"Why can't we 10x what we're currently doing?" In this episode, Alex (@AlexHormozi) simplifies the path to growth; doing more of what works rather than getting distracted chasing shiny objects. He also shares a brutally honest truth about all seasons of business (growth, stagnation, decline) - they're all stressful, and that's ok.
Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.
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In this podcast, I want to talk about the difficulty of growth, the difficulty of stagnation, and the difficulty of decline, and what you can do to avoid all of them by doing more of what's already working. And this is what most people don't. Before you even think about doing something new, do 10 times more of what's already working. And so this is like one of the things as soon as I buy a portfolio company, what I'll do is I go to the head of marketing, I go to the founder, and I say, hey, why can't we 10x what we're currently doing? Tell me why we can't. Honestly, two times out of three, they're like, I mean, we could. And I'm like, then why aren't we doing that? And what happens is they have all these other priorities that are not going to 10x the business. And they have this one thing that we already know works, that we have nothing that's stopping us from 10xing the business. And I say, great, let's do that. Call me in six months. Now, the thing is, is in the one out of three times for this, say, well, we can't 10x this because of this thing. Then I say, guess what the constraint of this business is? Solving that. And if you're doing anything but solving that, then you're not growing the business right as a founder. Rather, you're not growing it as fast as you could be growing it. You're doing outbound. It's a great, why can't we do 10 times the outbound? Well, I don't have enough leads from lists. Okay, great. So our constraint of 10xing this business is that we need to find more sources for lists. So we need to either scrape more lists, we need to buy more lists, or make more lists ourselves. Okay, that's solvable. Let's do that. If it's, hey, if we 10x or advertising dollars, like we just need to add more to the budget. Oh, we can't do that because our ads aren't good enough. Okay, great. So we need to have more creative. That's the constraint of the business. If it's content, which is why can't we make 10x content or make our content 10 times better, or maybe realistically, a combination of two, which is we're going to put out two times the content and we're also trying to make it two to three times better. Great. Then just what? Now we have a 6x. Can we triple the content and make it three times better? Sure. Well, what did we do in the best content that we had that we're not doing in all the other pieces? Great. Can we templatize that and make that the playbook that we use with every piece of content? Great. We're not doing that. Cool. Let's do that. Before we do any of these other ideas that you had. And so a lot of entrepreneurs, because it's boring to them, they figured out how to do this one thing and they think, oh, I should figure out how to do something else. When once you get something to work, the whole goal is to beat the living hell out of it is to squeeze every last drop from that thing that works. And you do as much as you possibly can as well as you possibly can before even thinking about doing something new. So let me walk you through the five stages of the traditional entrepreneur for advertising or even for business. They have something that they hear about. They think is cool. So they go into uninformed optimism. They're really optimistic, but they have no idea. Then they jump into this new thing and they become an informed pessimist. And so they find out way more about this thing. And then they're like, wow, this is actually kind of hard. And then they go to stage three, which is the value of despair where they're like, wow, this isn't working. This isn't what I thought it was going to be. And then what they do is dot, dot, dot, they start over at uninformed optimism because they hear something else is easier, but they miss out on step four and five, which is they become an informed optimist. So they say, okay, I understand how op-on works. I understand how paid ads work. I understand how organic works and what are the things that it takes to scale and how much work it really is. And then finally, get to level five, which is achievement, which they actually achieve the goal. But most people just repeat one, two, three, one, two, three uninformed optimism, inform pessimism, value of despair, start back over. And they just hit all three of those over and over and over again, whether that's new marketing channels, new products, new businesses. And this is a version of the woman in the red dress is that it's always deceptive to think that the new thing is going to be easier. And the only reason you think it's easier is because you don't know enough. I wish I could just give you the scar tissue of having done that three part triangle over and over again. But all I can tell you is that like when I get that little tickle on the back of my neck, where I'm like, ooh, this looks exciting. It's now become a warning flag to me because I've been burned so many times doing it to say, oh, I must not know enough about this because everything is hard. I'll give you an analogy that a mentor gave me that I really liked. And I think it applies to a lot of things. But when he was talking to me about departments in my business, he said, you have to know where the bodies are buried. And I was like, what do you mean by that? He said, if you ever talked to like a head of a department like IT or HR or legal or whatever, and they say, yep, everything's good. If you don't know what problems are actually going on in the department, you're too far away. And so that's in a way, uninformed optimism. They're just telling you, it's great. And you don't know any better. So you're uninformed. But you should know enough about the business to know where all the bodies are buried. You should know where all the skeleton and the closet are. And so if you're getting into a new thing, you have to know all of the ways or as many ways as you possibly can about what's going wrong. And once you do a little bit more research, you often find out that there's a lot of things you don't know about. And guess what? The thing you do know is working right now. And the likelihood that you doing 10 times more of that has far fewer unknowns than you doing brand new on something net new. Entrepreneurship already has so many risks and so much unknown. Bezos talks about this. He says, we want to manage as many of the risks as we can. So of course, we're going to incur some risks that are going to happen that are unforeseen to us. But the risks that we know about, we want to limit to the greatest degree possible because there's enough risk of our business going out of business by being a business. Why take on more risk for no need? It's risking what you have and need to survive for what you don't have and don't need. Growth is stressful. Stagnation is stressful. Decline is stressful. That means that business is stressful. And so the only stress-free people are people who are dead. And if you're in business, you need to accept stress as a fact of life and not something wrong with you or wrong with your particular business. It's just that things are stressful in general. Welcome to life. And so I see a lot of entrepreneurs try and change their businesses because they feel stressed. But every scenario of business has stress. There are different kinds of stress, but they're all stressful. And so the idea that there's something wrong with you or wrong with your business because it is stressful misses the point of how business works. And I'll tell you an analogy to make this make sense. So if you've been in business for any period of time, think about your first business or think about your problems that you had two years ago or three years ago in business. You're probably like, "Oh my God, those weren't even real problems. Those are like nothing problems." Well, future you three years from now thinks that about your problems right now. And so I think about this a lot because when I think about my problems of like when I was worried about how to get trainershop on time and like, you know, if somebody's membership wasn't wasn't recurring, I had churn issues or whatever it was within the gym that I had, those problems, I could solve those in my sleep now, right? Because the problems that I have are bigger. And so the thing is that you just become more enduring. You become tougher and your tolerance level for stress or what you deem to be stressful goes up. And so what's really interesting about this is that I still have the same problems I had when I had a much, much, much smaller business. I just don't think there are problems anymore. And so then that means that my choice to categorize the issue as a problem is actually the greater source of stress than the problem itself. And if you can adopt that perspective, you can be less stressed as you grow and make better decisions. And so I've just, I wanted to hit this point because I almost stopped and killed so many businesses early on because I thought there was something wrong with me or something wrong with the business because I was stressed rather than accepting that stress is a fact of life. And then I'm going to continue to be stressed as long as I'm alive. So fundamentally, stress comes from an immersive stimulus, a stimulus that's not, that's not enjoyable, right? But if you grow, there's tons of things that are not enjoyable about growth. If you're stagnating, there's tons of things that are not enjoyable at stagnating. And if you're declining, there's tons of things that are not enjoyable about declining. So there's just always going to be things that you don't like. Get used to it.
