that you followed our advice yes or no and then and of the people that said yes how much money do they make how much do they increase their business et cetera et cetera you know so i i know i imagine we don't have too much longer because uh we haven't we have an hour slotted i believe right oh no we have we have uh we have we have a few more i have a buffer we're good okay cool so one final question uh in your dealings right whether it be a dinner meeting somebody at an event doing business with someone portfolio company whatever right what is the one characteristic quality or dare i say red flag that you see in an entrepreneur where you're just like nope i'm not going to even associate with this person and then on the flip side what is the one that you go man this this is somebody i should know part of his two side of the same coin but the second one probably has a little bit more explanation so um i mean the red flag is always ego okay always like it's it's always ego that's ego like that's for personal life that's for business especially expect more than anything for portfolio companies it's the number one thing that we look for is is humility and there's a variety of reasons but like ego flows to everything flows to coach ability it flows to their ability to be to to learn and change their character traits to become what is required um like a lot flows from ego um and like a lot of the ability to lead like being a servant leader comes from humility and to build a 30 million 50 million 100 million company like you need to have that in my opinion so i think a lot of like there's you know there's these charismatic leaders that exist but the you know jim collins has written a lot about this and like good to great and built to last and a lot of these things he talks about like that level five leader who puts the customer first who puts the company first who doesn't try to take credit um and who always takes blame and gives gives away credit to everybody else and it's honestly very rare and that's why the vast majority you know right now we accept point two percent of the of the companies that apply you know to to come portfolio companies so it's it's not i mean it's an investment model it's different you know what i mean and for us it's like i only need one facebook like i don't need to have a hundred you know i mean like the the biggest company we have does 250 a day so you know i mean like i don't i don't need i'd love to ask you what industry but i know you're not right so like there's you know i mean like we have some some companies and they've grown a lot right and even that one we grew by just simplifying everything and just saying what are the points of leverage and i'm gonna wrap this with something that you said earlier which is like you realize the high ticket thing um and then that was a huge a huge like breakthrough you know in in your korean i remember the conversation really specifically so whenever you were saying that you were you're selling you know all these courses and uh at the time if i recall correctly i was getting a hundred to one um that's right it was some disgusting you know i cause i remember because i gave a presentation at that one um and i remember the the presentation and um and the thing is is i was like yeah man i was like that feels like a lot of work i was like you gotta sell like i was like like 500 customers make 500 grand i was like i need to sell like like not not that i need to sell a 10th of that i need to sell like a 20th of that i was like yeah if i just sold like 40 people i would make that money you're like 40 people and i was like yeah and i just remember that because like i think that was where it's like a perfect example of the audience of like finding points of leverage it's like is the leverage in my ability to to buy an arbitrage media and do all the tech little optimizations or is there one domino right to do the tim ferriss illusion right or is there one big leverage point that if i just prank that one everything else falls into place right like if you if you can figure out in the reverse way isn't it the answer is not raise your prices i mean sometimes it is but that's not that's the that is the outcome of the deeper thing which is figure out a way to provide more value and so like if you can find a way to make someone a million dollars you can charge 250 grand right right like the reason we come with the portfolio companies and i have this this visual that i just made yesterday about it but like we you know we we come in and we have we you know we get a minority stake for all the the interest that we do but it's also because like if i create 50 million dollars in net worth for an entrepreneur is it unreasonable for me to ask for 10. most people would say no right it's like well how do you sell stuff for 10 million dollars it's like will you make some 150. that's how you sell for 10 that's how you sell stuff for 10 million so you acquire the skills to do the thing and most people want to sell stuff for 10 million but they have a hundred thousand dollar skill set and then what happens is they destroy their reputation and then the word of mouth monster comes and eat them eats them alive right and so you asked about what is the thing that's a big red flag which is ego um what is the thing that that you know we look for it's three things um and they're the values of the company so it's the same thing that i look for in our personal life same thing that i look for in employees and same thing we look for in portfolio companies so layla and i spent a really long time trying to narrow it down because we believe in three values rather than five or ten or whatever because you can triangulate thinking it's very difficult to to map five values or ten values against like a decision and so the first one is do we believe this person is unappreciable character would we be proud to associate with this person on and off the field right and like being proud not just like being associated but would i be proud when i brag about my association with this person right that's unimpeachable character right in always and it's on and off the field which is hard because some people are like wait you don't hire someone because some of their personal decisions i'm like yeah 100 yeah yeah because humans can't differentiate it's hard to give advice you know what i mean in general if people think that you you know cheated on your wife like people it's harder for people to do that because even if it's good business advice psychologically it's difficult right and i i'm a realist if i think that people are not going to be persuaded by this person or they're going to have all these chips stacked against them i'm i can just choose to make a different bet you know what i mean like i can just choose to have to to vo to vote on a different jockey bet on a different different jockey right that's all it is so one is not a beautiful character the second is sincere candor right which is can this person and it's not it's not like can they not [ __ ] me that's not that's not what sincere candidates sincere candace can they have the hard conversations both taking the hard feedback and incorporating it and that is an element of humility and then also have the empathy to care about the people on their team and give them feedback when it is required and a lot of people avoid those conversations the real conversations it's easy to just like you know just give the you know no bs whatever like direct stuff but like being like hey surely uh you seem like you're your head's not in it lately and the team thinks that you're slipping and i want to figure out what's going on right or you know we gave you that piece of feedback the other day and i felt resistance and it felt like your ego flared up right like ha like you can even see my tone changes because like to have these conversations it's not easy right and if you're going to build a 30 or 50 or 100 million dollar cup which is the only thing that we're interested in investing in um is entrepreneurs who we think can get there right and so that's number two number three is competitive greatness because sometimes you've got you know an amazing human but they're just like really content and i want to be honest there's nothing wrong with that but but maketh a good company does not you know what i mean so like right right like sometimes it takes a little bit of of teeth you know i mean it takes a little bit of competitive drive and desire and sometimes that comes from fear of failure sometimes it comes from insecurities sometimes sometimes and the ideal way is that it's a pool not a push that's the perfect world but i i accept somebody who is competitively great michael jordan was 100 push not pull right but he was still the greatest right and so like i i accept that there are different forms of fuel and i just want to make sure that whoever we are doing business with has won absolutely absolutely and you know i was going to try to i was going to try to sneak in one more really lame interview question like what's your number one interview hack but i already know your answer it's find out if leila harmosi has the sister you you told me this recently you said you know find a fi basically like find a wife or husband that can be your your greatest partner and can really help you grow and i you know it's such it is kind of unorthodox advice or at least uncommon advice you know um but i i thought that was because who's the person you spend the most time with right it's your significant other and if that person is not supportive and and maybe even pushing you to to go further than you know my grandfather on my father's side he was a german physicist and he always used to say constant exposure always leads to some form of contamination and so if you are around someone all the time that is not supporting you that's not supportive that is you know against the grain it is going to affect you no matter how much you try to separate it no matter how much you try to be independent and so i really did love that advice because it it made so much sense you know um well i'll i'll answer a question you didn't ask so yeah that's always my big question what's the question i should be asking so so to find this and i'm actually thinking about this overall too uh because i was having a branding conversation yesterday with our creative director and um i realized that i think there's a parallel between branding and finding a mate so hear me out though i'm still working on this i'm open to this but i feel very confident in saying that there are three components that make a good marriage and obviously you know we're five years in and people like ah you're young like all right cool i'll just wait 20 years and then people listen whatever it doesn't really matter um and like my only my only dispelling of that is just that like the average marriage uh married person spends two hours a day together um 45 minutes of that is watching television uh 35 minutes of that is eating and 24 minutes of that is doing house chores and so the remainder of that time uh from that is like 20 or 30 minutes and that is it per day right and so compared to the amount of time that layla and i spend together i was like we've already been married 45 years based on the amount of time that we spend together oh dude that's a great point this is a different you know different view different lens so i mean i i know some people who literally only see each other on the weekends because they both work full time it's like well you spend one day a week together you know i mean like that's nothing anyway that's that's not my point the but there are three things that i think create uh great relationships in general uh the first is aligned mission which is do we want to go to the same place right and a lot of people don't even talk about this and it's like this is the life i want to live and for me it was like i want to do big [ __ ] and where i want to go will be hard and treacherous to get to right are you are you down for that journey a lot of people are not comma and that's okay it's just that they just might not be your person and these requirements that i put here most people will fail as they should because you only need one like i remember when i was i was in college and i was like this is all the things i'm looking for and someone's like and i was talking to a girl who was who was pursuing me and they were like geez like good luck finding that uh and i was like i only need to find one oh man that's such an amazing perspective on that because that oh dude that that hits home because it it makes sense like you there's they say oh there's all these fish in the sea but you have all these standards yeah but you only need you only need to find it once that's that's that's a great perspective yeah like being hot is a price of admission that is not that is not the that is not the the you know i mean like the end-all be-all that means like you have a ticket to play in the show you know what i mean so one is aligned mission right the second is similar values right or ideally you know same values which is we know where we want to go but how do we want to get there it's a big part some people want to get to the same place and they want to go out and very go about it very differently they have different values right and the reason that's important is because you're going to get stimuli that that come in your life you have things obstacles and if you're presented with the same data ideally you want to make this come to the same conclusion you want to make the same decision and so the variables that you weigh and how you assign weight to those things are going to be your values and so whenever layla and i because we've now been doing this a lot we've made a lot of decisions together a lot of big decisions if we ever have a time where we're not like on the same page about something we don't immediately like fight it's just like what data do you have that i'm not working with because i'm making this conclusion because we have the same values we want to get to the same place i'm making this conclusion based on these things what are you making your conclusion off of and then she'll share her i'm like i didn't think about that that's a good one or i'll show you something should be like oh totally anything about that that yeah that makes complete sense right and then we're like cool and then we are able like we haven't had we've only had one decision in our entire marriage that we disagreed on and i bulldozed layla and it was the wrong decision right um and i was like i'm i'm doing it you know what i mean and i i should have done that um and i you know and that's the thing and so like we have always come to the point where if we don't agree we don't do we don't do whatever it is like we don't have a business decision or a personal one who's business his business okay and the third piece so why mission where we want to go line values how we want to get there right and then the third is i like to say similar interest or you can say lifestyle doesn't really matter what words you use right but it's like what are the interests that we have because like you might like you want to go to the same place you want to get there the same way but it's like if the day-to-day we don't share interest it becomes more difficult like if i was if i had somebody who was super driven had the same values but then like wasn't into like fitness at all like didn't like exercise didn't like eating you know eating in a way that made sense like uh didn't didn't like you know walking you know just like just like what are my day-to-day things that i like or maybe they just love television i don't know like it's just are there things that they have that are interest that i'm like i have no or maybe they're really big artists i'm not an artist i'm not into art maybe they love museums and i'm like [ __ ] that sounds horrible right because i don't want to spend any time doing that right but like there's nothing wrong with that it's just like not my vibe right and so it's like because if we can have aligned into like the mission and values is baseline right and if we can have the similar interests then we're going to spend more time together and then when we get both exposed to stimuli we will both adapt the same way whereas when people have different interests they spend time being exposed to different things and then they end up adapting to the things that they're exposed to which sometimes can be in the same direction but sometimes it cannot be in the same direction and so you grow apart right and so the similarity that i'm seeing this with from a branding perspective is like what like what is a brand right i've been trying to break this down it's like what is a brand cause were like dude i love your brand i'm like what does it even mean right so i'm like i think on some level it's like there are some people who are aligned with me on the mission of what i'm trying to do and they're like i think this is dope i'm down to like go along with you right go on for the ride and then they also align with the values of like how i want to get there like gary v and i probably have similar missions but different values not a bad way we're just different you know what i mean like we just do you know just do different things we're different people you know i mean there's nothing wrong with that right same thing as like there's another girl who might not be your wife but she might be someone's wife right it's just just different right and then different interests right and so if i think the brand it's like this where i want to go this i want to get there and then this is like my day-to-day my calves my work my dessert stuff my you know i mean like these are the day-to-day interests that i have and i am a minimalist slash uh functional functionalist right and so and so if you think through those lenses i think um anyways that's that's what i think it helps build relationships and i also think it might be able to build a brand because i think brands are really just relationships with a mass audience so same mission same values same uh uh day-to-day environment desired ideal environment oh and and hot you you mentioned that well and i'll say this they should be hot for you rather than caught for everyone else because sometimes you'd even i have the key holder if you're on the bikes 100 100 awesome man i i'm going to tell you you know i think that if we just clip out the last 10 minutes of this interview you no one would ever need to buy a relationship course again you could just watch what you just said that was like the best relationship advice ever because it was just so brutally tactically honest you know i just stripped away all the [ __ ] you know so that i i i appreciate that i definitely learned a lot from that alex man thank you for coming on and and sharing all this and uh you know i i try to ask some more tactical questions and pull out some some real nitty-gritty stuff so um i you know i i appreciate you sharing all that and getting into the weeds and not doing what most people do and go on these long story tangents that are irrelevant you know i love your directness so thank you so much for coming on and i think people are really really really going to enjoy uh this interview appreciate it thanks for having me thank you to the audience thanks man

Channel: Dan Henry

Views: 128,434

Keywords: Dan Henry, Sell your course online, create an online course, how to sell your course, how to create an online business, sell courses online, Digital Millionaire Coaching

Id: L4K3NXYNBCk

Length: 74min 3sec (4443 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2022