"Your lack of ability to make decisions will kill you." In this episode, which was originally delivered to an audience at an Acquisition.com Scaling Workshop, Alex (@AlexHormozi) shares a lesson that he's had to learn repeatedly - focus. A lack of ability to focus is the Kryptonite to many entrepreneurs, and chasing shiny objects will keep your business smaller than almost anything else. Paradoxically, leaning into new opportunities is what got many first time entrepreneurs their first success, but focus is what will take you to $10M, $100M, and beyond.
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 on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.
Timestamps:
(0:09) My Business Backstory / How I Learned The Importance of Focus
(2:40) You Have To Learn To Say “No” / My Definition of Focus / What Focus Means / What Is Focus?
(3:42) Justine Musk Quote
(4:25) $B Opportunities
(5:22) Steve Jobs Quote / The Juicy “No’s”
(7:02) The Greatest Superpower of Entrepreneurs / Volume Negates Luck / The Perfect Clay Pot
(10:05) The Perfect Competitor
(11:15) Why Do We (I) Say “Yes”?
(13:02) Fighting The Same Boss
(14:51) Hiring My First Sales Director
(17:06) Why I Document My Journey
(19:38) World class Results
(21:12) People Will Always Make Room For Winners
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The biggest mistake that I have done in my entrepreneurial career, I'm going to walk through and then I'll explain kind of the meta concept that I think is why we are doing better now than we've ever done before. The very beginning of my business, I started an online fitness coaching because it's called the free training project which then flipped to for profit. I then started a gym. Now I did a smart move and said I'm going to focus on only one of them which was the gym and the gym grew. I kept doing this gym thing because that kept working and then all of a sudden as I kept opening locations, I was like man I'm pretty good at this marketing and sales stuff. Then all these people started being like hey can I give you money to do other stuff and I was like well I accept money and I can do other things so that sounds great. Within the next 12 months I had a dental agency, a car agency and a business that was the turnaround business which was me flying out to gyms and so I tried to grow four businesses at the same time where I was CEO of all of them. It took me getting into a head-on collision in a DUI where I had a mentor of mine, whatever you want to call it, who's like your lack of ability to make decisions will kill you. After that over the next seven days I broke up with, it's probably the best term because some of you guys are in terrible partnerships in one minute. I broke up with my partner that I had with a couple of gyms, not all of them but a couple of them. I broke up with a partner I had for dental, I broke up with a partner I had for Cairo and then broke up with another business that was related to tangentially with the launch thing and it sucked. But finally after all of those conversations I was able to just do the turnaround business and then within the next however many months you guys know that story it exploded and we made a whole bunch of money and then we switched to licensing and then we did three-something then 480 then 780 then a million then one two then one five then two and then we kept going straight line all the way to four. At that point I was like huh you know we could do start another business. That was when I started prestige and prestige obviously helped the top line and the bottom line as well but the day that I started prestige was the day that gym lunch stopped growing. So gym lunch maintained and then I grew prestige because then prestige got all my rein. Then I was like okay well I split my attention we went up in revenue well I'm going to create this ecosystem for gyms and so then I started Allen and so I'm now here with three companies I just have more money to do things now and so I'm CEO of Allen, CEO of Prestige Labs and CEO of gym lunch and as soon as that happened prestige labs went down slowly and gym lunch went down very very very slowly and that continued until I sold Allen and then after I sold Allen gym lunch straight line up and that was what allowed us to actually eventually exit the company. I bring this up because it's been the hardest lesson of my entrepreneurial career you have to learn to say no and I actually think focus just comes down to saying no to everything that is not what you said you would do. That's it that's all it is and so if we want to be focused then you can run that filter through your brain which is this is something that is not what I said I would do which means if I want to be focused the answer is no. Now how focused you are determines the extent to which and across domains that you say no to so on one level you say no to business opportunities even more focused to be a person who says no to business opportunities and new friend opportunities even more focused to be somebody who does no new friend opportunities no new business opportunities no networking opportunities and the list can keep going right if somebody did literally nothing else then they'd be the most focused person and so it's not a am I focused or not it's how focused are you there's this quote that I heard from Justine Musk which is Elon Musk's like seventh wife removed or whatever Elon if you ever see this I love you she said he said no in a way that protected his resources so that he could channel them towards his own goal and I realized that behind every no is a deeper yes to whatever it is that you do and so I just think about it that way which is like the focus feels bad on the outside because no one likes saying no but what it really is is saying yes again to the thing you said you would do and the reason this is so near and dear to my heart is because I have it's it's been the struggle of my life it's been so hard for me and the opportunities that I get presented now are insane they're nuts and I recently had to turn down an opportunity that was absolutely absurd and now the opportunities are all billion dollar opportunities everything's a billion now which is cool but I also have acquisition.com which will for sure be a billion dollar plus company in the next 36 months like we will be there that's like we need to we need to not do anything else I can just not mess it up and it's still hard and so I gave myself this saying which was and you can scale it up or down whatever you want which is I'm not going to sacrifice my first billion for my second and so right now some of you have your first million or 10 million or 100 million or whatever the number is for you and you get excited about your second hundred million or your second 10 million or your second million and you forget to make your first one and I'm keep I have so much content on this specific topic because it's something I struggle with so much and that's why I wanted to hit on this so you're going to hear another quote so you guys can tell me who this is people think focus means saying yes to the thing you focus on you've got to focus on but that's not what it means at all it means saying no to a hundred other good ideas that there are you have to pick carefully I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done innovation is saying no two thousand things Steve Jobs you've got to say no no no and when you say no you piss people off also Steve Jobs I was listening to an interview from one of his executives when they were building the I can't remember it was the iPod or the iPhone and so they were like so what was it like to work with Steve and he said Steve would start meetings and just say what have you said no to lately you just start with that because he figured out that that's what focus really meant is what you say no to and he said I would sometimes like have some nose ready for the meeting so I could like throw him out but he's like he wouldn't be satisfied if I gave him like obvious nose he said it had to be noticed something that you deeply wanted it had to be like a juicy no and some of you guys right now have juicy nose that are sitting there and you just have to get the credit from Steve Jobs for saying a real no because the other nose aren't actually nose they're obvious nose and if you actually pursued them you'd be an idiot the ones that really are the meaningful ones that propel you in your career are also these sacrifices that you put on the altar of the success that you want to have and so in some ways it's like it's it's all the opportunities that you turn away because you really thought about the one thing that you that meant that meant the most to you and so I got this from a mentor he said if you don't say no to good opportunities you'll never have the time to pursue the great opportunities and once in a lifetime opportunities come about twice a year so let me explain why this concept matters and why it's going to make you more money and why I think it's the greatest superpower of entrepreneurs so fundamentally you can do more stuff or get more for the stuff you do that's it which is fundamentally volume times leverage and within the context of a business it's the amount of stuff you do and what you get for every repetition which yields your ultimate output so in the beginning when you're really shitty at making cold calls you have to do a lot of them to get and you don't have a lot of leverage because you're bad at it to get some level of output but here's the really interesting thing about leverage and volume the more you do the better you get at doing I've told this story before and there's a lot of different analogies for it but two classes start in university for pottery making one class the professor says you have to make the perfect pot by the end of the semester it's the only assignment you make one pot and at the end I'll grade you on how good that pot is the other group he said I don't care how good the pots are make as many pots as you possibly can and I'm just going to measure it and the pot has to be round and it has to be able to hold water and that's it those are the requirements of the pot as many as you can and at the end of the semester everyone assumed that the person who had the quality pot was gonna be one of the best pot and the volume pots had the most volume pots but something interesting happened which is that the people with the volume pots had both the most pots and the best pots because they had so many more repetitions to get better they had done more work and they got better at what they did and so then they had literally far more output and the quality was better so they crushed the other team if it was a business Bruce Lee said I don't fear the man who's done 10,000 kicks one time I fear the man who's done one kick 10,000 times and so some of you are just doing one kick at a time which are your business ventures and you as entrepreneurs are just like wondering why your kicks suck it's like because they're always new and it's starting a game over with a different character every time you get to level two and saying well I'm gonna see if I can beat level one yet again with this new character and then you get stuck yet again I'm partially saying this because I'm trying to reinforce this with myself because saying no to that last billion dollar opportunity just recently I said no to so I made a video a while ago about a billion dollar opportunity I said no to a really big one it was far more than a billion dollar opportunity like this week and so this is me rededicating to the fact that the woman in the red dress just gets hotter and hotter and hotter it never goes away or at least it hasn't gone away for me if you continue to grow if you stay the same then you know the woman in the red dress or if you go down the woman in the red dress gets uglier right I say this figuratively what's interesting about this is that I actually think the distractedness comes from a place of delusion it's that we somehow fool ourselves into thinking that if we do two things we compete against people who do one thinking that we're that much better than the competition and we're just not because the person is going to be choose the person who said no to everything else imagine the perfect competitor somebody that you would be incredibly afraid to go up against they're incredibly intelligent they're incredibly hard-working they always learn from their mistakes they never stop they say no to nothing else be a tough person to compete against and then add on top of the fact that they're patient and they have no rush to beat you probably gonna win here's the interesting thing you can be that competitor like I mean I think about myself when I had I had I had if you count each location as a location I had like 10 businesses I was CEO of if you don't count the locations then I had four different businesses that I was CEO who's absurd not only was I just a CEO I was also the chief salesman for like half of them like at and also did the delivery like it was a period of time where I did not sleep I did not eat I did not work out I mean I kind of worked out because Layla forces me too and she feeds me so I ended up saying in okay shape but anyways point is is that I was only alive on like I was like hooked up to just energy drinks and adrenaline hoping to make this thing work and the harder I worked the less money I made because I was doing it wrong and I'm hoping that I can prevent one person here from doing that and so saying no as I try to see this now is saying is putting money in the bank saying yes spends the money and I think we want to say yes because yeses feel good in the moment and feel bad later when you have to stick with that commitment nose feel bad today because you have to let someone down but feel good later when you realize you don't have to go or you don't have to do that thing that you almost had to do and so it's actually nose and yeses are very short-term long-term in terms of decision-making so I was like why do we keep doing this and we royally why do I keep doing this um and so trying to zero that down has helped me um and just saying like oh this is you being wanting a cookie today that's why you're trying to say yes you just want a cookie right now and simplifying it like that has helped me get over it well I mean I you know wants an addict always an addict for you know distracted focus uh but for now I've conquered my my addiction for the the week um and so you know the reason people can't say no is because saying yes once you start takes less effort it gives reward now and pain later no gives pain now and reward later and I think where this really comes down is that our business when it gets tough stops rewarding you because like when things are growing it's exciting of course it's like a new relationship you're like super you know you're into it things are moving momentum's happening you're hiring people there's cash flow it's great but then all of a sudden you encounter this boss or this obstacle this thing that you can't get over and all of a sudden like all that reward starts going away are becoming far more infrequent and so then you your eye starts wandering and you start looking for the other relationship that high again um but trying to reframe that point as I am at level three and it doesn't matter how many new characters I switch to I'm going to have to battle this boss and so all I'm doing is delaying the inevitable for a confrontation that I have to have to do thinking about it that way has basically made me be like don't be a little bitch like you have to frame and this is a useful exercise for anyone is I try and frame the thing that I don't know how to the problem as something I don't know how to do so rather than saying who had the ads problem you guys so instead of saying ads agencies don't work I'm not saying you say this instead of saying ad agencies don't work you say I don't know how to work with ad agencies that is a skilled efficiency and now it's under your control right and so blame becomes something that you can control and then now you can do something about it I promise there are agencies that do a good job in your space the same thing is like um TikTok doesn't work for us I don't know how to work TikTok this is a skilled efficiency and if that's what I need to do for the next level rather than starting another business and reconquing the first three because I can get to that level really quickly and get that quick high I have to sit here and I have to be comfortable in the fact that I don't know what I'm doing and the problem with that period is that you basically have to try out all of your best bad ideas until you have no bad ideas left and you have only good ones and so and then one of those good ones will work and sometimes it takes five best bad ideas to get to a sixth good idea but once you have that sixth what's interesting about it is that like you've seen before once you unlock level three you know how to pass it every time and so I would say that the reason that we've been able to move so quickly now with the companies that we have and that we invest in that we buy is that we know what level you know one through a hundred million a year it looks like and now we're about to you know across our third company doing that and so like we've we've done this before now and I remember I think I was telling somebody the story but when I was trying to find a sales director for the first time I had no idea what I was looking for so the first thing I did was the first mistake everyone makes which is oh this guy is the best guy on the team I'll make him manager don't do that I did that and then of course I lost my best closer and my best closer also hated managing oh for two and so then I'm like okay I either have to give him a demotion which is gonna hurt his ego right just it's just terrible rock and hard place so that didn't work out so then I hired another sales manager this sales manager is the opposite of that guy all operations all process and he did mediocre to bad better than the guy who hated people and just wanted to close deals who's a pure hunter this guy did okay eventually we said hey how do you think you're doing he's like not that good and we're like okay you can either leave or we can take the demotion he was like I will swallow my pride and take the demotion I'd rather just close and I was like great so then I had a third sales manager and this guy loved people and he understood sales well and so he loved spending time doing one of ones he loved watching the guys improve he was just a people person and he was organized and he trained the team and the team's performance went up and I was like oh that's what a sales director looks like and from that point in my career I haven't missed on sales directors and that has been true of every other role I've had in the business and so all of the time that it took for for those managers to cycle through was growth I didn't have close rates that dropped cash for that suffered because I didn't know what it looked like and so I consider that ignorance debt and so we have to pay that debt down so all businesses incurred debt and the biggest one being ignorance of the founder not knowing what it takes to grow this business and so framing the problems that we have is the things that we have to confront as this is debt I have to pay and there's no way around it this is a toll of the success road that I'm on and I will stay at this toll until I come up with the change to pay this debt to open the lever so I can go to the next toll booth and keep driving until I hit it again and it's going to cost me probably more at the next one because these guys are greedy he's told these you know the lessons of life are very expensive and so for me the reason I spend so much time documenting a lot of guys probably don't know this but my podcast when I started it I didn't make it for you guys I made it for me and for those of you who are trying to like document your journey a really helpful frame because I didn't really get too obsessed with the fact that I had like 200 downloads per episode like it didn't really matter to me because I was like you know it'd be cool because one of the biggest things I always wanted was Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos the channel from 1997 where he's like here I am on Amazon and this is our sign and we'll see what happens and I wish that they had done that and so I've tried very hard to be able to do that you know with my own career and so for those of you who want a fun little tidbit the first podcast that I have is 90 days after I lost everything so you can actually hear from basically ground zero to here now the evolution and thinking so and I think that there might be some utility in that because as I'm walking through that it's at zero so what I'm thinking with is an entrepreneur who just lost everything is trying to figure out what the next move is and so use that for what you will but from a content perspective I try and document those lessons so that I can continually recognize the patterns again and so what I want to have happen is oh this is another one of those and then I can just play the playbook I'll be like what was I thinking then and I can go back into the archives and be like oh yeah this is what I'm looking for oh yeah this is what I'm looking for two biggest regrets I have is that I didn't document anything until I lost everything twice number one the second biggest regret that I have is that I have no recorded sales from the 4 000 closes that I did in person not one to be fair tech wasn't as good then it would have been a little bit weird but I could have done it and I regret that I mean imagine the fucking library I would have had and so I hope that you do that but what I want you to have is I want you to have your your playlist of your hottest calls if you are a salesperson or have great salespeople having them record when they're hot when you're like dude I could close anyone right now that's what you want to record because the way that you pause how you phrase your questions your tonality everything is what it's like to be on fire and being on fire is simply a different way of doing things that you were before that's more effective and so what you want to do is then study why what is it and how I talk and how I phrase these words that increases the close rate of my calls what is it and then you can get better and better and better at closing because you'll study the best game footage you'll repeat the most successful activities that you did advantages of saying no to everything is actually keeping a DPS because the best person in the world has only done that thing their entire lives and that's how you get world-class results the biggest returns come from the end of the cycle because fortunately unfortunately we live in a winner take all society and so if you look at the top selling book on Amazon it sells more than the bottom 5.9 million books on Amazon and when you buy stuff on Amazon you probably like oh there's three products here one that has 2,000 reviews one that has 200 and one that has 20 you're not like you know what I'm going to chance it on the 200 like I'm feeling risky today no you just buy the 2,000 why because it's trusted and that's how most people do it and that's why the sales are distributed 95 percent and then for some reason someone doesn't like the color of the main seller and or their phone didn't load weird and they accidentally clicked the number two best seller right and you got lucky and so I think some of you guys have some juicy nose sitting on your table at home I think you have some strategic decisions that aren't really strategic decisions they're things that just take up all your time when you could just be working on the stuff that you know will grow your business which is do more do better period and you don't need to try that new thing you probably don't need to go to that random lunch with so-and-so to explore synergies I know who you are and I'll tell you a fun story to drive this home so um recently there was a relatively large influencer who reached out to me and lots of following blah blah blah you know who they were and they're like hey I would love to connect and I was like this will not change anything about what my plan is to grow acquisition.com and I fundamentally have always held the belief that if I continue to grow a that door will either be open or there will be a bigger and better door that will open in that door's place if it closes because people will always want to make room for winners and winners have to say no to everyone else. Joe Rogan can call anybody to get them to answer his call and if he said no to them ten years ago do you think it's more or less likely that they answer the call when he calls them now more likely but if Joe Rogan had taken every one of those calls and not built the Joe Rogan experience the way it is now many of those people probably wouldn't answer their calls and so when people are trying to connect with you because the success you have realize that it's because of the success you have and they will only want to reach out to you more when you have even more success and so you actually threaten the main reason they reached out to you by choosing to take the call and so this particular individual he was like well you know maybe we can you know I have the deal that he could well I was like all right maybe this could contribute and says that I am free on Monday at this time he's like well I'm not free at that time and I said okay and he's like I'm not free on Mondays and I was like well I take calls on Mondays and he was like well I mean can you change it to any of the other days of the week and I said no and he just kind of like got weird and so then I was like I guess we won't meet and I can keep living my life because I know what I need to do right now to get us to where we want to go and there's probably nothing that this person is going to say that is going to in any way increase the likelihood that that occurs and so thinking about it from like how will this change my activities help at least does for me say no to the hundreds and thousands of things that want to take your attention and you just have to make the decision of whether you care about that thing more than you care about feeling good in the moment or saving face and I would strongly recommend as fast as seemingly possible being okay with people not liking you not understanding you and thinking that you are different than them because you are you're a winner
